Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama’s industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing — but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets their exquisitely drawn criteria for “high tech.
For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong. If you consider the first two Roxy Music albums to be part of his legacy (it’s hard to overstate the mark he made on what I consider the very best album by Roxy Music, their second album, For Your Pleasure), he did no wrong. If you consider the Portsmouth Sinfonia part of his legacy (although it also gracefully sits on the balance sheet of the excellent Gavin Bryars), he did no wrong. But between 1975 and 1985 there was never a misstep of any kind. When he made an album of songs it was as new and strange as anything being made at the time (I can only speak of Another Green World, his album from 1975, in the tones reserved for masterpiece, I can only speak of it the way I speak of a yardstick against which to measure other things, I can only speak of it with a perfect satisfaction that it exists, because what with the great mediocrity of things out there I am often demoralized and disappointed, but then I remember that I could, if needed, go and listen again to Another Green World), when he made abstract albums, like his collaboration with Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting, or his ambitious and perfect Discreet Music, he broke ground and anticipated developments (looping, for example) that were not to be popular for another generation, and when he produced or collaborated on popular music he made albums that were among the very greatest rock and roll albums ever made (Low, “Heroes,” Remain in Light, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo!, The Unforgettable Fire).
The MetLife mortgage lesson is that even companies with the best risk assessments and strongest balance sheets can’t compete with government gone wild.
Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did “I Want Sandy” change your life? These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again. Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of ‘exit event’ is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed. To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don’t take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.
The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.
Among the arrests, 17 were for assault, 17 for drunkenness and 16 for public order offences, police said. A spokesman for the ambulance service said 55 people were referred to hospitals from the 13 treatment centres around London. The remainder were treated and “sent on their way”. A lot of the problems were alcohol-related but also involved trips and falls and people being “under-dressed”, the ambulance spokesman added.
Has book blogging hit the wall? A marketing department email sent to bloggers on Thursday by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins, indicates some kind of horizon is in sight. What’s on that horizon? The end of the flow of free books, which will soon be reduced to a trickle.
