Despite my lack of blogging, I regularly come across some things that are amazing and bloggable. I have second thoughts about sharing them because 1)most other bloggers already know about them, and 2)I have so few readers as it is. I’m going to resolve to do a linksdump at least once per week (although to be fair I have a lot of things going on).
- Andy Worthington summarizes the number of prisoners brutally murdered when in US custody overseas. This mainly includes Gitmo, but also a few deaths in Iraq as well. I already knew about most of these cases, but few were new to me.
- I knew that there was a way to view saved passwords in Firefox, but I didn’t realize the security implications. This guide tells you how to create a master password for access to your Saved Passwords. This is an inelegant solution (even in the latest Firefox 3.5), but it’s better than nothing.
- Robert Frank on why drive-up ATM machines have Braille dots. Also, why does your fridge have a light but not your freezer? Why do brides buy wedding dresses while grooms rent tuxes? Here’s an introductory interview with Robert Frank here.
- F. Roger Devlin on gender issues and critiques of feminism. Michael Blowhard writes an introduction to Devlin’s writings. I’ve only started delving into Devlin’s writings, but the lengthy book review of Wendy Shalit’s book Girls Gone Mild seems a good place to start. I’ll probably blog about Devlin’s remarkable essays later.
- Fascinating background report about the green economy by Joshua Green. Basically the changing incentives at the state level made it difficult for green energy companies to grow. Obama’s stimulus package will solve this problem:
The stimulus was the first of three major initiatives intended to steer the economy toward something more like Amory Lovins’s soft path. To fill the tax-equity gap, the stimulus provides $32.7 billion in direct grants and another $134 billion in loan guarantees to attract new investors to large projects. To impose stability, it extends a variety of tax credits by anywhere from three to eight years. Most striking of all, it instructs the Department of Energy to invest directly in promising cleantech companies (though the payoff comes in jobs and environmental gains, not equity). By a stroke of his pen, President Obama made a federal agency the world’s largest venture capitalist. When the official in charge of the program appeared at a Santa Barbara energy conference in March, he was mobbed by eager CEOs.
So far, so good. “The stimulus package essentially saved the renewable-energy industry in the United States,” says Raj Atluru, managing director of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
- Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. (The 50 minute video presentation is worth watching by the way).
- Finally here’s a steal from Tom Tomorrow. Sorry Tom! His children’s book Very Silly Mayor will be released in October. I just wanted to say I remember Tom Tomorrow’s pieces about health care reform in the early 1990s. So when he talks about 20 years, he knows what he’s talking about!
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