Infected Worldmind
“There are pure charlatans in the world of the prosperity gospel, but what figures like [T.D.] Jakes (and Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and many many others) represent is something else entirely: They’re self-help authors on the one hand and apostles of moralistic therapeutic deism on the other, slapping Christian window dressing on how-to guides for upward mobility and psychological satisfaction. They aren’t playing to the follies and fantasies of the poor and desperate; they’re responding to the real-world aspirations of the working and the middle classes. They aren’t peddling fatalism and false hope; they’re offering ambitious Americans advice on how to be prosperous and happy in the workplace and the home, with a little God-talk worked in around the edges.”
—Ross Douthat, Sam Harris and the Prosperity Gospel
March 2008
“Our global financial system has become so staggeringly complex and opaque that we’ve moved from a world of risk to a world of uncertainty. In a world of risk, we can judge dangers and opportunities by using the best evidence at hand to estimate the probability of a particular outcome. But in a world of uncertainty, we can’t estimate probabilities, because we don’t have any clear basis for making such a judgment. In fact, we might not even know what the possible outcomes are. Surprises keep coming out of the blue, because we’re fundamentally ignorant of our own ignorance. We’re surrounded by unknown unknowns.”
—Thomas Homer-Dixon, From Risk to Uncertainty (This is the real danger of the current economic meltdown)
The Uncertain Future of Clear Channel →
ft.com
Worsening economic conditions (lack of easy credit) may pose a threat to Clear Channel’s plans to go private (through a 19 billion private buy out by two private equity firms), as the consortium of banks financing the deal may take advantage of loopholes in the commitment letter to withdraw (or limit) financing.
“When I go around Europe and speak to a variety of heads of energy companies, energy leaders, I often hear a fear that there is an attempt to form a gas OPEC (between Russia and the Central Asian States)”
—Matthew Bryza, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.
“We need to smurfercise our smurfs and smurfibilities as stocksmurfers.”
—Ryan Somma, Tragedy of the Commons Explained With Smurfs
“Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great.”
—E.J. Dionne
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“In fact, a[t] some point in the future, don’t be surprised if Google makes it more and more difficult to upload video on to Youtube by REQUIRING you to sign a license for the content first. Thats a heck of a lot cheaper than paying 150k dollars per infringing download.”
—Mark Cuban
Play
Wire Montages →
gawker.com
For later viewing.
Play
Tip Pools →
tastingmenu.com
The Tasting Menu has another great post that uncovers the mysteries of tip pools. I think that most customers don’t stop to think about the impact of support staff (especially the people that go unseen) on the quality of restaurant service.
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In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006.” A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: “I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sand castles.” Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: “‘Notability purges’ are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors.” Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: “Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you’ve destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face.”
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007—deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas—all deemed to be trivial, “NN” (nonnotable), “stubby,” undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic—Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia’s history, told a Canadian reporter: “The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow.” In September 2007, Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s panjandrum—himself an inclusionist who believes that if people want an article about every Pokemon character, then hey, let it happen—posted a one-sentence stub about Mzoli’s, a restaurant on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. It was quickly put up for deletion. Others saved it, and after a thunderstorm of vandalism (e.g., the page was replaced with “I hate Wikipedia, its a far-left propaganda instrument, some far-left gangs control it”), Mzoli’s is now a model piece, spiky with press citations. There’s even, as of January, an article about “Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia”—it too survived an early attempt to purge it.
” —Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia (or Dispatches from the Wikipedia War of the Early 21st Century)