If this doesn’t make sense, you’ve probably never had to browse hundreds of fonts.
Via Typophile
(Hint: the subject of this post contains all 26 letters in the English language)
On the limitations of listening to customers…
“When we were working on the program we asked our current Explorer owners, ‘Do you guys need the ability to go off road’ and 100% said ‘Absolutely, yes,” said a Jay Ward, a Ford spokesman. “When we asked them, ‘How often do you go off road?’ 70% said ‘Never.”
Ford on the creation of the Ford Explorer
Given my fascination with things like data and cars, I was of course interested in this example of phantom traffic jams.
Also, there’s a bunch of other cool things from the website that I found this video from.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead
Inflating away debt only works when the obligations are in fixed dollar amounts, like a mortgage. But essentially, all of our long-term fiscal problems are entitlement commitments that grow (are “indexed”) with inflation. When inflation rises, spending on Social Security and Medicare rise at the same rate. So the debt-inflation relationship is the opposite of the get-out-of-jail-free card some envision. Debt still goes up in real dollar terms, creating even more of a death spiral.
Why the U.S. Can’t Inflate Its Way Out of Debt
Don’t click the link unless the following sentence sounds interesting to you.
Assume that a restaurant has N dishes on its menu that are rated from worst to best, 1 to N
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Big Bang Treaty | ||||
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Don’t write this off because it came from The Daily Show. When someone’s right, admit they are right. Fox News is crazy.
Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite reporting can go wrong. Among the 12,830 words in the annual letter was this sentence: “We are certain, for example, that the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and probably well beyond – but that conclusion does not tell us whether the market will rise or fall.” Many news organizations reported – indeed, blared – the first part of the sentence while making no mention whatsoever of its ending. I regard this as terrible journalism: Misinformed readers or viewers may well have thought that Charlie and I were forecasting bad things for the stock market, though we had not only in that sentence, but also elsewhere, made it clear we weren’t predicting the market at all. Any investors who were misled by the sensationalists paid a big price: The Dow closed the day of the letter at 7,063 and finished the year at 10,428.
2009 Berkshire Hathaway Letter to Shareholders
Don’t trust outrageous claims from anyone.
I want to go to the Devil’s Swimming Pool at the top of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.
Stelvio Pass. Worth a drive.
Even better is the Transfăgărăşan
This isn’t really a *do*, but I came across it while looking at Snopes. The Chaiten Volcano in Chile erupted, and lightning came out of it. Here are bigger pictures of the lightning volcano.
In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust — what on Earth would Bill Buckley have made of “death panels”? The creed is caught up in a suspicion of all reform that conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe have always warned against.
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First, conservatives are suspicious of innovation and therefore subject all grand plans to merciless interrogation. Their core question goes something like this: Maybe you think this new health (or education or environmental) plan is a great idea, Mr. Liberal, but will it really work?
What are its unintended consequences? Can our governmental institutions carry it off? Not all progressive ideas pass the test. In the health care debate, conservatives were at their best when they shelved the demagoguery and asked practical, focused questions.
Three points for conservatives
I really like this article. Conservatives should be playing Devil’s Advocate to Progressive ideas. Political party fighting is crap. Focused, insightful, and thoughtful questioning of another’s ideas is a compliment. “I take you seriously enough to consider your ideas”