Matt Ulman

A great summary of recent history.

I blame Critical Mass.

Some people say that the growth of bikelanes over the last few years has sparked the backlash, but it’s hard to argue that those aren’t a net positive.

I commute to work by bike, and have for nearly a decade.  I’ll admit to not stopping at every light, but for the last six years I’ve been fortunate that there aren’t many lights between home and work.

I’ve been noticing lately (because I’ve been trying to pay attention) that when there is interaction w/ a pedestrian, either on the commute or on the weekend, it nearly always ends with them apologizing to me for jaywalking in front of me.  I’m no saint, but this city’s filled with people who aren’t following every law they’re supposed to follow.

Thank you for protecting innovation with your lawyer army and Scrooge-McDuck-sized vault of gold.

I shudder to think of the world we might live in: a world where we mortals have discovered a way to highlight text on a page but haven’t taken the unobvious next step of adjusting that selection.  Thank you, Geniuses of Redmond, for discovering this strange and nearly mystical technology.

I’ll include your other innovations below for posterity, although my puny mind struggles to understand the nonobvious, substantial, and significant nature of these inventions.  In fact, I may go mad from the sudden expansion of my perspective.

Whatever you do, gentle reader, look away before reading about the way they’ve completely redefined the way we ‘annotate’ things:

The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

When taking LUNESTA you may experience

• Unpleasant taste in mouth, dry mouth
• Morning drowsiness
• Dizziness
• Headache
• Symptoms of the common cold

You may still feel drowsy the next day after taking LUNESTA. Do not drive or do other dangerous activities after taking LUNESTA until you feel fully awake.

Possible serious side effects of LUNESTA include:

• Getting out of bed while not being fully awake and doing an activity you do not know you are doing. (To learn more, read the LUNESTA Medication Guide).
• Abnormal thoughts and behavior. Symptoms include more outgoing or aggressive behavior than normal, confusion, agitation, hallucinations, worsening of depression, and suicidal thoughts or actions.
• Memory loss
• Anxiety
• Severe allergic reactions. Symptoms include swelling of the tongue or throat, trouble breathing, and nausea and vomiting. Get emergency medical help if you get these symptoms after taking LUNESTA.

These are not all the side effects of LUNESTA. Ask your healthcare professional for more information.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Right now, the two top stories on Yahoo! news are:

• GOP says it’ll block bills until tax cuts extended
• 2 million lose jobless benefits as holidays arrive

I feel like any commentary on my part is redundant….

I’m not going to claim to have invented this, but more and more people are starting to talk about it.

The true problem is the return of neo-liberal thought and policy that is dominating debate, and the financial and political elites that are using this return to push their own destructive agendas.

He then raised his fist in the air and left the stage.

They’ll get what they deserve, those nose-spiting cheeseheads.

Frankly, I’m not sure how wonkish the debate about this article is, but it’s both hilarious and disturbing.   The fact that our press, the people who are supposed to keep us safe from abuse, can’t even understand first-year concepts makes me fear for the future.  This from a source that isn’t supposed to be biased and claims some knowledge of the subject (Business and Economics Editor).  From the mainstream source of The Letter from Birmingham Jail.

And the best part is that she continues to be wrong in the comments of this story.  Very, very wrong.  Treating savings like it only counts if you have a passbook, not as an economic concept that can be positive or negative… that’s what the average person on the street would do, but it’s no way to lead a technical debate.

I’ve had this post as a draft for a few weeks, just never had the time to finish it, but now something’s come up that makes me want to finish:

Lost Decade Looming?

Krugman talks about the commentary masquerading as news, and it makes me wonder: I don’t really have a lot of faith in the media, so I assume that commentary masquerading as news is generally just the regurgitation of talking points.  And what if the ‘deficit / inflation hawks’ are intentionally setting us up for a longer recession, one that hopefully lasts until 2012.  It’s a scary concept, this politicization of economics, and not in the traditional way.  Economics is politics at nearly every level and certainly the macro, but the idea that one side would intentionally misread the current economy in order to gain politically at the cost of the macroeconomy… that really frightens me.  Maybe I’m naive but I didn’t think we were there, and I hope we’re not.

Which brings me to the post from a few weeks ago, prompted by this headline at the Huffington Post, the link to which I can no longer find:

Dems Have Fractious Meeting On Bank Reform, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes

I’m not a big reader of the HuffPo, or any of the political theater blogs, but sometimes a guy needs a break from whatever.  This pattern, Dems Have Fractious Meeting On X, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes seems like a fools game.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone who pays attention to these things, but I can’t believe the Democrats are still falling for stuff like this. I mean, the fact is that the Republicans don’t want reform to succeed – they want (at the very least, see above) a costly political failure. Collaborating with them only means that X, whatever X is, is more likely to fail.

I had this idea a while ago, that in order to be a part of ‘something’, and especially to be in charge of ‘something’ you have to believe, at least on some level, that that ‘something’ should exist. It’s not the Secretary of Education’s job to decide if the Department of Education should exist, it’s their job to lead it.  The SEC fell down because the people running it didn’t believe in its mission. I understand that this rule can’t hold 100% or else we’ll end up with bloat evident even to the left, but there’s something to be said for the general idea.

How will more regulation, especially more watered down regulation, help that?