Old Economy The other day I had breakfast with a good friend who’s been in the computer industry for about the same amount of time I have. Six months ago he had a coding job with a very up-and-coming dot com. Two months ago they appeared on fuckedcompany.com for the first time. A month ago he and everyone else at the company was laid off. he was taking it very well. He's a talented programmer, the kind that doesn't have much trouble finding a job even now. But I know he was disapointed. I thought back to something that happened when I first moved to Seattle. At the time I was young and idealistic and I had stars in my eyes. We were going out to a party where some Microsoft people had just vested. They had moved the furniture out of their rental house and moved in a bar, a keg, a roulette table, several tikki lamps, a jazz band, a small portable dance floor with disco lights and a fountain that spouted whiskey sours. It was an Alice in wonderland experience for me, a fresh graduate school dropout recently of Washington DC. I’d never seen so many beautiful wealthy successful people my own age before. I struck up a conversation with a woman in a black dress. She said to me: “No one likes a good man. When someone does something good, it means there’s less good left in the world for the rest of us. That’s why no one likes a good man.” It is something that has stuck in my mind since then. What did she mean? Did she mean that we should apply the economics of scarcity to abstract qualities like good and evil? Did she mean that goodness invites envy and so brings badness along behind it? Or did she mean to say that there’s an economy of greed that’s more fundamental than money? Maybe this was her weird way of hitting on me and I, fresh out of studying Heidegger and Sartre, just read too much into. Maybe I just heard her wrong. It's possible I did. There were a lot of people at the party.