Author: Brian

Craig Newmark — Wikipedia: the first draft of history

“It’s an exemplar and test platform for large-scale, global collaboration. By that I mean large numbers of people working together for common goals. Wikipedia, in that sense, is a major advance for all humanity.

“It’s also dramatic proof of the supreme effectiveness of collaboration: people work together on Wikipedia to build articles, often in collaboration across the world, and often over long periods of time.

“The style of collaboration is novel in that it balances expert work with that of talented citizens. That’s the same balance we see emerging all over the Net. It’s also the same balance between representative democracy and grassroots democracy. In that sense, Wikipedia is a democratic system, reflecting the best of what we see in all human endeavors.”

Masnick:

Plenty of smart publishers are perfectly profitable.

conversations with global leaders
27 pages from mckinseyquarterly.com

Mahindra:

Lack of vision and resource constraint is the main reason for problems that we are facing today.

We can understand the resource constraint the country faced earlier. But not having right visionary leaders at the right place at the right time is going to cost us more in coming days.

Leaders who are running this India, these Indian states, these Indian cities… absolutely do not have a proper plan to serve 1.2+ Billion people.

Farmer:

The 18-year-long day is no less epic than a 700-page day spent with Joyce’s Ulysses and a whole lot more accessible and pleasurable.

Climate Change Costs $500 Billion Per Year:

Faith Birol, our pet IEA Chief Economist says “…the world must speed up the reduction in fossil energy use and make a transition faster to clean renewable energy, not only because because of climate change but because of growing problems within our energy system and possible implications for the global economy… .

“People are either hardened to it or really sensitive about it.”

Fort Hood is one of the largest bases. At Shoemaker High School, for instance, 80 percent of the students have at least one parent in the military.

“We were expecting something like this to happen,” says Cynthia Thomas, director of Under the Hood, a military resisters’ café near the base. “With the multiple deployments, the lack of psychiatric care in huge numbers, this has been building.”

This is ridiculous:

Royal Bank of Scotland, the biggest bank in the world, failed. Citibank, which by some measures is the second biggest, failed, requiring two and a half government infusions of capital.

Is good sense avant guard?

Unusual for a book about physics, Louisa’s book is crowded with people.

“Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement: is remarkable in two ways: first for her solid grasp of the quantum concepts and her ease of explanation, and second, for her decision to frame these concepts as conversations between the great men who struggled to formulate and understand this mathematical breakthrough into Nature’s storehouse of mysteries.

“Louisa does not entirely invent these conversations but assembles them from letters and unpublished papers. Her method gives an impressive immediacy to these ideas which mere exposition would lack, Nick Herbert says, “…eavesdropping on the private lives of the discoverers of the greatest of Nature’s secrets.”

Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed:

“It is important to improve resolution procedures for financial institutions in the event of insolvency.

This includes requiring firms to formulate contingency plans that would be used in the event of their failure. Doing so should reduce the chances that the collapse of a particular institution will threaten the broader financial system …

“At the same time, maintaining financial stability is also likely to involve more-proactive, state-contingent measures, that is, policies that vary with economic conditions.

“For example, when faced by several indications that asset markets may be exuberant, we might consider increasing capital requirements.”

Wall Street Journal

An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Health Care Costs, by Robert Reich:

Dear Senator,

I know you’re in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman’s derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor.

But Harry, you really need to take on future health-care costs. The House bill fails to do this. The public option in the House bill is open only to people without employer-provided health insurance. That will be too small a number to have bargaining clout to get good deals from drug companies and medical providers. And it will mainly attract people who have more expensive medical needs…

You also know a public insurance option that’s open to everyone would cut future health costs dramatically by imposing real competition on private for-profit insurance plans. That’s why the private insurers hate the idea. …

In addition to the House’s weak public option, the deals the White House and Max Baucus made with the drug companies and the AMA will force Americans to pay even more. If, on the other hand, Medicare were allowed to negotiate lower drug prices, biotech drugs weren’t granted a twelve-years monopoly, and doctors had to accept Medicare reimbursements in line with legislation enacted years ago, Americans would save billions.

You know all this but you’re also trying to get 60 votes in order get any bill to the floor. You have my sympathies, but unless you get these reforms into the final Senate bill you’re not really helping most Americans afford future health care. So what do you do?

First, try for the “reconciliation” process, which requires only 51 votes. Every one of the reforms I mention above would fit under the Byrd rule.

If that doesn’t work, wrap these reforms together … and have CBO score the savings. I guarantee you, the number will be large. Then you should dare anyone, Democrat or Republican, to vote against saving Americans so much money…

If neither of these tactics work, then take whatever bill you must to the Senate floor. But then introduce this reform package as the very first amendment to the bill. Call it the “Ted Kennedy Amendment for Helping Middle Class Families Afford Health Care,” and whip the hell out of the Democrats. … If you can’t get 51 votes out of Dems for this, publish the list of Dems who vote against it, strip them of their committee chairs or sub-chairs, and make sure the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee gives them zilch when they’re up for re-election.

Nobody promised you this would be easy, Harry. But, hell, why are you there, anyway? Your responsibility isn’t just to pass whatever will muster 60 votes and that the President and Dems can later call “health care reform.” It’s to do the right thing by the American people and bring down future health-care costs. Don’t cave in to Lieberman or Nelson or the drug companies or the private insurers or the AMA or anyone else. Lead the charge.

All best.

California’s outyear budget is underfunded by 49.3%.

this made me chuckle

“I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy,” said Michael C. Genest, the director of the California Department of Finance.

“I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status.”

Wall Street Journal

Scripp’s photo slideshow at NY Times.

“In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

“Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.”

EPA Office of Water
National Study of Chemical Residues in Lake Fish Tissue

Toxic chemicals in fish tissue in nearly all 50 states.

Mercury concentrations in game fish at 49 percent of lakes and reservoirs nationwide, and PCBs in game fish at 17 percent of lakes and reservoirs.

The local paper reports that Sony Pictures notified OneCommunity, which operates the county’s one-block hotzone, that a movie was downloaded “illegally.”

Wi-Fi Networking News

‘Superweeds‘

A Transgenic Variety of corn that is fatal to ladybugs?

We are repairing a long list of sloppy. The introduction of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops has created a dire situation:

Ladybug.
Frankencash.
Living vs killing.

Phil Cubeta:

What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another.

To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination.

We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets have failed us.

Walt Whitman:

We have frequently printed the word democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, younger brother of another great and often-used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.

Mike Masnick:

Scientists urge Congress to require federally-funded research to be freely available online.

Really, they’re pushing in favor of a new law, the The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009, which seems to make a lot of sense.

If the government is funding the research, the more widely available it is, the better.

Dean Baker:

Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.

[post-9/11]

The projected job loss from increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million.

Marshall Auerback:

If the activities of the banks are not facilitating the production and movement of real goods and services what public purpose do they serve?

It is clear they have made a small number of people fabulously wealthy. It is also clear that they have damaged the economy in many parts of the world.

Peak Oil fun for sociologists: As oil depletes, so does good music!

Sarah’s rousing issue:

She was referring specifically to the new one-dollar coin on which, she said, the familiar phrase “In God We Trust” would no longer be prominently displayed on the face of the coin but instead moved to the outer edge. “It’s a disturbing trend,” she said.

(The journalist bought a $30 ticket to hear her speech. The new coins were introduced by the Republican-led Congress in 2005 and commissioned by President Bush.)

Comedy gold on healthcare:

What may they feel about an elderly person who doesn’t have a whole lot of productive years left?….In order to save government money, government health care has to be rationed… [so] than this elderly person that perhaps could be seen as costing taxpayers to pay for a non-productive life? Do you think our elderly will be first in line for limited health care? And what about the child who perhaps isn’t deemed normal or perfect per someone’s subjective measure of their use or questionable purpose in the eyes of a panel of bureaucrats making our health care decisions for us.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the world is facing another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of organization: international capitalism and state capitalism.

The former, represented by the United States, has broken down, and the latter, represented by China, is on the rise.

George Soros:

The system cannot survive in its present form, and the US has more to lose by not being in the forefront of reforming it. The US is still in a position to lead the world, but, without far-sighted leadership, its relative position is likely to continue to erode. It can no longer impose its will on others, as George W Bush’s administration sought to do, but it could lead a co-operative effort to involve both the developed and the developing world, thereby reestablishing American leadership in an acceptable form.

The alternative is frightening…

The alternative is frightening, because a declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix. We used to be reassured by the generalization that democratic countries seek peace. After the Bush presidency, that rule no longer holds, if it ever did.

In fact, democracy is in deep trouble in America.