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rePost:: Some stirred-up Moslems?

Go to the linked site if you want context.

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
via . http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Active_Clippings/brzezinsky_muj.html

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rePost::How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker

Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant.  It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.

But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦
via How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker.

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rePost::Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon's Book

This was a reaction to this article: Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
Hope you can read both the linked sites.

We are teetering on a basic question, I think – what is government for? In the present situation, we don’t have the luxury of doing everything we’d like – of funding every project, of engaging in every kind of research or investing in every area of life that we’d like. We have to make choices. So we come to the question – as more and more citizens are impoverished and desperate, and we invest more and more money in propping up an economy that is still failing, still falling, what should governments do? What choices should we make? Is the mission of our society to preserve an economy at all costs? To preserve an imperialist enterprise? Or to preserve the people?via Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon’s Book.

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Praise::Presidential bet to rival Aquino: ‘I want you to succeed’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

This is called the Rights Based Approach to Development. I commend him the Presidential candidate for being updated in the some of what’s in fashion in the Development Community

When Aquino’s turn came, he said: “Thank you to Councilor JC for, acknowledging that I have a chance of running the country.”
He said human rights were not simply about the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, but also the right to a decent living, and the right to have food on the table.
via Presidential bet to rival Aquino: ‘I want you to succeed’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost::So You Want to Be a Pro::Pinoy Penman

Some good advice on how to become a professional writer!!!

So You Want to Be a Pro

Penman for Monday, February 22, 2010
…..

So rather than fuss over what “success” means, I’m going to address these remarks to people who want to become professional writers, by which I mean people who depend on their writing to support themselves and their families. Journalists naturally fall into this category and already know pretty much what I’ll be saying here; it’s the creative writer and the academic who may need a bit of a reorientation, since I’ve found that it’s this person who often doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the market needs.
…..
10. Don’t forget what you’re doing all of this for. Whether it’s for God, country, family, fame, or just the chance to get some paid time off to write that novel, or for that down payment on a new apartment or a new car, you have to remember why it’s important to keep writing, and to write well. Good writing can be its own reason for being, and provide its own satisfaction—but it’s even better if it means that much to somebody else.
via Pinoy Penman.

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rePost::Don't Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today

My introvert side is really affected by phone calls. I really don’t like it most of the time. I especially don’t like how the phone intrudes when you least want it.

But I hate the phone. Hate it. Hate. It.
I can let the phone ring without picking up. I own a cell phone but don't give out the number. The only people I willingly talk with on the phone are far-flung friends, and only because I know it's necessary to keep those friendships healthy. Even so, as these friends can tell you, I can be difficult to reach, and return their phone calls in my own sweet time, when I feel up to the exertion the phone requires for me.
via Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today.

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rePost::Free GSM stack in development – The H Open Source: News and Features

Hope they succeed!!!!

Free GSM stack in development
Harald Welte, kernel hacker and operator of gpl-violations.org, has released the first code from the OsmocomBB project which is developing a complete, free and open source software GSM stack.
The initial code presented by the project has “full control over the baseband hardware” and is able to scan GSM bands for cells. As yet it is not capable of making calls. Welte says “We are currently in Rx (receive) only mode and have no Layer2 or Layer3 implementation”, adding that he is confident that the difficult part, driving the hardware and implementing “minimal Layer1”, is done and he expects to have the ability to make “actual phone calls during the months to come”.
via Free GSM stack in development – The H Open Source: News and Features.

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Elink Pic::Because X is the new Why » Playing the Game

look at the pic from the linked site!!!

Playing the Game
By REGINA BAUTISTA
Reg of Cereal Saturdays (“A Weekend on a Weakday”) wanted to draw a comic about the awkward world of dating as a precursor to relationships, until she realized she never really dated. She is, however, awfully familiar with “The Game”, which will be discussed in further pictorial detail in today’s Show and Tell.
via Because X is the new Why » Playing the Game.

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Research:: Taxis and Taxes :: Stumbling and Mumbling

Read the part of the post not quoted here. This is interesting but I think that a major problem to this is that cabbies are like salesmen in a way their actions translate to easily measurable stuff, other professions on the other hand are not as easy to measure. Take for instance bankers. How do you isolate how hard they work versus the money they get. The structure of compensation really is counter to what we want to measure. This is I believe the most important factor : Most of what people do cannot be tracked to what they earn. I believe how easy it is to see our actions translated to income  the easier the more similar people become to the actions of the New York cabbies.

Taxis and Taxes
What’s the difference between high earners and New York cabbies? This question is central to the issue of whether the new 50% tax rate will actually raise revenue.
I ask it because of this new paper (early version here) by Orley Ashenfelter and colleagues.
They studied how New York cab drivers changed their labour supply in response to the higher incomes caused by fare rises. And they found a negative elasticity, of around minus 0.2. That means a 10% rise in cabbies’ revenue per mile caused them to work 2% less.
This means we have a backward-bending labour supply curve, because the income effect outweighs the substitution effect.
Now, if what’s true of cabbies is also true of bankers, this implies that higher taxes on the rich might indeed raise revenue. This is because the immediate effect of such taxes is to reduce peoples’ incomes, so if the income effect is powerful – as it is for New York cabbies – they will work harder to recoup the money.
Hence my question: in what ways do high earners differ from cabbies?
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Taxis and Taxes.

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