Mar 16, 2009
“The tendency for prices to fall during recessions has declined over time. An increasing
proportion of the effect of any reduction in aggregate demand shows up as a reduction in real
output. We shut down our factories rather than running them with lower wages and lower prices
for finished goods; in the event of deflation reducing collectible property taxes, a city will fire
half of its schoolteachers rather than cut any teacher's wage.
The longer a society remains stable, the more freighted down with special interest groups it
becomes. Unions or cartels of businesses slow an economy’s response to change because they
require the assent of many members in order to effect a change. This makes wages and prices
much stickier than in a classical free-market economy."
—Mancur Olson as paraphrased by Philip Greenspun. original
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Mar 11, 2009
Our product just launched:
MeeHive, your personalized news paper.
Press coverage.
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Mar 3, 2009
“Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns
on the other side. He shouted a warning to his sleeping roommates and threw his weight against
the door. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough
time to smash a window and escape.
Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought back against the intruders, who shot him through his
cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages. Weinberg lied to the kidnappers by
telling them that the residents of the neighboring apartment were not Israelis. Wounded,
Weinberg later again attacked the kidnappers, allowing one of his wrestlers to escape before
himself being shot to death. Weightlifter Yossef Romano also attacked and wounded one of the
intruders before being shot and killed.
The Germans offered an unlimited amount of money as well as the substitution of high-ranking
Germans. The kidnappers refused both offers."
—Wikipedia on the
Munich massacre. I'm reading about it in the wake of the
attack
on cricketers in Pakistan.
Things could have been much worse.
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Feb 22, 2009
My latest project:
NewsFlash, a feed-reader with a flashcard interface
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Feb 18, 2009
“If I get in five or six hours of writing, the other stuff [routine chores] feels
satisfying, like a kind of grace. But if I have to do that stuff when I haven’t
written—that’s a terrible thing."
—
Jonathan Lethemi via
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Feb 15, 2009
Alison L. Des Forges,
Rwanda observer extraordinaire,
RIP.
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Feb 13, 2009
Resolutions
Most new years resolutions have failed by this point.
By definition, a new habit doesn't fit in with the mindset and lifestyle you currently have.
You care about more than the resolution. You're really asking for the new mindset that enables it.
When you make a change its implications ripple through your life. For it to take hold,
the rest of your life must make room for it. Reorganize, repack. Resolutions are simplistic.
They encourage us to focus on one aspect of life, and to ignore implications for the rest.
Don't fix the action too quickly. Don't fixate on individual resolutions.
You have somewhere to get to, and you must change in myriad ways to get there.
Change requires practice. Make it a habit, a constant process of improvement.
Keep sketching [1,2]. Iterate. What's so special about January first anyway?
paraphrasing myself from two years ago after reading TJ
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Feb 7, 2009
The superior civilization:
Ants
comments
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Feb 6, 2009
I am thinking about the tragedy of the commons
We neglect what we collectively own.
More than a theory of economics, it is a cognitive phenomenon. Humans have
trouble with small numbers. One millionth of this subway gets rounded down to
zero. (This is one of the reasons gambling has allure.)
'Cognitive rounding' applies also to shared responsibility. This financial
crisis has no single culprit because we all reacted to a situation, and by
our reactions made it worse.
Kevin Kelly suggests we'll just go past ownership as an incentive.
Is the free
movement realistic in this expectation? I think it under-estimates human nature.
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