Posts Noted 2011 April 1

Blogs posts noted on 1 April 2011

• Seth Godin ponders Compared to perfect: the price/value mismatch in content:

Price is often a signalling mechanism, and perhaps nowhere more than in the area of content. Free enables your idea to spread, price, on the other hand, signals individuals and often ends up putting your idea in the right place. Mass shouldn't always be the goal. Impact may matter more.

• Ted Rall writes about The Devils We Don’t Know:

War should be voted upon by the citizenry. After all, we—not Congress—bear the costs. If a president can’t be bothered to explain why we should kill and be killed and spend billions of dollars on a conflict, too bad for him and his pet defense contractors.

• Tax the Super Rich now or face a revolution in the USA:

Yes, tax the Super Rich. Tax them now. Before the other 99% rise up, trigger a new American Revolution, a meltdown and the Great Depression 2.

…

Wake up folks. The Super-Rich Delusion is destroying the American Dream for the rest of us. The Super Rich don’t care about you. They’re already stockpiling for the economic time bomb dead ahead. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Time for you to plan ahead for the coming revolution, for another depression.

• Paul Kedrosky writes about Unearthing America's Past and quotes:

Conventional wisdom has it that invading Europeans simply wiped out the Native way of life. In fact, Richter argues, it's better to think of what happened in terms of historical layers, each new layer inheriting the shape of the previous one. In the fifteenth century, conquistadores brought the European Middle Ages to America, fueled by religious zeal; but, almost at the same time, European traders built a different kind of life, learning to coexist with Native civilization and importing a sensibility we might recognize as modern and capitalistic.

• Walking the Line Between Good and Evil: The Common Thread of Heroes and Villains

Conformity and standardization serves a purpose, but it isn’t universally applicable, and is context-specific. We should question authority. If no one ever broke a rule and unquestionably followed the given outline, there would never be any advancement in this world. Creativity, by definition, is rule-breaking. However, there needs to be a way to recognize rules that are being broken for the sake of doing social good, and those that are broken for illegal or immoral intent.

At any given point in time, there is a significant portion of the population fighting against conformity, refusing to get shoved into a box, breaking rules in order to advance civilization—but what if they all stopped? What if every single person stopped bucking the system, stopped challenging convention, and marched obediently to take their expected place in society?

• Mickey Z gives another reason to go vegan: Peak Dirt (and yours truly on the radio)

It’s been estimated that 75 percent of original US topsoil has already been lost and 4,000,000 acres of US cropland is lost each year to soil erosion (that’s roughly the size of Connecticut). An acre of US trees disappears every eight seconds. Since 85 percent of US topsoil loss is directly associated with livestock raising, there is a good first step we can take to battle Peak Dirt: go vegan.