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- Is There a Better Word for Doom? – Six disparate views on the value and ethics of actively re-framing the public discussion surrounding climate change. (tagged: politics policy environment communication propaganda climate change science )
- Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history – A talk given by Clay Shirky to the State Dept. a month or so ago, on the global, social, ubiquitous and cheap media landscape of the 21st century. Especially relevant in light of Iran's elections and protests at the moment. (tagged: web2.0 media propaganda technology social twitter politics transparency )
- Iran's Disputed Election | A Revolution in Pictures – Images are streaming out of Iran. Hundreds of thousands of people marching. Guns, fires, roads blocked by burning busses, riots and blood in the streets. The para-military storming the University. Protesters improbably evacuating an injured riot cop. Tear-gas ping pong. All revolutions look the same on the ground. They are not in practice ideological affairs. (tagged: iran politics election 2009 photos protest police )
- Gadget Teardowns – How to completely and utterly disassemble… just about anything, from a banana to your brand new Macbook Pro. Unclear whether you can put it all back together again! (tagged: technology design maker )
- The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online – An essay by Wired editor and Long Now pundit Kevin Kelly, making analogies between the "socialism" of the 20th century, and the open collaborative systems which have taken hold of the Internet. Larry Lessig hates the fact that he used the S-word, since it's got such a black name in the US, but I'm not so sure it was a bad idea. Actually I think that more than anywhere else, "socialist" ideas can probably work in the world of pure information. We're certainly nowhere near the limits of sharing online yet. (tagged: technology economics politics internet web2.0 socialism lessig longnow )
- Losing $63 Billion to Gray Market – P&G sells the same bleach and diapers to distributors in the US and Honduras, at wildly different prices. Enterprising Central American businessmen then re-ship goods to US making a tidy profit. This is a gray market? Sounds like a free market to me! Industry isn't "losing" $63B, they're just not being allowed to cheat their American customers. Remember how in capitalism competition is supposed to drive the cost of goods to the cost of production? Where were these guys in Econ 101? (tagged: economics trade policy )
- Britain’s Antiterror Officer Resigns – The prevalence of citizen collected surveillance, whether it be news media or cell-phone videos has made it clear what a bunch of liars the Authorities are. When given the chance to cover their own asses by abusing the institutionalized trust we have in them, they seem almost always to do so. The cameras are here. They are ubiquitous. They are not going away. They might as well record the cops. (tagged: transparency security police terrorism surveillance media )
- Bill Moyers Journal William K. Black – Interview with a former regulator who worked to restructure the Savings and Loans in the 1980s, on the current state of affairs. (tagged: finance economics bailout banking moyers politics regulation )
- Sabotage suspected in widespread phone outage in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties – Two targeted snips of fiber optic cables in the south bay have cut off hundreds of thousands of people from cell, landline, and network connectivity, including 911 access. Working hypothesis: disgruntled union workers, upset at the fact that contract negotiations are ongoing after expiration this Saturday. How fragile our little world is it seems. (tagged: terrorism security technology internet )
- Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world – Ten suggestions from Nassim Taleb, which we are almost certainly not going to implement voluntarily. (tagged: economics finance bailout taleb probability banking )
- Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers – I just don't buy the lament of the newspapermen. If the papers were subsidizing the collection of "real" news with ads, how sure are we that people ever wanted news? Why exactly should we believe that there ever was some public interest at heart in journalism? I'd say it's just as likely that the fragmentation of digital media, and the trend toward tabloid fluff, is an indication that nobody (or at least, not enough people) really cared about the "serious" news in the first place. Disaggregated, opinionated, (truly) non-profit journalism will certainly be different than the muckrakers, or Big Media, but it's unclear to me that it will be worse in any way for government transparency, or democratic interchange. (tagged: technology media government transparency democracy )
- The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Another great popularly accessible explanation of how we got into this mess, this time in cartoon form. Too bad there weren't any regulators in the story! (tagged: economy crisis financial animation mortgage subprime )
- Bank insolvency: tips & tricks – Never, ever, feed a zombie bank. The great thing (or, one great thing) about blogs is that you can talk about serious and technical issues, using analogies to zombies. Try that in the Economist, or the WSJ. (tagged: economics finance stimulus bailout fed banks zombie )
- Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe, and Carl Sagan – Musings from Ann Druyan (Carl Sagan's partner) on how we might apply the wonder of the cosmos, as revealed by science, toward the creation of naturalist spiritual communities. (tagged: science religion sagan atheism naturalism cosmos spirituality )
- There's no reason for non-recourse – Options are valuable. That's why we have markets for them. The trillion dollars worth of non-recourse loans (cf pawnbroker) which the Fed is apparently about to offer up to the finance industry, will, because they are non-recourse, lead to a misvaluation of the assets being bought, even if they're being bought by private entities, because the penalty for non-repayment is simply forfeiting the asset (which might very well end up being worthless). The Fed is acting like a pawn shop, but a dumb one: what pawn shop in its right mind would let you exchange your cubic zirconia for half the value of a diamond? (tagged: finance economics crisis bailout fed geithner bernanke )