October 2011
2 posts
Real protestors only use bitcoin to buy lunch
As I was leaving, having spoken to scores of protesters, I noticed two of them walking over to the A.T.M. at Bank of America. As much as this group may want to get away from Wall Street and corporate America, it may be trapped by it.
from Nytimes
September 2011
2 posts
“Sunday night’s announcement from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings that the...”
– http://gizmodo.com/5841887/could-qwikster-make-mad-bank-with-his-twitter-handle
“The Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine...”
– Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
August 2011
3 posts
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The...”
– Steve Jobs http://on.wsj.com/n9ou2O
“Keynesianism is not about chanting “big government good”. It’s about viewing...”
– http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/the-cracked-conservative-mirror/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto
“What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an “attunement...”
– Fooled by science. The New York Review of Books.
July 2011
5 posts
Scott Rafer's Blog: Income Taxation of Founders'... →
continuations:
Last year when there was a big debate about carry taxation, I came out in support of taxing carry as income (even though that will clearly mean a much higher tax bill for me personally). With the budget battle in Washington reaching ever new heights this issue is coming…
“Let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do....”
– Make Your Kid A Writer (via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
January 2011
1 post
“Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control...”
– http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1AZl4SuVR
September 2010
1 post
PILGRIMAGES: Be just and if you can't be just, be... →
That’s a quote from William Seward Burroughs, that famous junkie author (and junkie poet and junkie artist) who wrote some of the most profound words while on drugs since the opium-addicted Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the latter of whom I like to think of as belonging to a special category of…
January 2010
15 posts
“Cloud computing arrived, making VC deal terms economic only as growth capital...”
– Deprogramming VC & Reprogramming SWOT
Jesus, Rafer is so smart sometimes. This is the best rendering I’ve seen of a thought I’ve had for a few months.
(via giantrobotlasers)
Exactly. So now VCs trying to play in the <$1mm range have had to figure out how to scale their operations to make...
“War is among the greatest horrors known to humanity; it should never be...”
– Warfighting, official training guide of U.S. Marine Corps
“In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a...”
– The chess master and the computer, by Gary Kasparov
Retweaks
“How ironic that smug Democrats in the Administration refused to allow the single...”
– John Stauber (via azspot) (via marco)
ha, no. the problem wasn’t that obama didn’t go more left on healthcare. the problem is he should have pulled out of Iraq & Afghanistan, put heavy new (Volcker) regulations on Wall Street, and talked incessantly about jobs. These Mother Jones...
me as avatar
Google, China and Milton Friedman
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” - Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits
Google has received...
“SIR – Having read your article about difficult languages (“Tongue twisters”,...”
– Letters to The Economist (via Erin McKean)
“So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food....”
–
Roger Ebert on Eating /via mattlehrer
Rafer sez: Why I end up at so many meals while not caring about food.
(via rafer)
notes on my recent trip to california
-SF is growing on me. Love the lack of dress code. (Went to see FCC chairman and people had on T-shirts). Also managed to not drive the whole trip.
-I love in tech how some of the most influential people are also the friendliest. To name a few I saw who were super interesting, accessible and welcoming: Om Malik, True Ventures guys, Chris Sacca, Gideon Yu, Bill Trenchard, Keith Rabois, Bing...
Things startups do and don't need
Things startups do need
Sunny office
Windows that open
Democratically controlled music system
Two forms of internet access
Beer on fridays
EVDO cards
Video game system
Good coffee maker
Proximity to public transportation
Proximity to park
Heating that goes all night
Health care plans for everyone
Mac laptops with second monitors
Plants
Lots of in-person interaction
Gmail and Google...
December 2009
14 posts
“Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties...”
– Dave Barry on 2009
“One of the tragedies of the sale of the Journal is that it never aroused the...”
– The Day the Journal Died
draft toward an email etiquette guide
1) always ask people if it’s ok before introducing them to each other (double opt in)
2) after being introduced to someone, don’t cc the introducer more than once.
3) never, ever use bcc. for one thing it’s rude. for another, you can get caught with reply all. instead, forward after sending.
4) vacation auto responders are lame and for n00bs
5) keep emails short. five...
Text Laundering
Text laundering: The act of transforming text in order to confuse duplicate text detectors, for example those used by search engines like Google.
Here’s a recent Boing Boing post I picked at random:
If you’ve already made your Christmas gifts to Creative Commons and have a couple of bucks left over? How about buying a gift for the public domain!! Public.Resource.Org just ordered...
Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect
Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is...
The New York Times is at least 4 different papers...
- commodity AP style news
- bad summary reports on tech, finance, other topics by people who don’t seem to understand what they are talking about.
- hit (krugman) or miss (dowd) Op-Ed
- incredible actual reporting, like today’s article on how obama decided on his plan in afganistan
Ever wonder how free conference call service make...
First, notice how all their area codes are in rural areas (e.g. one I have is area code 218 - rural northern Minnesota). The FCC allows rural telecoms (e.g. Northern Valley Telecom) to charge long distance companies (e.g. AT&T) higher interchange rates. This was originally intended to be a way subsidize rural telecoms that have lower volumes and higher costs. The local telecoms split the...
November 2009
8 posts
Google and images of Michelle Obama
Can we bring some common sense into this debate? This image is currently the top result when you type “Michelle Obama” into Google Images:
This repulsive, racist image comes from this page Google is trying so hard to defend. Is this juvenile, offensive forum really the definitive source for presidential images?
If the page in question were some authoritative source for images,...
Christopher's Gentle Fist
Buying something on Amazon today I noticed this graphic near the checkout button:
Apparently if I enter “Christopher’s Gentle Fist” on other websites I can use my Amazon shipping and payment info:
I would argue that when we’ve gotten to the point that we are asking users to type phrases like “Christopher’s gentle fist” in order to buy underwear and...
“Epochs are in accord with themselves only if the crowd comes into these radiant...”
– Jean Giraudoux, quoted in Must we mean what we say? by Stanley Cavell