Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Hansen’s Writing Ball & Other Unusual Typewriters – A demonstration that there’s more than one technical path to a desired outcome, and something to make you wonder how our “everyday” technology could have ended up looking very, very different.
- Deficit Reduction Plus Tax Cuts Equals Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Anger – “Give Republicans credit for this: They don’t chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser’s game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?”
- Businesses Do Not Create Jobs – Businesses are not the enemy, but they are not an ally, either. Businesses are out to make money, which means maximizing profit rates (and the revenue underlying them) by meeting demand that the lost cost (to the business) and highest price it can get. Tax hikes to business can do harm, yes, if they impact on profitability so that other cuts need to be made … but tax cuts to businesses don’t automatically translate to additional jobs unless there’s business there that was unprofitable to go after before.
- In the Bag – MoMA | Counter Space Blog – The under-appreciated wonder of paper bags.
- Officer Threatened with “Rigid Feminine Pleasure Device” | NBC Chicago – Headline of the week, right there.
- The Brutal Decline of Yahoo [Infographic] – Yikes. (The one thing not addressed here, and still a “success,” is Flickr. Which does make me worry about how that part of the tale will turn out.)
- In Banning Sharia Law, Oklahoma Voters May Have Voted Against Native American Rights, Too – I’m sure the Good People of Oklahoma were sure that this ballot proposition would only stop the Bad Laws — like Sharia, or those nasty “legal precepts of other nations or cultures” — from polluting their precious jurisprudential fluids. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten (along with a lack of threat) what a web of laws and customs and “precepts” even the most insular hick in Oklahoma lives within, from trade agreements to tribal matters to religious principles in private contracts (whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian).
- The Other “Anti-Choice” Shoe: Aunt B.
- War Criminal Now a Republican Congressman [Dispatches from the Culture Wars] – Welcome to your new GOP House Majority.
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