As a meat eater, I feel obligated to think about the ethics of the habit. Given that we can easily survive without meat, I think it’s important to be conscious of the fact that it’s a luxury that we indulge in at the expense of the lives of other animals. In this month’s Atlantic, James McWilliams argues that eating the meat of animals raised in a “free range” is not more ethical than eating factory farmed meat: ...
The New York Times asked Tyler Cowen to review and rate the ideas published in the first nine Year in Ideas pieces that they published. Looking back at the old ideas was a great idea in itself, and the resulting piece is really interesting.
After my run-in with excessive traffic a few weeks ago, I’ve become interested in optimizing WordPress performance. ZippyKid has some tips on speeding things up without using WordPress plugins. The only thing I did from his list was turn on the MySQL query cache – it made a big difference.
Today’s IT business must-read is James Governor’s analysis of Salesforce’s $212 million acquisition of Heroku. Salesforce provides hosted customer relationship management software. Heroku enables you to host your Rails applications in the cloud. Governor explains why the deal makes sense: Salesforce avoids IT to sell to the business, while Heroku avoids IT to sell to developers. The two firms definitely have something in common. While Salesforce has done an oustanding job selling to line of business people, its direct outreach to developers through its Force.com PaaS platform and “Java-like” APEX language has been disappointing so far. Big Difference then- APEX is “Java-like”. Heroku is Rails. ...
Here’s a short post on politics. The Republicans claim to care most about the deficit and restoring fiscal sanity for the country, and yet the biggest fight they’ve put up has been to defend the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year. If all of the cuts were allowed to expire, then nominally speaking, the projected budget deficit over the next 10 years would fall by trillions of dollars. (Ignore the degree to which a large, sudden tax increase would stunt economic growth and thereby worsen the fiscal picture going forward.) ...
The big First Amendment news this week is that Amazon Web Services cut off WikiLeaks. They say it was because WikiLeaks violated their terms of service, most people think it was due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman. We know for sure that Tableau Software took down some data visualizations based on the leaks at the request of Senator Lieberman. Last night, their DNS provider cut them off. Columbia Journalism Review interviewed researcher Ethan Zuckerman about what these takedowns mean for the rest of us. Here’s the bottom line: ...
Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears. ...
I’m not surprised to see that Google has made an official response to the New York Times article I mentioned earlier this week. They’ve tweaked their search algorithm to prevent negative feedback from boosting a company’s ranking: We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results. ...
I’ve been following the WikiLeaks controversy with interest for months, but haven’t had much to say about it myself. A few points. My natural inclination is to support WikiLeaks. The ability to keep secrets creates the opportunity to abuse the public trust. Whistleblowers are one form of insurance against that abuse, and WikiLeaks provides an outlet that whistleblowers can use. That’s important. At the same time, someone who leaks 250,000 diplomatic messages to WikiLeaks isn’t just blowing the whistle on malfeasance. I really doubt they reviewed everything they leaked, nor that any one person has the knowledge to understand the risks of leaking 250,000 documents. Calling Julian Assange a terrorist is stupid. It cheapens the word. Even if you favor greater transparency, as I do, you must also acknowledge that this leak puts certain efforts at risk. This Dan Froomkin post explains how the leak may damage behind the scenes effort to remove dangerous nuclear material from Pakistan. In many cases, people are more candid when they are speaking privately. Increased transparency is more likely cause people to be less candid in their private communications than it is to make them more candid in their public communications. Nearly all of the information in the documents WikiLeaks has published thus far was already known to people, by way of off the record comments by officials to journalists. The main difference between the media and WikiLeaks is that they’re more selective in terms of what they let us in on. Andy Baio has a set of fairly comprehensive links about WikiLeaks Cablegate. Blake Hounshell spent all day going through the documents WikiLeaks published and posting about them on Twitter. ...
Despite what you may have heard, liberals are just as invested in eliminating the federal budget deficit as conservatives are. The difference is that conservatives want to fix it in the context of not raising taxes, whereas liberals are more open to both spending cuts and tax increases. Matthew Yglesias talks about one proposal, and explains how it differs from others, like the Simpson-Bowles plan: First and foremost that means explicitly situating the “budget” problem in a broader economic context. You see this two ways. One is the heavy (and appropriate) emphasis in the short term on mobilizing excess capacity to increase growth and decrease unemployment rather than austerity budgeting that will only increase resource-idling. The other is the principle they call No Cost Shifting, namely “Policies that simply shift costs from the federal government to individuals and families may improve the government’s balance sheet but may worsen the condition of many Americans, leaving the overall economy no better off.” ...