It’s pretty simple.
20/01/2012 • 2:12 am 0
how modern business works
11/01/2012 • 3:14 am 0
banks, what are they good for?
Why was it so politically difficult to reregulate the banks? he wondered. Why couldn’t the Administration harness the populist outrage? What good had Wall Street ever done for America? “There must be something useful in there, but it is really hard to see what,” he says. “That’s everybody’s challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. If there are arbitrage opportunities and you’re able to spot them a few seconds before anybody else, you can make a lot of money, but there’s no actual social gain from doing that. We’ve tried talking to our friends in finance, and they say, ‘Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.’ Well, there is some social loss if people are hanging on to a lot of idle cash, so the financial system, by providing liquid assets that provide a pretty good yield, is supposed to deal with that. But it turns out that, just when you need it most, that liquidity froze.”
What about Krugman himself?
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.”
Filed under: economy
29/12/2011 • 11:51 pm 0
the arizona humane society murders cats
A man took his cat, which he had rescued from the streets and raised, to a Humane Society clinic in Arizona for treatment. They wouldn’t take his mother’s credit card information over the phone. They killed the cat instead.
Filed under: the stupid - it burns!
29/12/2011 • 11:44 pm 0
fukushima
According to the Canadian Medical Association, the Japanese response to Fukushima was worse than the Soviet response to Chernobyl:
International authorities have urged Japan to expand the exclusion zone around the plant to 80 kilometres but the government has instead opted to “define the problem out of existence” by raising the permissible level of radiation exposure for members of the public to 20 millisieverts per year, considerably higher than the international standard of one millisievert per year, Gould adds.
This “arbitrary increase” in the maximum permissible dose of radiation is an “unconscionable” failure of government, contends Ruff. “Subject a class of 30 children to 20 millisieverts of radiation for five years and you’re talking an increased risk of cancer to the order of about 1 in 30, which is completely unacceptable. I’m not aware of any other government in recent decades that’s been willing to accept such a high level of radiation-related risk for its population.”
Following the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, “clear targets were set so that anybody anticipated to receive more than five millisieverts in a year were evacuated, no question,” Ruff explains. In areas with levels between one and five millisieverts, measures were taken to mitigate the risk of ingesting radioactive materials, including bans on local food consumption, and residents were offered the option of relocating. Exposures below one millisievert were still considered worth monitoring.
One study claims that fallout from Fukushima killed 14,000 Americans.
Filed under: sad
29/12/2011 • 11:32 pm 0
america: the decline years
17/12/2011 • 6:29 pm 0
pictures of the year
03/12/2011 • 9:53 pm 0
javascript snooping
Javascript for Firefox that can tell which sites you have visited.
Worked on my machine.
Filed under: computer dork
03/12/2011 • 9:49 pm 0
incivility
Willie Horton ads, Swiftboating, GOP convention-goers waving purple band-aids to mock a veteran’s war wounds, birtherism, Ann Coulter saying the “only choice was whether to impeach or assassinate” President Clinton, Coulter claiming 9/11 widows were “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, ads falsely claiming Barack Obama favored “comprehensive sex education for Kindergartners,” Rand Paul supporters trying to stomp the head of a protester, ads claiming Kay Hagen was “godless,” Michelle Bachmann calling for an investigation of ‘un-American views” among the Congress, “If ballots don’t work, maybe bullets will, etc., etc., etc….
Link.
Filed under: politics, the stupid - it burns!
03/12/2011 • 9:41 pm 0
google’s developers
From a Slashdot discussion on age discrimination in software companies:
Google’s giant R&D operation is starting to look like a huge flop. Google has never originated a successful post-search product in-house. The ad system was acquired from DoubleClick. They had to acquire YouTube because Google Video was a flop. The hard part of Gmail, the smart filtering, came from Postini. The Android software was acquired from Android, Inc. PIcasa was acquired from Picasa, Inc. Google Earth was acquired from Keyhole, Inc. SketchUp was acquired from @Last Software. Google Voice was acquired from Grand Central.
In-house, they produced Google Answers, Base, Lively, Knol, Buzz, Wave, Gears, Page Creator, etc – a collection of cool hacks, all now discontinued.
Filed under: computer dork, interesting
21/11/2011 • 1:12 am 0
infant mortality
The United States has fallen to 30th in rankings of infant mortality. But it still outranks Slovakia.
Slovakians? Suck. On. This.
Filed under: sad, the stupid - it burns!
19/11/2011 • 7:38 pm 0
campus saved from dangerous protestors by brave peace officer
UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walks to her car while protesters watch. For any political protester that wants to know how to create an effective message, this is how you do it, kids.
Filed under: sad, the stupid - it burns!
27/07/2011 • 2:29 am 0
the modern hierarchy of needs
link.
Filed under: funny, sad, the stupid - it burns!
26/07/2011 • 9:58 am 0
the decline of the tomato
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.
