Business
For my generation’s entire life we were told in no uncertain terms that home ownership was the bedrock of responsible personal finance. Now, of course, we’ve all learned — the hard way — that was a load of crap. Robert Bridges, writing for the Wall Street Journal, lays it on us in his lede graf: “At the risk of heaping more misery on the struggling residential property market, an analysis of home-price and ownership data for the last 30 years in California — the Golden State with notoriously golden property prices — indicates that the average single family house has never been a particularly stellar investment.” Bridges notes that the culture has “diverted capital from more productive investments and misallocated scarce public resources.”
Internet
As the mad rush to Google+ continues, I remain nonplussed about the new service. I knew right off that I would be able to maintain Twitter or Google+ but probably not both. Google+ has some interesting bits — I expect hangouts will become more important than anyone currently recognizes — but it’s also made me appreciative of Twitter’s 140 character enforced brevity. What I absolutely don’t understand is some percentage of the digerati announcing that Google+ will serve as their primary internet presence. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides excellent analysis of why this is a terrible idea. “Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options,” writes Kirkpatrick. “Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.” Marco Arment picks up where Kirkpatrick leaves off, insisting on the importance of owning your own identity on the internet. “But all of these proprietary networks that want to own and hold in your content are reversing much of the web’s progress in some other areas, such as the durability and quality of online identity,” writes Arment. “If you care about your online presence, you must own it.” Dan Gillmor adds to the conversation in a piece published by the Guardian. “We all need to face up to some issues surrounding control, including ownership and value,” writes Gillmor. “We’ve been too casual about this, and we can’t afford to stay that way.”
Media
Wired has finally published what it claims is the complete (albeit redacted) chat logs between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, its pet informant. Glenn Greenwald did a tremendous job last June of analyzing the history between Lamo and Kevin Poulsen, a Wired editor. Many of Lamos claims in various media outlets could not be verified because Wired refused to publish the entire logs. Now Greenwald has done an excellent job of analyzing precisely why Wired was reluctant to release the information. At the time of its initial story, Wired claimed — and subsequently continued to claim quite adamantly — that the withheld log data was either personal information about Manning that was irrelevant or “apparently sensitive government information.” As the newly released entire logs clearly show, this was false. Very early on, for example, Lamo told Manning that the logs would never be published and that because he was both a journalist and a minister, some legal protection could be provided.” Wired actively hid this from its audience. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Read Greenwald’s piece; it’s well worth it.
The New York Times is being unusually agressive in its coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s News International disintegration. Don Van Natta Jr., in his coverage of the publishing empire’s relationship with Scotland Yard, for example, depends extra-heavily on anonymous sources. “At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent, and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects,” writes Van Natta Jr. “At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.” Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s former chief executive of News International, was arrested on Sunday, charged in the phone-hacking scandal. Shortly thereafter, Paul Stephenson, the chief of Scotland Yard, resigned as a result of the scandal. This comes two days before a parliamentary inquiry into the series of events.
Politics
Minnesota is a microcosm of the US. In 1994 we paid an overall tax rate of about 13 percent; by 2008 that had dropped to 11.5 percent. In the 2000-09 period, city spending in Minnesota dropped by about 8 percent, inflation adjusted, while city revenue collection dropped 11 percent. The small-government Republicans are winning in Minnesota — they just got Governor Mark Dayton to cave on his campaign promise to tax the rich. Expect a similar outcome from President Obama. In Minnesota, because of a shift from income taxes to property taxes (in 2006, 37 percent of state and local taxes were income taxes; two years later, in 2008, income tax accounted for only 35.2 percent — in the same period property taxes rose from 30.1 percent to 32.1 percent) households with annual incomes higher than US$130,000 pay higher effective income taxes, but lower property taxes. In 2008, the bottom 10 percent paid only 2.4 percent of the total tax burden but earned only 0.9 percent of the income. The top 10 percent paid 38.5 percent of the total tax burden but earned 42 percent of the income. The rich pay more dollars but at a significantly lower rate. These are the numbers provided by the Minnesota Department of Revenue in its “2011 Minnesota Tax Incidence Study” (.pdf; 935KB) released last March. Similar numbers at the federal level are borne out by FactCheck.org. Meanwhile the state’s superrich tell Dee DePass and David Phelps, writing for the Star Tribune, that they won’t pay more, claiming it will hurt job growth. I’m still waiting for a cogent explanation of that particular cognitive dissonance; we’ve had more than 10 years of tax cuts for the wealthy — where are the jobs?
Privacy
Surprise: Online advertising networks are not honoring do-not-track requests from internet users even after promising to do so. That’s the core finding of a study from Stanford University Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
User experience
In 2004, Edward Tufte developed the sparkline. A sparkline is a “word-size graphic with typographic resolution” designed to be embedded anywhere a word or number can be used. Twenty years before that Tufte developed a visualization device that he’s only recently begun to call the slopegraph. Slopegraphs are used to “compare changes over time.” Charlie Park has written a really good guide to using slopegraphs.
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The blotter: Week ending 17 July 2011 was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 17 July 2011 at 2:53 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)