links for 2009-08-31

• Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
  The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?
  (tags: craigslist technology design to_read internet classifieds)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-24

• Eliminate financial double-think – Gillian Tett
  One of the founding principles of free market theory, for example, is the idea that markets work best when there is a free flow of information.

  Yet, some of those bankers who have been promoting free market rhetoric in recent years have also been preventing the widespread dissemination of detailed data on, say, credit derivatives prices. Similarly, while bankers have taken the idea of creative destruction as an article of faith, in terms of how markets are supposed to work, they have been operating on the assumption that their own industry would never suffer too violent a wave of creative destruction.

  (tags: finance markets usa derivatives secrecy hypocrisy elitism power regulation banking)
• Digital Roam: American health care on (4) napkins. Now all together!
  These napkins have been getting a lot of circulation. They've been ranked among the most frequently cited presentations on SlideShare since I've been posting them this week. I've sent links to my Senators Pelosi and Feinstein, and have sent them through to contacts I met at the Senate while giving a workshop there last year.

  If you know somebody in the administration who could use help clarifying what the heck is being talked about, please pass along these links.

  (tags: health_care debate politics napkins visual usa insurance reform)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-23

• Truth or Lies – Seed Magazine
  What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people. Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.
  (tags: truth lying brain mri psychology consciousness science humans morality ethics honesty personality)
• The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists – Joe Klein
  To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects.
  (tags: gop conservative politics nihilism spectacle extremism health_care washington partisanship media)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-22

• Obama’s Trust Problem – Paul Krugman
  I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.
  (tags: obama krugman politics compromise health_care opinion leadership policy washington)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-18

• Faking Fine Art | WBUR and NPR – On Point with Tom Ashbrook
  In the world of pricey art galleries and top museums, the paper trail behind a painting is almost as important as the work itself. This documented history, a painting’s “provenance,” proves the work’s authenticity and can raise its value to staggering levels.

  A new book tells the riveting true story of a con-man and a talented, struggling artist who teamed up to pull off what Scotland Yard called the “biggest art fraud of the 20th century.”

  How did they do it? Why? And what did it mean for the world of art?

  This hour, On Point: “Provenance.” A painter, a con-man, and a fraud for the ages.

  (tags: art radio con scam crime fraud value painting)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-17

• Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle | Mother Jones
  Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
  (tags: fiji water politics corruption environment sustainability business dictator government marketing)
• Rick Perlstein — Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage
  Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
  (tags: politics culture history usa conservative hate media health_care journalism irrationality perlstein paranoia)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-14

• Interrogation Inc. – A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails – NYTimes.com
  Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.
  (tags: guantanamo terrorism cia government secrecy security torture coverup detainees bush war_crimes iraq)
• The GOP's Misplaced Rage – The Daily Beast
  Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect. They can start building some by admitting to themselves that Bush caused many of the problems they are protesting.
  (tags: bartlett bush obama economics politics taxes clinton conservative extremism deficit gdp prosperity accountability recommended responsibility recession)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-12

• Effort to Rein In Wall Street Pay Hits New Hurdle – NYTimes.com
  A guaranteed bonus might strike many people as a contradiction in terms. But on Wall Street, banks have become so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders that they are reviving the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payouts — guaranteed, no matter how an employee performs.
  (tags: bonus compensation wall_street finance greed bailout moral_hazard banking regulation salary business)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-10

• Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home – Colorado Springs Gazette, CO
  Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.

  It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.

  (tags: colorado_springs colorado infantry war war_crimes iraq murder army ptsd military)
• A Reporter at Large: Duped : The New Yorker
  A liar’s testimony is often more persuasive than a truthteller’s. Liars are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble. Similarly, according to DePaulo and Bond, subjects who spontaneously corrected themselves, or said that there were details that they couldn’t recall, were more likely to be truthful than those who did not—though, in the real world, memory lapses arouse suspicion.
  (tags: lying psychology mri brain truth science deception)

Read Full Post »

links for 2009-08-09

• Obama’s Embrace of a Bush Tactic Riles Congress – NYTimes.com
  Other laws Mr. Obama has said he need not obey as written include format requirements for budget requests, limits on whom he may appoint to a commission, and a restriction on putting troops under United Nations command.
  (tags: obama signing_statements law executive authority congress constitution responsibility politics)

Read Full Post »