February 2012
22 posts
Mitt Romney and the car industry: A Detroiter in... →
What’s amazing to me is that Mitt Romney seems like a combination of the worst aspects of Al Gore and John Kerry. Stretching the truth & exaggerating, seeming to change his position daily, being wooden/mechanical and unlikable, and being filthy rich, out of touch, & part of a political dynasty. He can’t even be the moderate that he really is in that party.
So Mr Romney must...
Some Generalizing about Specializing →
Even though Khoi Vinh is specifically talking about designers and IAs here, this is exactly the same reason that I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a front-end developer, rather than just a developer.
Now, things have swung around the other way. The technology remains complex, of course, but it’s been successfully abstracted enough that it’s once again possible for a single person to...
What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic... →
Maybe we should listen to the anthropologist here:
Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.
Well, what happened this time around?...
Gordon "Gopher" Davies
littleknownblackhistoryfacts:
First person to break out into a sprint simply because everyone else was running.
Janet Miles-Quarry
littleknownblackhistoryfacts:
First person to tell someone they play too much.
Fortune Finance: Hedge Funds, Markets, Mergers &... →
So difficult to know who to listen to with investing for the future. You hear something different every time,
Investing is often described as the process of laying out money now in the expectation of receiving more money in the future. At Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) we take a more demanding approach, defining investing as the transfer to others of purchasing power now with the reasoned...
Herschel "Junior" Jansen, Jr.
littleknownblackhistoryfacts:
First person to inquire as to what’s crackalackin’.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog... →
It’s funny how much your perspective informs things. When I read the New York Mag article that Taibibi is referring to, it didn’t even cross my mind that he was trying to be sympathetic to the bankers, because the whole time I was thinking “Good, I’m glad things are getting back to some semblance of normalcy. I guess Obama’s financial regulations worked more than I...
Munson Archie
littleknownblackhistoryfacts:
First person to yell “awww sookie sookie nah!”
The End of Wall Street As They Knew It →
I was somewhat down on the president because it seemed like the financial rules didn’t have any real effect. Guess I may be wrong.
But for now, the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties. And those laws kept banking reliably risk-free and dull until the deregulation mania of the eighties and nineties unleashed finance. The system is being...
Slate - Dismal Scientist - March 20, 1997 →
Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land—or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?
The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the...
Timmy "Too Hype" Benson
littleknownblackhistoryfacts:
First person to get a party started right, and also quickly.
January 2012
31 posts
Twitter / @Sereneo: Ummm, I think I'll have a ... →
aim.me: just a man, talking about his wife →
aimdotme:
“All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family…
“So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just...”
– The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz
The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub | Txt... →
Let’s pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. Assuming you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs’ last couple points. If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured...
The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com →
And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before,...
The Tea Party’s Not-So-Civil War - NYTimes.com →
And yet, it’s precisely this aversion to political calculation that may relegate the movement to the margins, at least as far as the 2012 nomination is concerned. The pragmatic thing, after all, would have been for the various Tea Party leaders to coalesce around a single conservative candidate who might beat Romney in South Carolina. But such machinations would have been antithetical to the...
My Guantánamo Nightmare - NYTimes.com →
ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were...
Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will... →
If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant...
Steven Donziger, Chevron, Ecuador’s Environmental... →
One day last February, a judge in Lago Agrio, presiding over a spare, concrete courtroom in a shopping mall on the edge of town, issued an opinion that reverberated far beyond the Amazon. Since 1993, a group of Ecuadorans had been pursuing an apparently fruitless legal struggle to hold Texaco responsible for environmental destruction in the Oriente. During the decades when Texaco operated...
Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts... →
Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.
Crazy that the aide doesn’t even...
The 45 Places to Go in 2012 - NYTimes.com →
Seeing so many places I’ve never been and want to someday visit all in one list makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life for the past 32 years.
Morality and Persecution - Matt Gemmell →
It makes me shake with rage, and weep with frustration, that in the year 2012 we still allow the madness of denouncing homosexuality. My wife and I aren’t religious - indeed, as thinking, rational people who can so easily see its human-fabricated nature and the many evils it has visited on the world, we’re contemptuous of and embarrassed by it - yet we’re permitted by the state to be married.
...
How the brain spots faces →
The neuroscientists found different activity patterns on each side of the brain. On the left, the activity patterns changed very gradually as images became more like faces and there was no clear distinction between faces and non-faces. The left side would flare if someone was looking at a human or an eerily face-like formation of rocks.
But on the right side, activation patterns in the...
My Father’s Take On Internet Comments →
It means that the future leaders of your country, I say your ‘cause I’ll have long decomposed, are gonna be people that have absolutely no experience with actual confrontation. Thirty years from now the President of the most powerful country in the world is going to be some little shit who sat at his computer and hurled insults three feet away from his mommy’s tit like it was no big deal. I...
http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/10/100... →
“One day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich.”
Wow.
Slave Reference in Math Worksheet Upsets Parents →
“If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college, but molested you.”
© Chris Rock
I think Chris forgot to mention that the uncle continues to hit on you after you graduate.
The G.O.P.’s ‘Black People’ Platform - NYTimes.com →
That didn’t take long.
As we’ve gotten around to casting votes to select a Republican presidential nominee, the antiblack rhetoric has taken center stage.
You just have to love (and despise) this kind of predictability.
And people wonder why so many black people reliably vote for Democrats? I feel like, by actually addressing these statement seriously, he gave them more respect...
The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The... →
The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting...
The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership -... →
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done,...
“Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about...”
– The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz
How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - NYTimes.com →
In October, Colbert offered the Republican Party in South Carolina $400,000 to defray the cost of the presidential primary there in January in return for naming rights — he wanted the ballots, the lanyards, the press credentials to say “The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary” — and for a nonbinding referendum question that asked the voters to decide whether “corporations are...
King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse... →
Tyson compared the elemental composition of our bodies to the abundance of elements in the universe: a close match. This union between ourselves and the cosmos could offer some solace for the feeling of insignificance astrophysics could bring. “The universe is in us,” he said. After ninety minutes, Tyson was at last done. The audience gave him a standing ovation, after which he was hustled from...