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Survey says…. $700 billion!
I somehow missed this a few days ago. From Forbes: In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large…
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Who’s voting a blank check for those #*%)%(
Here’s the silver lining to global financial collapse. It’s kept me from obsessing about Sarah Palin and McCain’s latest whopper for the last week. Except in the context of financial collapse, for which there’s been plenty of material. What’s fascinating is watching this in the blogging era. Roughly a billion serious economists are online, and…
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To be fair, we can see Canada from the States
From a McCain staffer today (via Huffington Post): MIAMI — Move over, Al Gore. You may lay claim to the Internet, but John McCain helped create the BlackBerry. At least that’s the contention of a top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he…
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RIP, DFW
David Foster Wallace apparently hung himself in his Los Angeles apartment this weekend. In his best book, Infinite Jest, he’d written with a horrifying clarity about depression, addiction and failure. In the context of a not-quite-science-fiction near-future, in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (the U.S. has started offering years for sponsorship), in which…
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Obama, energy, and getting the whole story
I’ve been a casual reader of news the last few days. I’ve skimmed. I’ve been busy. But I think I’m not alone in that. Regardless, the point I’ve gotten about Obama’s energy policy is that he’s backtracked on offshore drilling, and is now willing to support it. I was a little pissed about this, until…
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Evolving economics
I know, I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been traveling, in the States for the first time since moving to Berlin (more on that later, but it was only in going back that I finally felt like an expat). Also reading, evolutionary theory and sociobiology. Which leads to this point. Reading this article on the…
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Word up to the past, or where to find a decent thesaurus
As a writer, I have become shamefully dependent on my thesaurus. By which, of course, I generally mean the Internet, since actually taking my fingers off the keyboard is a task too frightening to contemplate (and the thesauri in OpenOffice and Word are rudimentary at best). Until a few weeks ago, I have been very…
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A kind of springy beginning
I think I’ve spent the last six months entirely inside. It wasn’t a cold winter, but the dark and cold-enough of it seemed to get under my skin more than I expected this year. Though it’s possible that staring at a laptop screen for 29 hours a day every day has something to do with…
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RIP, Dungeonmaster
Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died today. Just 69, but he’d had health problems for a long time. He leaves behind a legacy that’s far stronger and more important than the non-geek world really understands, I think. D&D, and the gaming worlds that evolved from it, were hugely influential on generations of…
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Running to stay in place, thankfully
After a bit of swearing and frowning and several trips down to a part of Wedding which I don’t ordinarily see (but we all should, because there’s quite interesting African Lebensmittel shops there), the Ausländerbehördenites have at last given me a permission slip to stay in this part of the world for a bit longer.…
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Truth in fraud
I think you have to give this particular Net spam-fraudster a little credit for a sense of humor: Dear Winner, (they write) This is to inform you that you have been selected for a cash prize of 1,000,000.00GBP (One Million Great British Pounds) and a brand new BMW 5 Series Car from International programs held…
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Steve Jobs thinks books are bunk
From an NYT blog, a Steve Jobs quote bashing Amazon’s (no longer new) e-book reader: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed…
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Save the planet. Buy meat-offset credits
Because I am a fervent believer that the unrestrained free market has the best possible answers to all problems, I would like to propose to the Internets at large a solution to the problem of meat, and a way of reigning in the pork and cattle industries that have become nothing less than environmental disasters.…
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Obama: Fairy tale or American exemplar?
I’m thrilled about Obama’s win in Iowa. I’m not as surprised as maybe I should be, reading the headlines, but maybe this is one of the advantages of being overseas, and not steeped in the daily horse-race reporting. From here, the story emerging after Obama’s win — that Democrats are more focused on the prospect…
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Some say the year will end in fire…
A good way to swap the years in and out. The streets of Berlin on Silvesternacht (New Years Eve night) were as always marked by heavy artillery. Even after describing it a hundred times to people in the States, I had forgotten the visceral effect of letting everybody in the city have dozens of rockets…