#society (81 quotes)
I have arrived at that very fine line when I wonder if a two-week holiday in the sun or the snow is actually worth the ordeal of air travel – the Byzantine ticket pricing schemes, the invasive and tedious security lines, the crying babies, the unexplained delays, before you get on to the plane, while you sit on the runway silently begging air traffic control to end the torture and give you a precious “slot”, and while you wait for your suitcase which will always be the last off the carousel, even assuming that it’s actually on it … The sheer misery of the whole experience.
— , 'We can't give you information. We haven't got a Tannoy' The credit crunch is deadly serious, but it will not change the fundamental dynamic of how international capital markets work. Markets go too far: ingenious people take bigger and bigger risks, with more and more clever strategies, some of them sound, some of them, it eventually emerges, spectacularly not.
— , There will be blood The damage is done. Beacon and tracking regimes like it violate the unwritten soc-site covenant: They don’t care who you think you are or who you’d like other people to think you are. They barely glance at your meticulously managed profile — Chabon on the nightstand, Beirut on the iPod, gut carefully sucked in. Instead, they tail you, dissecting you site by site, purchase by purchase.
— , How Facebook Exposed Us All as Freaks Under communism, children at primary school began to study how the system was supposed to work. Under capitalism, most people have no idea of how international markets work – which is a shame given that these are the dominating economic forces in everybody’s lives.
— , Dicing with disaster If we were a rich world, we’d innovate our way out of this environmental crisis. We’d breed algae that piss petrol, and albatross that inhale hydrocarbons and then soar upwards to breach into the stratosphere, exhaling ozone. But we aren’t a rich world, so we’re tightening our belts and hoping something will turn up. Nothing will turn up though, because we’re all there is to do the turning up.
— , Wrapping up 2007 All attempts to inhibit the flow of information and make it work exclusively for the benefit of an organisation, whether it’s the government of China or Universal Records, are doomed. The genie is out of the bottle for good. Media owners talk wistfully of “owning” particular ideas or activities on the internet. They should stop. This is a mirage, glimpsed most often by those who spend little time on the web.
— , Don’t try to reinvent the web Via Russell Davies.