Like Romans Applauding Lions

The misplaced adulation of Reagan has reportedly affected more than just Republican rhetoric, and seems to have had an impact on policy. Former president George W. Bush told reporters he “honestly thought” everyone wanted him to follow in Reagan’s footsteps, which led him to emulate the 40th president’s out-of-control deficit spending, fealty to the super-rich, and illegal wars.

To employ a commonly used metaphor, our current proficiency in rocket-building is the result of a hill-climbing approach; we started at one place on the technological landscape—which must be considered a random pick, given that it was chosen for dubious reasons by a maniac—and climbed the hill from there, looking for small steps that could be taken to increase the size and efficiency of the device. Sixty years and a couple of trillion dollars later, we have reached a place that is infinitesimally close to the top of that hill. Rockets are as close to perfect as they’re ever going to get.

[via Kottke.org]

barthel:

1. Due to an editing error, Bieber’s quote about only having sex with someone you’re in love with omitted his statements about the the cover shoot’s photographer, Terry Richardson. “I mean, the handy I gave to Uncle Terry was different,” Bieber said. “He told me that didn’t count as sex.”

I’ve noticed among New Yorkers that there’s a kind of bogeyman idea about Midwesterners, that they’ll come in droves and take over our bodegas and delis and force us to eat pastrami on white and talk like Sarah Palin. And if someone is complaining about New York, a common put down is: “Why don’t you move back to Ohio?” Always Ohio.

[via Subtraction.com]

The magic of cities comes from their people, but those people must be well served by the bricks and mortar that surround them. Cities need roads and buildings that enable people to live well and to connect easily with one another. Tall towers, like Henry Ford II’s Renaissance Center in Detroit, make little sense in places with abundant space and slack demand. But in the most desirable cities, whether they’re on the Hudson River or the Arabian Sea, height is the best way to keep prices affordable and living standards high.

[via Greater Greater Washington]

This in-app subscription system will undoubtedly be one of the most user-friendly systems that subscription billing has ever seen. Actually, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it will be the most user-friendly. Apple has created a centralized place to handle a wide variety of subscriptions spanning many different companies. All streamlined. All with one-click capabilities. No need to enter billing addresses. No need to enter credit card numbers. If you want to unsubscribe, it’s one-click. Change your subscription terms? One-click. What was once a nightmare of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of different backend systems (or worse, phone calls) is now all taken care of thanks to the iTunes ecosystem.

And that’s exactly why consumers would use such a system. And it may finally be the answer for getting people to pay for content such as magazines, online.

[via Daring Fireball]

The critical flaw in our health-care system that people like Gunn and Brenner are finding is that it was never designed for the kind of patients who incur the highest costs. Medicine’s primary mechanism of service is the doctor visit and the E.R. visit. (Americans make more than a billion such visits each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty-minute visit to the doctor’s office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there’s nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and a pneumonia; the sixty-year-old with heart failure, obesity, gout, a bad memory for his eleven medications, and half a dozen specialists recommending different tests and procedures. It’s like arriving at a major construction project with nothing but a screwdriver and a crane.

This pushes a lot of my buttons.

[via Kottke.org]

My grandmother died this week, and as a tribute to her, I would like to share a few things I think made her a class act. Everyone in the world loved her, and by breaking down the code she lived by, it is easy to see why. These tricks and traits work not only for a grandparent or old person, but also for a twenty-something just trying to get by.

Sublime.

After submitting your work, the decision process varies. Often the Editor-in-Chief will reject your work out-of-hand, without even reading it! However, he might read it. Probably he’ll skim.

The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner’s product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user’s failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.

kfan:

Some of my rules for myself. (Some of these were purposeful decisions and some were canonized after I noticed them recurring.)

• No descriptions of what people look like.
• No descriptions of where things are in a room.
• If a part of a story feels boring to write, skip it and don’t ever come back to it.
• Don’t let narration/all-knowing voice explain something if it can come out in dialogue.
• Don’t write stories that have a bunch of characters. No one cares.
• If there are men in the stories, they’re assholes or dumb.
• Every story has to have at least one impossible thing in it.
• Absolutely no descriptions of food or of people eating. Gross gross gross.