May 2012
26 posts
Deus Ex Macchiato » Cash up front please →
A more intriguing one, though, is to make the banks hand over each year not cash, but one year call options on their stock. The regulator would then hedge these options. The bank’s shareholders would only be diluted if the stock went up, sugaring the pill for them, while the hedging process would ensure the regulator made money whether the stock went up or down. Indeed, as the position is long...
Lindsay Doran Examines What Makes Films Satisfying... →
After reading the book “Flourish,” by Martin E. P. Seligman, a catalyst of the positive-psychology movement, she began rewatching films through the lens of what Dr. Seligman identifies as the five essential elements of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. (He refers to these elements collectively as perma.)
The results surprised her. And they...
FDIC Rule Change Ends Too Big to Fail | The Big... →
I slipped off to the near future, and grabbed a copy of a fascinating letter. It ended Too Big to Fail, eliminated taxpayer liability for reckless speculation, freed Hedge funds and investment banks from onerous regulations, and made the entire financial system safer and more stable. I was able to sneak it back home to 2012.
How do some cultures stay lean while still... →
Think of sugar as a “metabolic bully” or the proverbial Trojan Horse of metabolic syndrome – you let sugar in, and before you know it, you have diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Consumption of sugar makes us metabolically inflexible as part of a vicious cycle I’ve diagrammed below. The more sugar you eat, the more insulin resistant you become. The more resistant you are to the effects of...
RIAA claims Limewire owes it $72 trillion—that's... →
According to documents recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the RIAA was asking for damages of about $72 trillion dollars, a figure that the judge in the case said is “absurd.”
…
The estimated wealth of the entire world is about $60 trillion, meaning that the RIAA should have known how outlandish its claims were to begin with.
...
What's HBO Go's Problem? - Megan McArdle -... →
It’s not that HBO would like to cut out the middleman and sell to us directly, rather requiring you to buy basic cable is the whole point. Cable is a total cash cow and a more flexible business model means lower revenues. The reason is that the incumbent business model of cable combines the features of bundling (basic cable) and a two-part tariff (premium cable channels) for a perfect...
How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 →
SASS vs. LESS | CSS-Tricks →
“Which CSS preprocessor language should I choose?”is a hot topic lately. I’ve been asked in person several times and an online debate has been popping up every few days it seems. It’s nice that the conversation has largely turned from whether or not preprocessing is a good idea to which one language is best. Let’s do this thing.
Really short answer: SASS
Slightly...
http://batsu.s7labs.com/ →
Batsu is a little experiment that S7 Labs whipped up in a 24 hour coding session. If your friends and contacts produce voluminous amounts of tweets, Batsu might be of use. It uses spam filtering techniques to figure out what of those tweets you actually care about. Check it out! We’ll likely be releasing the code under a free software license soon.
Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs'... →
If Jobs’s time in exile can be seen as an extended trip through business school, the heady start of NeXT represents those early days when a student thinks he knows everything and is in a rush to show that to the world. In fact, Jobs had just about every detail wrong. The Open Corporation was a dismal failure in practice. Its hallmark was that employee salaries were not kept secret; there...
“Pub chat today centres on evolutionary optimal survival strategies in a human...”
– Twitter / @cstross: Pub chat today centres on … via Brad DeLong
I vote edible.
Brad DeLong: Questions for Tim Noah: Berkeley... →
Back when Larry Summers was through here in April, he meditated on the fact that a TV set today costs 1/50 of what one cost back when he was born but that a day in the hospital costs 50 times as much. How much of the declining tolerance of upper-middle class opinion leaders to tax themselves for the benefit of equal opportunity and a Great Society comes from the fact that they regard themselves...
The Art and Reward of Penguin Charming →
While other Westerners had certainly noticed that the Inuit thrived despite their lack of access to antiscorbutics such as citrus fruits or cabbage, Cook was the first to realise that their secret lay in eating fresh meat, raw or lightly cooked, rather than the canned fish balls and sausage hashes with which the Belgica was provisioned.
This is how they procured said fresh meat:
Smith’s post...
http://kottke.org/12/05/yogurt-gives-mice-bigger-ba... →
In mating experiments, yogurt-eating males inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring than control mice. Conversely, females that ate the yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters and weaned those pups with greater success. Reflecting on their unpublished results, Erdman and Alm think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier,...
How venture capital is broken | Felix Salmon →
I’m all in favor of investment strategies which display low-volatility returns, but only when those returns are actually positive; in reality, according to this report, the average VC fund returns less money to investors than they invested in the first place.
And:
Given the high fees and the illiquidity and the inherent risks of venture-capital investing (the Russell 2000 can’t go to zero,...
The Big Easy’s School Revolution — Marginal... →
….Most of the buzz about the city’s reforms focuses on the banishment of organized labor and the proliferation of charter schools, which enroll nearly 80 percent of public school students, up from 1.5 percent pre-Katrina. But what really distinguishes New Orleans is how government has redefined its role in education: stepping back from directly running schools and empowering educators to make...
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
– Jeff Hammerbacher, Founder of Cloudera, early Facebook employee
This Tech Bubble Is Different - BusinessWeek
Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute →
At a modest marginal cost, the ETs [boosters that launch the shuttle into the atmosphere] could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible Shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the Shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build...
Kickstarter’s growing pains | Felix Salmon →
Meanwhile, Strickler is clearly much more conflicted about the way that his site’s most high-profile projects — the latest being the ridiculousPebble watch— are turning the site into some kind of online shopping platform. He came onstage directly after Marc Andreessen, who was talking about how Kickstarter was something of a Plan B for Pebble, after they had failed to raise venture funding. Now...
