thanks to kottke for the pointer!
1234567890 Day
This Friday, in addition to being Friday, is also 1234567890 Day. At 6:31 pm EST on that day, the Unix time will be 1234567890.
1234567890 Day.
-rePost: Something To Be Happy About-Unfogged
Unsullied
Posted by Becks
on 02.11.09
It’s almost equally impressive in this day and age that Captain Sully from Flight 1549 has been in the spotlight as a hero for nearly a month now without some sigh-inducing reveal like he’s having a sleazy affair or has a history of DUIs or some such. You know people are surely digging, loving to take down heroes almost as much as making them.
Kudos, sir.
Unfogged.
-rePost-GMANews.TV – Japan bestows grant to RP for its medium-term economic goals – Business – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA
Thank You to Japan! This is great news.
Japan bestows grant to RP for its medium-term economic goals
02/13/2009 | 04:20 PM
MANILA, Philippines – Japan extended a special grant to the Philippines, allowing Manila to meet its medium-term economic goals.
Worth Y700 million or P361.544 million, the said grant was the eighth such batch in Japan’s non-project grant aid (NPGA), the Japanese embassy’s Philippine website said.
All eight grants have now reached a total of Y15.1 billion or P7.803 billion.
Besides allowing the Philippines to procure commodities such as fertilizers, the grant also supports various projects including the distribution of personal computers for public secondary schools around the country.
GMANews.TV – Japan bestows grant to RP for its medium-term economic goals – Business – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.
-rePost-Business – Starbucks plans instant coffee debut – INQUIRER.net
This seems wierd to me. It’s like they determined that because of a deep recession they are blowing up thier biz model. They decided to be mass market, hope they know what they are doing.
Starbucks plans instant coffee debut
By Lisa Baertlein
Filed Under: Beverages, Lifestyle & Leisure, Food, New Products, World Financial Crisis, Economy and Business and Finance
LOS ANGELES — Starbucks Corp. is moving into the instant coffee market as it works to shake off its reputation as a seller of pricey coffee drinks.
The Seattle company plans to unveil Via instant coffee on Tuesday and to make it available next month.
Starbucks says the new drink item was 20 years in development and replicates the taste of Starbucks coffee. A trio of single-serve Via packets will sell for $2.95 and 12 packets will be priced at $9.95.
The move pits the company, which already sells its coffee beans in grocery stores and in its own shops, against giant food sellers with established instant coffee brands. They include Nescafe maker Nestle and Sanka seller Kraft Foods Inc .
Business – Starbucks plans instant coffee debut – INQUIRER.net.
-rePost-The Persistence of Ideology by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Winter 2009
The feeling of oneness you get, the feeling that you are not alone in your struggle, I’d have to confess I had that moment in the movie hero when the emperor shi huang ti was telling the unamed assassin(jet li) knowing that someone truly understands him, an of all people his enemy , he is ready to die! I felt a lot less than him. I was happy knowing that I am not alone.
Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.
If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be.
The Persistence of Ideology by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Winter 2009.
-Big Wow-Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a 'Wow' Experience – ReadWriteWeb
Specially like the ceo’s outlook, if you get the culture right everything else follows!
So what is different about Zappos?
* The company provides free shipping both ways
* Zappos has a 365 day return policy
* Only products available in the warehouse are placed on the site
* The warehouse is open 24 hours a day
* The company is contactable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
* The 1800 contact number is prominently placed on every page of the site
* The company trusts in its reps; sales staff don’t have scripts
* If products are unavailable, sales staff direct customers to competitors
Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience – ReadWriteWeb.
-rePost-Marginal Revolution: "Small steps toward a much better world"
Excellent Dissection of the Motto: “Small steps toward a much better world”, please read the whole thing,I especially like the last comment of tyler.
James Hudson, a philosopher and a loyal MR reader (it turns out I already know and admire his work), emails me the following observations:
Does anyone share my feeling that your slogan, “Small steps toward a much better world,” is odd?
But now it is long and so it goes under the fold…
First, better than what? I suppose it’s better than the world we have now; but then the “world” of the slogan is not a whole possible world, which would persist throughout time, but rather a temporal segment or slice of a possible world. We don’t now “have” a whole world; what we have is the present time-slice of the world. Or you might say that what we have is the whole past-and-present–the temporal segment of the world from the Beginning to Now; but this would be less suitable for comparison with what you are striving toward, so I will assume that the present time-slice or “state-of-affairs” is the intended standard of comparison.
Marginal Revolution: “Small steps toward a much better world”.
-Aloneness-rePost-Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Never alone
Never alone
January 24, 2009
From William Deresiewicz’s article The End of Solitude in the new edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century … Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
Posted by nick at January 24, 2009 02:11 PM<emphasis mine>
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Never alone.
-Hopeless Emptiness-Why I'm Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com
- Image via CrunchBase
I’ve always tried to walk my own path, this makes me seem weird to most people. I remember reading a phrase that stuck to me “The Age of Distraction”. We are living in the age of distraction, what is it? Let’s see, watch revolutioinary road, and remember the scene between leo , kate and michael shannon. It was the Hopeless Emptiness Scene. And I would be lying if I sad that I am probably in that mobious strip trying to find my way out. Mobious strip and revolutionary road, seems quite apt. IN my defense at least I know I am in a mobius strip like road and I must be revolutionary enough to escape. (Damn hate it when I can’t seem to let a couple of words go). I try to fight , I don’t know if I am winning, I hope I do! I hope you do to!
When I think about all the hours I wasted this past year on Facebook, and imagine the good I could have done instead, it depresses me. Instead of scouring my friends’ friends’ photos for other possible friends, I could have been raising money for Darfur relief, helping out at the local animal shelter or delivering food to the homeless. It depresses me even more to know that I would never have done any of those things, even with all those extra hours.<Emphasis Mine>
Why I’m Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com.
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-"I wish I was still living in the past-Not" or "Things were better then-Not"-Well – The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity – NYTimes.com
I’m starting my own meme. I’ll call this the “I wish I was still living in the past-Not” or “Things were better then-Not” meme!
Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.
The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.
“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”
Well – The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity – NYTimes.com.