From Cory Doctorow’s talk at GoogleNYC, talking about his book, Little Brother:
“[...] who discover, after a terrorist attack on the Bay Area, that destroys the Bay Bridge, that in fact that as bad and terrifying a terrorist attack is, it at least has an ending. Whereas the police response to a terrorist attack has [...]
Social reforms involving a minority1 approach their task with a mixture of two strategies:
Changing the way those in power perceive those whom you seek to help.
Changing the way those whom you seek to help present themselves to those in power.
This is not as subtle a statement as I’ve made it seem2 . There is [...]
I have no idea what the justification for this ridiculousness is, but please contact Jeffrey Hampton, Senior Zoning Planner for the City of Boston and register your protest.
A new city regulation in Boston will limit the number of undergraduate college students sharing the same apartment to no more than four.
more stories like this
The Boston Zoning [...]
Yesterday, I heard about the Boston Public Library’s baleful DRM policy, and a protest staged by the Free Software Foundation and DefectiveByDesign in front of the BPL this afternoon from 1-3PM. So, I arrived at the BPL around 12:55PM, waited ’til 1:35PM, and then left.
No one showed up.
So, I wrote a letter to the [...]
Really, when she was first appointed, I was optimistic. But I’ve lost that optimism.
Last week, Secretary Spellings spoke at a meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI). Reading through the transcript, I was struck by how deeply conflicted and fundamentally screwed up Spellings’s vision of education is. [...]
A strange juxtaposition from the Death and Taxes site for the budget graph, visualizing the relative proportions of the national budget by department and project:
It reminds me of the the first chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, wherein Carnegie recounts the capture of infamous gunman, “Two Gun” Crowley. During [...]
It’s essential to keep in mind that when you’re trying to talk to somebody about a field that perceived as rapidly progressing, you need to be more vigilant about securing the timeliness of your credibility. Reading Illich’s Medical Nemesis, I found myself constantly questioning his conclusions, given their foundation upon statements like:
Awe-inspiring medical technology [...]
From Matt Yglesias, a concise pearl:
This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We’re told we can’t leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren’t really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, [...]
I’ve been thinking about how to design self-suffcient, scalable communities. A big theme in my thinking is that scale is a fundamental, but often overlooked factor in the behavior of complex adaptive systems (CASs). We don’t have a good handle on any of the basic, conceptual primitives we want to use when discussing CASs: [...]
Some people deny that Wikipedia has a liberal bias:
Taxing cigarettes is a pretty repugnant policy. The government acknowledges that cigarettes are addictive and unhealthy and then turns around and makes a profit off that? And forces that policy to do double duty as a punitive measure in the interest of public health?
The government taxes the sale of an addictive and unhealthy [...]
Who could say (or take) that seriously? Isn’t there some analogue to “There is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred [...]
From the introduction to Instead of Education:
It is clear now, as it was not at first, why Illich reacted with such horror to my saying that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. That seemed at the time a good enough way to say that we should abolish [...]
They’re like statistics on steroids:
In a victory for Detroit automakers, the main backer in the U.S. House of tougher fuel economy standards said late today that he would not push for his 35 mile-per-gallon standard this week.
You know, in 1979, Volkswagen was making a car that got between 25 and 30 miles per gallon?
The Volkswagen Rabbit GTI, the North [...]
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