From an article reminiscing 1970s Australian filmmaking, George Miller; "You could argue that the golden years of Hollywood were when it was in the hands of vulgarians in the '30s and '40s, ...And that Shakespeare was in a sense a vulgarian, a lowly actor who wrote all that great stuff for those rambunctious theatres at a very rude time." (reply)
Magnetic resonance imaging uses magnetism to align hydrogen atoms in the body in and out of phase. When they fall back into their natural alignment the difference is measured as a radio-frequency. This is used to build up a layered image of the body from the inside.
The purpose of globalization is the free-flow of goods, capital, communication, ideas and innovations through national borders. Globalization is incomplete without the free-flow of labor. As someone who is part of the global workforce and has worked in Australia and the United States this is an unshocking and completely humdrum conclusion to come to.
The political borders of nationalism are what stops the flow of goods, capital, labor and services and worse; it is becoming harder and harder for labor to compete in the labor market they want to. People are artificially held at home, and artificially excluded from labor markets by nationalism.
Chris Berg argues that the liberal position on immigration is that it is moral to enable and promote the free-flow of immigration.
This is not merely apologetics. I suggest that not only is immigration practically beneficial, but we have a moral obligation to accept into our borders those who want to come. For individuals born in under-developed countries, simply crossing into the developed world can dramatically increase their potential salary, as well as allow them to experience the historically unprecedented living standards that we already enjoy. The objections to expanded immigration seem nationalistic or economically illiterate at best, and immoral at worst.There are real issues in the absorbing of large numbers of immigrants into a country in a short time period but not in the manner of 'Fortress Australia' which becomes the politics of isolationism, cultural weakness (Australian culture has to be protected politically through nationalism) and xenophobia. If anything, Australia, is an outstanding example of the absorption of immigrants and the positives that an increasingly open labor market brings. (reply)
Via Kicking Tires, the Smart FourTwo now has a waiting list of fifteen months in parts of the United States. I have seen them being sold at the Mercedes dealership in Chandler, AZ. There are also more of the Smart cars appearing on US roads. Phoenix is a good city for them as the big highways ring the city and the interior is a network of traffic lights in a geometric square grid. I suspect it would be harder to sell them in New Jersey where the traffic system is the inter-states.
Image via priusforums.com
Image via priusforums.comVia cafeconleche a quote from Robert Cringley, "Bill Gates used to worry about Microsoft losing its monopoly overnight because of a technical mistake. We all laughed. We laughed because Microsoft had such financial and sales clout and had the executive suite of nearly every customer company so snowed that they seemed unassailable. But on some level Gates was correct and we've seen that proved by Google."
Which is a pretty lazy analogy. Microsoft still has its operating system monopoly. For all of Apple's success it has made very little inroads into the operating system market. Firefox is an outstanding product but it is no more than 20% of traffic on most sites.
Microsoft is still an operating system and office productivity behemoth. The only thing Google and Microsoft have in common is that they are big tech companies; but they are not in the same market. Google is an advertising reseller, while Microsoft actually sells bundled code into products. They are two different markets.
Microsoft has been trying to get into the search market with Yahoo!, but even there, it is more like Microsoft is buying Time-Warner as Yahoo! is a massive media company, not a search one.
Because Google got big so quickly it has gathered all sorts of mythical attributes in modern media. It was an innovative company, it re-created what we expect from search engines, but also managed to sustain that search functionality through a well executive advertising business model.
Then again mythos sells, in the same way that sensationalism and drama does. Lazy analogies will consistently be the domain of the writer who has to appeal to a mass audience. (reply)
Mark Twain commented once that the coldest winter he had ever spent was in San Francisco. Personally, the coldest I have been was in Augusta, Maine during January. We were aligning microwave dishes on a mountain-top. I was above the tree line and frozen to a popsicle.
Prior to the Seventeenth Century the corporation had no permanence. It was more a temporary partnership where all assets were liquidated once a particular endeavour had been completed. They had a planned dissolution date and the capital that backed them was essentially impatient and only extended to that date when the corporation was dissolved.
The first two modern corporations were the Dutch and English East India companies. These were constructed on patient capital, had permanent corporate life, they separated ownership from control and legal liability from ownership. More importantly the corporations were able to build capital over time as a corporation.
Prior to, and even after, very few companies needed this type of organisational structure. Most manufacturing endeavours could be handled through what we would call angle investors today; and until the railway's of the mid-eighteenth century few companies organised as corporations with infinite life.
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik argue that violence was the reason that the Dutch and English East India companies required this organisational innovation. (more)
Pushmowers are useless. They only work if you have a patch of grass 10ft by 10ft and the grass never grows. I can recall tolerating one in Australia which just wouldn't cut cooch. We have one here in Arizona and it does not work either. We end up weed-whacking the grass first and then using the push mower. It is simpler and more efficient to use an electric mower for small plots. The back and forth over the same blade of grass fifty times wears thin very quickly. (more)
William Kristol writes that the United States cannot turn away from a pro-Democratic government and nation. This is consistent with Irving Kristol's description of neo-conservative foreign policy:
Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal.It appears that John McCain has adopted the same policy, with the twist that Christian nations must be defended - supposedly from authoritarian atheist hordes? - in order to save 'the friend' from 'the enemy'. In this manner McCain's foreign policy is neo-conservative and a continuation of Bush's foreign policy. However as Gregory Djerejain writes:
Look, all of this would have been stupid and deeply flawed policy, but at least morally defensible, if we meant to actually defend the Georgians. But we don't, and never will, as this would mean a war with Russia.Consequently any solution to this war will be diplomatic and not involve military force. Currently this conflict will continue for as long as the Russians say it will. The United States is in a politically weak position and Putin knows it. (reply)
