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Last year I was fascinated by a financial story that involved Porsche secretly buying Volkswagen stock for three years, disclosing that it owned 75% of the company, and reaping as much as 40 billion euros from distressed short sellers. Now Volkswagen is taking over Porsche. Porsche’s CFO, Holger Härter, who engineered the short squeeze, is out of a job, as is Porsche’s CEO, as is Porsche’s CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. Porsche still owns more than 50% of Volkswagen, but apparently it cannot continue to operate under its current debt load, creating an opening for VW: ...

PoliticalCartoons.com sells reprint rights to the cartoons they publish on the page where the cartoons themselves are published. I wonder to what extent this prevents people from appropriating the cartoons without paying for them. This arrangement makes it perfectly clear that you are not entitled to use the cartoons without paying for the legal right to do so, and makes it convenient to pay for them right there. The prices seem reasonable. ...

I see lots of links to Arnold Kling’s blog. He’s a libertarian-leaning economist, and I’m sure he has lots of important things to say. But this paragraph in an otherwise interesting post on health care in Massachusetts illustrates why I don’t regularly read his blog: Of course, no one on the Left believes that. The core belief there is that experts know best, and that experts are only thwarted by evil corporations and stupid conservatives. The notion that no expert knows very much, and that the evolution of market processes produces better outcomes, is too threatening to contemplate. ...

The Kindle seems neat and all, but I’m not going to pay for books that I don’t actually own.

Today I was thinking of disparate impact not in terms of employment law, but rather as something we’d be wise to look out for and avoid in a more general sense. In terms of employment law, disparate impact is any hiring condition that has the effect of discriminating against a protected minority without serving any essential business need, even if that discrimination is not intentional. (Disparate treatment describes intentional discrimination.) Legal definitions aside, I’m fascinated with the idea of disparate impact. It has me wondering about it in a larger sense. For example, let’s say I manage a development team and we make most of our decisions during meetings where everyone argues their side and the person who makes the most compelling argument usually wins. Such a system privileges people who argue well in a group setting over people who may be more quiet. If decisions were discussed in email rather than in meetings, perhaps the best writer in the group would see things go their way more often. ...

I’ve used the term a few times, and now it’s time to officially coin it: Hate Driven Development. It’s when you come to hate working on something so much that it inspires a surge of productivity that leads to completion. Most projects that involve this methodology include a procrastination phase.

Robert Reich belatedly answers the question I asked in January – can the economy ever really be what it was? He says no: My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years – featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere – simply cannot be sustained. ...

This is a special link roundup related to the W3C killing off XHTML 2 and putting all its eggs in the HTML 5 basket. I’ve posted about this myself here. John Resig: HTML 5 Parsing. The HTML 5 parser in Firefox is C++ code automatically converted from the Java parser used by the HTML 5 validator. hacks.mozilla.org: video - more than just a tag. On the use of the video tag, which is designed to replace Flash video (mostly). Shelley Powers: On XHTML2 and HTML5. Another roundup of HTML 5/XHTML 2 links. Henri Sivonen: An Unofficial Q&A about the Discontinuation of the XHTML2 WG. Sivonen represents Mozilla in the HTML 5 working group.

Discover Magazine: The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State. Neuroscientists explain my usual state of mind. FireQuery. jQuery-specific enhancements for Firebug. The Zinn-Segaran Experiential Greatness Scale. You never know when this is going to come in handy. Bruce Schneier: The Pros and Cons of Password Masking. I think it all depends on the environment in which the password will be entered. Threat Level: Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case, Overrules Jury. This lady is a hateful loser, but making it a crime to violate a site’s terms of service is awfully bad law. Shared Equity Mortgages. An interesting idea for people who don’t have enough money to make a down payment on their house. Vanity Fair: Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin. An awesome article that ran on Sarah Palin just before she resigned. Glenn Greenwald: The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture. In the discussions of torture, the number of people who were waterboarded is discussed frequently, the number of people in US custody who have died almost never is. O’Reilly Radar: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard. Pretty amazing application of Drupal. O’Reilly Radar: Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt. There’s a whole other world out there I barely know exists. Firefox 3.5 for developers. The stuff you need to know. Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today. I thought it was a bad idea back then. Robert Reich: Why the Critics of a Public Option for Health Care Are Wrong. I’m not giving up on real health care reform. FiveThirtyEight: George F. Will Admits Public Option Will Cut Costs. At least half the stuff people are saying about health insurance isn’t true. Slate: Why do Iranian police uniforms say “police” in English? I was wondering.

I thought baseball writer Rany Jazayerli’s description of blogging versus journalism was interesting: If you define a “blogger” as someone who delivers opinionated commentary over the internet from an informed but access-free perspective, then I’ve been a blogger since the founding of Baseball Prospectus over 13 years ago, which is to say for longer since the word “blogger” has existed. The part about “access-free” is critical, because that really is they lynchpin of the whole blogger/journalist dichotomy. Joe Posnanski has one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, but he’s not a blogger: he’s a journalist with a blog. ...