The PRC has inserted a large statue of Confucius in Tiananmen Square: A mammoth sculpture of the ancient philosopher Confucius was unveiled this week off one side of the vast plaza. It’s a jarring juxtaposition for a square the ruling Communist Party treats as politically hallowed ground: a mausoleum
Yale law professor, Amy Chua, thinks Chinese mothers are superior. She describes this as not allowing kids to: • attend a sleepover • have a playdate • be in a school play • complain about not being in a school play • watch TV or play computer games • choose their own extracurricular activities • get any
Shawn Blanc on the Mac App Store: The problem had nothing to do with availability or quality of 3rd-party Mac software. To the contrary, OS X has an outstanding community of 3rd-party developers. You and I have no problem finding and using new tools to make our day-
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures thinks mobile economics will mirror web economics: I think it means the mobile is slowly but surely moving to a web model. And as that happens, it is important to think of it as one big web and lots of devices and software accessing
Google isn’t a web application company—they’re an advertising company. That’s what they do best, and that’s what drives their company. Of Google’s $23.6 billion of revenue in 2009, all but $760 million of it was derived from advertising, and nearly 70 percent of
Ian Hines on designing URLs for humans: So what, specifically, is different? Each URL string on this site will now form a complete sentence. This entry, for example, can be found at http://ianhin.es/wrote-about/designing-urls-for-humans. You can tell what this post is about immediately
Aaron Mahnke thinks we’re in a new age, unique from the information age: In the Information Age, it was the knowledge workers who were the most valued. Programmers, IT people, the “computerati” as I call them. But today things have changed. Today we value the creators, the curators, the
Brilliant essay by Clay Shirky on to whether and to what extent social media can be a force for democracy. His basic thesis is that a strong civil society, not communication, precedes the defeat of authoritarianism, but that communication is necessary to build it. Therefore, the U.S. should support
Megan McArdle makes (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/the-limits-of-the-taxing-power/68179/) it even more clear why tax arguments for the individual mandate are so dangerous: 1) Can Congress enact a $50,000 tax on second term abortions? 2) Can Congress enact a $50,
Julain Sanchez: But isn’t it preposterous that it’s preposterous? Step back from that steady accretion of precedents and instead just ask how far a federal power to “regulate commerce…among the several states”—especially in the context of separate and parallel powers to regulate commerce with foreign nations
In January 2009, just months after the 2008 financial crisis, I wrote a lengthy (9,000 word) study of the financial crisis—analyzing what happened, what caused it, and what I thought we should do to prevent it from happening again. Below I am publishing the study in its entirety.
WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange comments on his motivation: Asked what his “moral calculus” was to justify publishing the leaks and whether he considered what he was doing to be “civil disobedience,” Assange said, “Not at all. This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to