March 2010
63 posts
Sam Anderson has the best 'trend piece' I've seen...
The median age seems to hover around 20, and males outnumber females probably twenty to one. Sex is ever-present, whether insinuated or enacted. (My wife sat in front of the webcam for a while, and it was suddenly, disturbingly, a much friendlier world.) People are endlessly soliciting nudity, both in person and via signs (“FLASH TITS FOR HAITI,” etc.). Roughly one out of every ten chatters is a...
February 2010
19 posts
Who could argue against better allocation of the...
Tom Hazlett’s work on radio spectrum gets a much deserved airing in Richard Thaler’s latest NYT column. Given the looming deficit crisis, and the fact that less than 10 percent of households get their TV over the air, you’d think it’d be a no-brainer to auction off the malallocated TV band to the highest bidders.
Professor Hazlett estimates that selling off this spectrum...
3 tags
5 tags
4 tags
3 tags
Lost Hypernerds: Follow the Twitter Person Who’s... →
My top 5 artists this week. →
The Beatles (5)
Pixies (2)
Edwyn Collins (2)
Suede (2)
Magnetic Fields (1)
5 tags
That was fast
OK, I don’t mean this blog to turn political. I plan to find a new outlet for this sort of stuff and then I won’t interrupt the stream of skulls and creepiness and cat pictures you’ve come to expect. But for now I have to address a question my friend Vero de Rugy raises at NRO’s the Corner blog. She notes that Scott Brown broke with the GOP to support the new jobs bill and...
Competition and patience
Until recently, Amazon and its Kindle were the only real e-reader game in town. This allowed them to force on publishers an arguably arbitrary (and low) price of $9.99 for bestsellers. With the introduction of Apple’s iPad, however, publishers now have a viable competitor to which they can defect. The result will likely be higher e-book prices in the near term, and this has prompted some...
4 tags
Not all commissions are created equal
Yesterday President Obama issued an executive order creating a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The idea that a commission independent of partisan politics can help solve intractable political problems draws much of its inspiration from the success of the various BRAC military base closing commissions. Unfortunately, some of the key ingredients that made BRAC successful are...
3 tags
4 tags
4 tags
6 tags
2 tags
My top 5 artists this week. →
Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2)
Snow Patrol (2)
The Killers (2)
The Strokes (2)
Death Cab for Cutie (1)
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
