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Penalties for politicians - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...2363901
shared by anonymous on 28 May 13 - Cached
  • This reminds me of something writer Robert Heinlein once said: "Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not ensure 'good' government, it simply ensures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the 'backseat driver' syndrome."
  • Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well ... they're willing to accept the responsibility, but they're not willing to take the blame. What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.
  • The problem is that they don't have, in President Obama's words, "skin in the game." When it comes to actual wrongdoing, they're shielded by doctrines of "absolute immunity" (for the president) and "qualified immunity" (for lesser officials). This means that the president can't be sued for anything he does as president, while lower-ranking officials can't be sued so long as they can show that they were acting in a "good faith" belief that they were following the law.
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  • Then, of course, there's the unfortunate fact that the worse the economy does, the more important the government becomes. As Tim Noah pointed out back when the financial crisis was new, "On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details."
  • I'd favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I'd get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones). I'd also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven't passed a budget. If they can't take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I'd ban presidential travel when there's not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.
  • I'm willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there's a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.
  • But the real lesson is this: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down. The best solution of all is to take a lot of that power back. When the power is in your hands, it's in the hands of someone who feels it when you fall down. When it's in their hands, it's your pain, their gain. That's no way to run a country.
  • anonymous on 28 May 13
     
    "We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down."
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The Strange Case of the Super Mario Bros. Movie - 0 views

www.grantland.com/...ge-case-super-mario-bros-movie
shared by anonymous on 28 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 28 May 13
     
    "The cast was basically in revolt. The actors would shove each day's new pages aside unread. Hoskins and Leguizamo swilled scotch together between takes, leading to an on-set accident in which Leguizamo drunkenly crashed a truck and Hoskins broke his hand. By the time Stayton got there, the disgruntled performers had abandoned any effort to put on a happy face. When Stayton told Hopper the directors declined to speak to him for the story, the actor responded, "That's the only intelligent thing I've heard that they've really actually done.""
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Why the Government Surveillance of Fox's James Rosen Is Troubling - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...ama-fbi-spying-fox-james-rosen
shared by anonymous on 24 May 13 - Cached
  • But as even top intelligence officials have acknowledged, overclassification is rampant in government. Much basic information, without which effective national security reporting would be impossible, is reflexively classified, whether or not it poses any realistic security risks, and reporters routinely discuss such information with sources. In practice, that means the government can pick and choose which leakers to go after—and which ones to wink at, because they're serving the administration's interests. No doubt, the government does have an interest in—and an obligation—to protect legitimate secrets, but an aggressive campaign that targets reporters and subjects them to broad and secret intrusions (and maybe prosecutions as well) will undermine a necessary check on government power and prevent the public from learning crucial information about what is done in its name.
  • anonymous on 24 May 13
     
    "It is rare for someone who writes about the intelligence community to have speculation of this sort confirmed almost instantly, but a report in the Washington Post Monday has shined a spotlight on another hitherto unreported leak investigation in which the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read the email of Fox News reporter James Rosen. "
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A Virtual Weimar: Hyperinflation in a Video Game World - 1 views

mises.org/...nflation-in-a-Video-Game-World
shared by anonymous on 21 May 13 - Cached
  • But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.
  • In casual use, the term “inflation” is used in conjunction with price increases. From the perspective of the Austrian School of economics, though, that phenomenon is a secondary effect of increases in the money supply.
  • Furthermore, inflation is not simply an increase in the supply of money within an economy; it is the increase in that portion (if any) not backed by a commensurate increase in specie
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  • As virtual currencies are digitally-created and not commodity-backed — therefore, not particularly dissimilar from real world currencies in this day and age — those such as Diablo 3’s gold are de facto fiat currencies.
  • Faucets are ways through which game currency is injected into the game. This generally involve players receiving currency from the game system itself, as opposed to other players.
  • Sinks are ways through which game currency is removed from the game. This generally involve players paying currency into the game system itself, as opposed to other players.
  • The establishment by Blizzard of a real money auction house (“RMAH”) alongside a virtual gold auction house in the game provided players with an incentive to both farm the game for real world profits and to pursue arbitrage opportunities. The RMAH was also created, at least in part, to disincentivize players from patronizing third party markets outside the game.
  • Nevertheless, bots — automated game participants whose sole purpose is to farm the game world for items to sell — quickly emerged.
  • Although its anonymity may make it subject to skepticism, several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active 24/7 in the Diablo 3 game world, allegedly “harvesting” (producing) 4 million virtual gold per hour.[4]
  • The combined effect of heavy bot activity and insufficient sinks immediately impacted the gold markets, and inflationary pressures were soon apparent.
  • The RMAH had minimum and maximum dollar amounts for in-game gold transactions: $0.25 minimum, $250 maximum. Market participants were also limited to dealing in increments of a certain size, called a “stack.” The “stack” was initially set to 100K gold. But as gold prices fell owing to rapidly building supply, the stack size was changed in August 2012 to 1 million. This practice, known as redenomination, is a fairly standard (if cosmetic) method of addressing inflation, but was viewed by some players as tacit devaluation.
  • To be clear, at the time at which the redenomination was introduced, gold was still trading above the floor rate. But being artificial, caps and floors not only prevent markets from clearing, but give black markets a target to undercut, to say nothing of offering players an opportunity to avoid the 15 percent fee — another intended gold sink — levied upon transactions within the auction house.
  • By early 2013, the gold price had fallen to the exchange floor set by the game managers — $0.25/million — and players began to show signs of concern.
  • Hyperinflation is the economist’s equivalent of an astrophysicist’s quasar cluster or a marine biologist’s dolphin “stampede”: a rare exhibition of a unique set of circumstances which arise infrequently and are closely studied when they materialize.
  • Such events are exotic enough that they become legendary: many individuals knowing little about monetary policy are aware of the recent outbreak in Zimbabwe, or familiar with the defining instance in the post-WWI Weimar Republic.
  • Economically, the tipping point in the transformation of inflation into hyperinflation is characterized by a profound drop in the outstanding demand for money
  • when holders of money expect the supply of money to increase — particularly without any sense of timing, bounds, or other guidance
  • monetary demand in the present drops in favor of surrendering money for vendibles.
  • The focus of possessors of money, therefore, devolves into an effort to capture known, present purchasing power against the likelihood of its decline in the near future.
  • If historical cases of hyperinflation — real, and now virtual — have one thing in common, it is the instinct among its victims to blame the symptoms rather than the disease.
  • The Austrian economist Hans Sennholz noted that during the German hyperinflation, “intrigue and artifice” were believed to be at work.[12] Similarly, a handful of Diablo 3 players, frustrated about the decimation of their purchasing power, expressed increasing suspicion of manipulation and conspiracy theories.
  • While RMAH prices for virtual gold rallied occasionally, the prevailing direction of black market prices for virtual gold was inexorably lower as third party sellers undercut the in-game gold floor.
  • Several competing definitions for hyperinflation exist, with the strictest — an increase of 50 percent in one month — defined by economist Philip Cagan in his 1956 book The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation.
  • On May 7th 8th, 2013, Blizzard rolled out Patch 1.0.8, which contained the seeds of the last, hyperbolic surge of gold superabundance.
  • In just a few hours, the already gold-swamped economy saw trillions more created: a mammoth deluge of, by then, worthless virtual gold chasing finite goods, driving prices upward in leaps and bounds.
  • It was, at last, the hyperbolic blow-off characteristic of real world hyperinflationary episodes. Some of the price increases (in Diablo 3 gold) are shown below: 2013 avg price 1-6 May avg price 7-8 May price radiant star amethyst 17.4M 41.2M 85.8M radiant square ruby 187K 260K 337K flawless square topaz 491 5,170 8,700 star emerald 764K 1.1M 1.6M tome of jewelcrafting 694 3,400 3,100
  • And in a noteworthy departure from real world hyperinflation, rather than resorting to barter (which frequently takes the form of food for skilled labor), as runaway inflation became hyperinflation, many chat channels — through which some measure of trade was consummated — seem to have fallen empty: without a need to eat or clothe oneself in the virtual world, some players simply appear to have turned away.
  • Blizzard quickly closed the in-game auction houses and audited transactions which took place during the blowout, banning players who took advantage of the bug and donating the proceeds of certain sales to charity. The gold stack size was also moved back from 10M to 1M.
  • Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies.
  • More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets. [24]
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 May 13
       
      Kirk Battle remarked: "Which would completely kill the game."
  • By no means does this analysis intend to equate the actions of virtual gaming firms with the policies of governments or central banks, or to malign their indisputably talented managers, designers, and programmers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 May 13
       
      Kirk Battle's Comment: "Bullshit. It's a huge indictment of their capacity to fix or resolve market pressures because these number jockeys were sitting there with perfect info and still couldn't do it."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 May 13
       
      Side note: I more fully understand why Valve hired a hotshot Economics dude.
  • anonymous on 21 May 13
     
    "in the last few months, various outposts in that world - Silver City and New Tristram, to name two - have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante's Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances - and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug - has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation."
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The Growing Importance of the Arctic Council - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...wing-importance-arctic-council
shared by anonymous on 17 May 13 - Cached
  • The Arctic Council was established in 1996 by the eight countries that have territory above the Arctic Circle -- the United States, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
  • Its main purpose was to be an intergovernmental forum (also involving Arctic indigenous groups) that promoted cooperation primarily regarding environmental matters and research. The Arctic Council's central focus has remained on environmental issues in the Arctic, and the body has had no meaningful decision-making power.
  • However, during this year's meeting, the council's members signed a legally binding agreement coordinating response efforts to marine pollution incidents.
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  • Satellite data collected since 1979 shows that both the thickness of the ice in the Arctic and range of sea ice have decreased substantially, especially during the summer months.
  • U.S. Geological Survey estimates from 2008 suggest that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas reserves are located in the Arctic Circle.
  • In 2012, 46 ships transporting a total of 1.3 million tons reportedly used the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the northern coast of Russia; this represents a considerable increase from 2011, when 34 ships transported approximately 820,000 tons. In response to the route's growing importance, Russia set up the Northern Sea Route administration in March to supervise shipping.
  • Europe has a vested interest in alternative shipping routes to Asia becoming more economically viable, since such routes would allow trade to circumvent numerous bottlenecks like the Suez Canal and increase access to Asia's growing consumer markets.
  •  China has also shown a particular interest in the Arctic, and has lobbied the Nordic countries to support Beijing's bid for observer status in the Arctic Council.
  • Sailing along the Northern Sea Route rather than through the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal significantly reduces the trip between Rotterdam and Shanghai -- the Northern Sea Route is around 20 percent shorter. This translates into significant savings in terms of fuel and crew costs.
  • The Arctic Council is just one of many bodies dealing with regional collaboration in the Arctic. The Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Nordic Council and the Conference of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region also coordinate intergovernmental or interregional collaboration in the Arctic on a number of issues.
  • Allowing six more countries to become observer states shows that the members of the Arctic Council -- even those initially skeptical of expansion, such as Canada and Russia -- see the expansion as an opportunity to give the Arctic Council greater relevance.
  • In the coming years, the debate among member states to determine whether the Arctic Council should move beyond environmental issues and become a forum to address issues related to militarization, natural resources and trade routes will become more prominent. 
  • On May 10, the U.S. government presented its new general strategy for the Arctic. Little concrete information was revealed, but a clearer plan for implementing the strategy reportedly will be worked out in the coming months.
  • anonymous on 17 May 13
     
    "The Arctic is expected to become more important in the coming decades as climate change makes natural resources and transport routes more accessible. Reflecting the growing interest in the region, the Arctic Council granted six new countries (China, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) observer status during a May 15 ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden. By admitting more observers, the Arctic Council -- an organization that promotes cooperation among countries with interests in the Arctic -- will likely become more important as a forum for discussions on Arctic issues. However, this does not necessarily mean it will be able to establish itself as a central decision-making body regarding Arctic matters."
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Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - 0 views

iopscience.iop.org/...article
shared by anonymous on 16 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 May 13
     
    "We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."
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Climate Change Is Making the Whole Planet Tip - 0 views

blogs.smithsonianmag.com/...is-making-the-whole-planet-tip
shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.
  • The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it's doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It's actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change-induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter."
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Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - 2 views

www.salon.com/...net_destroyed_the_middle_class technology
shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
  • This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways.
  • Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
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  • “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
  • But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”
  • One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.
  • And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.
  • So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.
  • Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
  • And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.
  • So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.
  • the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.
  • The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.
  • If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.
  • And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.
  • So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?
  • And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I think that's a worthy question considering the high-speed with which we adopt every possible technology; to hell with foresight.
  • Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.
  • I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
  • But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.
  • And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Ha ha. Ayn Rand people don't have to admit to *anything,* trust me, dude.
  • It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.
  • But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      This makes me curious. Is he arguing that there are fewer *nodes* because the information access closes them?
  • You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      My understanding was that the U.S. heads of business got the nod to go ahead and start manufacturing things *other* than weapons, because our industrial capabilities weren't anhialated (sp?) relative to so many others.
  • There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
  • In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
  • Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
  • I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.
  • And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.
  • The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.
  • And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Quite true. She's obviously not rolling in solid gold cadillacs.
  • But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.
  • The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.
  • I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.
  • The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
  • We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
  • The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
  • I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.
  • It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
  • You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
  • I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
  • The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
  • I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
  • All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
  • Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Group House. HAH!
  • So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.
  • And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.
  • I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      See, now I like this guy. This is like the political equivalent of aiming for the realist view in geopolitics. We separate what is likely from what is unlikely and aim not for "the best" situation, but a situation where the worst aspects have been mitigated. It's backwards thinking that both parties would have a hard time integrating into their (ughhh) brand.
  • Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?
  • Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
  • I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
  • Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Again, a take I rarely encounter.
  • I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I have had this very thing happen to. I didn't get to have my moment of discovery. I think Google Glass is going to fix that. Hah. :)
  • And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
  • I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
  • So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
  • Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth -- even democracy"
18More

Geopolitical Journey: Europe, the Glorious and the Banal - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...rney-europe-glorious-and-banal
shared by anonymous on 14 May 13 - Cached
  • How prosaic business opportunities generate the most risky and grandiose undertakings has come to interest me. This school arose with the specific goal of training sailors to go farther and farther south along the African coast in search of a sea route to India.
  • The Portuguese sought this route to cut out the middleman in the spice trade. Spices were wealth in Europe; they preserved and seasoned food, and were considered medicinal and even aphrodisiacs. But they were fiendishly expensive
  • The more I learn more about Henry, the more his program reminds me of NASA and of Tom Wolfe's classic, The Right Stuff, about America's space program. Like NASA, each mission built on the last, trying out new methods in an incremental fashion. Henry didn't try to shoot to the moon, as they say. He was no Columbus, risking everything for glory, but rather a methodical engineer, pushing the limits a little at a time and collecting data.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Europe wasn't kind to the world it discovered. But over time it did force each culture to become aware of all the others; after centuries, a Mongol student might learn about the Aztecs. Instead of a number of isolated worlds, each believing itself to be the center of the Earth, each new discovery fed the concept of a single world.
  • On this cape, early in the 15th century, well before Columbus sailed, Henry planned Europe's assault on the world. In the process, he laid the foundation of the modern world and modern Europe.
  • If Henry created his school solely for knowledge, then perhaps sending messages in a bottle and waiting for a reply would have done that. But Henry, the prince who became a monk, also acted for wealth, God's glory and to claim his place in history.
  • Today, we have entered a phase of history where the buccaneering spirit has left us. The desire for knowledge has separated itself from the hunger we have for wealth and glory. Glory is not big today, cool is. Cool does not challenge the gates of heaven, it accepts what is and conforms to it.
  • This is a passing phase, however. Humans will return to space to own it, discover unknown wealth and bring glory.
  • Out in West Texas and other desolate places, private companies -- privateers -- are reinventing the space program. They are searching for what Henry sought -- namely, wealth and glory.
  • Certainly, European imperialism brought misery to the world. But the world was making itself miserable before, and has since: One group of people has always been stealing land from other groups in a constant flow of history. What culture did not live on land stolen from another culture, either annihilated or absorbed? Ours has always been a brutal world. And the Europe Henry founded did not merely oppress and exploit, although it surely did those things. It also left as its legacy something extraordinary: a world that knew itself and all of its parts.
  • Only the dead leave legacies, and Europe is not dead. Yet something in it has died. The swagger and confidence of a great civilization is simply not there, at least not on the European peninsula.
  • Instead, there is caution and fear. You get the sense in Europe -- and here I think of conversations I had on previous trips in the last year or so -- of a fear that any decisive action will tear the place apart.
  • The European search for comfort and safety is not trivial, not after the horrors of the 20th century. The British and French have given up empires, Russia has given up communism, Germany and Italy have given up fascism and racism. The world is better off without these things. But what follows, what is left?
  • I am not talking here of the economic crisis that is gripping Europe, leaving Portugal with 17 percent unemployment and Spain with 26 percent. These are agonizing realities for those living through them. But Europeans have lived through more and worse.
  • Instead, I am speaking of a crisis in the European soul, the death of hubris and of risk-taking. Yes, these resulted in the Europeans trying to convert the world to Christianity and commerce, in Russia trying to create a new man and in Germany becoming willing to annihilate what it thought of as inferior men.
  • The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is. 
  • We humans are caught between the hunger for glory and the price you pay and the crimes you commit in pursuing it. To me, the tension between the hunger for ordinary comforts and the need for transcendence seems to lie at the heart of the human condition. Europe has chosen comfort, and now has lost it. It sought transcendence and tore itself apart. The latter might have been Henry's legacy, but ah, to have gone to his school with da Gama and Magellan.
  • anonymous on 14 May 13
     
    "We flew into Lisbon and immediately rented a car to drive to the edge of the Earth and the beginning of the world. This edge has a name: Cabo de Sao Vicente. A small cape jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, it is the bitter end of Europe. Beyond this point, the world was once unknown to Europeans, becoming a realm inhabited by legends of sea monsters and fantastic civilizations. Cabo de Sao Vicente still makes you feel these fantasies are more than realistic. Even on a bright sunny day, the sea is forbidding and the wind howls at you, while on a gloomy day you peer into the abyss. Just 3 miles east of Cabo de Sao Vicente at the bas"
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U.S., Mexico: The Decline of the Colorado River | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-mexico-decline-colorado-river
shared by anonymous on 13 May 13 - Cached
  • In 1922, the seven U.S. states in the Colorado River Basin established a compact to distribute the resources of the river.
  • As the United States' territory expanded to the west, the Colorado River briefly was considered a portal to the isolated frontier of the southwestern United States, since it was often cheaper to take a longer path via water to transport goods and people in the early 19th century.
  • the geography and erratic flow of the Colorado made the river ultimately unsuitable for mass transportation.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Irrigation along the river started expanding in the second half of the 19th century, and agriculture still consumes more water from the Colorado than any other sector.
  • When the original total allocation of the river was set in the 1920s, it was far above regional consumption. But it was also more than the river could supply in the long term.
  • The river was divided based on an estimated annual flow of roughly 21 billion cubic meters per year. More recent studies have indicated that the 20th century, and especially the 1920s, was a time of above-normal flows. These studies indicate that the long-term average of flow is closer to 18 billion cubic meters, with yearly flows ranging anywhere from roughly 6 billion cubic meters to nearly 25 billion cubic meters. As utilization has increased, the deficit between flow and allocation has become more apparent.
  • Populations in the region are expected to increase; in some states, the population could double by 2030. A study released at the end of 2012 by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation predicted a possible shortage of 3 billion cubic meters by 2035.
  • The Colorado River provides water for irrigation of roughly 15 percent of the crops in the United States, including vegetables, fruits, cotton, alfalfa and hay. It also provides municipal water supplies for large cities, such as Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas, accounting for more than half of the water supply in many of these areas.
  • There is an imbalance of power along the international border.
  • The United States controls the headwaters of the Colorado River and also has a greater macroeconomic interest in maintaining the supply of water from the river. This can make individual amendments of the 1944 Treaty somewhat misleading. Because of the erratic nature of the river, the treaty effectively promises more water than the river can provide each year. Cooperation in conservation efforts and in finding alternative water sources on the U.S. side of the border, not treaty amendments, will become increasingly important as regional water use increases over the coming decades.
  • The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation oversees the whole river, but the management of each basin is separate.
  • Additionally, within each basin, there are separate state management agencies and, within each state, separate regional management agencies.
  • For the Colorado River, the U.S.-Mexico border is likely less relevant to the competition for the river's resources than the artificial border drawn at Lees Ferry.
  • While necessary, conservation efforts and the search for alternative sources likely will not be able to make up for the predicted shortage. Amendments to the original treaty typically have been issued to address symptomatic problems. However, the core problem remains:
  • More water is promised to river users than is available on average. While this problem has not come to a head yet, there may come a time when regional growth overtakes conservation efforts.
  • It is then that renegotiation of the treaty with a more realistic view of the river's volume will become necessary. Any renegotiation will be filled with conflict, but most of that likely will be contained in the United States.
  • anonymous on 13 May 13
     
    "An amendment to a standing water treaty between the United States and Mexico has received publicity over the past six months as an example of progress in water sharing agreements. But the amendment, called Minute 319, is simply a glimpse into ongoing mismanagement of the Colorado River on the U.S. side of the border. Over-allocation of the river's waters 90 years ago combined with increasing populations and economic growth in the river basin have created circumstances in which conservation efforts -- no matter how organized -- could be too little to overcome the projected water deficit that the Colorado River Basin will face in the next 20 years."
7More

Is This How We Equalize the United States? - 1 views

motherboard.vice.com/...-we-equalize-the-united-states geography u.s.
shared by anonymous on 13 May 13 - Cached
  • For anyone that's paid a speck of attention to the tedium of political redistricting, which happens while a state grows unevenly, (and must dynamically respond to density, electorate disparity, natural resources and ridgelines, etc.), this is straight out of some psychedelic dream.
  • For Democrats, it could be straight out of a nightmare. That's because Freeman's map necessitates 50 equally populous United States. His methods for creating the map are explained thusly: 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 May 13
       
      Sound, but it also assumes that - if we went to allll this trouble to recreate the *states* - we would somehow retain the exact same political method for determining the presidency. But then I'm one of those 'radicals' that views the winner-take-all and heavily two-party system biased system suboptimal. A lack of appreciation for the actual compromise that took place to bring our political entity into being would offer greater understanding. Still, quite a fun thought experiment!
  • While Freeman's map is supposed to combat the idea of gerrymandering, the process of manipulating boundaries to win a higher populations for political parties, it might have an undesirable effect for Democrats.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Just looking at that giant 'Ogalalla' state and knowing it contains as many people as the 'Atlanta' state, I thump my head thinking of how the demographics, cultural values and natural landscape might be newly described and compared.
  • After reviewing the map, I'm asking, "Why 50 states?" I'm jonesin' to see the version of this map that has 438 equally populous states and 100 senatorial administrative districts (to make up the 538 electoral votes).
  • anonymous on 13 May 13
     
    "Looking around the US map, we see the lines of latitude and rivers that make logic of its divisions. When I reach for the words to explain my studies in geography, I often depend on the words of Ruthie Gilmore, a high-ranking scholar in the field, "Geography isn't where is Kansas, it's why is Kansas." But it can often seem so arbitrary and mathematically devised. And it is, more or less. So why do we love the shapes of our states so much? If you walk around Williamsburg on a sunny day, everybody has a little Ohio-or whatever flyover state they hail from-tatted on their arm. "
1More

How to spot a murderer's brain - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain
shared by anonymous on 12 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 May 13
     
    "Do your genes, rather than upbringing, determine whether you will become a criminal? Adrian Raine believed so - and breaking that taboo put him on collision course with the world of science"
1More

How to Customize Your Windows 7 Taskbar Icons for Any App - 0 views

www.howtogeek.com/...ws-7-taskbar-icons-for-any-app
shared by anonymous on 11 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 May 13
     
    "Would you like to change out the icons on your taskbar with a beautiful set of icons that all go together?  Here's how you can change out the random candy-colored icons for a stylish icon set of your choice."
1More

Change The Windows 7 Start Orb the Easy Way - 0 views

www.howtogeek.com/...ndows-7-start-orb-the-easy-way customize desktop
shared by anonymous on 11 May 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 11 May 13
     
    "Want to make your Windows 7 PC even more unique and personalized?  Then check out this easy guide on how to change your start orb in Windows 7."
21More

We've Entered The Volatile Postnormal Stage Of History - 0 views

www.fastcoexist.com/...le-postnormal-stage-of-history
shared by anonymous on 09 May 13 - Cached
  • Mark Twain once wisecracked, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes."
  • Perhaps that metaphorical understanding of the self-similarity of human events is part of the work--or tools--that futurists find useful.
  • we have slipped inexorably out of the late industrial, postmodern era that started soon after the end of World War II.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • I refer to this period as the postnormal. I did so partly to avoid the unwieldy "post-postmodern," but also to indicate the nature of the break: the old rules don’t apply any more, but there may still be some rhymes we can use to pierce the postnormal fog.
  • "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent," that normal scientific methods of inquiry won’t work.
  • So, I turned the adjective into a noun to characterize our new era: a time when volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (known together by the acronym VUCA) are at an all-time high, and where established approaches to analysis and planning are increasingly ineffective.
  • In a nutshell, the world economy has become massively unstable and complex, far too interconnected to understand in any real sense.
  • the world’s most successful investors are unable to find low-risk investment
  • some points that echo:
  • what happened in the developing world following the end of World War II. The colonial empires through which European governments had dominated much of the world’s land, trade, resources, and people, rapidly disintegrated.
  • over 700 million souls were under the control of the British Empire outside the UK in 1945, falling to 5 million by 1965, 3 million of whom were in Hong Kong.
  • The echo of colonialism in the postnormal is subtle.
  • We don’t have colonialism any longer, but the neoliberal capitalist economic system is global, and largely grew out of the same countries that were colonial powers.
  • We’ve created a global financial and manufacturing system that has come to control and concentrate the world wealth and power into the hands of a small elite.
  • The only difference it that it is no longer the crowned heads of Europe setting policy, but the technocrat managers of large corporations, financial institutions, and the political class.
  • The rising concerns about inequity--shown in Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the rewriting of the constitution in Iceland--are an echo of the early rise of anticolonial insurgents.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 May 13
       
      Also the Tea Party, at least a shade of it. :)
  • If the past is prologue, we might see the fall of the European Union, the defection of regions like Catalonia and Scotland from their nation states, and the rising of trade barriers as a means to protect local workers and industries.
  • We can imagine the explosion of a new generation of manufacturing, one that doesn’t rely on either armies of semi-skilled laborers or industrial regions dominated by computer-controlled factories and their supply chains and logistics networks.
  • a new caste of millions of artisanal product designers will be building small runs of 3-D printed products, sharing designs and selling through a social web, using low-cost machinery, and sidestepping the control of large corporations. Such an advance has the opportunity to destabilize the world’s patterns as much as the rise of industrialism did.
  • anonymous on 09 May 13
     
    "By looking at the past, we can judge what this new era might bring: a lot of chaos, populist movements fighting off the old economic order, and a 3-D printing fueled return to a more local economy."
31More

The Liberal Narrative is Broken, and Only Populism Can Fix It - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...275600
shared by anonymous on 08 May 13 - Cached
  • It is time to go populist.
  • A major reason for the limited support liberals gain (even within the Democratic Party) is a basic misunderstanding of the way democratic politics work.
  • Liberals console themselves, when they learn that for every American voter who identities as a liberal there are two conservatives, by saying, Ah, you don't get it; studies show that the majority only subscribe to conservative philosophies but they are 'operational' liberals.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • This lovely thought does not have a leg to stand on, because people cannot vote for these programs.
  • Instead, they must cast one vote that covers all the various programs and issues -- domestic and foreign -- before them. In doing so, they do not build some kind of index where they award five points for promoting Social Security, four for Medicare, three for parks, minus two for farm subsidies, and so on.
  • Rather, voters fall back on political philosophy as a shortcut to reach their summary choice -- the only one they have.
  • And when it comes to general philosophical leanings, the overwhelming majority of the population lean conservative, as these graphs show.
  • On the philosophical level, the liberal approach does not play for many because it is too abstruse.
  • When CNN asked a group of Democratic voters to recite the Republican message, they did so crisply, on the spot. When they same group was asked to recite the Democrats' message -- they hemmed and hawed.
  • Thus, President Obama stated in the 2013 State of the Union, "It's not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth."
  • Previously he told Americans, "I believe government should be lean; government should be efficient. I believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don't hurt others."
  • He followed in the footsteps of the popular Bill Clinton, who made his mark by declaring that the age of big government was over and ending welfare as we knew it. Both cases reflect the pressure on liberals to kiss the we-don't-favor-big-government ring before they can hope that the majority of Americans will give their message a chance.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 May 13
       
      See also: Clinton & Blair's "Third Way"
  • More important, many government activities have become indefensible.Reports are published daily showing very large parts of the government are no longer serving the people and that they have been captured by special interests.
  • One reads on Monday that Congress voted 394 to 1 to extend a subsidy program started in 1925 to ensure there would be enough helium for zeppelins, but now serves only a few private interests.
  • On Tuesday, that casino and private prison corporations who declare themselves real-estate investment trusts (REITs) although they have nothing to do with the real-estate business have gained IRS approval not to pay taxes on their profits.
  • On Wednesday, that a hospital chain requires its physicians to hospitalize 50 percent of the seniors who set foot into its ERs and automatically orders a battery of tests for them whether they need it or not, all charged to Medicare.
  • On Thursday, that when 19 of the largest Wall Street firms violated anti-fraud laws, rather than face criminal prosecution, they were made to promise not to break the law in the future. When they broke it anyway, in 51 different cases, no charges were filed and the offenders were simply made to repeat their promise to behave.
  • And on Friday one is reminded that not one of the fine people who brought us the finical crisis that lost millions their homes, jobs, and life savings have been jailed, including those who hired people to systematically commit massive fraud. And that that the banks we bailed out are still too big to fail, while their executives got big bonuses and are carry on brewing the next financial bubble.
  • On it goes. Moreover, one must assume that for every government capture by special interests the press reveals, there are quite a few others not aired.
  • No wonder many found that the Tea Party spoke to their anger. True, the movement also attracted some people who hold racial prejudices and oppose gay marriage.
  • But it is a serious mistake to hold that this is the main attraction, or ignore the Tea Party's key message: namely, that the government is not working for us, is not responsive to our needs, is not hearing our voices.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 May 13
       
      Salience.
  • Instead of dismissing Tea Partiers as a bunch of redneck hicks, liberals should tell them they are half right -- the government all too often is not serving the people -- but have the wrong address for their very justified anger.
  • It should be directed at the special interests
  • Readers may wonder why, if it is true that large segments of the public are open to populist appeals, did Occupy Wall Street fare so poorly?
  • First, because it had no clear narrative and was mainly an expression of a very diffuse sentiment; second, because it mixed populist with liberal messages; third, because it was unclear who the bad guys are -- Wall Street? The bankers? The one percent? The System?
  • A populist narrative must clearly focus on special interests, even admitting that they may include some with liberal feathers. And it must call for liberating the government from special interests so that it might once again serve the people. This is a thesis that could unite liberals with many others who have many very sound reasons to be furious.
  • The next step, a major first step to return the government to one for the people, by the people, is actually a relative easy one to outline: rolling back the negative impact of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.
  • However, few will be ready to support major limitations on the private monies gushing into elections until they have come to see the source of our malaise. It is as simple -- the message ought to be simple -- as this: The culprit is not the government but the unfettering of the special interests who all too often have captured its reins.
  • anonymous on 08 May 13
     
    "The left dare not answer conservatives by simply saying government is good. Instead, it must make special interests a rallying cry."
1More

Skeptic Rebuttals in one line - 0 views

www.skepticalscience.com/oneliners.php
shared by anonymous on 08 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 May 13
     
    Timesavers, all of 'em.
1More

Office OneNote Gem Add-Ins - 0 views

www.onenotegem.com
shared by anonymous on 07 May 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 07 May 13
     
    A fantastic collection of Microsoft OneNote add-ins.
8More

Five tools to extract "locked" data in PDFs - 0 views

knightcenter.utexas.edu/...tools-extract-locked-data-pdfs
shared by anonymous on 07 May 13 - Cached
  • Remember, no converter is perfect. This is because PDFs can hold scanned information (that requires another kind of conversion, like OCR), complex tables (with columns or rows spanned multiple cells) or without graphic lines, in short, distinct patterns that hinder the correct formatting of the converted file. 
  • According to the journalist, the best way to do this is to randomly check the converted data to see if it's different from the original. And don't be fooled, there will almost always be a need to clean up the data when using an automatic conversion, especially for tables.  
  • 1. Cometdocs
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 2. Zamzar
  • 4. PDFtoText
  • 5. Tabula
  • 3. Nitro PDF to Excel
  • anonymous on 07 May 13
     
    "Extracting data from PDFs for open use is not a simple task, as ProPublica reporter Jeremy B. Merrill, one of the contributors to the "Dollars for Docs" project, can attest. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas asked programmers and specialists in data journalism, including the ex-editor of the Guardian Datablog, Simon Rogers, for their recommendations and identified some free tools to facilitate the conversation from PDFs to an open format, like CSV tables."
23More

The Invention of Childhood, or Why It Hurts to Have a Baby [Excerpt] - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm
shared by anonymous on 06 May 13 - Cached
  • It’s impossible to overstate the colossal impact this turn of events had on our evolution, but it requires some context to fully appreciate what it means. Our habit of being born early is part of a larger, stranger phenomenon that scientists call neoteny, a term that covers a lot of evolutionary sins at the same time it explains so much of what makes us the unique, even bizarre creatures we are.
  • you might think that neoteny is simply a matter of a species holding on to as many youthful traits of an ancestor as long into adulthood as possible
  • And our brain development is anything but arrested. In fact, just the opposite. As I said, complicated.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The different ways some parts of us seem to accelerate and mature while others bide their time or halt altogether has generated a flock of terms related to neoteny—paedomorphosis, heterochrony, progenesis, hypermorphosis, and recapitulation.
  • In the end, however, it comes down to this—each represents an evolution of evolution itself, an exceptional and rare combination of adaptations that changed our ancestors so fundamentally that it led to an ape (us) capable of changing the very planet that brought it into existence.5 Put another way, it changed everything.
  • Mostly we think of Darwin’s “descent by natural selection” as a chance transformation of newly arrived mutations—usually physical—into an asset rather than a liability, which is then passed along to the next generation.
  • But what neoteny (and paedomorphosis and all the rest) illustrate is that the forces of evolution don’t simply play with physical attributes, they play with time, too, or more accurately they can shift the times when genes are expressed and hormones flow, which not only alters looks but behavior, with fascinating results.
  • By being born “early,” our youth is amplified and elongated, and it continues to stretch out across our lives into the extended childhood that makes us so different from the other primates that preceded us.
  • All of the evidence emphatically points to our direct, gracile ape ancestors steadily extending their youth. They were inventing childhood.
  • Exactly how all of this unfolded on the wild and sprawling plains of Africa isn’t clear precisely, but there can be no doubt that it did. We stand as the indisputable proof.
  • The clustered neurons that together compose the brains of all primates grow at a rate before birth that even the most objective laboratory researcher could only call exuberant, maybe even scary.
  • Within a month of gestation primate brain cells are blooming by the thousands per second.
  • But for most species that growth slows markedly after birth. The brain of a monkey fetus, for example, arrives on its birthday with 70 percent of its cerebral development already behind it, and the remaining 30 percent is finished off in the next six months. A chimpanzee completes all of its brain growth within twelve months of birth.
  • You and I, however, came into the world with a brain that weighed a mere 23 percent of what it would become in adulthood.
  • even arriving in our early, fetal state, with less than a quarter of our brain development under our belts, we are still born with remarkably large brains.
  • this approach to brain development is so extraordinarily strange and rare that it is unique in nature.
  • evolution doesn’t plan. It simply modifies randomly and moves forward. And in this case, remember, remaining in the womb full term was out of the question. For us it was be born early, or don’t be born.
  • we simply haven’t yet gathered enough clues to know precisely when an early birth became unavoidable. There are, however, a few theories.
  • Some scientists believe earlier births would have begun when the adult brain of some predecessor or another reached 850 cc.
  • The lake, the streams and the rivers that fed it, and the variability of the weather made the area a kind of smorgasbord of biomes—grasslands, desert, verdant shorelines, clusters of forest and thick scrub. The bones of the extinct beasts that lie by the millions in the layers of volcanic ash beyond the shores of Lake Turkana today attest to its ancient popularity.
  • In fact it was so well liked that Homo ergaster, Homo habilis, and Homo rudolfensis were all ranging among its eastern and northern shores 1.8 million years ago
  • Viewed from either end of the spectrum, none of the clues about his age have made much sense to the teams of scientists who have labored over them. Each was out of sync with the other. Some life events were happening too soon, some too late, none strictly adhering to the growth schedules of either modern humans or forest apes. Still, the skeleton’s desynchronized features strongly suggested that the relatives of this denizen of Lake Turkana were almost certainly being born “younger,” elongating their childhoods and postponing their adolescence. Apes may be adolescents at age seven and humans at age eleven, but this creature fell somewhere in between.
  • anonymous on 06 May 13
     
    "At least 27 human species have walked the Earth, but only our lineage survived. Our ancestors may have crossed a cerebral Rubicon that led to babies being born "early""
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