Highfalutin

"Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

Bruuuuuutal assessment.... - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

Useful analysis but a flawed conclusion: interest and investment into space exploration may be in a lull, but the inevitable discovery of inhabitable worlds as well as ongoing and exponential improvements in technology will drive new efforts. We are natural explorers looking for the next frontier ... it is an unquenchable thirst. - dkb

a brilliant and lively analysis! - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"We Americans turn every major crisis into a morality tale in which the good guys and the bad guys are identified and praised or vilified accordingly. There’s a political, journalistic, and intellectual imperative to find out who caused the crisis, who can be blamed, and who can be indicted (either in legal courts or the court of public opinion) and, if found guilty, be jailed or publicly humbled. The great economic and financial crisis that began in 2007 has been no exception." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

howz this for pathological (commenting): "Once set up, the elitist psychopathic system corrodes the entire social organism, wasting its skills and power. Once a Pathocracy has been established, it follows a certain course and has certain "attractive" powers. In a Pathocracy the socioeconomic system arises from the social structure which is created by the system of political power, which... more... - millie from Android

Taking foodies to task! Hilariously snarky article. - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

(if i'm hijacking just let me know. this is your place after all. no hard feelings.) - millie from Android

"Can a retired 16th-century French provincial magistrate teach us how to live today? Sarah Bakewell’s engaging and idiosyncratic biography of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne suggests that the answer, in some quite subtle and interesting ways, is that he can." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"Each year for the past two decades, the artificial-intelligence community has convened for the field’s most anticipated and controversial event—a meeting to confer the Loebner Prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing Test. The test is named for the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: how would we know?" - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"The crash sparked a wave of public ire against financiers, and against rich people in general. It also intensified the debate about inequality, which has risen sharply in nearly all rich countries. In America, for example, in 1987 the top 1% of taxpayers received 12.3% of all pre-tax income. Twenty years later their share, at 23.5%, was nearly twice as large. The bottom half’s share fell from 15.6% to 12.2% over the same period." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"IN FRANCE workers angry about pension reforms have blockaded fuel refineries, causing 4,000 petrol stations to run dry. The Netherlands’ recently elected minority government depends for survival on support from a Muslim-baiting populist. Economies across Europe are struggling to cope with sluggish growth, lacerating budget cuts and the after-effects of borrowing binges. But there is an exception to the gloomy European rule." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

"Foucault began to spend more time in the United States, at the University at Buffalo (where he had lectured on his first ever visit to the United States in 1970) and especially at UC Berkeley. In 1975 he took LSD at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park, later calling it the best experience of his life." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

quite excellent - Nicķ from Bookmarklet

“Now postselection gets even weirder thanks to some new ideas put forward by Seth Lloyd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a few buddies. They say that if you combine postselection with another strange quantum behaviour called teleportation, you can build a time machine." - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

I think there's a reason why you never meet anyone named Alice or Bob anymore. They've all been grandfathered out. - Akiva

"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40." - Nicķ from Bookmarklet