*innocent look*

• Deportation priorities have changed.  (The Rectification of Names)

  Unless he's thinking in retroactionary terms that the malign influence of the Obama presidency stretches backwards, into the past. The virulence of the MS-13 organization in particular has to with the way it was nourished by US criminal justice policy, which was to deal with the problem by outsourcing it, deporting members in huge numbers to their home countries, especially El Salvador and Honduras, where they overwhelmed weak local governments, taking over the streets and recruiting new members and systematizing the smuggling of people back to the US, and participating alongside the Sinaloa Cartel in the Mexican drug war. A Trump-like policy over most of the past 30 years has made them ever stronger.

• The gig economy and why it should be regulated (naked capitalism):

  The lack of protections for workers, the casual nature of the work and the elements of direction and control exerted by the platforms all point to a need to regulate the gig economy. Self-regulation by the platforms, as is currently the case, cannot ensure better working conditions and can jeopardise the sustainability of well-intended platforms in what is a global race to the bottom. Moreover, unless authorities step in and recognise that workers should not be denied protection just because they work for platforms, platforms will continue to have an advantage over traditional industries, risking a deterioration of working conditions that extends beyond platform-based work.

• How Western civilization could collapse. (BBC Future)

  According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception. By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the Empire in.