For Khanna, Julio’s story epitomized everything that was wrong with the industrial food system in the United States — a system she has been trying to change since she was 17. Consciously modeled on the Freedom Rides of the 1960s civil rights movement, the Food Rides aim to shine a light on issues of “food justice” — a catchall term that focuses on “ecological and community revitalization and reorganization” as it relates to diet and agriculture. Julio’s workplace travails represented a kind of food injustice — part of a larger system that deepens racial and class divisions, contributes to surging rates of obesity and diabetes, and weakens the traditional relationship between farmers and the land across the globe.

Khanna has been well positioned to trace all these links from her earliest years. At the age of 9, her family moved from New York, where her father worked for Kodak, back to his native India. Leaving the affluent Rochester suburbs for the crowded poverty of Bombay, says Khanna, induced an intense culture shock. Another two years of high school in England meant that, before Khanna was 17, she had grown up on three continents. The result: an intimate understanding of the “stark realities” of global economic disparity, as well as the ties that bind everyone in the world together — simply because of what we eat.

While getting her master’s degree at the University of California at Davis, she organized the creation of the first undergraduate major in sustainable agriculture. Since then she has worked steadily at organizing awareness and action around food justice issues. If we “change our relationship to food,” she says, “we can change our relationship to the planet.”

Khanna doesn’t believe the problem can be solved simply by ramping up farmers’ markets and promoting the consumption of locally produced organic food. To address food injustice, she argues, we have to attack poverty. She describes a vision that recalls the Ford Motor Co.’s policy of paying its workers relatively high wages that enabled them to afford to buy the cars they were building.

“There is definitely a lot of room in the food chain for quality jobs and higher wages. If the 20 million people in the food chain all were paid well, that would probably revitalize our economy … and people would actually be able to afford good food.”

Encouraging signs have been accumulating for two weeks, but Friday’s unexpectedly strong report on September’s retail sales is perhaps the biggest news yet. Sales rose 1.1 percent compared to August, and are 8 percent higher than a year ago. The numbers for August and July were both revised up. That’s a very good showing, a sign that consumers are shaking off the trepidation that kept their wallets sealed earlier this year.

The best auto sales since April and the best overall retail sales since February are not the kinds of numbers that tend to prefigure a recession. It’s not coincidence that the Dow is finishing up its best week since April.

It’s always wise to temper one’s optimism when one of the best arguments for why an imminent recession is unlikely is that major sectors of the U.S. economy — like housing — are already so depressed that it’s hard to imagine them getting significantly worse. It’s also possible, as Kelly Evans suggests at the Wall Street Journal, that the U.S. economy has entered an atypical zigzag mode marked more by volatility than any sustainable trend. And doomsayers still abound, for good reason. China’s economy looks a little suspect, Europe is still teetering on the brink, and the U.S. government seems much more likely to encourage contraction by cutting spending than to try to help move things forward.

But it is now beyond doubt that the summer slump is over, for the moment. And that makes the next few months very interesting. With a year to go until Election Day, there’s not much time left for American perceptions of the economy to change. For the White House, it’s pretty much now or never.

But the co-creator (with Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system and author of the C programming language deserves more than just a moment of silence from programmers everywhere. The modern digital world is built out of the tools that he created, and their descendents. A lifetime employee of Bell Labs and its various corporate spawn, Ritchie was a geek Prometheus. His gift of fire was code that worked on all kinds of different machines and made possible the interconnection of, well, everything. Unix and C are embedded in the deep structure of the Internet and the entire networked computer domain. The world owes Ritchie an awful lot.

“Everything we’ve got,” wrote Paul Adams at Popular Science, “Internet servers, telephone backbones, the microprocessor in the keyboard I’m using to type this — emanates from Ritchie’s work.”

Moments ago, I pulled out a copy of Peter H. Salus’ “A Quarter Century of Unix” and scanned it to see if it would jog any memories of revealing anecdotes about Ritchie. My attention was caught by a picture dated 1986. Bearded, his hair thinning at top, Ritchie is sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a fantastic, jovial grin. He’s also wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of a vaguely Princess Leia lookalike peering out from under the classic symbol for “no” — a circle with a slash through it.

From the picture alone, it’s impossible to parse the T-shirt’s code. Maybe there’s a snappy one-liner beneath the image or on the back of Ritchie’s shirt that explains all. But I didn’t need it. The entire presentation simply screamed out Deep Geek — proclaiming gleeful membership in a Chinese-food-eating hacker tribe that delights in awful puns and ironic juxtaposition, that sees the world a little bit off-kilter from the rest of us iPhone-twiddling drones, from all the billions of  inhabitants of the networked world that people like him made possible. I don’t know what the shirt means, but on Dennis Ritchie’s 55-year-old chest, it looks iconic. Let’s put it this way, if the characters in the sit-com “Big Bang Theory” had to bid against each other on eBay to buy that shirt, the price would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars within minutes. And why not — geeks like Ritchie built the Internet!

And they did it, not because they wanted money, or even necessarily to foist something “insanely great” on the general public. They did it because that’s what they were interested in, because it in some way improved their own lives and they wanted to share the results.

There’s a great quote from Ritchie at the end of “A Quarter-Century of Unix” that captures the essence of his contribution perfectly:

Some people have the impression that the original Unix work was a bootleg project, a “skunk works.” This is not so. Research workers are supposed to discover or invent new things… We always had management encouragement… Our intent was to create a pleasant computing environment for ourselves and our hope was that others liked it.

The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance… Another danger is that commercial pressure of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode.

If we can keep alive enough openness to new ideas, enough freedom of communication, enough patience to allow the novel to prosper, it will remain possible for a future Ken Thompson to find a little-used CRAY/1 computer and fashion a system as creative, and as influential, as Unix.

What a wonderful credo! Death to excessive relevance! Geekier words were never spoken!

What’s more, in 2008, Obama campaigned in Ohio and Michigan against free trade agreements like NAFTA, for blatantly political reasons. But now it’s a victory for him to get the biggest free trade deal since NAFTA — the South Korean FTA — through Congress? It doesn’t add up.

Even curiouser is the sight of both Democratic Michigan senators supporting the South Korean FTA. If Michigan is the American state hit hardest by globalization over the past couple of decades, why would any Democrat politician there cheerlead for even more free trade?

The answer to that can be found in changes in the FTA negotiated by the Obama administration that specifically relate to the auto industry. U.S. and European automakers have long argued that South Korea imposes a confusing, unique and ever-changing set of automobile safety and environmental standards that collectively impose formidable non-tariff barriers to foreign car imports. The new deal, hammered out last December, exempts U.S. cars from those standards.

Consider, for a moment, the irony at work here. One criticism often leveled against free trade agreement is that they funnel manufacturing investment to countries with weaker environmental regulations than the U.S. But here we have a case where the U.S. is declaring victory after persuading South Korea to exempt U.S. auto imports from greenhouse gas emissions limits that exceed what the U.S. requires. That’s a little embarrassing.

On the other hand, at least insofar as safety standards are concerned, there does seem to be a fair amount of evidence that South Korea’s regulations are purposefully designed to keep foreign competition at bay. In testimony to the House Ways and Means Commission in 2007, Stephen J. Collins, president of the Automotive Trade Policy Council, described a bewildering regulatory environment in which specifications for “tinted windshields, frequencies for remote keyless entry systems, bumper configurations, power window requirements, and license plate sizes” changed from year to year. For foreign importers, the cost of complying with such regulations could cost millions of dollars per car model.

“Just last week,” reported Collins, “we were notified of a change in the auto insurance policies that arbitrarily placed imported vehicles  in the highest risk classification. The result is owners of imported vehicles will pay the highest premium possible for their auto insurance, (both Ford and DaimlerChrysler were placed in Class #1, the most expensive), as well as a totally unacceptable process foreign companies must use to certify compliance with these regulations.”

Whatever one thinks of Korea’s regulatory environment, the deal cut by Obama’s negotiators assuaged the U.S. auto industry’s concerns about the FTA, thus explaining the support from Michigan Democrats. But whether the changes will  boost car imports significantly is still highly open to question. A study conducted by U.S. International Trade Council concluded that Korea’s carmakers would end up benefiting more from the deal in the long run than Detroit’s Big 3.

It’s just not clear that American car companies make what South Koreans want to drive. For example, one of the non-tariff barriers that most irritated American car manufacturers was a tax on engine size. The bigger the engine, the bigger the tax. This effectively discriminated against American automakers who have historically specialized in building bigger, more powerful, cars. The new agreement exempts U.S. autos from that tax.

But anyone who has ever been to South Korea — or any other East Asian nation — understands immediately that, engine tax or no engine tax, big American cars just don’t make sense in crowded Asian cities where the cost of a gallon of gas is several dollars higher than in the U.S. And there is nothing that a free trade agreement can do to change that basic truth.

So there’s your big win for Obama: a legislative victory that upsets big swaths of his own party, won’t materially improve the fortunes of the domestic auto industry, and is unlikely to make a significant difference in states that are critical to his election.

Simply put, deep discount stores do great when the economy sucks. And as the middle class gets squeezed, the dollar stores have prospered.

These are stores that are capitalizing on the need for pure survival: food and drink purchases account for more than half the sales of 99 Cents Only. So while the top 1 percent of Americans do better and better, sneering down from their skyscraper windows at the protesters gathering in cities across the nation, the 99 percent are lining up at 99 Cents Only, looking for the cheapest possible milk and eggs.

A quote captured by the Wall Street Journal is particularly illuminating:

“The economy has taught people there are alternatives from the mainstream that are providing products of quality and value,” said Robert Passikoff, founder of retail consulting firm Brand Keys Inc.

The use of the word “taught” here is in the sense that a sledgehammer “teaches” a concrete wall to crumble. Americans get no option to fail this course. Wonder where all those record amounts of food stamps are getting spent? Check the dollar store.

The amazing thing about the whole process was just how easy it was to stop paying $7.99 a month to Netflix. Just as Netflix made the experience of ordering movies delivered by mail or streamed to my computer deliciously simple, Netflix also made the process of changing the details of my account a piece of cake. I had expected to jump through hoops, to be thwarted by various strategies aimed at keeping my cash flowing to the company uninterruptedly. But no — I clicked a few buttons and I was done.

Live by the user-friendly sword, die by the user-friendly sword. Because I sure wasn’t alone in expressing my desire to send less money Netflix’s way, judging by Netflix’s swift decision, announced Monday morning, to shutter Qwikster before it ever opened, and keep both DVDs and streaming as part of the same corporate service. The negative consumer reaction, first, to Netflix’s price hike, and then to the announcement that is was splitting up its product line, translated into a hemorrhaging of customers. We won’t know exactly how bad the damage was until Netflix reports its quarterly numbers, but it’s clear that the bottom-line consequences were severe. Ironically, Netflix’s ease of use probably exacerbated the mass emigration. It was just so easy to say no.

The lesson that has been reinforced here, once again, is that in a world where our access to digital entertainment options is essentially unlimited and switching costs — the friction that keeps us from making changes — are minimal, companies have to be really, really careful about not pissing off their customers. Which makes this quote given to Fast Company by a Netflix VP all the more astonishing: (Emphasis mine.)

“It was a very bold move forward, without considering the effect on our members,” says Steve Swasey, Netflix vice president of corporate communications. “We just looked at the strategy. We said we want to be able to brand DVDs — to give them their own life, to give them their own advertising and marketing — and we thought the best way to do that was to give them a name and its own company that would be a subsidiary. We were wrong.”

How can this quote possibly be true? Netflix is a company that has dedicated itself from day one to making its service as blissful as possible for its members. To say that the company had not considered the effect of a major change in strategy on its own members is absureds and insulting. Of course Netflix considered the effect on its members. But the company’s executives, convinced that in the long-run,the future is streaming, gambled that they could get away with the dramatic move.

Netflix may well be correct in their long-run assumption. Clunky physical media is obviously on the way out. But consumers don’t live in the future. We live in the now — and in this particular now, we can click one button and express our financial displeasure. And so we do. In the short-term, Netflix’s customers voted their disapproval with their feet to a degree that the company just didn’t anticipate. And that’s something that every other player in the digital entertainment landscape — whether named Facebook or Google or even Apple — should be paying close attention to. We know from watching the rise and fall of social media networks that there is no such thing as consumer loyalty in the Internet age. What we may not have realized is that a generation that has displayed so little discomfort at switching from Myspace to Facebook is also psychologically prepared to dump Netflix for Amazon, or maybe even the iPhone for Android, should the post-Steve Jobs Apple start screwing up.

So now Netflix is groveling — in the middle of writing this post, I received an e-mail from the company announcing the end of Qwikster while reassuring me that “We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows.”

Unfortunately for Netflix, there’s nothing in that sentence that’s going to make me sign back up for streaming access. The damage is done.