Douglas Ruskoff: Video Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.: We are at a crossroads. Right now we have the ability to optimize our systems, our technologies, and our currency to humans, rather than optimizing humans to them.

Metafilter discussion of previous: “The Plague of Free.”

Awful Marketing: St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired: In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn’t be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper’s online comment boards.

HavardBusinss.org: The Digital Economy’s Coming Subprime Crisis: Uh oh: it’s the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore.

Anil Dash: The Web in Danger: We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say “nobody saw this coming”.

Susan Ohanian: It’s the Poverty, Stupid, Not Pre-K Skills: If our corporate-politicos would look at the November 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, they would see that half of American children receive food stamps, which means they live in food insecure homes, and studies show that Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.

Joe Bageant: Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers: At heart, it’s a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman’s democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.

Philly.com: USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.: Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: “This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children.”

Time: The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell

Newsweek: Partying Like It’s 1999: Think the U.S. economy has come a long way? Think again.