September 2011
Hearing Looks at V.D. Experiments on Guatemalan... →
Sickening. But it’s nice to see Welles.’ Ms. Reverby’s work playing out where it should.
Dan Ariely » Asking the right and wrong questions →
…we have an industry that asks one question it’s giving the answer to, and a second question that assumes that people can accurately describe their risk attitude (which they can’t). This saddens me because, while I think that financial advisors are overpaid for the service they provide, in principle they could contribute much more, and they could even deserve their salary. But only if they...
August 2011
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Your Friends Are Not Your Audience: A Disturbing... →
This is the curse and the blessing of the instantly multiplied audience, I suppose. Whoever has heard this [‘comedic confession’ of a possible date-rape] story before apparently thought it was funny. They don’t seem to have found it creepy, anyway. And it seems to be far from the first time [the open-mic night participant]’s told it, considering that at one point he...
Do We Really Need A National Weather Service? |... →
While Americans ought to prepare for the coming storm, federal dollars need not subsidize their preparations. Although it might sound outrageous, the truth is that the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Weather Service, are relics from America’s past that have actually outlived their usefulness.
…
Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds. It...
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W. W. Norton: After a Month of Rain →
wwnorton:
Everything I thought I wanted is right here, particularly when the sun is making such a comeback,
and the lilac engorged with purple has recovered from its severe pruning, and you will be back soon
to dispel whatever it is that overtakes me like leaf blight, even on a day like this. I…
WatchJamie xx’s BBC Essential Mix | Nialler9 Music Blog
So good.
America's new superheroes: a budget committee? -... →
So are we stuck between a fiscal policy rock and an economic hard place? Not necessarily. It’s possible to stimulate the economy further, now, without increasing the 10-year deficit. It would mean steering funds away from spending and tax cuts that offer low “bang for the buck” economic stimulus and toward higher “bang” policies.
Then the deficit would be no higher...
The ‘broken patent system’: how we got here and... →
Jefferson’s initial skepticism about patents led him to insist that patented inventions be useful and non-obvious, the foundational rules of our system. Those rules might actually solve the software patent dilemma for us if we just wait long enough: the gold rush to patent all these fundamental software technologies means that they’ll all be public domain prior art in a few years, and any...
“What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just...”
– FACEBOOK COO SANDBERG: The Women Of My Generation Blew It, So Equality Is Up To You, Graduates
Jay-Z's Hegemony in the Age of Kanye | Marc Lynch →
Watch the Throne then can be seen as a shrewd move to institutionalize Jay-Z’s hegemony in a rapidly shifting and potentially hostile environment through a fully-realized new alliance system. The key moves came years earlier: Jay-Z allowing Kanye to produce Blueprint 3 instead of trying to destroy him after his 2007 diss track “Big Brother”; his signing of key rising stars to...
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““When you’re manufacturing anything, even if the work is done by robots and...”
– Jon Gertner, Does America Need Manufacturing?
The short answer is yes and the longer answer is that when you outsource manufacturing, pretty soon you outsource everything upstream of that: research, design, and product management.
It isn’t possible to cut out one element of a supply chain, and...
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Bernanke Blames Politics for Economic Turmoil -... →
“The country would be well served by a better process for making fiscal decisions,” he said.
Mr. Bernanke said he remained optimistic about future growth — he gave no indication that the Fed would increase its economic aid programs, though he said the central bank’s policy-making board would revisit the issue at a scheduled meeting in September — but he warned that the government had emerged as...
Defiant Syrians to Assad - Qaddafi’s Fate Is... →
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Will Steve Jobs depart empty-handed? |... →
…we also decided to look back and see what Jobs is likely to take with him when he steps down, in the way of retirement benefits, severance and the like. The answer: not much.
That’s small surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to his pay in recent years. Jobs has famously been paid just $1 a year in salary since 2003 — and nothing else, whether equity, perks or pension. The nominal $1...
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What is journalism worth? →
What is journalism worth? That’s the question journalism managers and entrepreneurs have been trying to figure out ever since it became clear, years ago, that the Internet was disrupting local publishing monopolies.
And so we’ve endured years of conference panels, email exchanges, and blog posts about paywalls and paid content strategies, as publishers try to figure out exactly how...
Do Smart, Hard-Working People Deserve to Make More... →
The second is that the moral argument should be on the side of redistribution. I am willing to listen to utilitarian arguments against redistribution (e.g., high marginal tax rates reduce the incentive to work, blah blah blah blah blah); I may not agree with them, but they are a plausible position. However, I have little patience for the idea that rich people deserve what they have because they...
Confessions of an Ex-Moralist - NYTimes.com →
The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than...
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Watchroomthily:
nellodee:
The Decemberists - Calamity Song Colin Meloy transposed the Eschaton chapter of Infinite Jest into this amazing new music video, that immediately became my favorite music video ever. (thank you Miss V.)
militarized whirligig beanies
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“So I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for...”
– Why Arabic is Terrific
Via Evann, my hero. I snorted my tea more than a few times, particularly on the footnote’s “road to bro advancement”.
Also, this one post was better than the 5 of 8 weeks of immersive Arabic 1 class I recently attended. Our teacher wasn’t stellar....
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“The life-threatening labor required to make the jeans of people who don’t do...”
– William Gibson on the incredibly dangerous sandblasting technique used on designer jeans. (via dbreunig)
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“If I’ve got a robot with a machine gun that’s got a max range of 800 meters, and...”
– Bad Eyes Keep Unmanned Infantry Out of the Fight | Danger Room | Wired.com (via bregel)
“So why is today scarier than 2008-09? Because this time not only have we got...”
– American Idiots: How Washington is destroying the economy - The Term Sheet: Fortune’s deals blog Term Sheet
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“Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher...”
– The Secret Language Code: Scientific American (via slantback)
I’ve spent time thinking about this, but often in the context of songwriters. This is fascinating.
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