Drake Bennett:

Rather than a guide to a properly lived life, personal morality becomes a spur that grows out of guilt, or an after-the-fact story we tell ourselves about actions already decided on. And rather than a moral compass, what we may have is closer to a thermostat, stubbornly set to a comfortable moral mediocrity.

Scott Adams:

Imagine you could make fuel out of poor people.

Obviously using humans for fuel would be wrong and you wouldn't do it. But I'm not done confusing your moral compass.

Now let's say the people who are used as fuel are volunteers, of a sort.

Benedict Carey:

Studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Guy Kawasaki:

Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn't do.

The nature of temptation

Rudy Rucker's latest book was published in late May.

Surfing across the transfinite dimensions, this giddy sequel to 2007's Postsingular chronicles the fight to keep Earth "gnarly" in the face of aliens who want to steal the quantum chaos that makes the planet interesting.

Have you seen Happy-Go-Lucky?

The film opens with her visiting a bookshop and fingering a copy of Roger Penrose's book, The Road to Reality. "Don't want to go there," she mutters to herself. Meanwhile, outside, her bicycle is being stolen.

Decius:

I'm going to file "Giddy Anticipation of an Apocalypse" next to actually having an AK-47 on your flag as God's way of telling you that you're bat shit crazy.

On a Martin Gardner book:

It's an absolute orgy of intellectual play.

Hylozoic

Amanda Cox:

A chart of industrial production -- the output of manufacturers, miners and utility companies -- suggests that the economy is poised to turn around, but that the climb out of the current downturn will be a long one.

Matt Taibbi:

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

Eric Janszen:

The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Ray Dalio:

Everybody should, at this point, try to understand ... that we are in a D-process. The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course.

Peter Schiff:

I think the slowdown in the global economy will be short-lived. But I think the US depression is going to be with us for a long time.

Hold on to your hat:

House prices in the U.S. from 1890 until 2005, plotted as a roller coaster that you ride from a first person perspective.

From last December, Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

From a year ago:

Fortune offers a Flash animation showing the S&P 500 on a time line, alongside the US President and the Federal Reserve Chairman. Bear markets and recessions are highlighted for easy comparison.

Turning a Corner?

Gordon Crovitz:

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow told an interviewer last week that she spends so much time in Spain because "they seem to enjoy life a little bit more. ... They don't always have their Blackberrys on." In order to get passengers to pay attention to safety announcements, Air New Zealand decided to show a video of stewardesses and pilots dressed in nothing but body paint.

Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus.

David Owen:

If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are traveling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Maria Semple:

It's a throwback to a better time, when people didn't check Defamer every 15 minutes.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Kurt Schwenk, via Carl Zimmer:

I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you'd be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.

From a March 6, 2001, transcript of an online chat between Bernd-Juergen Brandes (cator99) and Armin Meiwes (antrophagus):

antrophagus: It's only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can't have everything. There's still some time before you really feel my teeth

Sam:

You can't eat panda ... they are too greasy!

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Information Overload? Relax.

Joseph Clarke:

Tracing the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

William Whyte:

The fault is not in organization, in short; it is in our worship of it. It is in our vain quest for a utopian equilibrium, which would be horrible if it ever did come to pass; it is in the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society. There must always be, and it is the price of being an individual that he must face these conflicts. He cannot evade them, and in seeking an ethic that offers a spurious peace of mind, thus does he tyrannize himself.

Paul Graham:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them.

Paul Bloom on Robert Wright:

God has mellowed.

Infrastructure for Souls

Simson Garfinkel:

Privacy matters.

Until recently, people who wanted to preserve their privacy were urged to "opt out" or abstain from some aspects of modern society. Now, however, abstinence no longer guarantees privacy.

The story of privacy in America is the story of inventions and the story of fear; it is best told around certain moments of opportunity and danger.

It's comforting to know that U.S. law eventually gets things right with respect to privacy--that is the power of our republic, after all. But it's also troubling how long it sometimes takes.

Though a stronger identification system would undoubtedly harm some citizens through errors, I think the opposition is unfortunate.

We need to learn how to protect privacy by intention, not by accident.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort.

Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

See also:

“Given his role in REAL ID, Tom Davis would not be a good choice for privacy, which is something that President Obama specifically promised to protect in his remarks on the cyber security strategy,” says Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Many cyber security planners refer obliquely to ‘authentication’ and ‘identity management’ programs that would devastate privacy, anonymity and civil liberties. Davis would probably work to roll past these issues rather than solve them.”

Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence

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Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what's hot.

Fever° Red hot. Well read.

Step into a world ...

this is an exploration of other people's lives.

look around you, there are streets like this in every town.

they are all connected.

Some may prefer to browse at Flickr.

From the archive, see also, Faces of Meth.

the street

FRONTLINE:

This is the story of the most important change in the relationship between government and private business in a generation.

In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk draws on a rare combination of high-profile interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky merger, and the government's new role in taking over -- some call it "nationalizing" -- the American banking system.

Breaking the Bank

Edward Henigin offers a window into Giganews. Presented as a Lightning Talk at the latest NANOG in Philadelphia.

Up and to the Right: The Recent History of the Global Usenet Feed