My recent post on zombie industries (in which I argued that the pissing and moaning coming from authors and some publishers recently is a sign of an industry that is currently in serious trouble) leads inevitably to the obvious question: If, appearances to the contrary, the customer actually sets the price in a marketplace, and [...]
Zombie industries are all around us–these are businesses whose models have ceased to be relevant and they’re just waiting for something better to knock them over. This doesn’t mean they’re not still earning money–some of them are earning quite well, thank you. And it doesn’t mean that they’ve been artificially resurrected with government stimulus money, [...]
In my post on the Entitlement Mentality I quoted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” The last several election cycles in America have made it shockingly clear that Americans no longer know the difference between opinion and facts – or, if they do, [...]
Now, let’s go on over to the Republican side of the fence and do some more sacred cow tipping. I could pick on them for their mirror-image myopia on the same issues of environmental stewardship, but let’s go for something more fun. Let’s take the classic Republican relationship with tradition and history.
It’s ironic, really. America has been the science and technology innovation engine of the world since the days of Thomas Edison, being joined in supremacy by Japan by the last decade of the 20th century. And yet, despite an amazingly vibrant tech industry (whose growth remains fairly unhindered despite the dot com crash and the [...]
This year’s Beyond Belief conference is up, and it looks like it’s gonna be a doozy. This year, in honor of another very bitter election season in the midst of a number of medium-sized crises, the cadre of scientists and philosophers have trained their sights on public policy. For those of you who haven’t stumbled [...]
