Category Archives: Links

Quote of the day – Thursday edition

MMM nails it

Not many people realize it, but food, clothing, housing, durable goods, travel, and a host of other things are cheaper today than they have been throughout most of history. These prices have actually been dropping in inflation-adjusted terms for decades. So if you focus your spending on meeting your needs, as the MMM family likes to do, you couldn’t have been born at a better time. Life is fantastic.

On the other hand, corporate marketing skill and consumer envy have been rising faster than inflation for quite some time.

From Ramit

every time an HR rep gets fired, a life coach is born

I’m still alive!

Not that you would know it by my pathetic posting. Here’s some links for you, my loyal and neglected followers

  • Comparing Modern Education to a Placebo
  • Ideas and Execution
  • More from Sivers –

    Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.

    A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind. Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macintosh computers.

  • I really liked Never Eat Alone

Belated post

  • Bet On America –

    The evidence for our nation’s downward spiral isn’t sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals. We think we’re the only country with decline-and-fall issues.

    I’ll wager that many of the toughest challenges for Americans in the future won’t be associated with our geopolitical decline, weakness or decrepitude. No: Our challenges will be the unimagined consequences of our many successes.

  • A travelogue on East St Louis
  • Predictions from the year 1900 – a must read
  • ASP.net Chart Controls
  • The economics of Scientology

Thursday link roundup

Your saturday morning reading

  • Dead Left – Jon Chair on Naomi Klein
  • The Atlanta PD and their odd hat history
  • Radley Balko and the non-existent presidential crime policies of the candidates
  • American Murder Mystery – everyone should read this, it’s about the current and future face of crime.
  • Report: Rich Consistently Outearning Poor

    Armbrister stressed that it would be premature to draw any final conclusions from the 550-page report, cautioning that “much supplementary research must still be done.”

    “Yes, we do need more data,” she said. “But regardless, it is apparent that a severe gulf exists between rich and poor. And this cannot be mere coincidence. There is clearly an unknown mitigating factor at work here, and I strongly suspect it may be financial in nature.