“There are indeed more undocumented Mexicans living in the United States than there were 20 years ago, but that is because fewer migrants are returning home — not because more are sneaking into the country. And the reason that fewer Mexican citizens are returning home is because we have stepped up border enforcement so dramatically. Mull over that last point for a minute. If Congress had done nothing to secure the border over the last two decades — if it had just left the border alone — there might be as many as 2 million fewer Mexicans living in the United States today.”
—Princeton Alumni Weekly: Crisis Contrived
April 2012
“Her demise isn’t a heroic sacrifice — if anything, it works as a tragic byproduct of her complete inability to keep her bright ideas to herself, turning one of her silly quirks into something lethally serious. It’s great in a completely different way from Stark’s death, and it’s tremendous evidence that the show is playing for keeps in its final season.”
—
Yep. Holly’s demise was well written, well played, surprising yet completely in character.
“Drivers who kill or maim pedestrians with their vehicles are still only rarely treated as criminals in New York, as long as they are not drunk and do not flee the scene. Even that is sometimes not enough to merit serious charges.”
—The Invention of Jaywalking - Commute - The Atlantic Cities
“
And now here it is, April 2012, and Google has finally gotten around to revealing GDrive. But does anyone still care? Users who really needed such a service have since migrated elsewhere. When Dropbox raised its $250M Series B in October, it was boasting over 45 million users. Now it has over 50 million. Box.net, meanwhile, raised $50M in September, touting 7 million users. Today, that’s 10 million.
Google says there are 40 million Google Apps users, including 4 million businesses, to give you an idea of the size of Google’s customer base.
Today’s Google Drive is GDocs+ – it’s no longer tapping into the pent-up, unsatisfied demand for a decent cloud storage and sync service. People who use Google Docs might try it, but if they’re already satisfied with the alternatives – the platform-agnostic, popular alternatives – they may just skip it.
” —GDrive aka Google Dropbox finally launches
“In 1982, bank lobbyist Alan Greenspan was appointed to head a U.S. commission to shift Social Security out of the public budget (where it was funded largely by progressive taxation) and fund it by user fees that fall on employees and employers. The aim was to privatize it Chilean style. Wall Street’s dream is to turn wage set-asides over to money managers to buy stocks and create a stock market boom (and in the end, siphon off commissions and push contributors into high-risk bets on the losing side of the deal with large financial institutions, Goldman Sachs style). In effect, Mr. Greenspan’s position was that Social Security should not be a public service. It should be a user fee, so that prospective retirees would pay for it in advance. Their savings were to be lent to the government to enable the Treasury to slash taxes on the higher income and wealth brackets. So the effect was to reverse the long trend toward progressive taxation. The upshot of the Greenspan tax increases (only on labor, not on wealthy earners) was to create a budget surplus for the Social Security Administration, enabling the government to cut taxes on real estate, on finance, and for the rich in general. Capital gains taxes in particular were cut in half.”
—Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty « naked capitalism
“A dynamic is put in place in which debt keeps labor down – not only by eating up its wages in debt service, but in making workers suffer sharp increases in the interest rates they have to pay or even risk losing their homes if they miss a payment by going on strike or being fired. Alan Greenspan explained that unemployment was not needed to keep labor down these days. All that is needed is to traumatize and disable them politically by debt leverage. This is why, despite the fact that productivity has risen so dramatically, the real economy and its wage levels have tapered off in an S curve. The magic of compound interest has increased debt (and the savings of the 1%) to more than absorb the productivity gains. And this financial overgrowth has accrued to the 1%, not to the 99%.”
—Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty « naked capitalism
“Industrial capitalism was based on increasing production and expanding markets. Industrialists were supposed to use their profits to build more factories, buy more machinery and hire more labor. But this is not what happens under finance capitalism. Banks lend out their receipt of interest, fees and penalties (which now yield credit card companies as much as interest) in new loans. The problem is that income used to pay debts cannot simultaneously be used to buy the goods and services that labor produces. So when wages and living standards do not rise, how are producers to sell – unless they find new markets abroad? The gains have been siphoned off by finance. And the financial dynamic ends up in austerity. And to make matters worse, it is not the fat that is cut. The fat is the financial sector. What is cut is the bone: the industrial sector. So when writers refer to a post-industrial economy led by the banks, they imply deindustrialization. And for you it means unemployment and lower wages.”
—Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty « naked capitalism
“What also was expected universally fifty years ago – indeed, until about 1980 – was that governments would play an increasingly important economic role, not only as forward planners but as direct investors in infrastructure. To Keynesians, government spending served to pump money into the economy, maintaining demand and employment in cyclical downturns. And for hundreds of years, governments have undertaken basic infrastructure spending so that private owners would not use monopoly privileges to charge economic rent. Nearly all observers expected the fruits of technology to trickle down, not be siphoned up to the top, to the banking sector whose “financial engineering” played no directly technological role in the production process. Textbook models describe – or rather, assume – that rising productivity will be passed on to labor in the form of lower prices (reflecting falling costs of production, enabling wages to buy more) or, if prices are “sticky,” higher wages.”
—Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty « naked capitalism
“
ANN ROMNEY: The dog loved it. The dog was, like—
DIANE SAWYER: But the dog got sick, right?
ANN ROMNEY: Once, he— we traveled all the time and he— he ate the turkey on the counter. I mean, he had the runs. But— he would see that crate and, you know, he would, like, go crazy because he was going with us on vacation. It was to me a kinder thing to bring him along than to leave him in the kennel for t— in— in— in a kennel for two weeks, so.
” —Transcript: Diane Sawyer Sits Down with Mitt and Ann Romney - ABC News
“
It makes me a bit sad that there is so much focus these days on the surface side of syntax—making indentation significant, omitting a semicolon—but rather little on how a change in syntax can actually change the experience of programming in a deeper way.
Aside #1: It is too bad that the genuine advantages of Lisp and Smalltalk syntax do not seem to have been sufficient to win over the familiarity of a generally C-like look-and-feel.
” —Nicholas D. Matsakis , Syntax matters…? - Baby Steps
“Previously, Trumka had warned the President that certification was premature, because Colombia had failed to do enough to stop the killing of union backers and human rights workers, and because the deal risks harming American workers while enriching multinational corporations Trumka suggested that labor leaders had expected the White House would give them a little more time to improve the deal, and that they had been surprised by the sudden approval. Pressed on whether the move could really hurt enthusiasm among blue collar swing voters, Trumka insisted that the labor organizers on the ground who will drive turnout were already responding negatively. “The people on the ground who deliver the votes are…wondering why,” Trumka said. “Our job is made more difficult.”
—AFL-CIO’s Trumka rips Obama: What about the 99 percent? - The Plum Line - The Washington Post
“The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market. In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.”
—Why Obama’s JOBS Act Couldn’t Suck Worse | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
“Psychologists point out that emotions are adaptive: They make us change behavior to help us survive. Anger prepares us to fight; fear helps us flee. But what about sadness? Studies show that when we are sad, we think in a more systematic manner. Sad people are attentive to details and externally oriented, while happy people tend to make snap judgments that may reflect racial or sex stereotyping.”
—Too much happiness can make you unhappy, studies show - The Washington Post
“The happier you are, the better, right? Not necessarily. Studies show that there is a darker side to feeling good and that the pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you . . . well, less happy. Too much cheerfulness can make you gullible, selfish, less successful — and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
—Too much happiness can make you unhappy, studies show - The Washington Post
“That is not the test plan. That is just the table of contents.”
—Notes from @UncleBobMartin’s Demanding Professionalism talk in Tampa, Florida on 11 April 2012. — Gist
“In 1790, the very first Congress—which incidentally included 20 framers—passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate…
[Eight] years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another framer, President John Adams.” —Einer Elhauge: If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did The Founding Fathers Back Them? | The New Republic
[Eight] years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another framer, President John Adams.” —Einer Elhauge: If Health Insurance Mandates Are Unconstitutional, Why Did The Founding Fathers Back Them? | The New Republic
“Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.”
—Inside the mind of the octopus | Orion Magazine
“THERE is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.”
—Kinky Friedman, Wise Old Jimmy Buffett - NYTimes.com
“If it succeeds, “Battleship’’ will be the advance guard of a whole fleet of planned adaptations of Hasbro games including “Ouija,’’ also being developed by Universal for release in 2013, as well as “Risk’’ and “Candy Land,’’ which are both in the works at Sony Corp. “Stretch Armstrong,’’ a movie based on the glutinous-armed toy from Hasbro, is set for 2014 release by Relativity Media.”
—‘Battleship’ leads attack of game-based movies - Boston.com
“Let the IMG tag be INCLUDE and let it refer to an arbitrary
document type.” —Tim Berners-Lee, 3 March 1993, WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: Re: proposed new tag: IMG
document type.” —Tim Berners-Lee, 3 March 1993, WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: Re: proposed new tag: IMG
