Mixed Martial Arts fighting, in the US especially the United Fighting Championship, has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. Presented here for your edification is an argument against its taking itself too seriously… Viacheslav Datsik
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You know things are rocky when the Comptroller General, David Walker, starts making comparisons between America’s present situation and the fall of Rome.
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I know it’s The New York Times, but still, an outright lie in the first sentence of an article is a bit much.
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People who loudly condemn software (or music, or film) “piracy” often confuse the concepts of a) taking something from someone else and b) getting something for nothing. Their reasoning seems to be based on the idea that since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, if you get something for nothing, you must be stealing it.
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One of the problems America has that I didn’t mention yesterday is the number of people it imprisons—another thing I haven’t heard much about from the Democratic Presidential candidates.

Over two million Americans were in prison in 2006, more than in any other country. American per capita rates of incarceration are generally between three and eight times as high as other Western developed nations. For a country as rich as the United States, that’s ridiculous, and for a country that claims to be based on ideals of individual freedom, that’s shameful.
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I think next year’s US presidential election is going to be simultaneously important and irrelevant. Important for the obvious reason—electing another Republican would simply be insane, and getting that party out of power is absolutely necessary. Sadly irrelevant in the longer term because I don’t think that any of the Democratic candidates are really willing to tackle the major problems this country has.
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Last night Seth and I had a conversation about how hard it is to think of products that you can be sure will still be available in a couple of years. I brought the topic up in reference to sneakers, because I dislike having to choose new models every couple of years if I’m perfectly happy with the old ones. I’m not talking about refusing to try anything new, just that I’d like to be able to fall back on the old model if none of the new ones are as good.
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One of my credit cards expired recently, so I was issued a new one. This new one came equipped with an RFID chip. It’s supposed to be a convenience thing, allowing the card to be read without swiping it, but the first thing I thought was “security flaw”.
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I’ve been reading danah boyd‘s work about online public spaces for a few years, and recommend her writing generally. Today I read one of her essays on how class divisions are being reflected online, specifically in the makeup of social networking sites.
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Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine has a good article on what being a gold farmer in World of Warcraft is like. I read the author(Julian Dibbell)’s book on the topic of MMORPG economies, Play Money, last year and liked it. Reading the book, or the article, or Edward Castronova’s piece on Everquest currency years ago, all bring forth a similar feeling: disjointed vertigo.
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I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I consider an extremely important book for understanding how the world came to be the way it is. Collapse is more important for understanding where we may be going.
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While walking around San Francisco this evening, I considered how the city’s topography gives it a distinct identity—specifically, how that might influence its assimilation (or lack thereof) into a profoundly brand-driven modern capitalist homogeneity.
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On the Grannan family’s recommendation, I recently read William Bernstein’s The Four Pillars of Investing. It’s really good, and I see no reason not to recommend it to more or less everyone.
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As I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and also thinking about pollution and global warming, the concept of hidden costs keeps coming up.

Pollution is an obvious “hidden cost” in typical capitalist systems: it’s very difficult to measure how much harm it does, and no cost is associated with that harm (except punitively, which is different from its showing up on a balance sheet).
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This article about Lego, power, and property in an elementary school was completely fascinating to me. It recounts the experiences in a clearly “alternative” school when the teachers and children attempted to unravel what was causing conflict over the resources of “Legotown”.

If you have any interest in politics, equality, children, education, or the nature of property, read the article.
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It’s worth spending the time to consider what licensing/copyright/usage terms to apply to one’s output, whether creative or otherwise. The default is copyright, which applies (at least in the US and the EU) as soon as one creates something. This means that the work is given the full range of legal copyright protections—regardless of whether they’re wanted or not.
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In early January I wrote a post called Tools for Political Understanding, the beginning of an attempt to help others analyze the political sphere. With yesterday’s post in mind, I’m going to look at the “War on Drugs” using the tools I suggested as aids to understanding.
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One of the key problems with attempting to suppress certain behaviors in a subject population is that you end up introducing corruption into your system of government. I’m really referring to attempts to suppress behaviors that are popular in themselves (drinking alcohol being a classic example). You can’t really enforce demand, and most of the population will know that the proscribed activity goes on all the time behind closed doors.
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My first cellphone was with an Irish provider—despite the fact that I lived in San Francisco at the time I bought it, and had no plans to move back. It was (is) still worth it to have that phone, because I use it on a pay-as-you-go basis. This has worked extremely well for several years.
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I’ll probably write about the game itself at some point, but wow, I thought the ads were terrible.
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Recently NASA announced plans to build a permanent base on the moon, and Stephen Hawking said that reaching space is critical to human survival. Is it time to invest in getting off-planet, or is the whole thing a wasteful boondoggle?
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Niall sent me a large number of messages today about accidents resulting in radiation poisoning. Reading about completely unsafe practices and the escape of radioactive materials into the commercial scrap metal business made me feel rather unsafe.
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This one comparison stood out:

The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion).

That’s truly amazing. Taken from this article, which talks about how the pharmaceutical industry when from pretty big in 1980 to incredibly huge now.