January 2011
16 posts
Twitter and Twenties
Twitter needs money, and I want their source of income to be my money. If I’m paying them dollars, then maybe I won’t be subjected to ads and marketing spam and obnoxious sidebar placement of promoted tweets (remember: if you’re not paying for the service, then you’re the product being sold).
There’s good news for both of us: there’s lots of things I want from the service that they don’t...
Disunion - NYTimes →
I know Kottke posted this over three months ago, but it’s worth linking to once more. The New York Times Disunion blog is about the U.S. Civil War, and is publishing civil and military accounts on a day-by-day basis (offset by 150 years). If you’re like me and like to start from the beginning, here you go.
"Robots, man. They're nothing but heartbreak." →
Anthropomorphize your Roomba.
Cry when this happens:
… it was all the worse when he’d die in the middle of vacuuming, because it was like, wow, he loved us so much that he gave his life for our carpet.
(I love Metafilter, sometimes just because of comments like this one.)
A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years -... →
This is Douglas Coupland’s pessimistic guide to the future (#2: “The future isn’t going to feel futuristic”). Many of these predictions/tips/warnings seem unavoidable (or at the very least, they’re likely conclusions to existing bifurcations or conflicts). I think I could spend an hour discussing each of these with folks. Who wants to go first?
How piracy works - The Word of Notch →
Notch (you know, the Minecraft guy) wrote an interesting bit about piracy. This salient bit is the punchline, in my opinion: (emphasis mine)
If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. Not actual revenue, as I can never go into debt by people pirating the game too much, but I might’ve made even more if that person had bought the game...
Is long-term solitary confinement torture? - The... →
Atul Gawande paints a horrifying picture of solitary confinement and its impact on personality. When we look back in 10, 20, or 30 years and realize what terrible things we’ve been doing to our own citizens, we will feel incredible shame.
I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but... →
It’s wrong to advocate vegetarianism because raising animals for food consumption is “inefficient”: the numbers behind that argument aren’t even close to what’s often quoted in the news, and if we made minor changes to land usage and feed habits, they get even better.
What Is It About 20-Somethings? - NYTimes.com →
Please, New York Times, diagnose what’s wrong with my generation. Pay no attention to soaring budget deficits or retirees with a severe sense of entitlement (governments choose to cut education spending to fund pensions). Ignore the financial burdens we’re being shouldered with from university educations that leave us unprepared to compete in this era’s global economy. Overlook the fallaciousness...
Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury - Vanity Fair →
We expect our politicians to at least seem polished and in-control. Sarah Palin sounds like a half-wit paranoid egomaniac with anger management issues and a short attention span… and that’s her good side. Read Vanity Fair’s piece about her to find out the bad (and the ugly).
Unions and Airlines →
Philip Greenspun examines the effect of unionization on airlines, profits, and bankruptcy. This short article is a great dissection of how presumedly “good” economic structures (unions, in this case) can interact in a strange fashion with the system they’re a part of, and how they eventually yield a rational outcome that nonetheless is far from the original intent of almost every participant...
Simplr →
If you’re on Tumblr and use Safari 5, you should use Simplr. It reskins the Tumblr dashboard and adds a few niceties here and there, like setting the author’s name on a post to the post’s permalink.
WatchEarly one morning, I was driving up to Tahoe with some friends. They were asleep.
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? - The... →
This 1982 article from The Atlantic is your assigned reading for Friday: learn about cartels, price fixing, artificial scarcity, and marketing as a form of consumer behaviour manipulation.
(The title is apt, and has stuck in my head for days: have you ever tried to sell a diamond?)