With surveillance ever-present and opponents of war and worse turning into that which they once opposed (a la Animal Farm), and our dear leader learning to love Big Brother, it is no wonder that sales of George Orwell’s dystopian future are spiking. A variety of sites have jumped on the meme of huge sales spikes for 1984, and it seems Obama’s legacy will be tightly linked to Orwell’s fiction.
Category: Ideas (Page 1 of 5)
Interesting article on how to use Google for country and file specific searches, somewhat like an un-named spy agency. Adding keywords like “site” and “filetype” aren’t new, but since most people use Google, knowing these and other ways to refine searches can improve other searches.
Thoughts on writing in letters from Raymond Chandler.
Some amusing quotes, mangled and twisted.
Is “insulting religion” an objective standard, or simply a way for some people to crack down with the weight of government and the courts on something certain people find offensive? Here’s another test case from Turkey.
Over at NPR the economics debate between libertarian John Papola and Keynesian James Livingston continues, with a rebuttal from Papola. For a recap, watch the classic rap video econ-off between Hayek and Keynes that Papola created a few years ago, “Fear the Boom and Bust.”
Contrast this io9 article with news that Flipboard just created 50 million magazine editors. Which is more exciting? Is it io9 with it nostalgia for a “world where what you read online comes to you in silos. Instead of a feed reader, you can get an app that organizes your app subscriptions on a nice digital bookshelf where they look just like a bunch of paper magazines in a bookstore” or the one about Flipboard allowing you to curate your own magazine, where “where each user tacks pieces of content into collections that other users can follow. Flipboard users with good taste and and lots of friends could suddenly become influential drivers of attention to news articles”? I’d go for the latter.
Paid or free, both have value. Now some investors are noticing the profit potential in paid courses.
This will become more important as electronic books and music squeeze out physical content. How do you sell back any electronic music or books that you bought? Both Amazon and Apple are exploring methods for a marketplace in electronic content. Fearing market dominance, many people are worried about what will happen, citing the low cost of used books on the internet.
Scott Turow, the best-selling novelist and president of the Authors Guild, sees immediate peril in the prospect of a secondhand digital thrift shop. “The resale of e-books would send the price of new books crashing,” he said. “Who would want to be the sucker who buys the book at full price when a week later everyone else can buy it for a penny?”
This long article at the NY Times, covers copyrights and patents involved in such a prospect. How sad, when there is no patent involved in opening a used book store. The issue of paying royalties on used books is always a sticky one, though. But should someone have to be paid every time their content is sold and resold?
Surprised to see this on PBS org, of all places, but a good anti-Keynesian argument by John Papola against the silly idea that consumption is the only way to prosperity. The rebuttal by historian James Livingston blasts “austerity” which is the code word for reducing government spending and letting private money remain in private hands, or opposing the idea of inflating our way to prosperity. Livingston’s argues that without “trade unions, social movements, families and governments…markets typically destroy themselves.” These forces act as “outer limits — determined by civil society.” Ah, there’s that mythical “civil society”, or as many Norwegian social democrats simply say, “society.” There is no such entity. Rather, it’s a group of people who declare that they know what’s good for everyone else, and justify that belief by saying “society” benefits. Livingston frankly admits his view “requires planning. Not central planning, mind you. Just some kind of public, purposeful, collective action that acknowledges the social purpose of economic growth.” That so-called collective action is nothing but the law imposed by certain people on everyone else in society, and “social purpose” is defined by those in power at that time. With no logic behind it, just emotion.
