Daily deal providers are the moral equivalent of predatory lenders selling subprime liars loans to people they knew couldn’t afford it.
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Yes, you read it correctly. Because he was barred from investigating fraud (which was outside his expertise), he investigated “why the Irish financial crisis occurred.” He knew, of course, without investigation or expertise in detecting fraud, that the crisis did not occur because of insider fraud even though insider fraud is the most common cause of such crises. Nyberg’s report is the third report Ireland has paid for (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars). It contains no essential new facts not already known from the prior reports – because it did not conduct any real investigation. It reads like a defense lawyer’s brief for the senior management of the failed Irish banks. Ireland paid Nyberg large amounts of money to make it far harder to prosecute or even sue the CEOs that destroyed the Irish economy. This is significantly insane.
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EPUB output was less impressive. It wasn’t terrible; the books are certainly readable, but the styling was iffy. In particular, to repeat a common theme, paragraph borders and shading rarely came through correctly, as they do when creating EPUBs from Pages. In addition, all the links to internal bookmarks were broken. It’s not terribly difficult to fix these things after the fact by editing an EPUB’s constituent XHTML and CSS files — for example, to repair the broken links, I simply replaced every instance of “#” with “#” — but even though I could automate this sort of thing with macros, it’s a hassle that I’d just as soon avoid. I hope Nisus Software can improve their EPUB output considerably.
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How is it different for me to have a relationship with a woman because my husband doesn’t have girl parts than for me to have a relationship with an alpha man because my husband is a beta? Or for my husband to find someone who makes him feel economically powerful rather than economically egalitarian in our relationship? How is having a physical attribute you can’t change all that different from a psychological or socially-constructed attribute you theoretically can?
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None of those things are descriptions of David. She may think she loves him, but to anyone who listens to her words it’s clear she loves the world he offers. That’s not a reason to love anyone, in fact, it is proof you do not love him. However much the parents want her to “marry well,” they should have heard these words and realized that she didn’t love him and that it inevitably wouldn’t last. That was their responsibility. David, if he was any kind of man, should have noticed and let her go. And any intelligent women seduced by the prospect of a man’s new world should describe her happiness in three sentences and count how many times his name comes up, and then return the ring.
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It seems to me to be shocking that people like Grayling and Dawkins, who make (rightly in my view) such a fuss about hiving off a section of our children into religious schools on the basis of their parents beliefs in the hereafter, are nevertheless comfortable with the idea, of later, on hiving of a section off them into elite universities on the basis of the size of their parents wallets.
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But anyhow, let’s descend back into the fantasy zone for a moment and explore how Amazon could fix this business model if it actually had any intention on doing so. I’ve heard a lot of arguments that these devices should be free. I don’t think we’re there yet — that would literally mean giving a Kindle to anyone that requested one, which isn’t tenable considering that Amazon would need to eat a big subsidy upfront and get reimbursed through advertising over time. Never mind the manufacturing issues stemming from 100 million Americans requesting their free Kindle. People love free stuff.
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I get it that the average non-scientist out there isn’t going to take the time to read an article about “ordinary” science. I get it. Our culture has, by and large, decided that asking questions about our world is not very exciting.
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