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 Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct! |
James Surowiecki on insider trading and members of Congress . From 1993-1998, "senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per cent annually". Here's a piece on the same study from the FT early last year.
Debate between economist Milton Friedman, John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and T.J. Rodgers (CEO of Cypress Semiconductor). (via mr)
Lord of the Flies (1955)
Author: William Golding
"I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me."
The Lord of the Rings (1954)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
"The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs."
My blog is worth $5,645.40.
How much is your blog worth?
Google's design philosophy centres on end user loyalty not money, going beyond the browser's lowest common denominator, to develop simple Web applications that are as dynamic as native applications, and to launch early and often to learn from users.
Aberrant comes from Latin aberro, aberrare, "to wander off, to lose one's way," from ab, "away from" + erro, errare, "to wander."
Yahoo Strikes Deal With Stanford, but basically a donor has ensured all Stanford students will get free unlimited music downloads and Yahoo will be getting paid for it.+ The Dictonary.com word of the day is sinecure, meaning a no-working job (I'm paraphrasing ;-). The most interesting thing about it, as usual, is the etymology. It literally means 'without cure (of souls)' in Latin, like you find in 'curate'. Refers to those positions in the church where someone didn't actually have a parish or didn't go. Remember your history about absentee priests?
+ Brazil (appropriately threatens to break AIDS drug patents, then makes a deal to but for half. Strong work.Our laws say the only food aid we can send overseas is stuff grown by our farmers and shipped by our shippers and-apparently-sold often on the side by our relief agencies to self-finance their own anti-poverty programs. Nice huh? CARE and Catholic Relief Services and five other biggies will take food designated for people in Africa and sell it in markets there to raise money for their programs in the region. Talk about starving Peter to finance Paul!
Well, Congress tried to change this stupid law, which basically results in 50% of our food aid disappearing in admin and transportation costs, but the Iron Triangle of food businesses, shippers and relief orgs successfully blocked the legislative change, despite firm White House support. The reform act was supposed to allow U.S. Agency for International Development to buy food locally for starving populations, thus simultaneously improving local agriculture conditions. Sounds pretty sensible given that poor local ag conditions is what gets your starvation in the first place.
Tell me the Shiites and Kurds aren't bending over backwards to make this constitution work for the Sunnis, who largely sat out its drafting but are now being offered a special panel in the first Parliament to revise the constitution--basically a mini-constitutional congress just for Sunnis, or a make-over, politically speaking.
Inexplicably to me, the Bush team, which has finally settled on the right rationale for the war in Iraq--to help Arabs carve out a space in the heart of their world where they can create a decent, progressive future, instead of drifting aimlessly under autocrats and worshiping a glorious past--is equally silent. Instead of going to the U.N. and seeking a resolution declaring the Sunni terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his ilk war criminals, it sends Karen Hughes around the Arab world to get flagellated by Sunni Muslim women for how awful we are. The Bush team calls that "public diplomacy." I call is losing a public relations war to mass murderers.
Edward Jay Epstein on why Pixar should make nice with Disney again. Bottom line: Disney owns the sequel rights to all of Pixar's films and Pixar can't afford to do battle against Toy Story 3 or The Incredibles 2 in future summers.
FedEx keeps 5 empty planes flying over the US each night to help fill in surprise delivery gaps as needed.
The president's speech on terrorism Thursday was excellent. He made clear, better than ever, why winning in Iraq is so important to the wider struggle against Islamo-fascism. But it only makes me that much more angry that he fought this war as though it would be easy – never asking for any sacrifice, any military draft, any tax hikes or any gasoline tax – and that he tolerated so much incompetence along the way.
You're fine with a Supreme Court nominee with no judicial experience at all
With no written record of legal thinking that isn't sealed off by Executive privilege
On what basis can you possibly be fine with Harriet Miers?
Do you really think the President couldn't find someone better?
To me, this choice is great. I love the idea of the non-judge (though she's still a lawyer) and the politico. That sort of homogeneity is just plain wrong for an institution as important as the Supreme Court. No more weirdo, life-led-in-a-legal-cocoon types.
So Miers is a Bush loyalist. Big deal! He's supposed to pick people he doesn't like, doesn't know, doesn't trust?
In combination (Roberts and Miers), the Dems cannot complain about these picks. America does just fine.
The Man: "Plays like a sequel to some terrible movie that was mercifully destroyed before it was ever released. " -- Kevin Crust, LOS ANGELES TIMES
From a recent study : "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies". This seems like a potential chicken/egg issue...is religion the cause of all this or do unhealty societies cause people to find religion?
