They finally put a tarp over the stinky mulch — after spreading half of it around, so it still smells. http://t.co/4ZDt8WcM
January 2012
December 2011
“It’s pretty much impossible to imagine how the world can reduce the risks of climate change without imposing some sort of emissions limits, and airline emissions seems like as good a place to start as any. If the Administration disagrees with the European plan, then it would seem to be under a heavy obligation to propose its own. All it’s doing now is shilling for the airlines. Is this any way to run a planet?”
—Comment: Obama’s Climate Betrayal : The New Yorker
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.”
—Keynes Was Right - NYTimes.com
“For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.”
—The Fat Trap - NYTimes.com
Horrible smelling fertilizer pile is steaming as they bulldoze it. It’s alive! (@ Mission Dolores Park) [pic]: http://t.co/ee7tTajH
Ho ho ho (@ Mission Dolores Park w/ 3 others) http://t.co/ha42rUbe
Play
“While emphasizing that he was definitely completely insane and would likely become even more so as leader of North Korea, the younger Kim nevertheless wondered if he could ever be enough of a lunatic to truly replace the most unhinged dictator on the planet.”
—Kim Jong-Un Privately Doubting He’s Crazy Enough To Run North Korea | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
“Maybe the bigger dilemma is that, too much of the time, our cities aren’t going fast or slow. Chuck Marohn, executive director of the nonprofit Strong Towns, has argued that we continue to make the mistake of building 45 mile-per-hour cities — places where we travel (usually by car) at a speed that’s somewhere in the murky middle. This happens because we forget the difference between a street, where vibrant, valuable, low-speed development should flourish, and a road, which should quickly take us from one place to another. Instead, Marohn says, we’ve ended up with a bunch of “stroads” — four-lane arteries, lined with mini malls and parking lots, that are too fast to encourage good development, and too slow to efficiently move us in and out.”
—In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars - Salon.com
“A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.”
—Waldo Jaquith - On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.
RT @sconover: Compose is this huge red button. I assume that if I click it something really bad will happen. / @google
RT @skilldrick: *THIS* is why you should read #SICP: http://t.co/lfxhpwir (or something else equally impractical)
Code Retreat was fun! I finally started getting working code after I started drinking beer. @sfcoderetreat @coreyhaines
.@mperham This Saturday, you can practice throwing away all your code every 45 minutes at http://t.co/BWY1X61h @sfcoderetreat
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But one particular reason all of this matters so much is that the greatest loss of revenue to the UC was not, in fact, from state budget cuts, but from investment losses (though the privatization of the university was well on its way even before the financial crisis). And as Peter Byrne shows in his massive series, the UC investment strategy was radically shifted in the early 2000′s away from safe and reliable (and more modest) methods of investing into (ultimately disastrous) modes of investing that caused the UC’s finances to drop like a stone when the bubble burst:
“[After 2003] regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter—all financiers by trade—took control of UC’s investment strategy. Sitting on the board’s investment committee, the three men steered away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real estate deals. According to UC internal reports, the dramatic investment change has led to an “overweighting” of investments in private equity. One concerned regent has likened the change to “gambling in Las Vegas.”
” —The Regency « zunguzungu
Why We Threw out All Our Code (And Why You Should Too) - NowJS Blog →
blog.nowjs.com
“This past week, we proudly released NowJS v0.7. This version is the most stable and performant version of NowJS to date. It’s managed to survive our vicious benchmarking tools and our ridiculously comprehensive test cases. But our greatest accomplishment with this release is that every single line of code is brand new.
In a matter of minutes, we decided to scrap 3 months of work and rewrite our architecture. No file, function or concept was left unquestioned. What inspired this iconoclastic frenzy? ”
