Month: May 2010

The Times, where my weekly column appears, tells Google to piss off:

[Times Online] will only show their homepages, not articles, to search engines. That means the sites – which are fine, focused products – could be passing up their greatest customer acquisition opportunity: their content itself. Non-members who reach a story page are greeted by a Times+ sign-up and login overlay, obscuring the article; there’s no taster, no excerpt and no way that anyone will find those articles via search sites.

Massie asks:

[H]ow many readers who've grown-up with "free" newspapers will sign-up? True, newspapers often spend far too much time and effort and money chasing the "youth" market and alienating their existing base as they hop aboard the latest faddish bandwagon but in this instance forgetting about the kids adds risk to an enterprise already loaded with hazard.

The disagreement between Avent and Friedersdorf narrows.

A blog devoted to butching up the magical symbol. Another Dish fave after the jump:

But not necessarily in the short term. Tyler Cowen posits:

I'm still an optimist about the much longer run, whether for utility or GDP.  In fact the greater the current labor market troubles, the greater the long-run "human capital dividend" from reallocating resources.  Sooner or later, we'll have another burst of important innovation, comparable to that of 1870-1940.  We just don't have it now.

Fallows sees an added benefit:

[Ending the ban] should also have another effect, in ending the prolonged absence of ROTC programs from a number of the nation's elite universities. (ROTC = Reserve Officer Training Corps, a way of bringing civilian-educated officers into the military.) The case I know best is Harvard's, where ROTC programs were forced off campus in the late 1960s as part of the general effort to register opposition to Vietnam war policies. That made sense at the time, at least to me. But what was initially intended as a focused objection to a specific war extended into a general separation between an important military intake system and some of the most elite universities. This separation is, in my view, bad for the military, bad for the universities, and bad for the country. Almost no one urging the anti-ROTC change of those days would have argued or imagined that 35 years after U.S. troops left Vietnam the ban should still be in place. As the original Vietnam-related rationale has faded into distant memory, the prohibition on ROTC has been sustained as an objection to the military's exclusion of openly gay service members.

Wendy Kaminer re-examines looks, gender and careers:

Would Elena Kagan's sexuality be a subject of so much speculation if she looked like Sarah Palin, or Kim Cattrall?  At The Washington Post, Robin Givhan complains that Kagan, like many other serious, substantive, middle-aged women, doesn't dress like Cattrall, without acknowledging that, given various accidents of nature, she'd look quite foolish if she did.  People choose their clothes partly to signal membership in a "particular social tribe," Givhan observes; but if they have any sense of style (as opposed to a mere sense of fashion), they choose their clothes on the basis of their body types.  And, some women simply strive to make beauty or the lack of it less relevant to their failures or successes.  Men are armored by their unrevealing suits; women are expected to expose themselves, with various degrees of discretion.   

"Armored by unrevealing suits." I've always wondered why I only have one.

Copyranter captions:

"Let the sea help you breathe." Ads by Tel Aviv agency BBR Saatchi & Saatchi for Otrivin sea water nasal spray. It's the ol' literal visual approach. In rare cases, it works. Most of the time, it doesn't. These? Are just fucking scary. As, or more, scary then these and these instances of Scary Photoshop.

Wrong again:

The narrator of the poem is annoyed by his neighbor’s insistence that there has to be a fence between them. If only his neighbor would get beyond his father’s beliefs – originating in an old proverb – and reconsider his thinking.

"It is a Government not driven by party interest but by the national interest, with clear values at its heart.

The values at its heart are freedom, because over the past decade the state has become over-mighty and civil liberties have been undermined consistently…

Fairness, because after 13 years of a Labour government inequality is wider, social mobility has stalled, severe poverty is rising and social justice is falling…

And the third value at the heart of this Queen's Speech is responsibility, because under Labour the age of irresponsibility broke our society and left our economy deep in debt…

Devolving power not centralising; trusting people not dictating to them; saving money not wasting it. It's a radical programme for a radical Government, and that is exactly what our country needs," – prime minister David Cameron, in a parliamentary speech where he spoke of the "appalling mess" left by the previous Labour government.