So, I will be working at Hollywood . com, starting Monday. I am excited about this. I will be manager of the tech team (7 people plus the QA/project manager). I am disappointed that this means I will have less time for my own personal startups, but I think this will be a great job.

An interesting quote about slavery from Adam Smith:

The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any…. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master, when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked both by Pliny and Columella….

The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of slave cultivation. The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen…. The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies, are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America; and the profits of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn, as has already been observed. Both can afford the expense of slave cultivation…

The argument is that men will pursue owning slaves even when it was uneconomic. I can think of other examples: the Germans wanted to enslave and kill Jews, even though it was a terrible setback economically for Germany, with brilliant scientists like Albert Einstein fleeing Germany and moving to the USA. Adam Smith talks about the craving of men to feel superior to other men, though he doesn’t touch upon sexual assaults aimed at women, which is also a part of slavery. Historians have worked too hard to come up with economic explanations for slavery, when explanations based on pure emotion and lust work much better, and explain much more.