April 2009
21 posts
‘The Market’ is nothing more than the people who comprise it.
In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel.
The Makers of Things
As one leading G-7 official put it to me recently, “In the short term, we need to get the world moving again. Then, over the medium term, we will tackle global imbalances.” This is the essence of the “Depression Foil” — a single-minded preoccupation with avoiding a 1930s-style collapse at all costs while putting off the requisite heavy lifting for that proverbial next day.
Averting...
… page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting influence on whatever thing you really want to do — on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing.
…
When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded, it...
we are hunted →
teenage engineering →
Black Money: International bribery. It’s a trillion dollars a year, with corporations on one side, heads of state on the other. And it thrives in an invisible world.
@ 34m:00s
During G8 Summit Press Conference with Bush and Blair, question directed to Blair.
Reporter : Were you aware that your government was approving payments to a friend of President Bush’s as part of British...
There are no waste collections from households at all. People have to take full responsibility for everything they throw away.
Kamikatsu
The banking industry that emerged from that collapse was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far less lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partly because bankers were so conservative about lending: Household debt, which had fallen sharply as a percentage of G.D.P. during the Depression and World War II, stayed far below pre-1930s...
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I...
The Dark Side of Dubai →
People make the mistake of observing how things are and assume that’s how they should be.
Due →
Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion.
lamboo →
courtesy materialicious
The problem is that while successful complex systems evolve from simple systems that work, not every simple system that works can support additional complexity. It’s not enough just to start simple, you have to start simple with a framework designed for future evolution and growth.
Daring Fireball