Feb 23, 2010

Yes, the Awl just printed 1200 words on _Lochner_. Because The Awl is TEH AWESOME!

Seriously, where else do you get bloggage like that? Chris Lehmann: you rule.

Feb 23, 2010
The revolution will not come as quickly as we expected. History has proved this, and we must be able to take this as a fact, to reckon with the fact that the world socialist revolution cannot begin so easily in the advanced countries as the revolution began in Russia—in the land of Nicholas and Rasputin, the land in which an enormous part of the population was absolutely indifferent as to what peoples were living in the outlying regions, or what was happening there. In such a country it was quite easy to start a revolution, as easy as lifting a feather.
—Lenin, Political Report of the Central Committee, March 7, 1918
Feb 22, 2010

Education Economics

Economists are always saying people wouldn’t be stuck in low-wage jobs, if only they had gone to college. Imagine everyone went to college. Do economists really think there would be nobody working at McDonald’s anymore? Would college graduates really be paid more for making fries? What gives?

Feb 21, 2010

Deep Thought

Fox News has now spent more time on Piven and Cloward than MSNBC ever will.

Feb 21, 2010

Top Ten TV Shows

  1. The Wire
  2. The West Wing
  3. The Thick of It
  4. Arrested Development
  5. My So-Called Life
  6. Californication

Feb 21, 2010

Boy, there’s nothing more thrilling than piecing together history

Feb 20, 2010
Power was lying in the streets and we picked it up. It was light as a feather.
—possibly apocryphal, see cited version
Feb 20, 2010

Here’s to the crazy ones

Apparently Kontra wants to rumble. Unfortunately, they seem to be having some reading comprehension problems. To be clear:

  1. What I was calling dumb was the assumption that Google tests everything thoroughly before they release it.

  2. What I was calling totally reasonable was the theory that Google does not test everything thoroughly before they release it.

  3. I do not, in fact, think this is a totally reasonable practice in reality. I think this is crazy.

I agree with the rest of the post: Buzz was a huge disaster. Google’s leadership doesn’t have taste. Testing needs to be done on actual users.

Buzz is a clear example that testing on Google employees just isn’t enough. Google employees work for the new Borg; they’re totally used to all their private data being shared with all their coworkers. They’re precisely the last people who will ever notice a privacy problem with any Google product. But they’re the people who get listened to. And thus the blind spot.

Feb 19, 2010

There is work to do; there are men to do it. Why not bring them together? No, says Mr Baldwin. There are mysterious, unintelligible reasons of high finance and economic theory why this is impossible. It would be most rash. It would probably ruin the country. Abra would rise, cadabra would fall. Your food would cost you more. If everyone were to be employed, it would be just like the war over again. And even if everyone was employed, how can you be perfectly sure that they would still be employed three years hence? If we build houses to cover our heads, construct transport systems to carry our goods, drain our lands, protect our coasts, what will there be left for our children to do? No, cries Mr Baldwin, it would be most unjust. The more work we do now the less there will be left to do hereafter. Unemployment is the lot of man. This generation must take its fair share of it without grousing. For the more the fewer, and the higher the less.

…

It may seem very wise to sit back and wag the head. But while we wait, the unused labor of the workless is not piling up to our credit in a bank, ready to be used at some later time. It is running irrevocably to waste; it is irretrievably lost. Every puff of Mr Baldwin’s pipe costs us thousands of pounds.

—J. M. Keynes, “Can Lloyd George do it?” in Essays in Persuasion, 91
Feb 18, 2010

Chuck Klosterman writes about a rock concert performed on a cruise ship:

There are two main hurdles involved with the writing and reporting of this story. The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace, who published the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the forty-eight hours prior to this trip. The second hurdle is my inability to swim, which means this trip could possibly kill me.

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