daniel

The darkness of Tom Waits' lyrics is accentuated by the rumble and rasp of his voice, which sounded old even when he was young. On Bad Like Me, Waits reflects on loneliness, life, death and heartbreak. Here, he talks to Terry Gross about performing, being a father and writing his haunting melodies.

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The darkness of Tom Waits' lyrics is accentuated by the rumble and rasp of his voice, which sounded old even when he was young. On Bad Like Me, Waits reflects on loneliness, life, death and heartbreak. Here, he talks to Terry Gross about performing, being a father and writing his haunting melodies.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Shared by Daniel
from mike

You know how the politicians are always saying we need to be competitive with China? Well, we are about to get super competitive when it comes to internal censorship of the global Internet. Everybody except for a handful of malcontent “privacy activists” is behind the bold new plan to make all Internet service providers in the United States turn off any domain within five days, if Washington says “turn it off.” As usual, this new legislation is cloaked in bullshit terminology about copyright and lost profits for media conglomerates, but the result is exactly the same as China’s “great firewall” — except, this being the land of “corporations are people, my friends,” the ISPs will be responsible for the dirty work instead of some top-level government technological agency.

Via Cryptogon, here’s the relevant chunk of the legislation:

A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

How? The whole Internet domain system requires a constantly updated Domain Name Server database that connects your computer to whatever server holds your “Tranny Hunter” porn or Communist Revolution/Buffy slash-fiction forum. Your ISP might be Verizon or AT&T for your “smart phone” or it might be dial-up AOL for confused old people who still have $9.95 a month charged to their Discover card. Either way, the ISP “resolves” the domain name you’re trying to reach with the computer servers that have that content, wherever it might be. (All you actual tech people in the comments can correct this if necessary.) So when the Government sends a “turn off these domains” order to your ISP, the ISP will have no choice but to block the offending websites. Problem solved! You know they’ve been working on this feverishly since the WikiLeaks outrage, right?

Here’s a Forbes blog post that explains just how the law will be used:

The PROTECT IP Act would allow copyright owners – movie studios and other content providers – simply to accuse a website of infringement, which could lead to that site being shut down by court order and entire links to the site being wiped clean from the Internet. Any website with a hyperlink, such as Twitter, Facebook or a blog, would be subject to liability. More, non-infringing sites could be inadvertently shut down under the proposal. Indeed, the law is so far-reaching that it would force Internet providers like Comcast to block all access to the allegedly illegal site.

The potential for abuse by the notoriously litigious content industry is clear. Last year, when the government sought to shut down one child pornography site, it ended up affecting some 70,000 legitimate sites for several days, even notifying visitors that the sites – many of which were business sites – were purveyors of child pornography.

For instance, the bill is so broadly written that, in theory, it would allow any copyright owner to shut down a legitimate retail website, such as Amazon or Best Buy, by alleging that one product being sold on the site could “enable or facilitate” an infringement.

But in practice, it won’t be giant business websites like Amazon that get the plug pulled. It will be the little guys, the alternative press, the OccupyWhatever sites, anything that gets in the way of the Internet’s actual role in America: retail advertising and shoe shopping and lonely online pursuits shown to lower people’s actual engagement with the world, like sport teams or pornography or gadget blogs or orc-battle games or anything shit out by the Murdoch empire of diversions.

Oh well. It was really an aberration that the Internet functioned as openly as it has these past two decades. But that era is already over, as proven by the U.K. national police shutting down mobile messaging during the summer riots or, just two months ago, San Francisco’s BART stations easily turning off all the cell phone signals within the stations to prevent protesters from organizing an action there against police brutality. [Cryptogon/Forbes/Reuters]

Thanks Mary M

Shared by Daniel
i guess everything is like everything else. at least they're going to make more stuff for kids.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Courtney Carver of Be More with Less.

I never thought I would laugh at how busy I used to be. I was serious about my ability to be superwoman. I could work 40+ hours a week, raise a child, volunteer when anyone asked, exercise, travel, cook, and clean. I could do it all, and then some.

Everyone was doing it all, so I did too. I didn’t want to do it all. Doing it all made me exhausted. Doing it all cost me friendships. Doing it all cost me my health. My busyness wasn’t even a little bit silly.

Becoming less busy was not an accident, but a decision I made on purpose. I made the decision that a busy life wasn’t a life for me. Being a good person, loving wife, mother and friend…that was the life I wanted. Next to that, I wanted the freedom to do things that made my heart sing instead of things that weighed me down.

Until I intentionally left a life of chronic busyness, I couldn’t see how silly it really was. The silliness of busyness is that sometimes you are so busy, you can’t recognize you are in trouble. You are so overwhelmed that you can’t figure out how to change. You are so used to being busy that you create more work to make your life even busier.

You may be lost in the silliness of busyness if…

• Your usual response to “how are you?” is “so busy”, “crazy busy” or “busy but good”
• You spend time worrying about how busy you are going to be tomorrow
• You get angry when your spouse or friends aren’t as busy as you
• Your busy life keeps you up at night thinking about everything you didn’t get done
• You make a point of letting people know that you stay at the office after hours
• You check email several times a day
• You zone out during conversations thinking about everything you have to do
• You volunteer for things you don’t care about
• You spend time complaining about how busy you are
• You make list after list to make sure you don’t forget anything during your busy day
• You allocate time each day to clean your desk or organize your stuff
• You regularly eat in your car
• You use a phone in the car because “it’s the only time you have to talk”

If you are anything like me, you are busy because you want to be or because you don’t know how to be un-busy. You are busy out of misdirected guilt because you think if you do enough, you will be enough. When you decide that it is ok to live life your way, you can stop being busy and start doing things that matter. You can talk about your meaningful day instead of ranting about your busy schedule. Decide today that you are enough, even if you never do anything, accomplish anything or produce anything ever again. You are enough.

How to be less busy

• be unproductive on purpose
• only check email 2X per day
• delete email and toss mail that you don’t need to read
• turn your phone and computer off when you aren’t working
• turn everything off in the car (except the car)
• put your ipad down
• read The Power of Less
• help someone
• do less, be more
• stop trying to keep up, measure up or catch up

While you may think that you are making sacrifices for others by being busy, you are likely sacrificing the same relationships you think you are saving. Get real, make time and consider what is most important to you. Then do that first. The rest can wait.

Courtney Carver is the author of Simple Ways to Be More with Less. Read more from Courtney at her blog, Be More with Less, or follow her on twitter.

Shared by Daniel
from amol

For some time now I’ve been carrying the following question in my mind: are American workers fully benefiting from their toil? We have had years of stagnant wage growth. At the same time, health insurance premiums have been going up faster than wages, inflation, and economic growth. It’s pretty obvious that some of what would otherwise have been wage growth is going toward premium increases.

Those premium dollars go somewhere, first to insurers (or third-party administrators) and then, mostly, to health care workers. A recent NEJM Perspectives piece by Robert Kocher and Nikhil Sahni puts some numbers to this story.

Of the $2.6 trillion spent in 2010 on health care in the United States, 56% consisted of wages for health care workers. Labor is by far the largest category of expense: health care, as it is designed and delivered today, is very labor-intensive. The 16.4 million U.S. health care employees represented 11.8% of the total employed labor force in 2010. [...] [H]ealth care labor is becoming more expensive more quickly than other types of labor. Even through the recession, when wages fell in other sectors, health care wages grew at a compounded annual rate of 3.4% from 2005 to 2010. [Emphasis added.]

So, your wages may be stagnant, but those of the health care workers financed by your rapidly growing premiums have risen. Even some of the 46% of health care spending that doesn’t go directly to wages eventually makes its way into the paychecks of those who manufacture health care equipment, supplies, and devices. On the whole, the health care industry and related businesses are doing well. Most other workers are not.

Certainly, workers get something for their premiums. But are they getting as much extra value each year as those premium increases imply? It is not clear to me they are. Along with the growth in cost Kocher and Sahni point to a troubling story in health care productivity.

Yet unlike virtually all other sectors of the U.S. economy, health care has experienced no gains over the past 20 years in labor productivity, defined as output per worker (in health care, the “output” is the volume of activity — including all encounters, tests, treatments, and surgeries — per unit of cost). Although it is possible that some gains in quality have been achieved that are not reflected in productivity gains, it’s striking that health care is not experiencing anything near the gains achieved in other sectors.

Here’s part of their chart that illustrates the productivity trends over the period 1990-2010. The full chart is here and it echos the findings of David Cutler several years ago.

So, employment and wages in health care are growing, while output (procedures, tests, visits, etc.) is not keeping up. This is consistent with findings from Massachusetts that show that most health care job growth has been in administrative functions. With our growing premiums, we may be paying more and more for less and less that relates directly to health. Instead, we’re paying for behind-the-scenes coding, billing, and other administrative and management functions. To be sure, those are essential for providers to survive in today’s complex health care market. But they likely do little for patient care.

The health care sector may be contributing toward boosting GDP by employing more people and at increasing wages. But, as Uwe Reinhardt suggested recently, it’s not clear the sector is increasing health or welfare (in a non-economic sense) as much as that growth would seem to imply. So, what are American workers getting for their toil? A lot less than they deserve, and some of it is consumed by negative health care productivity.

---
Software picked, likely related articles at The Incidental Economist:

• Some good comments on Medicaid outcomes studies
• Thoughts on quality [podcast]
• Gone fishin’

It's a sunny fall day in Arlington, Texas, and some 80,000 fans have come from far and wide to cheer on America's Team, the Dallas Cowboys. Most of them showed up early outside the team's two-year-old, $1.2 billion stadium, filling 24,000 parking spots en route to some pregame tailgating. As they make their way to their seats in the largest domed structure in the world, (recyclable) commemorative plastic cups in hand, to watch the 'Boys take on the New England Patriots—who chartered a flight from Boston, about 1,500 miles away—many stare at the massive video boards, twin 160-foot-by-72-foot behemoths that require 30 million LED lightbulbs.

Here, at a venue that, according to Forbes, consumes as much energy as Santa Monica, California, it seems reasonable to ask: Big-ticket sports can't truly be green, can they?

Well, they're trying. For all of Cowboys Stadium's in-your-face excesses, the organization reportedly hopes to reduce solid waste by 25 percent, energy use by 20 percent, and water consumption by 1 million gallons annually. Not convinced? Then try baseball's San Francisco Giants. "The way I look at it," says Jorge Costa, the Giants' senior vice president of ballpark operations, "this is a city of 42,000 people. And in a city of 42,000 people, you generate a lot of garbage." The reigning World Series champs are three-time winners of the Green Glove Award, awarded to the major league team that has recycled the most over the course of the season. In the past several years, the Giants have diverted 75 percent of their garbage from landfills via recycling and composting; have installed 590 solar panels at AT&T Park, enough to power more than 5,200 homes since 2007; have seen their ballpark earn LEED silver certification; and have even created more sustainable ways to produce their famous garlic fries.

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Shared by Daniel
from mike, and from andrew sullivan, who i couldn't keep up with anymore
google, please don't take away the internet's best tool. it's like the only thing left that focuses on information more than, umm, like, personal credit, or something.

The company is eliminating the "share" function on Google Reader:

Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that "carefully constructed human curated" list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

Sarah Perez won't comply with Google's sneaky attempt to get people to actually use Google+.

Shared by Daniel
from mike

Via www.bookforum.com, from an interesting interview:

GB Who are the best speakers in the world today, politically?

JRS Long silence. The reason for which there is a ‘long silence’ is that, with the gradual bureaucratization of politics, we have ended up with – through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – politicians increasingly reading speeches written for them by somebody else; that is, politicians being made to feel that they were not the real political leaders, but rather – in a sense – heads of a large bureaucracy. The result has been that politicians may think that they have a responsibility to speak in a solid and measured way – with the consequence that they not only became boring and bad speakers, but sound artificial and are not listened to. Modern speech writers started adding in ‘rhetoric,’ which sounded artificial, and led to people listening even less to political speeches. This also came with a rise in populism; that is, we saw the revival of populist speaking – with populist politicians winning power here and there – meaning that the speech writers started putting populist rhetoric in as a gloss on top of the boring managerial material that they had been producing. So what we now have are sensible, elected leaders giving speeches that, at one level, are boring, solid stuff and, at another level, cheap rhetoric.

…Many political leaders think that it is dangerous to speak well. In fact, they are looking to bore people – and we feel that. As a result, when we stand up and say real things, people are quite shocked. And that is because they are always working on this level of measurement. If we take someone like a Trudeau or an FDR, or an LBJ, or a de Gaulle – someone like that – they knew that speeches are not about who will like them and dislike them. Speeches are actually about whether people will respect you because you have spoken to them in a way that they take to be honest – as if they are treated in a way that is intelligent. Trudeau was often boring, but his secret was that, even when he was being insulting, he was talking to you as if you were as smart as he was.

Thanks Aubrey