Michael Lewis investigates just how bad local finances are in California (spoiler alert: real bad): To understand the regional economies, [Meredith Whitney] had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local [...]
If the conformity becomes a matter of mutually supporting status based on marker-opinions (‘good and clever people believe x, stupid and wicked people believe y’) then the effect is magnified. Supporting the ‘European project’, in all its harmonising glory, has long since become what ‘good people’ support and only mad folk and cranks (or worse) [...]
Anand Girdharadas at the New York Times: Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess [...]
I don’t presume to understand Japanese politics but, looking at these photos, it seems hard to believe that the Government that has overseen such remarkable reconstruction isn’t doing better in the polls.
In October of last year I moved permanently to Japan. Because I now work from home, my podcasting habits have been affected somewhat. I do still make time for podcasts but I’m not as desperate as I once was and I find it more difficult to force myself to, say, listen to my Japanese podcasts, [...]
These just seem to get later every year, don’t they? Initially it was January, then February, now it’s March. It’s probably good that I waited a couple of months, though, because there’s a few new ones that have snuck in just in time. Let’s see what I’m listening to this year and how many sentences [...]
I wrote the original ‘What Do I Listen To?’ more than a year ago and felt it was time to give it an update. Who are the up-and-comers? Who’s managed to hang on? Who’s fallen by the wayside? Read on to find out what’s on my iPod in 2009. The Brainy Gamer Podcast http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast Last [...]
On the heels of Mitt Romney’s ridiculous speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference I thought it’d be interesting, and a throwback to that first year philosophy class I took, to offer a proof for why non-liberal societies must be oppressive. There are a couple of philosophical terms here and I’ve tried to link to [...]