Wow.

Today's word is disillusioned.

Peggy is disillusioned.
Somehow, things will never
be quite the same again.

My First Dictionary

Last week I ended up building a distributed keystore for a client.

Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores

Offered for your consideration ...

See also, from a few days ago:

What is new is that Harman is said to have been picked up on a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington.

From the archive:

How does our government eavesdrop? Whom do they eavesdrop on? And is the interception of communication an effective means of predicting and preventing future attacks?

Noam Cohen's friend:

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

Irony

Robert D. Kaplan:

People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict.

The Revenge of Geography

Robert Solow on Richard Posner's new book:

No one can possibly know how long the current recession will last or how deep it will go. Whenever the US economy returns to some sort of normality, or preferably before then, it will be necessary to improve and extend the oversight and regulation of the financial system. The main goal should be to make another such episode much less likely, and to limit the damage if one occurs.

As Posner sees it, talk about greed and foolhardiness is comforting but not useful. Greed and foolhardiness were not invented just recently. The problem is rather that Panglossian ideas about "free markets" encouraged, on one hand, lax regulation, or no regulation, of a potentially unstable financial apparatus and, on the other, the elaboration of compensation mechanisms that positively encouraged risk-taking and short-term opportunism. When the environment was right, as it eventually would be, the disaster hit.

An audio commentary accompanies this article.

From earlier threads on the book:

Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it.

How to Understand the Disaster

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

I observe the absence of "century" and "millennium" modes. It sadly informs me that "0 is not a valid date." Apparently nothing newsworthy happened in 1401. Ditto for 1425.

It would be nice if they could present the Google Books data with this interface.

Google News Timeline

Steven Johnson:

The book's migration to the digital realm will not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but will likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

Samantha Power:

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

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Have you seen Readernaut?

Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and engaging in meaningful discussions with friends.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

Gabriel Sherman:

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street.

From 2005, Tom Friedman:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

A final thought from the bankers:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

The Wail of the 1%

Richard Posner:

It is tempting, indeed irresistible under conditions of uncertainty, to base policy to a degree on theoretical preconceptions, on a worldview, an ideology. But shaped as they are by past experiences, preconceptions can impede reactions to novel challenges.

One can't expect to receive praise, or even to avoid criticism, for preventing a bad thing from happening unless people are sure the bad thing would have occurred had it not been for the preventive effort. If something unlikely to happen doesn't happen (and, by definition of "unlikely," it usually will not happen), no one is impressed. But people are impressed — unfavorably — by the costs incurred in having prevented the thing that probably wouldn't have happened anyway.

Most people, even most experts, were especially unlikely to be persuaded by prophets of doom in the absence of a machinery for aggregating and analyzing information bearing on large-scale economic risk. There was no financial counterpart to the CIA to assemble an intelligible mosaic from the scattered pieces.

A focus of reform, therefore, should be the creation of a centralized, unitary financial-intelligence apparatus in government that would have complete and continuous access to the books of all financial institutions.

He is talking his book, which comes out in a month.

Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it.

David Kilcullen:

People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Why the Economic Crisis Was Not Anticipated

Helaine Olen:

A doorman on duty surveys the scene and rolls his eyes. “Another Roubini party,” he mutters.

More than a few economists are convinced that Roubini’s call was less a matter of his genius and more about the simple fact that if you forecast a recession often enough, sooner or later you’ll be vindicated.

Roubini doesn’t come with an off switch. It isn’t that he can’t sleep, he says. It’s just impossible for him to accomplish everything he wants to in a conventional workday of 8 or 10 or 12 hours.

Two from the archive:

Home Depot's first Manhattan store, which opens to the public Friday, will have a doorman.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!

Peter Drucker:

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict.

TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Jenny Diski:

The only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.

The Prime of Roubini