I’m just going to link Gawande’s oft-cited report in the New Yorker about the cost of medical care in Brownsville, Texas (which caps damages from medical malpractice) so I can have a short URL to hand out to people who still think malpractice is the main driver of the cost of medical care in the [...]
I enjoyed Judith Levine’s article in Salon where she excoriates the attitude that an economic collapse is good for moral hygiene. Several friends of Cynthia and mine were laid off from Spansion yesterday, and they aren’t singing the Diamond Sutra.
Amazon’s now offering genomic, chemical, and economic data sets for use in their elastic storage service. You only pay for the compute resources you use to process them. If you have a public data set, you can submit it for inclusion.
Lee Nau just IM’ed me with news on Kepler’s Books: Clark Kepler may have some financial help to keep the store open. People have rallied behind the store. There’s already a weblog dedicated dedicated to the cause.
[ via Cynthia, who told me that Rika posted about it. ] After over 50 years of selling books on the Peninsula, Clark Kepler has decided to close his store. That leaves Books Inc., who took over the space used by Printers, Inc. store in downtown Mountain View, as the only independent new bookseller in [...]
An analysis of the recent DNS poisoning attacks [ via meuon ] finds that the attackers’ motivation was gaming a pay-per-click search engine. A couple of days ago, a coworker asked me if I’ve been able to apply any of my economics training in my current profession. Well, for one thing, I could had told [...]
How does one group of conservative Christians plan to deal with the uncertainties of the modern world? The authors envision a state designed to protect the “integrity” of the home — autonomous family units composed exclusively of one woman, one man, and as many children as possible. As incentive for the mother to stay home [...]
Unqualified Offerings reports Japan’s Defense Ministry will issue their annual white paper as a manga to increase readership. It’s not the first time the Ministry has gone the pop culture route. Manga on ‘serious’ subjects are not new. In 1988, the veteran artist Ishinomori Shotaro wrote Japan, Inc. about the trade wars of the period. [...]
At last, a week late, my notes. Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs. Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now [...]
MoveOn, via the Hindustan Times, reports that the GOP used some Indian call centers for some work in 2002. I bet the folks working at those call centers must had had a laugh, especially if they were push-polling. I’m surprised that Blame India Watch didn’t pick up on this one. And I would had passed [...]
Cheryl Morgan found Blame India Watch, a blog tracking anti-India/outsourcing stories. The site’s slogan is: “Lost your IT job? Blame HR and your management. Don’t blame India, or Indians.” I’d add, blame the Internet, wage-differentials, and technology.
[ via Boing Boing ] v-2 had a great retort to those who beat up on Ikea and Starbucks: in a global economy someone was going to find a way to mass market the Scandinavian furniture and coffee drinks that you thought you had a hipster monopoly on. I’ve heard the same complaints about Amazon [...]
I want to gently respond to Robert Scoble’s post about offshoring and Open Source: I find it ironic that Slashdot is worrying about offshoring of programming. These are the same folks who cheer everytime a country like Israel or China chooses to go with free software over software written in America that costs money. Nice [...]
Warren Buffet, advisor to California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, denounced Proposition 13, the infamous property tax measure. This provoked a knee jerk response by California’s Republicans and Democrats. This came at the same time I was reading Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom. Zakaria doesn’t care for government by initiative either, and holds out California [...]