John Gruber has a piece on JavaScript framework Apple has developed for the iPhone: PastryKit. It’s interesting to see how close Apple is getting to providing the “native experience” in a Web application. It’s a lot closer than most people would have thought possible, I think.
The Institute of Medicine’s methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn’t have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we’re looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on. ...
Oracle and content farming don’t have anything to do with one another (or do they), but they do seem to be topics that are dominating the news in my little corner of the world today. The last obstacle to Oracle’s takeover of Sun (and MySQL, its subsidiary) is the European Commission, which is investigating the antitrust implications of the merger. Last week, hearings started. Everyone sees this as their last chance to make themselves heard on the topic, and the stakes are high. ...
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.
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...