Noted for December 29, 2012
Worth Reading:
Erik Loomis: The White Race Cannot Survive Without Dairy Products
Matthew Yglesias: Chinese hours worked: Some people like long hours, others don't: Restricting Hours Makes Some People Sad But Most People Happy: "Some minority of workers, Stakhanovites, just has a totally genuine preference to maximize their income by working 80 hour weeks. Then there's another large bloc of workers who feels torn between a desire to limit their hours and a desire to be considered hard workers…. Restricting hours to 40 hours a week will make the Stakhanovite minority (and the factory owners) sad, but most people will be happier. I take it that's why you basically always see some kind of hours regulations in democracies. It's not that the rules aren't bad for someone—the Stakhanovites—it's that what happens in a democracy is you arrange things to suit majority tastes and most people don't like the Stakhanovite lifestyle. The problem is that it's hard to know what limits to put on this kind of logic."
Bill Black: Deprogramming Progressives Indoctrinated into Supporting Austerity « naked capitalism
Bruce Sterling on Why It Stopped Making Sense to Talk About 'The Internet' in 2012: Five simple reasons: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Freddie de Boer: The Tryhards
The tech debate blasts off (a linkfest) - Towards a leisure society
Evan Soltas: The Deficit: Not as Bad as They Want You to Think
Scott Lemieux: Kennedy, Rehnquist, and the Construction of “Borking”
Mark Kleiman: Hoyer, McConnell, and hostage-taking
Daniel Dennett: How are hallucinations possible?
Kashmir Hill: The Facebook Privacy Setting That Tripped Up Randi Zuckerberg: "She was able to see the photo because of a privacy setting that you may or may not realize exists. When you post a photo, you have a range of options as to who gets to see it…. You may choose “Friends,” as Randi Zuckerberg did, and think your photos can then only be seen by your friends… but you’d be wrong…. By default, your photos can also be seen by the friends of any people you’ve tagged in the photo…. To change that setting, you have to choose the “Custom” option in your photo sharing settings…. To prevent friends of your tagged friends from enjoying the photo you’ve uploaded, uncheck that box…. I think it’s fair to say that Randi Zuckerberg was surprised by this one. If she’d like more privacy, she should uncheck that box."
tomslee: "I love the singularity video… it highlights one of the major differences between the next round of technologies and previous ones, which is that the new ones will be pervasively governed by license agreements. The ways in which they benefit and harm us will depend more on the terms of those agreements than on the engineering aspects of the technology."
