The early brains of a better world...

[elfs]

How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won. Johann Hari explains how Goldman Sachs pressured legislatures to deregulate futures trading in food commodities, and then used those commodities markets as a reliable retreat from collapsising real estate markets, in the process jacking the price of bulk foods up by as much as 320%, causing mass starvating and death. Futures trading is a way of managing risk; bundling those futures as derivatives created even more risk than a market without futures trading. Goldman Sachs exploited that "flaw" for its financial benefit.

The strong do what they will, the weak endure what they must - Thucydides.

How to make an American job before it's too late. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, explains how the disconnect between startup and manufacturer threatens the future of American prosperity, and how we need to stop thinking about "China strategies" and start thinking about "America strategies" for our companies when they get big enough to need mass-production.

Many Poisoned Rivers. Jonathan Mirsky reviews Jonathan Watts's new book, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind - Or Destroy It. Watts outlines how China's manufacturing zones are becoming toxic wastelands, the rivers are contributing to the Pacific Ocean's degredation, the water is undrinkable and the air unbreathable.

After you've read about fifty pages you will find his occasional attempts at fairness bizarre, as in his clichéd conclusion that, faced with two 'extremes', 'the truth was probably somewhere in between'. But there is no 'in between'. China is destroying itself and threatening the rest of us. And, like useful idiots, we are helping the Chinese do it.

Proportional Leading For Fluid Web Designs. White space between rows of text must be proportional to the width of the text. This article shows you how to lead (that's "led", not "leed") your line-heights properly so your pages show up great on both your 1920x1080 monitor and your 320x480 smartphone.

How to use Starbucks as your office. Now that Starbucks offers free wi-fi, learn how to use it well.

Very Scary Fireworks. In 1962, the United States exploded a fusion bomb over Hawaii. Here's the video of that event.

Wonder Woman's new costume. Woah. No heels. No excess skin. What is the world coming to? (Apparently, JM Strazynski is coming to Wonder Woman, that's what.)

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I think you are referring to the test Thor and its followups Bluegill and Kingfish. It was detonated 248miles above Johnson Island to test potential ABM uses. Johnson island is 800 miles away from Hawaii. And while the test did create "impressive artificial Auroras" and the EMP did create quite a mess, no, we did not detonate a nuke over Hawaii.

It's like saying the oil in the gulf is washing ashore in Memphis Tennessee.

[tagryn]

It seems likely that China's slanted sex ratio of having more males than females in recent cohorts could have serious implications for their foreign policy in the direction of larger armed forces and more militant policies. Combine that with the environmental disaster that's happening in concert with their industrialization, and their could easily be an appeal to obtaining clean lebensraum (or the equivalent Mandarin term). Certainly Taiwan, they've made no secret about that, but also perhaps Korea, Mongolia, the depopulating eastern steppes of Siberia...it isn't going to be an easy thing to be a neighbor of China in the upcoming decades.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

"China is destroying itself and threatening the rest of us. And, like useful idiots, we are helping the Chinese do it."

No, actually we're asking them to do it, if not demanding as much. It's what draws foreign investment in manufacturing in the first place: low wages and lax environmental laws. If either or both of those change, poof goes the manufacturing, which will go someplace at least as desperate for the jobs. And it will do so at least as quickly as the China miracle happened.

The same thing happened to America's manufacturing base when union wages and tough environmental laws came into force.