Bakadesuyo finds out who doesn't scoop the poop:
Fewer males (35.3%), those with a lower income (18.2%), and owners who allowed their dogs off the leash (26.2%) cleaned up their dogs' feces than females (58.2%), those with higher earnings (68.7%), and those who kept their pets on a leash (72.6%).
David Rieff skewers the status quo on global aid:
Neither Geldof nor Bono has ever been willing to accept that, however well-intended, the premise of Live Aid was flawed from the start. Amid criticism of the ways in which the monies from Live Aid were being used by international relief agencies to fund programs connected with resettlement, Geldof told The Irish Times that “the organizations that are participating in the resettlement effort should not be criticized…. In my opinion, we’ve got to give aid without worrying about population transfers.”
The way in which both men have capitalized on their new status as global consciences to rescue their pop music careers has been grotesque, but their sincerity is beyond doubt. Yet their competence to hold the opinions that they peddle is another matter. What is so great about sincerity if it leads not to understanding but to mystification?
Esquire's attempt to balance the budget by 2020. It's only partisan politics getting in the way.
Piercarlo Valdesolo reports on a study suggesting that good luck charms actually do work. He then wrecks the effect for his readers:
The influence of the charm depends crucially on your belief in its inherent powers. Once you acknowledge that performance is a function of what goes on in your brain rather than a product of any mystical properties of the object itself, it becomes useless.
Felix Salmon points to a new trend in microfinance: the fact that we need to look at where microfinance money actually goes (not always to the one purchase, like a sewing machine, that we think it does). One study showed that:
[S]ome 46% of borrowers used a decent chunk of their business loan to pay down other debt and about 28% spent part of the money on a big household purchase—even though fewer than 4% of people in either category ever admitted this to their bank. …
As [microfinancer Carlos] Danel put it, microfinance is an industry that was born out of supply—one that came from people thinking about what organizations were capable of doing. Now, he said, the challenge is to figure out what poor people around the world actually need.
(Cardboard depiction of the homeless by Michael Aaron Williams via Wooster Collective)
(Hat tip: John Whitehead)
David L. Ulin interviews Alain de Botton about his book A Week at the Airport and his residency at Heathrow:
The real problem with airports is that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane — and because it’s so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings. And yet airports definitely reward a second look — they are the imaginative centers of the modern world. It’s here you should go to find, in a concrete form, all the themes of modernity that one otherwise finds only in abstract forms in the media. Here you see globalization, environmental destruction, runaway consumerism, family breakdown: the modern sublime in action.
It includes a tutorial on "the Sully lede." Ben and TNC are also feted. Shucks.
I don't see how he explains away this, I really don't. (From yesterday, with fixed link.)
The Dish 