The president said gaining congressional approval would not be much of a problem. Democrats disagree.
Month: December 2018
📺 “The West Wing” Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail | Netflix
Directed by Jessica Yu. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. On this year's "Big Block of Cheese Day", a college friend of Donna's asks Sam to help her get her late grandfather, accused of being a Communist spy inside the U.S. government, a presidential pardon; dealing with the recent revelation that his father had been having an affair for the past 27 years, Sam faces off with an F.B.I. agent, and later with Nancy McNally, over the pardon. Elsewhere, a ...
Sam: I’m just going to change my shirt.
Leo: You look bad. You’re tired. You slept in the office. It’s Friday. Go home.
Sam: Why?
Leo: Because I think you’re putting too much faith in the magical powers of a new shirt.
Leo: You look bad. You’re tired. You slept in the office. It’s Friday. Go home.
Sam: Why?
Leo: Because I think you’re putting too much faith in the magical powers of a new shirt.
👓 Books of the year: economics | Economist Espresso
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. By Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl. Princeton University Press; 368 pages
Do the rich world’s problems stem from an overdose of liberal principles, or their insufficiently bold application? Glen Weyl and Eric Posner argue that the ideals of thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Henry George can still inspire radical change. Such luminaries were unafraid of challenging the status quo. Following suit, the pair suggest expanding and refining markets, putting them to work for society as a whole. Property may not be theft, for example, but it is monopoly. Every individual should put a value on each item she owns, down to the last pencil, and be taxed on her total declared wealth. The twist: she must stand ready to sell any item at its declared value, should a buyer emerge. Such policies are so radical that they are unlikely ever to be adopted. But they may help jolt liberals out of their hand-wringing.
This is certainly an intriguing way of doing taxes. Reminiscent of the way that claiming races are done in horse racing.
📺 POKÉMON Detective Pikachu – Official Trailer #1 | YouTube
POKÉMON Detective Pikachu - In Theaters May 10, 2019
The first-ever live-action Pokémon movie, “POKÉMON Detective Pikachu” stars Ryan Reynolds as the titular character in the first-ever live-action movie based on the iconic face of the global Pokémon brand—one of the world’s most popular, multi-generation entertainment properties and most successful media franchises of all time.
Ryan as the voice is just inspired casting.
👓 Of Were-Owls and Wandering Jews | Jewish Review of Books
There were two Jewish shape-shifters in my Faerie and Zion reading this month. The first is the protagonist of Metunshemet (Owled), an Israeli novel for younger readers. Noga is a sixth grader in Kfar Sava. But she also has a second, secret identity: each night she turns into an owl. She has an owl friend named Vermeer and some acquaintances among the neighborhood fruit bats, but finds all of her nocturnal relationships far less challenging than the ones with her parents, her younger brother, and the other kids at school.
I’ve been randomly thinking about other were-animals lately, so it was interesting to see this pop up serendipitous-ly.
I decided to give the professional subscription to Inoreader a chance for a year and a half. Hoping some of the additional features will save me some time and effort in my reading flows. Now to tweak some of my set up.
👓 Inoreader How-to: Share your personal feeds and HTML clips | Inoreader
You probably spend some time to carefully group subscriptions in folders, star and save interesting articles, tag pieces of interest. If you take pride in your content curation work in Inoreader, you’d probably like to share the results with others – and this is really easy in Inoreader, thanks to custom RSS feeds and HTML …
Thought about stopping in, but the wait time was over an hour. Should have made a reservation.
Had a nice cocktail and light dinner.
👓 Renaming Hypothesis tags | Jon Udell
Jon Udell (Jon Udell)Wherever social tagging is supported as an optional feature, its use obeys a power law. Some people use tags consistently, some sporadically, most never. This chart of Hypothesis usage illustrates the familiar long-tail distribution: https://i0.wp.com/jonudell.info/images/hypothesis-tag-density.jpg ...