harryh

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)

The problem with this is that they can’t afford it. The Swiss budget is 62.8 CHF. They have 8 million people. That’s only 7,800 CHF each which is clearly not enough to make poverty disappear.

The fact that the Times didn’t bother to present this simple math shows how dumb the story is.

(via harryh)

There’s this part: “Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.”

That was $10,000/yr Canadian. 7,800 CHF is about 8,57 USD. Not too far off. 

(via rickwebb)

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)

The problem with this is that they can't afford it. The Swiss budget is 62.8 CHF. They have 8 million people. That's only 7,800 CHF each which is clearly not enough to make poverty disappear.

This comment pretty much sums it up: “It’s like, how much more metal could this be? And the answer is: none. None more metal.”

Cue co-founder Daniel Gross talking to Quentin Hardy of The New York Times about the brilliance of Amazon’s cloud services. (via parislemon)

FWIW that kinda makes Daniel sound like an idiot. Amazon's big 68gb boxes cost about 1.3k a month on demand. That's the kind of # that a competent tech co-founder should know off the top of their head. Oh wait, he's the CEO, ya forgivable then. I'm sure Dens doesn't know this number.

I'm not saying that there isn't injustice being done to gay couples, but it's not at all obvious that there is injustice being done in this specific case.  Complaining about a case where no harm has actually been done only weakens the case of those advocating for change.

New York City mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, during his weekly radio show, reacting to today’s mass shooting in Aurora, CO.

Well said.

(via the New York Times)

Like.

(via dpstyles)

Mass shootings of middle class white people by the obviously insane are not a real problem. This sort of thing is incredibly rare.  You're more likely to get struck by lightning.

The real problem is socioeconomic.  Despite making up only 13% of the population 50% of the murder victims in the US every year are African American, and the bulk of them are poor.  So let's talk about how much racism is a problem. Let's talk about the underclass.  Let's talk about the drug war.  Let's talk about huge portions of our major cities that are still engulfed by crime on a day-to-day basis. Let's talk about the real broken parts of our culture and what can be done about it.

- Chris Hayes (via emmawelles)

One of the most successful online social drugs is people tagging in Facebook photos. I can’t recall when this feature was first introduced but getting a message saying “you’ve been tagged in a photo” followed by a link was incredibly seductive. It still is.

Politicians that do this do not deserve our support.  This isn't a game where you cheer just because your team does something that makes for a good sounds bite.  It's a conversation about how our country should work.  We should cheer for great additions to that conversation and boo for subtractions no matter which side of the aisle they come from.

“RIP Good Times”: Silicon Valley’s Cuban Missile Crisis by Dalton Caldwell

It’s mind-boggling to me that there are people who don’t realize how close to the brink we were. There was a 48 hour period where the banks and the federal government literally weren’t sure that direct deposit was going to work. Like for anyone. At all. 

(via rickwebb)

With today’s release of Foursquare 5.0, Foursquare has modified its “dodgeball” icon and cemented it as the solid logo and visual brand for the company.

Starting today, you’ll begin to notice an inspiring new icon for your Foursquare experience. Our new icon grows out of a love for playground games, the kind we all remember from youth, which is the most wondrous part of the human lifetime. Humans naturally crave simple geometry, which is why we’ve removed all squares and angles and rebuilt the icon purely out of four overlapping circles—just as your circles of friends overlap with the circle of life. We are all headed toward the same fate. Circles are a reflection of communities of common purpose, and we see circles in check-ins ranging from the neighborhood pizza parlor (a delicious circle!) to the circle that is the Earth we all share, spinning optimistically through a universe of limitless possibility.

One more change we’ve made: our dodgeball is now pointed upwards, as if being aimed into the face of God Himself.