Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
Matthew Yglesias on Joe Lieberman’s obstructionism.
Paul Kedrosky has a good post on the latest trend that lowers the value of the Web, content farming:
Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.
Via Michael Sippey.
Update: John Battelle has a more optimistic take.
First of all, we should get one thing out of the way — it’s not any citizen’s job to give a politician credit for his political calculations. In fact, that should rightly be part of the calculus of any political calculation; a politician should have to weigh the benefits of making, say, an unsavory insider alliance against the negative of public criticism for that move. If a leader doesn’t have to earn the admiration you give him, then a) that admiration doesn’t mean anything, and b) he will surely spend all his political capital on the people who do make him earn it.
Matt Taibbi on Obamania.
I have a Facebook account that I rarely use. I generally only log in if someone sends me a friend request, and then I read a little bit of the news feed and leave. In truth, I really should visit more because I have a number of friends and family members who regularly update their status there and upload photos, and it’s nice to see what they’re up to. But I rarely do.
What I dislike most about Facebook (aside from the massive number of requests to use various applications that I get all the time) is that I have to so actively pay attention to my privacy settings there. I’ve read any number of articles explaining the optimal privacy settings for my account, and I’ve probably spent more time tweaking those settings on Facebook than I have on privacy settings for every other Web site combined.
Then last week, Facebook revamped everything and required me to go back and look at the privacy settings again.
What I found when I got there was that Facebook suggested that I abandon all of the privacy tweaks I had made in the past and share everything with everyone. I told it to keep all of my old privacy settings, but even then, things have changed.
The bottom line is that if you have a Facebook account, you’ll want to read the EFF’s guide to Facebook’s privacy changes or some other similar guide to get a sense of which settings you need to modify and which information they’ve placed out of your control. I thought this stuff was supposed to be fun.
At the end of the day, however, the piling-on in liberal circles does not match the objective evidence about the economy. And if it sets any precedent, you may have a robust recovery by the middle of next year, but with neither the White House’s conservative nor liberal critics willing to give them much credit for it. Voters may stay away from Democrats as a result, pushing the country toward more conservative economic policy and ensuring that liberal critics of the economy aren’t lacking for greivances any time soon.
FiveThirtyEight: If An Economy Recovers and No One Cheers It, Does It Make a Sound?
It just occurred to me that I’ve never had (or given) a really well executed developer-centric performance review, and it had me thinking about what should be in such a review. There are a lot of things that should be discussed in any performance review, I’m not going to go over those. I want to talk about the kinds of questions a developer and their manager probably ought to discuss at their review.
To me, the most important part of a performance review is to help the person getting the review get better at their job. It’s a chance for people to get feedback that will help them figure out which skills they need to improve and determine where they may be lacking in terms of professionalism. The second most important part of a performance review is to help the manager get as much value out of the employee as possible. Does this person work better undisturbed most of the time or regularly collaborating with others? Is this person happiest grinding away at hard problems that discourage most people? Do they like or dislike refactoring old code that could use improvement?
With that in mind, here are some questions that managers might want to discuss with developers in their performance review:
The last thing I’d add is that I think annual performance reviews are really important. In many cases where programmers manage other programmers, they tend to be ignored or handled in a cursory fashion, but I think that’s a big mistake. So if you’re a manager, do your performance reviews and put some real work into them. Your employees will benefit, even if they don’t appreciate them.
But let’s set a more modest goal: return to more or less full employment in 5 years –which means seven lean years of depressed employment. To keep up with population growth over those 7 years, the United States would have had to add 84 times 127,000 or 10.668 million jobs. (If that sounds high, bear in mind that we added more than 20 million jobs over the 8 Clinton years). Add in the need to make up lost ground, and we’re at around 18 million jobs over the next five years — or 300,000 a month.
Paul Krugman in The jobs deficit.
There’s no stopping the “me” generation. In the ’60s they got all the good drugs, in the ’70s all the sex, in the ’80s all the money, and now, in the waning days of the aughts, they won’t let go of all the jobs. It goes without saying that during the next decade they’ll gobble up all the good healthcare.
Andrew Leonard in Curse of the boomer hegemony.
Why is health care reform important? I haven’t seen it put better than in this St. Petersburg Times op-ed.
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Earn fake money shilling for health insurers
Business Insider has an interesting story on health insurance companies paying Facebook users in FarmVille currency to contact Congress opposing health care reform. Pretty amazing on any number of levels. Via Waxy.