December 2009
20 posts
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown.
—Krugman
The research that Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer previewed for David Brooks has finally come out: Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem. [Via: NBER]
we exist in different worlds
It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories. I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.
—Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company
So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers. They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news...
It is clearly a much better picture, and appears to be mostly genuine. It shows employers have come back so much and are starting to rehire.
You create this class of people who essentially become permanently unemployed and can’t get back in. You have people who have lost contact with the labor market, whose skills are not relevant for jobs for the future, who employers regard with skepticism...
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
—Tony Judt, What is...
But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.
—O’Reilly
I’ve outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the “small pieces loosely joined” model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.
One of the points I’ve made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better...
This is an important turnaround after the free fall in world trade, industrial production, asset prices, and global credit availability which threatened to push the global economy into the abyss of a new Great Depression in early 2009.
—Preview of UN Report on the world economy
Nice Bikez →
Even though he kind of plays with the facts, it’s more about the overall message.
—Erin Power, 21, of Long Island, N.Y., on Oliver Stone, during a class [HIST-288: Oliver Stone’s America] dedicated to his work at American University by Peter Kuznik.
that's what property taxes are for
The gravy train continues to roll without impediment for select groups of employees on the public payroll…Startling amounts of taxpayer-funded booty continue to be dispensed across New Jersey without regard for the common good.
—State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation: The Beat Goes on, waste and abuse in local government employee compensation and benefits
Counties are...
How to compromise your ethics for $110
JustAnswer.com - breaking new ground in homework for hire and plagiarism. Now, for $110, provide answers of 225 to 300 words each to sixteen questions on business ethics!
Question
225 - 300 words to each question COURSE TEXTBOOK: Ferrell, O.C., Fraedrich, J., & Ferrell, L. (2008). Business ethics: Ethical decision making and cases (7th ed.) Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company Unit 1: The...
I am seeking to get out because of what’s happening. Not that I see a crisis, but people seem to be loving it too much.
—Paul Krugman on selling assets in Brazil
ginning content from their audiences
The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore.
—David Carr
we live in public
Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.
—Tiger Woods
Copyright, Fair Use, and the Perils of Legislation
Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown commented in the WSJ on “Google and the Copyright Wars” (11/12). Many are focused on the status of orphan works in the Google Books project, but Sanford and Brown argue that the idea of fair use and its application by search engines is the controversy’s center, not orphan works. Sanford and Brown would say that a search engine’s use of the...
We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.
—Marcus Brauchli on the Washington Post
He has to convey the fact that his strategy is not an open-ended one for an indefinite war. In different ways he’s going to have a hard sell with both Republicans and Democrats, simply because the country is in a kind of state of unease.
—Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter
there’s a real chance that, soon enough, Chinese economic weakness will be a bigger problem than was Chinese economic strength.
—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, via Economic View: NYT