Category: rePosts

These are the sins of the generation in power to the generation just trying to begin their careers. What happens when the tables are turned?
 

Although unemployment remains very high, at this point that’s mainly due to lack of hiring; layoffs are quite low. This means that people who still have decent jobs aren’t feeling much at risk of losing them. So any urgency would have to come from concern about those who don’t have jobs — those who lost them in the slump, and of course young people trying to get started on their working lives.
And those people — at least one in six workers, judging by U6 — don’t seem to have much political or psychological visibility. In effect, they’re being written off.
via No JOLTS to Complacency – NYTimes.com.

Laughed real hard when I was reading this.
 

Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow “define themselves” with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that “says something” about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality.
via Charlie Brooker on why he hates Apple Macintosh computers | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Using a United States Geological Survey estimate for how the fault responsible for the earthquake slipped, research scientist Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., applied a complex model to perform a preliminary theoretical calculation of how the Japan earthquake-the fifth largest since 1900-affected Earth’s rotation. His calculations indicate that by changing the distribution of Earth’s mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).
via Japan Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days, Moved Axis.

Forgotten some of these things!

 
Unreasonable
It’s unreasonable to get out of bed on a snow day, when school has been cancelled, and turn the downtime into six hours of work on an extra credit physics lab.
It’s unreasonable to launch a technology product that jumps the development curve by nine months, bringing the next generation out much earlier than more reasonable competitors.
It’s unreasonable for a trucking company to answer the phone on the first ring.
It’s unreasonable to start a new company without the reassurance venture money can bring.
It’s unreasonable to expect a doctor’s office to have a pleasant and helpful front desk staff.
It’s unreasonable to walk away from a good gig in today’s economy, even if you want to do something brave and original.
It’s unreasonable for teachers to expect that we can enable disadvantaged inner city kids to do well in high school.
It’s unreasonable to treat your colleagues and competitors with respect given the pressure you’re under.
It’s unreasonable to expect that anyone but a great woman, someone with both drive and advantages, could do anything important in a world where the deck is stacked against ordinary folks.
It’s unreasonable to devote years of your life making a product that most people will never appreciate.
Fortunately, the world is filled with unreasonable people. Unfortunately, you need to compete with them.
via Seth’s Blog: Unreasonable.

When arguing about progressive tax rates I sometimes find it difficult to give concrete examples on why people who are better off should be paying more. This is a nice argument for it.
 

A smart writer – even one you don’t always agree with – also has smart readers. (Of course, the flip side is that a clueless writer who gets the facts wrong all the time also has clueless readers who get the facts wrong all the time.) Here’s a bit of a letter one of Sullivan’s readers readers sent him, reproduced on Sullivan’s blog:
I’m a bit late with this, but I wanted to respond to your post yesterday in which you wrote:
“To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful.”
Let’s look at this issue another way: A homeowner who owns a $1 million home will pay more for insurance than will the owner of a $200,000 home. The insurer is not penalizing the first homeowner for his success. The first homeowner simply has more to lose and therefore pays more. If you believe the core function of government is to provide a stable environment (physical, financial, legal, social) in which society can flourish, the wealthy have more to lose from government’s absence. Penalizing the successful wouldn’t help anyone. Underwriting the successful costs money.
via Justifying Progressive Tax Rates | Angry Bear.

Rather, the problem is that the benefits of growth have failed to trickle down to disaffected youth…. With modern manufacturing underdeveloped, many young workers with fewer skills and less education are consigned to the informal sector. Corruption is widespread. Getting ahead depends on personal connections of the sort enjoyed by the sons of military officers and political officials, but few others.
It may stretch credulity to think that a high-growth economy like China might soon be facing similar problems. But the warning signs are there. Given the lack of political freedoms, the Chinese government’s legitimacy rests on its ability to deliver improved living standards and increased economic opportunity to the masses. So far those masses have little to complain about. But that could change, and suddenly.
via Barry Eichengreen: Wellsprings of Uprisings – Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality with All Ten Tentacles.

 
The deal, as explained by Cnet, is that Hollywood used to see Netflix as a harmless company providing a cute little service to a niche audience. (The Internet? Streaming? What am I, a nerd?) But then Netflix experienced an explosion in popularity, with the company seeing a 66 percent growth in subscribers in the year leading up to last December. And given Netflix’s ubiquity—you can find it on many Blu-ray players, the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii, etc.—it’s hard to imagine a scenario where people will all of a sudden stop using the service.
Unless, of course, Hollywood drains the life out of it.
Since Netflix is no longer seen as a harmless little company—the studios are complaining that it’s eating in airline movie sales, DVD sales, and that cable companies will no longer pay for movie rights because Netflix eliminates movie “scarcity”—Hollywood now sees itself in a prickly situation. Do you go with the flow, and try to figure out how to make Netflix “work” for you, or do you try to eliminate the threat while you still can?
I’m sure you know the answer to that one.
via Fearing iTunes-Like Domination, Hollywood Plots Netflix’s Downfall.

 
I think Netflix could pretty much start by expanding their catalogue of foreign films and art films and documentaries. If the film studios aren’t going to allow netflix then they have to build their own.  Something more than the half effort the TV execs did with HULU.