inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
Still alive. It would be shame to give up with the 10th anniversary(!) fast approaching. Who knows how old that is in internet years? That said I’m getting much more use out of twitter and facebook in terms of sharing things I’ve found interesting. That’s really the place to find me. (Oh the ambient intimacy of it all!) Now everyone is essentially a blogger it seems little arrogant to expect people to type in a separate URL to find out that I saw a great video of a cat. A personal website is great as a platform for content be it code, art, academic publications, journalism or similar project but as I’m currently not creating anything like that I’m reassessing what damien.nu is for, or more interestingly what it could be. Most likely a back up for when people start deserting facebook. Anyway, go read Bruce Sterlings 2010 state of the world. It’s always good. Space age verbal diarrhea. And watch Wallander on BBC iPlayer, its also very good (if you’re outside UK try Modify Headers get access to iPlayer). And while you’re at it Un Prophete is great and this will do your head in.
I had never seen Jonathan Meades until yesterday when I chanced upon a doc he was fronting on BBC 4 about the Scottish island of Harris. Essentially an architecture critic in a suit running about an island with no buildings spouting a constant stream of hugely entertaining and verbose ramblings. It’s almost like a Chris Morris sketch. Except it’s real. Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter
Just discovered this. Criminally underrated. Last year Jean Claude Van Damme makes ‘real’ film playing himself.
Loans going into ‘bad banks’ should be valued at current market prices for assets rather than hopes of improvement in the future, according to a key figure behind the rescue of the Swedish banking system in the early 1990s. Bo Lundgren, Sweden’s former minister for fiscal and financial affairs, told an Oireachtas committee yesterday that so-called ‘mark-to-market’ valuations would ensure the quickest possible recovery for the financial system. He declined to comment specifically on Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency, which is taking over up to €90bn of risky property loans in the banks. But the agency is expected to ignore strict loan writedowns to current property values in favour of recent European Commission guidelines, which allow it to set an “economic” or “through-the-cycle” value on loans based on estimated long-term asset values.
From Irish Independent
In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.
from Good Magazine
File under iPhone apps I always meant to create but didn’t and then someone else did Byki, a very pleasant language learning/flash card app I’ve used on my aging G4, has released a mobile version. Over the years I’ve attempted to learn various languages during my commuting dead time, usually mp3s of French with Michel Thomas, but with limited success mainly due to the problem of repeating the French response on a crowded Tube without looking crazy. Byki should resolve this sorry state of affairs.
