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Ought Nine
01.10.2009
Whatever you think of the merits of the case (laid out in by Wikipedia), you have to pity the Russians a little bit. For centuries the biggest country in the world, Russia could never conquer its way to a single economically useful land border or seaport. What used to be ...
My Year In Twitter
01.26.2009
Ments of the day: and
It burns when I peer into the abyss
Sines of the day: and
Today's pressions: and
Ments of the day: and
Today's featured pres: and
...
You Forgot Poland
02.11.2009
The following are excerpts from an article by Juliusz Ćwieluch and Wawrzyniec Smoczyński [what a name!] that appeared on October 25, 2008 in the popular Polish newsweekly :
“I was told about the attack a few hours before it started. It was at night, I got a call from vice-president Cheney” re...
Blog Gardening
02.16.2009
There are two joys that come with doing this kind of cleanup. The first is the discovery that, although writing regularly for seven years may not make you a good writer, it will certainly make you a less terrible writer than when you started. The second is the ability to go Orwell on ...
Borderlands
02.18.2009
Part of the border follows a wadable little river called the Bug, while the rest is just a notional line drawn across indifferent potato fields. Yet despite appearances, this is one of the hardest-working borders on the continent.
To the west lies the European Union, a land of ginge...
Getting Fit in San Francisco
02.28.2009
Hidden among these boot camps is an outfit called , a deceptively low-key fitness cult that for a hundred bucks a month got me fitter than I had ever hoped to be. The cult leader, Mike, is a former college football player with a sunny disposition and a strong desire to climb....
Cowpox, Smallpox
03.05.2009
Unnoticed among the financial headlines last October was the scariest news story of 2008:
Ironically, this outside force may already be here, in the form of the economic crisis itself. ...
Andrew Ross Sorkin Explains
03.17.2009
Today's New York Times features a fascinating front-page , entitled "The Case for Paying Out Bonuses at A.I.G.". Sorkin argues that if we do not pay $165 million in performance bonuses to executives at the failed insurer, we risk chipping at the very foundations of the rule of law:
If ...
Shell Game
03.24.2009
If this second point of view is true, then the bank rescue plan is a shell game. Half a trillion dollars is going to make a one-way trip from the FDIC to a number of large banks, with a big taste skimmed off for the usual Wall Street intermediaries in return...
Books I Would Buy
03.27.2009
Daniel Gross has been writing excellent columns on for years, and synthesizes a lot of the material in a new book:
And finally there is Lawrence Roberts, whose supremely informative called ...
Wrong Tomorrow
04.01.2009
At the start of March, an economist named Robert Barro gazed deep into historical data and announced in a that we had a 20% chance of falling into economic depression.
I found myself mesmerized by this prediction, a shining diamond of unfalsifiability. In August 2008, Barro had made a , c...
Glorious Friedman
04.15.2009
See also these .
...
Idle Words Spring Offensive
04.18.2009
I will be heading east in a couple of weeks to nose around Moldova and Ukraine. I would love to meet people who live in Chisinau, Odessa, or the curiously skinny republic of (actual slogan: "Compared to Moldova, this is like the Riviera"). If you live there, or have contacts there, please drop ...
Into Moldova
05.08.2009
So the eastern half of Europe is very poorly and strangely connected. Ljubljana is practically on the Italian border, but getting from there to Trieste (72 km) means a seven hour train ride, despite the lack of any border formalities. Suceava (Romania) is 40 kilometers from Chern...
Moldova
05.31.2009
In a sufficiently parallel universe, Moldova would be the Napa Valley. There are vineyards and grapevines everywhere, and the area is famous for its wine and brandy. The country is a pretty green landscape of rolling hills and forest, in a mild climate tempered by the nearby Black Sea. The loc...
Seeking Testers For A Bookmarking Site
06.11.2009
These are lean times in social bookmarking. The staff at del.icio.us has been eviscerated by layoffs, and the project is now being run by a skeleton crew. Magnolia, the other useful bookmarking site, has gone offline for the summer while it implements a new " " feature.
...
Transnistria
06.21.2009
Next up is a pair of concrete barriers designed to break the momentum of any advancing Moldovan armored columns long enough for the Russian garrison in Tiraspol to wake up and mount a defense. This is Transnistria's . Two chain-smoking Russian soldiers f...
Localizing Pinboard
07.03.2009
Thanks to all the people who volunteered to alpha test , my new bookmarking site. The site is now open for beta testing (which means bookmarks are backed up and features are less likely to break). Give it a try if you find delicious too slow for your needs.
...
The O-Zone Romanian Proficiency Exam
08.26.2009
Because of the internet, the first Romanian words I ever learned were about . Now that I've been living in the country for a while, I thought I would check to see how many other Numa Numan secrets were within my understanding:
Alo? Salut! Sunt eu, un haiduc
și te rog iubirea mea
Alo?...
How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked
09.06.2009
If you listen to me, the answer is much simpler. . Either host your blog with a competent centralized site (like LiveJournal or Blogger) that takes the burden of upgrading, backing up and patching off your hands, or use whatever personal publishing software you like (WordPress, Mov...
Using WordPress to generate flat files
09.08.2009
Some readers have emailed asking me for more specifics about how to run WordPress offline, like I suggested in my . So I spent a couple of hours struggling with it last night to get a sense of what it would take.
If you want comments, you'll need to switch from whatever is built in...
Looking for SF Lodging
12.20.2009
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