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August 11, 2012

EBay and Amazon Eye Same-Day Delivery – Businessweek. (Great trend; has anyone used ebay in years?)

Behind closed doors: The magic of unsourcing. (Give me a user board and one or two highly technical monitors any day over a call center employee.)

Breaking up the euro area: The Merkel memorandum | The Economist. (The path for Europe is clear; I will elaborate more soon.)

Apple owns US smartphone market while Samsung dominates worldwide | Ars Technica. (Yet more evidence that Samsung is making all the Android profits.)

Stephen Colbert on Papa John’s “Obamacare” price hike | TPMDC. (Give me a break Papa.)

Can Hospital Chains Improve the Medical Industry? : The New Yorker. (Pretty interesting story! Medical care is a mess: I wish someone would actually care.)

Slack and the Art of Exhaustion : The New Yorker. (Running. 14 minutes dead.)

I’ve inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code—what now? | Ars Technica. (Programming.)

Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion? – ProPublica. (When all your ideas are stolen, why do anything?)

Project management for high-performing lazy people | VentureBeat. (I should read this.)

Emptyage — Yes, I was hacked. Hard. (Backup. Backup. Backup.)

Romney Tax Plan on Table. Debt Collapses Table. – Bloomberg. (Mathematically impossible. Scary that this guy might be VP.)

In Linkvie.ws

An absolutely breathtaking view of the Milky Way as seen from Mars.

Science is fucking awesome.

For the first time since 1998 more money leaves China than enters it

MAINLAND China can now boast over 1m wealthy citizens (qianwan fuweng) each with over 10m yuan ($1.6m), says the latest edition of the “Hurun Report”, which keeps track of China’s capitalist high-roaders. But the mainland seems to be having trouble keeping them. According to the report, published on July 31st, more than 16% of China’s rich have already emigrated, or handed in immigration papers for another country, while 44% intend to do so soon.

But only 28% of those asked expressed great confidence in the prospects over the next two years, down from 54% in last year’s report.

Perhaps those rich Chinese aren’t just investing. If this is a sign of future (bad) trends in China, it could mean trouble for the world economy. It could also mean a big impact here in the US and elsewhere; the Chinese tend to be fierce competitors (and these are some of the best and brightest).

The Economist, 8/4/12

iEconomy versus iKorea: The ten+1 things you need to know in the Apple-Samsung-Google war (to date)

August 8, 2012

If you haven’t been following the Apple/Samsung patent battle, here’s the short-shrift:

The iPhone was a revolutionary device.
Samsung has been shamelessly copying Apple products since the iPhone came out.
Samsung is the only company making money on Android.
Apple thinks Google shamelessly stole the iPhone (Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, was on Apple’s board while the iPhone was being developed). This is true, but who wouldn’t? Google just got a head start because of their inside knowledge.
Apple is trying to slow the sale of Android devices by aggressively going after sales injunctions due to violations of their IP (all the multi-touch patents, design patents, etc.). There are good economic reasons to do this; plus, Apple (at least Steve Jobs) has vowed to kill Android.
Since Samsung is making all the Android money (and copying Apple in it’s hardware products the most shamelessly), that’s where the battle has naturally lead.
Because of the patent suits, Apple (usually very secretive) has been forced to admit into evidence much of the iPhone development history and have it’s senior leadership testify in court (really interesting stuff).
People worry that Apple is destroying the mystery by doing this.
Samsung is no hero (even if you are sick of Apple); South Korea is pretty freakin’ corrupt.
Although Apple deserves restitution (license fees, penalties, etc.), it wouldn’t be good for them to prevent outright some technologies from entering the market (e.g.,multitouch). This would really be bad for progress, market competition, and the consumer.
Conan has the definitive take on all this (below).

Update: Apple wins first patent fight, awarded 1 billion in damages.

In Lists, Opinion

A Record Decline in Government Jobs: Implications for the Economy and America’s Workforce

It’s easy to be cynical here and say something like “good riddance”, etc. However, what we are talking about is a severe cut in infrastructure investment (people, safety, science, and so on). As Asia and other parts of the world invest, we cut the pieces that they are copying…

Total government (i.e., the sum of state, local, and federal) employment has decreased by over 580,000 jobs since the end of the recession, the largest decrease in any sector since the recovery began in July 2009. State and local governments, faced with tough choices imposed by the confluence of balanced-budget requirements, falling tax revenues, and greater demand for public services, have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, and other workers.

The Hamilton Project, 8/12

Great find on Slate: Karate Kid lost footage: A close look at deleted scenes, Ralph Macchio’s audition tape, and more..

Slate, 8/3/12

Linkvie.ws

August 4, 2012

The History (And Artistic De-Evolution) of Patent Drawings | Gadget Lab | Wired.com. (If you ever get to DC, check out the old Patent building – it’s beautiful too.)

Bill would force patent trolls to pay defendants’ legal bills | Ars Technica. (The Patent system…subject of a future essay.)

Why Rich People Better Start Worrying About Income Inequality. (You mean rich people can get sick too? The gates in gated communities don’t keep out viruses? Huh… maybe they should support universal health care.)

Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012 | The Comic’s Comic. (Gatekeepers – annoying in any field.)

Get Save As back on Mountain Lion’s File menu easily and without hacks | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog. (Thank you Jesus.)

Race, IQ, and Wealth | The American Conservative. (It takes 2-3 decades to close the IQ gap for immigrants – I wonder how much it depends on the density of immigrant populations.)

Colson Whitehead’s Rules for Writing – NYTimes.com. (I write good.)

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do.. (I write gooder.)

Paul Ryan’s Influence on the G.O.P. : The New Yorker. (If Ryan is the intellectual center of the Republican party, that’s pretty sad.)

Air conditioning: Cool innovation | The Economist. (Finally, progress in aircon!)

3D manufacturing: Print me a phone | The Economist. (What’s especially interesting about this technology is the way it is forming communities in the United States – hackerspaces and makerspaces. I think it really will be a positive, not only for our country, but for our society. I look forward to going back to the days when a kid could build and understand things (like old TVs and radios).)

Electronic Arts Sues Zynga, Says The Ville Is An “Unmistakable Copy” Of The Sims. Zynga: EA Doesn’t Understand Copyright (Updated) | TechCrunch. (Zynga deserves to die.)

In Linkvie.ws

Debt, Depression, DeMarco – NYKrugman

Who is Ed DeMarco? He’s a civil servant who became acting director of the housing finance agency after the Bush-appointed director resigned in 2009. He is still there, in the fourth year of the Obama administration, because Senate Republicans have blocked attempts to install a permanent director.

The main point, however, is that Mr. DeMarco seems to misunderstand his job. He’s supposed to run his agency and secure its finances — not make national economic policy.

Your one stop shop for Krugman: http://www.longvie.ws/category/nykrugman/

NYTimes, 08/03/12

3 Million Dollars?

August 1, 2012

Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner institutes yet another Nobel alternative award – 3 M each for theoretical physics. In theory, this is awesome. But I wonder if all these monetary awards from “enthusiasts” of science will start to skew the field. (In other words, do some people have too much damn money?) How are awardees really being chosen? Sometimes there can be a tendency to pile on more and more accolades to some and ignore the important contributions of others. (Unless of course someone wants to give me an award…) But, there are probably still better ways to make money than in theoretical physics (see below).

In Funny, Links, Opinion

The Heretic

Over the course of the preceding year, IFAS researchers had dosed a total of 22 other men for the creativity study, including a theoretical mathematician, an electronics engineer, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. By including only those whose jobs involved the hard sciences (the lack of a single female participant says much about mid-century career options for women), they sought to examine the effects of LSD on both visionary and analytical thinking. Such a group offered an additional bonus: Anything they produced during the study would be subsequently scrutinized by departmental chairs, zoning boards, review panels, corporate clients, and the like, thus providing a real-world, unbiased yardstick for their results.

The Morning News, 7/26/12

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

July 30, 2012

The chance to earn a prestigious degree is not the only reason Chinese buyers find the U.S. market increasingly appealing. “There is an increasing number of wealthy Chinese who are buying in the U.S. to diversify their portfolio,” says NAR economist Jed Smith, who helped compile the annual survey. “Even with the rally in recent months, homes here still look very good from an investment point of view.”

China’s Gift to U.S. Homeowners

July 30, 2012

London 2012 Olympic Marketing – Best & Worst

Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns

Remember the days when a lot of “serious” gamers were worried that the runaway success of social gaming companies was going to lead to a world where mindless, microtransaction-pushing social games would crowd out the rest of the industry? Those concerns are looking somewhat quaint this week after market leader Zynga posted results that were much weaker than expected, sending its stock price tumbling.

I suppose one can build a good business taking advantage of the most mundane psychologies of the population, but can you grow a truly great company?

If you don’t know the story of Cow Clicker, it’s worth a read. Social games are usually where creativity goes to die (dear lord: Draw Something?). But there must be opportunities for real, creative, innovation in games with the social graph…

Cow Clicker

Ars Technica, 7/27/12

Christopher Nolan: escape artist

Orson Welles once said that a successful artist should know the limitations of their form, and while Nolan knows these limitations, he also knows what to place at the boundaries to give the impression that the limitations don’t exist.

BFI, 7/18/12

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