Yostivanich

“A Trea­sury offi­cial made incor­rect state­ments about the health of the nation’s biggest banks even as the gov­ern­ment was dol­ing out bil­lions of dol­lars in aid, accord­ing to a report on the Trou­bled Asset Relief Pro­gram to be released on Mon­day by the spe­cial inspec­tor gen­eral, Neil M. Barofksy.”

“But more impor­tant, the episode illus­trated an essen­tial truth about the state of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics: at this point, the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of one of our nation’s two great polit­i­cal par­ties is spite pure and sim­ple. If Repub­li­cans think some­thing might be good for the pres­i­dent, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for Amer­ica. The Repub­li­can cam­paign against health care reform, by con­trast, has shown no such con­sis­tency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death pan­els and so on — that reform will under­mine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s tra­di­tions and with what con­ser­v­a­tives claim to believe.” Indeed.

“A study to be released Mon­day of finan­cial news cov­er­age this year found that gov­ern­ment, Wall Street and a small hand­ful of story lines got the bulk of the atten­tion while much less was paid to the eco­nomic trou­bles of ordi­nary people.”

“The most vibrant buzz this sum­mer around the Warner Broth­ers lot here and CBS Enter­tain­ment head­quar­ters in nearby Stu­dio City was not being gen­er­ated by the slate of new shows on the CBS fall sched­ule. Rather, it focused on the sud­den emer­gence — dur­ing sum­mer repeats, no less — of a series that had been on the air for two sea­sons.” I love Big Bang, awe­some tv show.

“A bold move made by the Mem­phis Gay and Les­bian Com­mu­nity Cen­ter resulted in van­dal­ism, when a bill­board fea­tur­ing a gay marine was destroyed.”

“Almost every form of pub­lish­ing has been orga­nized as if the medium was what they were sell­ing, and the con­tent was irrel­e­vant. Book pub­lish­ers, for exam­ple, set prices based on the cost of pro­duc­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a tex­tile man­u­fac­turer treats the pat­terns printed on its fab­rics. Now that the medium is evap­o­rat­ing, pub­lish­ers have noth­ing left to sell. Some seem to think they’re going to sell content—that they were always in the con­tent busi­ness, really. But they weren’t, and it’s unclear whether any­one could be.”

“Gold­man Sachs stands to receive a pay­ment of $1bn – while US tax­pay­ers would lose $2.3bn – if embat­tled com­mer­cial lender CIT files for Chap­ter 11 bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion, peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.” Are you serious?

“On Mon­day, six weeks after Ms. VanDyke’s team was sup­posed to have the project ready, Google plans to announce what they were work­ing on: a new fea­ture of AdSense for mobile Web sites. It lets mobile pub­lish­ers run spe­cial Google text ads on their sites when the site is vis­ited by a smart­phone. But instead of the basic text ads shown on reg­u­lar cell­phone Web sites, the ads come in dif­fer­ent sizes, with more sophis­ti­cated design, and can include small images.”

“Our son taught me an extremely valu­able les­son. When it comes to kids, we often bring moral­is­tic bias to their inter­ests. There’s a per­va­sive ten­dency in our soci­ety to label things as either good for chil­dren or bad for chil­dren. Cul­ti­vat­ing children’s nat­ural intrin­sic moti­va­tion requires aban­don­ing all judg­ment of good and bad con­tent. Soci­ety has a long list of sub­jects that we’ve deter­mined they should learn. But learn­ing itself is kick-started when enmeshed and insep­a­ra­ble from what a child inher­ently loves. How many par­ents are ignor­ing this, push­ing flash cards and phon­ics cards onto their kids, attempt­ing to trig­ger learn­ing in an amo­ti­va­tional situation?”

“Clearly, other com­pa­nies know how to sync pain­lessly with iTunes music (see RIM’s Black­berry Media Sync for exam­ple), so why doesn’t Palm develop a sync­ing solu­tion for their own hard­ware? The exact rea­son is unknown, but my guess is that it’s a com­bi­na­tion of things. Per­haps Palm doesn’t have the resources to develop their own sync app. Or maybe they want some pub­lic­ity. Or maybe they just want to push Apple’s but­tons. Who really knows. But I seri­ously ques­tion the strat­egy and brains of any com­pany that ties crit­i­cal prod­uct capa­bil­i­ties to the unsup­ported use of their competitor’s soft­ware. I mean, really? Can it get any more ridicu­lous? Can you pos­si­bly send a more mixed, less confidence-inspiring, “we’re a bunch of hacks who can’t pro­vide our own sync soft­ware for our prod­ucts” mes­sage to customers?”

“One hun­dred forty-three years after pas­sage of the 13^th Amend­ment to the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and 60 years after Arti­cle 4 of the U.N.‘s Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights banned slav­ery and the slave trade world­wide, there are more slaves than at any time in human his­tory — 27 mil­lion. If you were to plot slaves on the map, you’d stick the biggest num­ber of pins in India, fol­lowed by Pak­istan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined.”

“One of the things that is so pathetic about the dem­a­goguery of Rush Lim­baugh and Glenn Beck is that their under­stand­ing of his­tory is so puerile that in any civ­i­lized debate they would be laughed off the stage. Of course they don’t allow a civ­i­lized debate.” Indeed.

“The US and the UN have given an upbeat assess­ment of the pos­si­bil­ity of set­tling the nuclear dis­pute with Iran. US National Secu­rity Adviser Jim Jones said Tehran was now “will­ing to come to the table”, fol­low­ing talks this week between Iran and major pow­ers. The head of the UN’s nuclear agency, who is in Tehran, said there had been a “gear shift” towards co-operation.”