Category Archives: Uncategorized

Apple turns the screws

Leave a reply

Apple wants 30% of Kindle App ebook sales

It’s quite amazing how unpopular the move is. Even people on Apple sites are against it.

It’s all rather strange – Unless you consider the fact that people who are reading are not doing things Apple wants them to do i.e. watch movies, grow stupid, become consumers, watch TV, etc.

Books turn brainwashed consumers into free thinkers, and that might be the last thing Apple wants.

More, including comments (many NSFW), at Apple responds: we want a cut of Amazon, Sony e-book sales.

Politics and the AntiVaccination Movement

Leave a reply

From Why the ‘Prius Driving, Composting’ Set Fears Vaccines

I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people.

The Long Divergence

Leave a reply

The Crescent and the company

IN 2002 a group of Arab scholars produced a brave report, under the auspices of the United Nations, on the Arab world’s twin deficits, in freedom and knowledge. A salutary debate ensued. Now Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist based at Duke University, has written an equally brave book on “how Islamic law held back the Middle East”. One can only hope that the result will be an equally salutary debate.

Ayn Rand in old age

Leave a reply

From Monastic Musings:

I was surprised to read about Ayn Rand’s old age at Gruntled Center. In the face of the cost of treatments for lung cancer, she signed up for Social Security and Medicare using her legal name, Ann O’Connor.

This would not bother me in the least, had she written or said anything to retract her condemnation of those programs. But – in spite of her many tirades against hypocrisy – she quietly accepted government funding while continuing to condemn both the programs and the people who accepted the funding.