Thoughtful post about Google, but what really interests me is the idea that as something (be it company, country, etc.) gets bigger and more powerful, it can do things that, when seen from the inside, are “in our best interest”, but, when seen from the outside, are “evil”. And that this can happen without necessarily [...]
Quote of the week (year? decade?) TSA Backscatter X-ray Backlash: Marijn Ornstein (security boss of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport) said: ‘If you look at all the recent terrorist incidents, the bombs were detected because of human intelligence not because of screening … If even a fraction of what is spent on screening was invested in the [...]
Whoda thought that combining gay marriage and schema design would lead to an great post?
“We have too much ground floor area seeking too much retail space from too few retailers, who seek to sell too many non-essential goods to too few customers, who increasingly have too little money to buy them and too little space in which to store them.” The above quote by PSU professor William Macht is [...]
Wait! He forgets other great stuff, like filling out all those forms, and getting weird letters from your insurance company which (I admit) are a little scary because they don’t quite make sense but then being able to talk to the nice people on the phone about it, and … and being able to change [...]
I don’t always agree with him. Sometimes I think he’s more mean than funny. But, sometimes, he cuts right to the bone. Sometimes it takes a jester to tell it like it really is. We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets [...]
“If there’s demand, people will find the supply” I truck this phrase out every time I here about a “war” against a topic that you can’t really fight a war against. Be it drugs, prostitution, gambling or even terrorism, there’s no way to stop these things by cutting off the supply: drug stashes, prostitution rings, [...]
Amen. Didn’t expect this from The Economist, and yet, they wrote a similar argument 20 years ago. We can start here, then dismantle everything else with the word “War” and led by a “Tsar” (pick your own spelling). Think of the money we’d save and the good it would do to our society.
Great talk by John Gruber (of Daring Fireball) titled “The Auteur Theory of Design”. He starts off wondering why some groups are able to create great things (art, movies, software programs) and other, seemingly equally strong groups produce, well, crap. Borrowing from the Auteur Theory, and using Hitchcock as an example, his main premise for [...]
This explains why wages have been stagnant over the last few years despite people saying the economy is rising. And why the savings rate in the US has gone so low (and our borrowing so high – btw, how could someone as “brilliant” as Greenspan not see that cheap money would lead us to borrow [...]