May 2010
Monday, 31 May 2010
Deepwater Horizon: How about shutting them all down?
The Economist: “What we’re seeing here is a perfect circus of media nothingball: people aggressively criticising the administration for not acting aggressively enough while aggressively ignoring the fact that they oppose anything aggressive the administration does.”
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac Man
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Why Taxing Carried Interest As Ordinary Income Is Good Policy
Fred Wilson: “When I invest my own capital in a company (either directly or through my funds) and that investment generates a capital gain, I will still get to pay a lower tax rate.”
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Spare Britain the policy hair shirt
Martin Wolf: “Let us translate this proposal into ordinary language: ‘If you are unwilling to starve yourself when desperately ill, nobody will believe you would adopt a sensible diet when well.’ But might it not make sense to get better first?”
Deficit hawks ignore the R-word
Harold Meyerson: “Second, it calculates the dollar cost of the stimulus but neglects to factor in the dollar benefit from, for instance, keeping hundreds of thousands of teachers, police and firefighters on the job and paying taxes rather than collecting unemployment insurance.”
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
The privacy Machiavellis
Chris Jay Hoofnagle: “An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world.”
Monday, 24 May 2010
The Anethics of Innovation and Disclosure
Chromatic: “I’ll take less of the kind of ‘innovation’ which suggests that if I didn’t want to share information publicly last month, I suddenly want to this month without you even asking.”
Sunday, 16 May 2010
You can’t have your cake and bomb it, II
The Poor Man Institute: “While history tells every war reduces civil liberties, it also tells us that every single war ever fought eventually ends – look back as far as you like, it only gets truer. What this requires is acknowledging that there is little actual threat posed to the United States of America by people in Afghanistan or Pakistan who lack the skill required to cause combustion in gasoline.”
Friday, 14 May 2010
Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls
NYTimes.com: “Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates. ‘We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,’ she said.”
Friday, 7 May 2010
The Intellectual Situation
n+1: “The confusion surrounding the internet’s relation to the book has been created by the fact that many webists emerged from the culture of the book (rather than television, say); that they themselves genuinely liked books; and that communications online took place in the medium of text. ‘The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history,’ posited the SXSW publishers’ panel in 2009. But what kind of reading, what kind of writing? The internet is the largest group of people ever assembled, period.”
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Families?
Jonathan Rauch: “In this very different world, early family formation is often a calamity.”
Users are Their Own Worst Enemy for Online Privacy
PCWorld Business Center: “But, the dirty little secret of network and information security is that consumers have jobs, and they bring those same social networking practices into the workplace as well.”
Jenny Beth Martin - The 2010 TIME 100
TIME: “She serves as co-chair of her hometown Tea Party in Atlanta, and she helped lead the 9/12 movement’s march on Washington in September. It was only as she watched protesters trickle down Pennsylvania Avenue to promote Tea Party principles, she says, that ‘the enormity of the movement hit me.’”
Monday, 3 May 2010
Save the Environment - Drill, Baby, Drill
Robert Hahn and Peter Passell: “We found that full-speed-ahead exploitation of the restricted oil reserves would lower prices at the pump by a few cents at most.” – the founder of the American Enterprise Institute Center for Regulatory and Market Studies, and the editor of the Milken Institute Review
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA
OSnews: “Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon’s press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction.”
The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash
Charlie Stross: “Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry.”
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Attention Whole Foods Shoppers
Foreign Policy: “Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that ‘sustainable food’ in the future must be organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most.”