Showcase of some of the nicer Google Web Fonts. My eyes glaze over whenever I have to search for a font, so this is a welcome starting point.
Jimmy Williams, a repentant former lobbyist, explains to Planet Money the basics of lobbying and his doe-eyed vision of getting money out of politics. The really insightful point he makes about it all is that the perception that money chases politicians is flipped. In reality, it’s the politicians who chase the money (he regularly dodged calls from politicians he didn’t need), because of the frequency of the election cycle and the sheer cost of getting elected. His solution: remove the dollars.
I’m pessimistic this can be done. Politicians are rich, not just in salary, but also in lifestyle. We’d be asking them to pass laws that would restrict their wealth. Only an enormous amount of public pressure would have any sort of hope.
But I think there might be another strategy: remove the need to spend money. I’m taking a guess that much of the money is spent on ads and publicity. What if, instead, politicians who voluntarily adhere to a set of campaign austerity rules get free access to a PR network with an expansive reach?
Bloggers and content aggregators: I’m looking at you. Set aside space the size of, say, a Google ad, and subscribe to a political ad network which screens for candidates who are abiding by the stripped down finance rules. Maybe this network could even allow you to weight ads by political affiliation or views (it would certainly have to take into account the reader’s location). I haven’t done the math, but I imagine the reach of this network could be enormous with just the top 0.5% or 1% of sites on board. The technology to do this might be similar enough to existing ad delivery networks that perhaps a network would be willing to license or run the infrastructure. What’s left then is creating the organization that coordinates all this and vets the politicians, which is admittedly no small feat.
Dear Futura, does this ridiculous question mark embarrass you? It should.
Very neat! I’ve recently been spending my idle time (not much of it) thinking about how I might design the interface for an operating system, and it looks like Canonical will just do it for me.
I still would like to see deeper integration with all the fantastic web apps people use these days. They all have APIs, so why not design the OS around how we use the web?
…In December, officials from the country’s tourism board decided that they would hand over the reins of their @sweden Twitter account to a different citizen each week.
