2012-02-02
post/16938394760
Fifty years ago, the four most valuable U.S. companies employed an average of 430,000 people with an average market cap of $180 billion. This year, the four largest U.S. companies employ an average 120,000 people with an average market cap of $334 billion. The titans of 2011 have twice the the value of their 1964 counterparts with a quarter of the employees.
(via The Atlantic)
I’m not sure why people think the tech industry is a panacea for job creation. Wealth creation? Perhaps. Jobs? Not so much.
2012-01-30
post/16758996658
2011-11-07
post/12475628829
Philip Gould, an advisor to Tony Blair, quoted in a Guardian interview published in September. As the story notes, “A surgeon in America told him he did not need the extreme surgery that the NHS had suggested. Gould took his advice and the cancer came back. By the time he returned to the NHS, it was too late.”
Gould died, aged 61, over the weekend.
2011-09-02
post/9720304354
… as opposed to low-atmosphere ozone as a component of smog, which is merely an actual killer. As in, people die: according to the EPA, 12,000 premature deaths a year.
From the Guardian’s report, Obama backs down on tighter smog regulations.
2011-08-02
post/8384849523
2011-07-06
post/7317646356
The Telegraph: Phone hacking: families of war dead ‘targeted’ by News of the World.
Am I allowed to hope that the “painful period” is as painful as possible? Please?
post/7294368813
Neal Ascherson in the Wolves in the Drawing Room (subscribers only), from the LRB, vol 33 issue 11.
The article is mainly about Scotland and its recent election, but this quote about Canada and first past the post was too good to pass up.
2011-07-03
post/7205312908
Ferdinand Mount in the subscriber-only LRB article Get off your knees, a review of a biography of Charles Bradlaugh, noted Victorian atheist, campaigner and politician.
As an atheist, he wasn’t allowed to take the oath of office in the Houses of Parliament, to which he as elected in 1880, for six years. The passage above describes the legal manoerver (well, I’d use the word “hack”) that the new Speaker used to finally let him take his seat.
2011-02-25
post/3511315904
Reading New York Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ (by Ryan Sayre at 3quarksdaily), this part - on the possibility of national borders in the sky, as a consequence of using skyscrapers as docks for airships - struck me.
Nowadays the idea that a building could contain a border seems quaint, or odd, and I wonder if the idea that the internet is its own place with its own rules is slowly going the same way. The utopian hippie/hackers of 1990s declaring the independence of cyberspace are increasingly running into the twin demons of commercial borders - Spotify over there, Rdio/Mog over here, and nothing for most - and political interference - with Egypt and Libya (temporarily) dropping off the net, and the US throwing its weight around to attempt to close down Wikileaks.
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but there’s something there, I think.
