From FiveThirtyEight.com…
So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”
Hah! NYTimes piece about Mail Goggles — a new service available only to Gmail users,
The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker can seem like the equivalent of bungee jumping without a cord.
Some time ago I picked up on a terrific LRB article on ‘Cityphilia’ by John Lanchester. Well, now he’s written the companion piece, ‘Cityphobia’. Here’s how it opens:
Byron wrote that ‘I think it great affectation not to quote oneself.’ On that basis, I’d like to quote what I wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.’
Lovely stuff.
Typically astute column by Simon Caulkin…
As Martin Wolf wrote in that well-known socialist organ the Financial Times, ‘either banking should be treated as a utility, with regulated returns, or it should be viewed as a profit-seeking industry that operates in accordance with the laws of the market, including, if necessary, mass redundancies’. Since the latter is unacceptable, he concluded, we have to move towards the former – and regulation must include pay above all.
In this context, the dire warnings from the free-market champions about the perils of interfering with today’s pay-setting methods take on a surreal air. If companies and shareholders really are ‘better at setting salaries than bureaucrats’, as The Economist affirms, given that ‘better’ has resulted in the almost complete meltdown of the global financial system, what, please, would ‘worse’ look like?
I’m glad he picked up the absurdity of the Economist’s frantic attempt to straddle the chasm between admitting the colossal screw-up that the banks have managed and avoiding the inescapable conclusions to be drawn from it.
Barack Obama in St Louis. From the Huffington Post.
From Register Hardware
First Gartner and now IDC has highlighted the rise of the Small, Cheap Computer as one of key product categories keeping the European PC market afloat.
Laptops too are helping keep vendors’ heads above water, and together with the SCCs helped shipments of all types of personal computer grow 27 per cent year on year during Q3, IDC said.
Notebook shipments were up 52 per cent when comparing Q3 2008 with Q3 2007. SCC shipment growth can’t really be considered since the first one, the Eee PC 701, didn’t go on sale until Q4 2007, and up to that point the only alternative, the UMPC, didn’t really trouble the score-keeper.
We can say that European netbook shipments went from zero in Q3 2007 to over 2m in Q3 2008, a figure that’s just under ten per cent of the 27.9m PCs shipped into Europe in Q3 this year.
This is a good illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. All of this NetBook activity dates from the appearance of the OLPC.
O yikes! I’m laid low by a horrible streaming cold after two very intense work-weeks and so I logged onto Twitter (first time I’ve been online in nearly 24 hours) to alert my friends to this fact. I tweeted “Sneezing, coughing and spluttering with a horrible cold”. And then found a tweet from Charles Arthur pointing to a Blog post which suggests that he may ‘unfollow’ me. He takes a strict, non-nonsense line on these matters, viz:
First: what I like is people pointing me to interesting stuff. Which generally means people who include links to interesting stuff in their tweets. When people don’t have those sorts of things in their tweets, and when it really is the unexamined life (”Having cup of coffee” “Eating biscuit”) then I’m afraid I’m not interested. I love ya and all that, but I’d like to get something done. And for me that means finding a fresh perspective, not knowing that you still have a pulse and a functioning brainstem.
What does this mean?
If people start using Qwitter and ask me why I’ve unfollowed them, I’ll point them to this post. It’s simple really. In an attention economy, there’s only so much time I can listen to what colour your curtains are. Then, I’ve got to get on and earn some money. Please, no hurt feelings though.
So there you have it: useful stuff only. To be fair, Charles also provides some cute Applescript for quick-posting of links to Twitter.
I can see what he’s getting at. Some Twitterers (e.g. Dave Winer) are terrific at providing a constant stream of interesting links. But actually one of the things I like about Twitter is that it also enables me to know about the trivial detail of friends’ lives.
… in 1931, Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He was released in 1939. Wonder if any of the authors of WallStreetCrash 2.0 will go to gaol?
FiveThirtyEight.com is a terrific site. Thanks to Hap for telling me about it.
Well, well. The Icesaver saga gets more interesting by the hour. Here’s today’s Telegraph…
A series of official Government statements yesterday showed that several universities, as well as hospitals, police forces, charities and more than 100 local councils are now potentially facing financial crises after being blocked from accessing funds in Icelandic banks adding up to at least £1.164 billion.
Cambridge disclosed it had £8.5 million in Heritable, a subsidiary of the failed Landsbanki, and £2.5m in Glitnir, but said that the funds represented just three per cent of its total bank deposits.
Another 11 universities meanwhile, including Manchester University, the Open University, Glyndwr University, based in Wrexham, and Manchester Metropolitan University have deposits in Icelandic banks adding up to £66 million.
A Cambridge spokesman said: “We have alerted HEFC (the Higher Education Funding Council) and we are seeking to have a concerted recovery effort with the other British universities affected.”
One of the funniest things about these depositors is that they all solemnly explain that they poured money down the Icelandic drain after taking the best possible “professional advice”. Who are these mysterious advisers? And shouldn’t someone now be sueing them for negligence?