This year’s annual bad s3x writing awards. I think that “bad” is modifying the “writing,” not the “s3x,” though in many cases, it appears to be both.
[Via Kathy Shaidle]
Michigan’s Inspiration For Sam Walton
RIP, Fred Meijer. When I was a teenager, if nothing else was open, Meijer’s always was.
Do Job Creators Matter?
Jim Manzi’s thoughts on Paul Krugman’s argument with Paul Krugman.
Want To Fix Unemployment?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: opponents of the Keystone Pipeline are naive, according to Austan Goolsby. Does that include Barack Obama?
Marketing Science To Girls
How not to do it.
In Which Matthew Yglesias
The Great Global Warming Fizzle
As Bret Stephens notes, it’s hard to kill off a religion — Marxism persists, after all — but this one is losing much of its force.
[Update a few minutes later]
A funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse.
New Solar Fiction
This
The War Between The Useless And The Useful
I think we know who will win in the end, but it’s going to get ugly. The Occumorons are just the beginning. And Glenn Beck was right.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This seems peripherally related: the Great Jobs Massacre.
[Update a few minutes later]
Three reasons that colleges are oversubscribed. It’s been a scam for decades and, like housing, a government subsidized bubble that’s about to pop.
More America 3.0 Analogies
From Jim Bennett’s Facebook page:
Iain Stuart Murray: Hopefully America 3.0 won’t have to be patched continually like version 2. And it should outperform Europe 5.7.1.2 and probably UKX.
James C. Bennett: Well, America 1.0 was based on a cleaned-up version of England 5.0, the highly successful 1688 release. 3.0 throws out the patches created for 2.0 that had gotten cumbersome and tries to play on the strengths of the original design. Since the original code was English, some of the design could well prove useful for a new UK release.
Iain Stuart Murray: let’s see – England 5.0 was replaced by UKI in 1707, thanks to a merger with another operating system. This proved so successful that it kept adding new features, although it lost some really attractive ones in 1776 when America 1.0 was spun off. UKII in 1801 might be thought of as the first in a series of bloatware expansions. UKIII was in 1858, and UKIV in 1877 following the complete acquisition of Indian call centers that had been outsourced. There were a series of updates between 1906 and 1914, and then several features were spun off until the completely radical revision of UKVII in 1948. That looked shiny when first released, but soon became the slowest system on the market, leading to the equally radical UKVIII in 1979. UKIX (1997) was based on UKVIII but required more and more admin permissions as time went on. There is hope that UKX (2010) will make it cleaner, but there’s been little evidence of that so far.
James C. Bennett: Unfortunately, the development partnership for UK X, formed at the last minute by adverse market circumstances, has resulted in the partner’s insistence on incorporating large chunks of code from Bonaparte V, which runs on an entirely different operating system. Since Bonaparte V itself is already displaying severe problems, this was a particularly problematic choice.
Heh.