There’s no stopping the “me” generation. In the ’60s they got all the good drugs, in the ’70s all the sex, in the ’80s all the money, and now, in the waning days of the aughts, they won’t let go of all the jobs. It goes without saying that during the next decade they’ll gobble up all the good healthcare. Andrew Leonard in Curse of the boomer hegemony.
Why is health care reform important? I haven’t seen it put better than in this St. Petersburg Times op-ed.
There has been a lot of talk this week about criticism of Obama from the left. After Andrew Sullivan posted a number of emails from readers under the subject of “Leaving the Left,” Glenn Greenwald, a persistent (and I think, fair) critic of Obama had enough: What’s most striking about these valiant defenses of Obama is how utterly devoid they are of any substantive points and how, instead, suffuse with weird, even inappropriate, emotional attachments they are. These objections are grounded almost exclusively in (a) a deep-seated conviction that President Obama is a good and just man who means well; (b) their own rather intense upset at seeing him criticized; and (c) a spitting ad hominem fury of the type long directed by Bush followers at any critics of their leader, and generally typical of authoritarian attacks on out-groups critics. ...
Today I’m reading about a completely fascinating wargame that was set up at Harvard to explore which strategies might work with regard to Iran and its weapons programs. Experienced foreign policy professionals were brought in to play the United States, Israel, the Iranian government, and others. Columbia University professor Gary Sick played Iran, and writes about the game on his blog. The details of the game’s outcome (Iran wins easily) are interesting, but I also love the idea of wargaming to explore possibilities and wonder how it could be incorporated more into business planning. ...
The challenge for Bloomberg is to create software that is better, faster and more visually useful than what rivals offer to help develop players and predict their performances. A demonstration of Bloomberg’s software showed dazzlingly colorful graphics and an easy way to plot statistics and compare players in complex combinations. The developers say that after studying rival software makers, they can do more and do it better. From an article in the New York Times, Bloomberg Technology Embraces Baseball. Moneyball was really a book about identifying and exploiting undervalued assets. The main thing that has changed since the book was published is that players are valued much more accurately than they were when the A’s were beating teams with higher payrolls. ...
Information is Beautiful: Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus. I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources. Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.
The system by which World Cup qualifying teams are seeded and assigned to groups is more interesting than you might think. Nate Silver explains how the system works and which teams are winners and losers going into the drawing this weekend. Over the years I’ve seen lots of complaining about the group assignments various teams have gotten, but never an explanation of how they work. The ways FIFA intentionally sets things up to benefit the host country are particularly interesting. ...
Mark Sigal has a really nice piece for O’Reilly Radar looking at the challenges that lie ahead for Android: Now, as a developer, do you develop different versions of your software to take advantage of the cool features of each of these different devices (and the lifecycle of supporting same)? Do you focus on just the device that pushes the highest volume (and release more apps specific to that device)? Or, do you pursue a lowest common denominator that strives for uniformity across all form factors? ...
The word of the day is cartocacoethes.
With President Obama’s decision last night to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq, I think we can officially declare the honeymoon over. Maybe it was already over awhile back. Obama was always more moderate than many of his supporters had wished, and people always tend to expect that Presidents can accomplish more than they really can. There are a lot of Democrats in the Senate who just aren’t interested in working to pass legislation that’s progressive in any way. The main lesson I take away from Obama’s first year in office is that we have a national government that is unwilling to even look realistically at the nation’s problems, much less try to enact solutions to those problems. ...