Brad DeLong has a good article at Slate explaining why the Pozen plan for saving Social Security, a variant of which President Bush proposed in his press conference last week, may not be so appealing for people who are interested in saving Social Security. Economically speaking, reducing the benefits for people who don’t need them so much makes sense. Politically, it very well may doom Social Security in the long run. ...
Tom Coates says trackback is dead. Ever since it was invented, I had plans to add trackback to this site, but I never got around to implementing it. Now it looks like I’ve waited so long that I don’t need to bother. The hidden virtues of laziness once again make themselves apparent.
Today is Dave Winer’s 50th birthday. Happy birthday!
Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen on installing Windows on a new (used) laptop: I may install a handful of programs but that's all. I don't like installing software on my computer. The more programs you install, the more likely there's going to be a conflict somewhere.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution attempts to define liberalism (and conservatism and libertarianism) in one sentence. For liberals, he comes up with, “We don’t want to rake people over the coals with risk,” which I think is pretty close to the truth and fair, especially as regards economic matters. The crux of the debate when it comes to Social Security, bankruptcy laws, universal health care, mandatory minimum wage, public education, and most other domestic issues that aren’t driven by the Christian right is the degree to which the government insulates people from risk. There’s an honest debate to be had about what the right answer is both in terms of our moral posture and what best serves the greater good. My personal philosophy is that relying on markets to sort things out is generally the most efficient approach, but I never forget that liberals who want to insulate people from risk aren’t the only people looking to pervert the function of those markets. Most of the lobbyists in Washington are working to get Congress to pass laws to insulate their clients from risk, and their clients are big business. Their risk is reduced by having fewer responsibilities to their employees and customers, less environmental regulation, more regulation of their competitors, and financial support from the government. They have plenty of cash to buy legislators and no shame when it comes to asking for free hand outs. I’m also mindful of John Maynard Keynes’ famous statement that “In the long run we are all dead.” Markets may be the best long term solution to allocating resources, but I find it inhuman not to attempt to ameliorate the suffering caused by dislocation in the meantime. Update: I got an email from a reader who was confused about my bottom line position, which is this: I believe that the US government does not do a good enough job right now of insulating people from risk. ...
From the minutes of the July 23, 2002 UK Prime Minister’s meeting: C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. And: ...
First, I heard that a guy I know had mistakenly thrown out his iPod Shuffle in the Google cafeteria the day after he got it, and now I read about Cameron Purdy flushing his iPod Shuffle down an airplane toilet. Maybe that’s the secret to Apple’s financial success – releasing expensive but easy to mistakenly discard products. You know the Shuffle is a great product because in both cases, the victims have expressed their intent to immediately give it another go. ...
You know you’ve hit the big time when domain squatters register incorrect spellings of your name.
It has certainly seemed to me that lately lots of money is being poured into interesting Web projects. Furthermore, the big Web companies seem to be innovating. Once again, people I’ve known for years seem to be reaping the benefits, getting hired to do fun stuff or working at startups. Janice Fraser says it’s a whole new Internet. Jason Kottke says maybe it’s a whole new Internet bubble. Update: Mena Trott responds to Jason. ...
A reader points out that there’s a function in MySQL 4.1 called group_concat that deals with the pagination problem that I mentioned.