Where credit is easy, and the consequences of non-repayment are not too drastic, households can maintain consumption for long periods even when their income is falling. So, the political resistance to pro-rich policies is much less sharp. The massive increase in income inequality in the US since 1970 has coincided with an equally massive boom in consumer credit.

The obvious question is whether this political equilibrium can survive. We’ve already seen a tightening of bankruptcy laws in the US and a big shift away from fixed-rate loans. Almost certainly, in the wake of the current debacle, lenders will act to protect themselves from jingle mail by lending lower proportions of house value and demanding additional security.

A million foreclosures

Humans weren't made for scrolling and searching. We were made for zooming.

What MemeStreams needs is a zoom interface. Also, I need a big-screen multitouch display.

Like A Super Hero

They're no less artful than full-length books, but they need less of your time. The perfect form for today's lifestyles

Can the novella save literature?

From Paul Graham and Robert Morris:

This site is about Arc, a new dialect of Lisp. It's unfinished, but usable, so we decided to release what we have so far.

The current version compiles into MzScheme and structurally is as much a skin on MzScheme as a separate language. For example, Arc's read is MzScheme's, and so are Arc's numbers and math operations. But from the average programmer's point of view, Arc is no more similar to Scheme than any two Lisp dialects are to one another.

Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers.

To the extent we can influence whatever customs are associated with Arc, we'd like to propose three principles.

Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. In fact, it was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it.

Second, we'd like to encourage a sense of community among Arc users. If you have a question or a suggestion, share it with everyone in the forum. And if you know the answer to a question you see in the forum, help out whoever posted it by replying. Be nice; if someone's being a dick, don't let the anonymity of forums tempt you to reply in kind.

And finally: It's not a coincidence that we wrote a language for exploratory programming rather than the sort where an army of programmers builds a big, bureaucratic piece of software for a big, bureaucratic organization. Exploratory programming is the fun end of programming, and we hope that will be the guiding principle of the Arc community.

Arc: A Medium for Sketching Software

The US economy is slowing down, but the long-term trends for the country are more favourable than many think. There has also been a sharp improvement in many of America's social pathologies, such as violent crime and drug abuse

America still works

President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

Bush made the assertion in a signing statement that he issued late Monday after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. In the signing statement, Bush asserted that four sections of the bill unconstitutionally infringe on his powers, and so the executive branch is not bound to obey them.

"Provisions of the act . . . purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief," Bush said. "The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President."

Bush asserts authority to bypass defense act

Moo. Corn. Moo Corn. (So sorry about the rainforests!)

History records that previous commodity booms were not followed by mass starvation, resource wars and the end of civilization. John Atkin is out to make sure it doesn't happen again.

An agricultural zoologist by training, he serves as chief operating officer for crop protection at Switzerland's Syngenta, a competitor to the U.S. giant Monsanto in the controversial business of agricultural technology.

Of the recent surge in prices for all manner of foodstuffs, he says don't blame biofuels. Coffee and frozen orange juice are up, and they don't go into your gas tank or compete for land with ethanol-related crops. Iron ore, copper and most nonfarm commodities are up too. And whatever the errors of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the biggest factor may be a simple failure of optimism about the global economy. Every CEO's mental map now includes India and China, yet somehow the whole spectrum of natural resources producers failed to invest sufficiently to meet the demand of several hundred million new consumers.

Mr. Atkin cites a United Nations forecast that, by 2030, food production will have to have increase 50%, partly to feed a bigger world population and partly to supply the richer, more varied diets demanded by the newly affluent of the developing world.

Future Farmer

IT DOESN'T TAKE an Anglophile to appreciate the English way with understatement, particularly at moments of high tension or pique. Readers of the Moscow Times got a slight taste of this national characteristic last Friday, when Mr. Giles Cattermole, a resident of Sonning-on-Thames, wrote in to express his discomfiture at the current state of British-Russian relations:

So Andrei Lugovoi allegedly assassinated Alexander Litvinenko. And that's fine--he becomes a hero, gets elected to the State Duma and is appointed second head of the LDPR party list. He also gets asked if he will run for president.

Vitaly Kaloyev, the architect from the Caucasus region of North Ossetia, assassinates Peter Nielsen, a Swiss-based air-traffic controller, and Kaloyev gets a senior government job in his hometown.

Now, just what message about Russian society and morals does that send?

You couldn't have asked it more politely yourself.

See also: Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russians Come From?

Russia's Regression

Mark Bowden, from the Atlantic archive:

The most effective way to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A survey of the landscape of persuasion

See also, The Truth About Torture.

The Dark Art of Interrogation

Storytelling lies at the heart of African culture — and now it’s digital.

This Is Nollywood tells the story of the Nigerian film industry—a revolution enabling Africans with few resources to tell African stories to African audiences. Despite all odds, Nigerian directors produce between 500 and 1,000 movies a year. The disks sell wildly all over the continent—Nollywood actors have become stars from Ghana to Zambia.

We experience the world of Nollywood through acclaimed director Bond Emeruwa's quest to make a feature-length action film in just nine days. Armed only with a digital camera, two lights, and about $20,000, Bond faces challenges unimaginable in Hollywood and Bollywood.

Electricity goes out. Street thugs demand extortion money. The lead actor doesn’t show. During one crucial scene, prayers blast from loudspeakers atop a nearby mosque, making shooting impossible. But, as Bond says, “In Nollywood we don’t count the walls. We learn how to climb them.”

In Nigeria’s teeming capital of Lagos, we attend an audition where hundreds of hopeful actors vie for their chance in the limelight. We meet some of the industry’s founding fathers who tell us of their responsibility to educate their massive audiences: many of the films deal with AIDS, corruption, women’s rights, and other topics of concern to ordinary Africans. The impetus behind Nollywood is not purely commercial; the traditional role of storytelling is still alive and well — just different.

This Is Nollywood shows how the egalitarian promise of digital technology has found realization in one of the world’s largest and poorest cities. And it shows the universal theme of people striving to fulfill their dreams.

“We are telling our own stories in our own way, our Nigerian way, African way,” Bond says. “I cannot tell the white man's story. I don't know what his story is all about. He tells me his story in his movies. I want him to see my stories too.”

This is Nollywood