There’s really no time to lose. This whole inauguration thing is a complete distraction.

To watch a lot of the news shows, you’d think it was time for touchy-feely reflection about all the lofty things we want to do in the next four years. In my opinion, that’s exactly wrong.… Read full post »

I voted today.

I declined to show my ID. To vote in NH, you don’t have to show ID, something my wife and I wanted to test. We found that they do let you, but they make you sign a scary affidavit which then goes into a folder the label… Read full post »

People are bad at discussing probabilities—and it could kill us all.

A weatherman may predict that there is an 80% probability of rain, but then when it doesn't rain we'll often say “he was wrong.” It's rare to hear anyone say “this must be the one in five cases where… Read full post »

I spend a lot of time working, and I like to be in pleasant surrounds when I do. The trouble is that while standard issue office furniture where I work is functional enough to use, it’s still more utilitarian than artsy.

Like most people, I’ll hang posters or art around,… Read full post »

Quite some years ago, I worked at a company that has long since vanished from the technology landscape. I loved working there, but it occasionally made strange marketing and internal administration decisions that drove me nuts. To cope, I often wrote parodies of the policies, mailings, and whatnot an… Read full post »

In a segment of the Melissa Harris-Perry show this morning on MSNBC, this interaction was notable and refreshing.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The rich are always coming up with reasons to sound envious of the poor, as if the poor… Read full post »

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) may or may not still exist. It’s been on its last legs as a formal organization, though some of us still converse over its mailing lists and it’s not clear to me in the slightest that if it disappears as a formal organization we shou… Read full post »

I had the good fortune Saturday to attend a writing workshop that Cary Tennis hosts. It was a great pleasure to meet one of the faces from the Open Salon mothership, Salon.com. But it was also really quite interesting to see how the writing workshop worked and to interact with the… Read full post »

The Libertarian movement wants us to believe that less government implies more freedom, and more freedom implies more happiness. It's so easily stated, what could possibly go wrong?

Their theory is certainly easy to act on. One always knows what to do next: “See government?… Read full post »

Sometimes we get so mired in the thick of things that we lose track of where we began and what we were about. I think economics is a lot like that. We’re all affected by it. We all have opinions. And yet we’re told it’s a vast topic about which we… Read full post »

When people die, we have very nice ceremonies to remember them. Often we end up saying things posthumously to or about them that we never managed to say to them while they were alive.

Why do we wait?

Memorial services are more for the living than the dead. They… Read full post »

Language is a complex beast. A single word, or a sequence of words taken together as a phrase or sentence, may mean one thing now and quite another thing… Read full post »

I signed Jennifer Tyrrell’s petition to tell the Boy Scouts of America to end its policy of discriminating against gay youth and leaders.

You should sign, too.

It had a place for personal comments. This is what I wrote. Feel free to borrow from any part of it if… Read full post »

I guess the Obama administration has decided that rather than fight the moniker “Obamacare” they might as well embrace it. A smart move, I think. Calling it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is long and clumsy, and its acronym PPACA is really no better.

And anyway, they coul… Read full post »

President Obama said Friday, “My main message is to the parents of Travyon Martin: ‘You know, if I had a son he'd look like Trayvon.’ A/… Read full post »

A friend was looking for an old post on Open Salon. I wrote some remarks on how to use Google to search for it. I find a lot of people don't know these little tips, so I figured I'd share them here.

The first thing to know is that you… Read full post »

During the last week Greg Smith wrote an editorial about why he was resigning from Goldman Sachs, where he said “the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.” Until his resignation, he was executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity deri… Read full post »

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has seemed to tap into a deep-rooted sense discontent in the American populace over how capitalism has gone wrong. Criticism has not come just from the Left, but also from the right, as recently discussed on the excellent new MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes:… Read full post »

I’ve been reading news stories about Ron Paul’s newsletter scandal—in the Huffington Post, The New Republic, and the Christian Science Monitor, to name just a few. And I feel like they’re all overlooking something important.

These analyses all seem to focus strongly on his of… Read full post »

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell famously said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And Republicans in both houses of Congress have seemed dedicated to this quest, opposing virtually anything Obama tries to do… Read full post »

I’ve got a beef with whole “Mitt’s bet” thing from last night’s debate that’s a little different than what I’m seeing in most of the media.

But I’ll start with a recap in case you aren’t up to speed.

What Happened?

Last night in the Iowa GOP deb… Read full post »

It’s common to receive a charity promotion that says “Donate now because someone has offered a matching gift.” For every dollar you send, they’ll send a dollar. It apparently gets people giving more. People like to see their money multiplied that way. Such a donation magnifies… Read full post »