Posts

Few theories have grabbed my imagination the way behavioral economics has, and I’m not alone in that. One of the big stories when President Obama was elected was that his administration was going to use behavioral economics to painlessly solve a variety of problems. Last week, economics professors George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel wrote an op-ed for the New York Times throwing some water on the idea that we can nudge our way into solutions for big problems. Here’s the conclusion: ...

Dani Rodik explains why basing economic policy around shoring up market confidence is a fool’s errand. The cause of the recent massive cereal recall. Looks like Republicans are back to claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves. Republicans are completely incoherent when it comes to economic policy. Rany Jazayerli writes about Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus. This is a beautiful piece of writing. Adam Rifkin wrote an insightful piece on Google’s corporate culture: Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications… How scientists avoid confirmation bias.

Bruce Schneier explains why the Internet kill switch is a bad idea. Yahoo’s UI group did some research and figured out the size limits on mobile browser caches. At the end they have some recommendations for people who create mobile content. Andre Torrez thinks we should be able to define date formats using examples rather than tokens. Someone should create a Web page that lets you pick a language and enter a date, and returns the appropriate formatting string. Frequent rc3.org commenter Jacob Davies posts some ideas for stimulus over at Obsidian Wings. Many billions of dollars could be productively spent on upgrading water infrastructure alone. Having millions of people out of work is an incredible waste of resources. Best flow chart ever. Ian Betteridge notices that all of those iPad killers Apple’s competitors were talking about aren’t being produced. There’s something fishy going on with WikiLeaks.

Consumer Reports cannot recommend the iPhone 4 due to the antenna issue: It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4. ...

Terrance Aym thinks that the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico could release a giant methane bubble that ends life as we know it. He wins the “most extreme hypothetical” award. Zonal Marking previews the final game of the World Cup. Federal prosecutors want to charge ticket scalpers with a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for bypassing CAPTCHA to purchase tickets in bulk. Oh, and if you are bypassing CAPTCHA on Web sites, the NSA is setting up a surveillance program that will probably catch you in the act. In the UK, the new conservative government is giving up anti-terrorism powers, just as it promised. Police officers will no longer be authorized to stop and search people without probable cause. Rich people are walking away from their mortgages at a greater rate than poor people. That’s why they’re rich, I guess. Etsy engineer Mike Brittain explains how they resized 135 million images in 9 days.

One thing I noticed about this list of Popular Rounded Sans Serif Fonts is that none of them are on TypeKit. The US government has lost 75 percent of the habeas corpus cases brought by detainees at Gitmo, and yet we’re asked to trust them with the authority to detain people indefinitely without putting them on trial. There are still 181 detainees at Gitmo. All the action is at Bagram in Afghanistan, now. Gaia Vince reports that Seed, the company behind ScienceBlogs, has a history of compromising on ethics in the quest for revenue. Adam Serwer writes about the degree to which Americans have allowed fear to undermine our principles. A lot of people propose to reduce the future obligations of the federal government by raising the retirement age. Put me in the group who sees this as another example of the callous disregard for people whose work involves manual labor on the part of the rich and coddled. David Galbraith has figured out exactly when and where the Web was invented. The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson explains what we’ve learned about current trends in soccer strategy from the World Cup. The State Department has denied a visa request by Colombian journalist Hollman Morris based on some language about “terrorist activities” in the Patriot Act. Hollman has won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard but is barred from entering the United States. He has been a persistent critic of human rights violations by the Colombian government, which is allied with the US.

Good thing I wrote about Blizzard and ScienceBlogs’ identity management problems on Wednesday, because both of them have already reversed course. Seed removed Food Frontiers (the Pepsi blog) from ScienceBlogs after some of their higher profile bloggers started abandoning ship. And Blizzard has cancelled its plans to publish the real names of posters on its forums. It is still using real names in the Real ID system, which I think is a mistake. Screen names are the answer, Blizzard. Trust me. ...

University of Delaware economics professor Laurence Seidman has a proposal that’s too sensible to ever be adopted for fixing the federal budget. Here’s his description of the problem: The worst federal budget policy is the one we’re now following: ignoring the looming large future deficits while refusing to enact temporary fiscal stimulus to combat the recession. As long as Congress and the president refuse to tackle the large looming future deficits, financial markets and the public will rightly stay nervous. ...

I’ve been posting links to Twitter and Pinboard, and I’m going to try to start collecting them here as well: Bradford Plumer explains to a sceptic why we should act now to mitigate climate change. What science tells us about how to get the most out of a vacation. Fake is a browser automation tool from the creator of Fluid (the single-site browser tool) that I’m playing with. Seems great so far. Internet Explorer 9 incorporates some cool new performance measurement tools. Eric Meyer argues that CSS vendor prefixes are a good way to allow browser makers to innovate, and should not be discouraged. I agree. Maciej Ceglowski looks into Legacy.com, the site that provides online obituaries for many newspaper Web sites, including the New York Times, and finds a business that is built around cynically exploiting the bereaved. There’s evidence that exercise helps prevent the effects of aging on your brain. If companies really want to save money, they should offshore the executive suite. Steve McCurry digs into his archive for soccer photos.

Brad DeLong captures the general line of thinking in an article for The Week, entitled Keynes & Co. have lost the stimulus argument. In it he explains why he’s pessimistic about our current economic situation, things the government can do to restore economic growth, and why the government probably isn’t going to do any of those things. Here’s his summary of the current situation: The good news is we have avoided another Great Depression. But it seems ill-advised for Barack Obama to stand up on a Friday morning in early July and say that the economy is “headed in the right direction” (even if, as he said, “we are not headed there fast enough”) and to highlight “the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector.” The employment-to-population ratio has been flat since November. Over the past six months–since the downturn ended–the U.S. economy has not been recovering from its near-depression, and not been putting a greater and greater portion of its potential labor force to work. Rather, it has been bumping along the bottom. There is a big difference between the economy getting “better” and the economy “no longer getting worse rapidly.” ...