- More evidence that bow ties are a symbol of the banality of evil, or something like that. What I find most fascinating about this is the implication for what a corporate entities investment in another, similarly prominent and capitalized corporate entity implies about the psychology of investment returns and risk... and that ultimate objective of neoclassical economics, "efficiency." Query for neoclassical economists: Under what conditions is an otherwise-identical Carnot engine most "efficient," and what does that correspond to for a socioeconomic Carnot engine?
- Today marks the sixty-sixth anniversary of the last time nuclear weapons were actually used, instead of merely "tested". This has nothing whatsoever to do with the consumption of another tulip bulb on Wall Street. Nothing. Mark Cuban's musings on patents merely confirm this, as the New HuffPo (parallel to the history of New Statesman entirely intentional) inadvertently published. It's inadvertent because it's inconsistent with the preestablished ideological convictions and personal economic interests of its ultimate owner — see preceding item.
- Sometimes there are weird consequences for one's dubious conduct. Really weird.
- This blawg's only feline friend the IPKat offers well considered mewsings on the recent UK governmental reaction to a major report on copyright reform... that won't work in the US, or in a system that must interface with the US system. The Hargreaves Report, for all of its depth, is a remarkably insular document in one critical respect: It entirely discounts the tension between the kinds of "freedom of expression" directly and indirectly allowed in/enabled by our First Amendment and the rights of creators to their creations (in the US, also of constitutional weight). By limiting itself to a Eurocentric perspective, it is as ultimately flawed as various big-content-industry proposals for "enhancing" enforcement of US copyrights.
If there's one thing that we should have learned from the past twenty-five centuries or so of even moderately nonunique literacy, it is that the arts will always find a way to transcend and subvert national boundaries... even if only, like François-Marie d'Arouet and Aleksandr Iseyevich Solzhenitsyn, forcing creators to live in exile and send their creations back.
Aaaaand that's all the link sausages I managed to put into the smoker (I smoke link sausages before posting them so that they don't add to the rancidity of the 'net... at least not immediately). There's another batch being smoked right now, though.