James Surowiecki on the tax code’s debt bias: If the benefits are illusory, the costs are all too real. Economies work best, generally speaking, when people are making decisions based on economic fundamentals, not on tax considerations. So, as much as possible, the tax system should be neutral between
Loren Brichter comments on Tweetie’s reload gesture: So I thought about it, and asked: what was “reload”… really? In the context of Twitter, it really meant “load newer”. And when you loaded newer tweets in your tweet stream, where did they go? At the top of your list.
During his campaign, President Obama ran as a “post-partisan” — a president who would not be consumed by partisan battles. A president that would unite rather than divide us. A president that finds common ground between us, and works from there. In his inauguration address, he said: On this day,
John Taylor wonders whether the Internet’s ability to make anything available at any time is reducing our appreciation for people’s work, and their creativity: But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance
Good comparison, Pelosi: A triumphant Speaker Nancy Pelosi compared the legislation to the passage of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare 30 years later. Appropriate, considering both Social Security and Medicare are entitlements that ended up costing many times more than what they are supposed to, and are pushing us
And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention?
Google just announced its own turn-by-turn navigation for Android 2.0. It has voice search, traffic data, street view, and apparently caches map data along your route. Of course, it will be free. This will be very difficult for other dedicated turn-by-turn navigation companies to compete
Electric Literature is a new literature magazine trying something new: quality writing, many formats, and they’re not afraid to charge: “Instead of paying a printer $5,000, we pay five writers per issue $1,000,” Mr. Hunter said. They take submissions from writers and publish the 5 best stories
Aayush Arya responded to my criticism of John Gruber, writing that As much as I think Obama did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize just for having noble intentions, I do think that every American should be proud of it nevertheless. I don’t think there is anything wrong with
Want to see first-hand what’s wrong with our political discourse? Exhibit A, courtesy of an otherwise-intelligent John Gruber: To any American who isn’t happy about our president having won the Nobel Peace Prize: There is something wrong with you. Don’t you just love how simple
So I made a short film. We had less than a week to make a 5 minute film for a campus film event, so we did it. It’s imperfect, there’s all kinds of things I wanted to do with certain scenes that we didn’t, all kinds of
We don’t need a notes application to fully develop an idea, from beginning to end. We already have applications for that. They offer all kinds of ways to write down and organize your thoughts. What we do need, however, is a way to capture a thought just as quickly