Quotes

It’s a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to “save” us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America’s most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it’s about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.

What they’re “protecting” us from – Anil Dash

As a consequence of the wikileaked releases, military documents in the public domain now acknowledge that fifteen children were imprisoned, at some time or another, at Guantánamo (see table below). This is three more than the twelve the State Department acknowledged to the public after our earlier report on the subject, and seven more than the eight the State Department reported to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/reports/guantanamos-children-the-wikileaked-testimonies/guantanamos-children-the-wikileaked-testimonies

My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles.

The price of “Free” | Serious Simplicity

Lately I’ve noticed that all of my most-used applications and services are things that I’ve paid for.

That’s right James Verone says he has no medical insurance. He has a growth of some sort on his chest, two ruptured disks and a problem with his left foot. He is 59 years old and with no job and a depleted bank account. He thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.

Man robbed bank for $1 to cover jail health care | 9news.com

‘Hey, if being a geek means you’re willing to take a 400-page book on vaccines and where they work and where they don’t, and you go off and study that and you use that to challenge people to learn more, then absolutely. I’m a geek. I plead guilty. Gladly.’

Microsoft’s Bill Gates: A rare and remarkable interview with the world’s second richest man | Mail Online

That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.

Ellsberg: All Nixon’s Crimes Against me now Legal | Informed Comment

You are taking from the poor to give to the rich. Your actions are unconscionable. Shame on you. You take food out of the mouths of children by cutting reduced breakfast programs while at the same time transferring public money from public schools through an expanded voucher program for the education of wealthy families.

WisPolitics.com: Voces de la Frontera: Statement on civil disobedience at Joint Finance hearing

Congress gave [Phillip Herr] until the end of 2011 to report on the USPS’s woes. But Herr and his team concluded that the postal service’s business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service’s survival plan isn’t reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving.

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – BusinessWeek

Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call “significant positive abnormal returns,” with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.

Members of Congress Get Abnormally High Returns From Their Stocks

With the approval of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., federal prosecutors are trying to force the author of a book on the C.I.A. to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about the agency’s effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

James Risen Is Served With Subpoena in C.I.A. Leak Case on Iran Sabotage – NYTimes.com