January 2012
7 posts
“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized...”
– A few days old, but still the best quote of the month, by Fidel Castro.
How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the... →
parislemon:
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced...
After 12 years of battling to stop Monsanto's... →
“… the modern GOP: Ruthless finance capital empowered by white male...”
– The analysis of the day by Salon.com’s Joan Walsh.
Partial transcript of communications between the...
COAST GUARD: There are people who are coming down the ladder on the bow. Go back in the opposite direction, get back on the ship, and tell me how many people there are and what they have on board. ...Tell me if there are children, women and what type of help they need. And you tell me the number of each of these categories. Is that clear?!
COAST GUARD: ...Listen Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit, go back on board!
(Noise can be heard in the background where other Coast Guard officers are shouting to each other in the same room about "the ship, the ship")
SCHETTINO: Please ..
COAST GUARD: There is no please about it. Go back on board. Assure me you are going back on board!
SCHETTINO: I am on a life boat of rescue, I am under here. I am not going anywhere. I am here.
COAST GUARD: What are you doing, captain?
SCHETTINO: I am here to coordinate the rescue ...
COAST GUARD (interrupting): What are you coordinating there! Go on board! Coordinate the rescue from on board! Are you refusing?
SCHETTINO: No, I am not refusing.
COAST GUARD: Are you refusing to go on board, captain? Tell me the reason why you are not going back on board.
SCHETTINO: (inaudible)... there is a another life boat ...
COAST GUARD (interrupting again, screaming): You go back on board! That is an order! There is nothing else for you to consider. You have sounded the 'abandon ship'. Now I am giving the orders. Go back on board. Is that clear? Don't you hear me?
SCHETTINO: I am going on board.
“In short, SOPA and PIPA not only harm the internet, they support existing...”
– Tim O’Reilly sums up the madness of SOPA and PIPA.
November 2011
1 post
September 2011
3 posts
“We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy...”
– Chris Hedges in the by far best essay out there about the 9/11 anniversary.
“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is...”
– A long, thoughtful, thorough and utterly depressing farewell to the conservative cult by former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren.
“The tar sands are the dirtiest source of fuel on the planet. As I wrote in Our...”
– Al Gore’s take on the crazy Keystone XL pipeline project.
August 2011
7 posts
“The great failure of globalisation: The simple fact is that globalisation has...”
– Economist Jeffrey Sachs in the FT — and the man has a good point, as always.
“Fact. There is a link between cuts and riots
In a recent study, we focused on...”
– Summary of a brilliant paper by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth in The Guardian. Too bad Teabaggers don’t read nonfiction.
“A modern 200-mile-per-hour rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco will...”
– The great high-speed rail lie, excellent explanation in the Chronicle how the US is falling further and further behind, clinging to old modes of transportation, thanks to oil and other lobbies.
“[Perform the following reality check next time you throw your data down Facebook...”
– Streetview might creep people out, but Google’s Data Liberation Front has some valid points and offers handy tools called Takeout.
“The problem is not with the facial recognition itself, but the data that is...”
– Johannes Caspar, the head of Hamburg’s data protection authority in an interview with the FT about why the city state is taking Facebook to task for its most recent privacy landgrab: facial recognition as a default privacy invasion.
“It will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”
– Paul Krugman on the sorry last-minute deal in DC.
July 2011
8 posts
Mobile broadband costs around the world
Sobering comparison of access costs around the globe from Android Tablet Fanatic. Not surprising the “Anywhere countries” Korea, Sweden and Japan take the cheapo crown.
Provided by Android Tablet Fanatic
“The so-called Amazon-tax law isn’t a tax at all. It doesn’t impose...”
– Excellent editorial from the LA Times why IT-smart Amazon is playing dumb when it comes to refusing to collect sales taxes, hiding behind a flawed argument based on a tax-cheat business model.
“Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the...”
– Paul Krugman’s smart take on what it’s like to watch an alleged superpower implode thanks to Tea Party idiocy, and possibly drag the world economy with it. Makes one wonder whether the demise of the US dollar as reserve currency will be hastened, too.
“The dingbats at Fox News’ illiterate dementia variety hour, Fox and...”
– Another brilliant Gawker exegesis of plumbing the lowest lows of spinning a story, so it finally rotates on a chickpea-sized brain.
“More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60...”
– Fascinating story in the WSJ for a behind-the-scenes look at Apple stores.
“The video-chat launch underscores a bigger point: Facebook and Google are now in...”
– The networking men in the black pajamas are going a “mano a mano.” Good Morning Silicon Valley sums it up nicely, the question is: Do I care?
“Recent census figures show that Detroit’s overall population shrank by 25...”
– Encouraging data points re. the “creative class” from one of my favorite cities in the U.S.: Detroit, as reported by the New York Times.
“And H&H, rest in peace, was the most insidious force of all in the...”
– An essay in TIME pondering the demise of H&H Bagels in my old hometown, looking at the sad trend to water down authentic foods.
June 2011
3 posts
“Facebook really, really doesn’t want you to leave. Rather than providing...”
– RedWriteWeb’s detailed instructions for deleting your Facebook account. How to get out even though they want to pull you back in. Make this week quittin’ time!
May 2011
6 posts
“It’s inevitable that many a block-headed hippie among the Bonnaroo...”
– RWW quotes Adam Gold from Nashville Scene about the just slightly eerie fact that this year’s Bonnaroo festival will issue RFID-equipped wrist bands for access control & tracking. What’s next — get an NFC chip injected and receive a free concert bootleg in your inbox?
“[SLUG: Make ‘em pay again!] …while philanthropic or government...”
– The conclusion plus detailed recommendations of a Columbia J-School report about “The Business of Digital Journalism by Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave and Lucas Graves. Worth downloading and reading in its entirety!
Detroit as "Capital of the Experimental" →
Urban visionary Tony Goldman tells Model D what he sees in the D: “I’ll tell you first what I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t tear down a single building. I wouldn’t build a single new parking lot. I would use every piece of the city’s 140-square miles to create the country’s best urban parks system. I would create a thoughtful urban homesteading program and give...
“…limiting access to meaning can be a more powerful tool for privacy than...”
– From “Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies,” a good read by Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick from Microsoft Research.
“We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at...”
– From an essay about political killings and double standards by Noam Chomsky.
April 2011
4 posts
“A study of highly educated Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs who leave tech hubs...”
– The brain drain in reverse. Eye-opening SJ Merc story about a new study by creative sleuths Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the school of information at Berkeley, and scholars from Duke and Harvard.
“Writers who contribute free content to a website may be individually happy to do...”
– Deeply disturbing article in the CJR from February about content farms and what they mean to journalism in the not-so-long run.
March 2011
27 posts
Color me this! Babbling about the photo-sharing...
I played with Color last night, feeling my way around yet another photosharing app, one with tons of VC money thrown at it and a celebrity founder. My take-away: It is a fundamentally new kind of photo app, for two reasons.
First, it turns taking and looking at pictures into a completely ephemeral game. Snap, look what just popped into your stream, taken by a complete stranger. Snap, laugh, like,...
An actual homework question given to Georgia...
motherjones:
Q. What does the U.S. do with illegal aliens?
A. The U.S. puts them to work in the army. B. The U.S. shoots them into outer space. C. The U.S. puts them to death. D. The U.S. sends them back where they came from.
One of the multiple-choice homework questions for a story entitled “What Is an Illegal Alien?” recently given to a bunch of third graders at Chesney Elementary in...
“The United States has dropped off the list of the top 25 most globalized...”
– Interesting data points from the KOF Swiss Economic Institute on globalization (via Richard Florida).
The Understatement: Digital Subscription Prices... →
understatementblog:
Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:
Full sized chart
As Frédéric Filloux and others…
“I worked in Saipan, which is in the Marianas Island in the Pacific, and there,...”
– Physician Kevin Patterson explains how processed foods and fast food are making the world both fatter and sicker. (via nprfreshair)
“[Facebook just became even creepier] This month — and for the first time...”
– Irina Slutsky has a story on AdAge how the big sell-out of users on social networks continues, moving into real-time mining and targeting.
Radiation in Japan put into perspective: not as... →
A brilliant interactive map from the Tokyo Post and Tableau Public that puts the panic-mongering over Japan´s triple catastrophe into perspective: “…in even the most severely affected regions, it would take over 100 weeks of constant exposure to experience enough radiation to cause radiation sickness.”