Coal’s Cost

When viewed from a fatality per power perspective, the nuclear option still looks very good.

Staying Urban

From the Freakanomics blog, featuring Ed Glaeser, author of  Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.

Certainly for anyone who’s a parent, like myself, the suburban school districts offer huge enticement to leave cities. And this is really a question of how we’ve decided to structure our schools. So I want you to just imagine, if, for example, instead of having a New York restaurant scene that was dominated by private entrepreneurs, who competed wildly with each other, trying to come up with new, new things and, you know, the bad restaurants collapsed, the good restaurants go on to cooking show fame, and you have these powerful forces of competition and innovation working. Imagine instead if there was a food superintendent, who operated a system of canteens, where the menus were decided at the local level, and every New Yorker had to eat in these canteens. Well, the food will be awful, and that’s kind of what we’ve decided to do with schooling. That instead of harnessing the urban ability to provide innovation, competition, new entry, we’ve put together a system where we turned all that system off. And we’ve allowed a huge advantage for a local, public monopoly. It’s very, very difficult to fix this.

I’m not sure if this is a pro-voucher idea, but it is an interesting take.

IE6 Countdown

If you need to start a cause to get people to stop using a product you built, you’re doing something very very wrong.

Dead Servers

Fun times on the line with GoDaddy yesterday as our server went offline and refused to reboot. Shockingly at about 3pm after sacrificing our entire afternoon to IT gods, I kind of lost it.

Matthew A. – Server Concierge: Is there anything else I can help you with? (third time he asked this in as many minutes)

me: in a bit of a hurry to move me along are we ?

me:
no, many thanks for providing as usual, no support what so ever. as usual, godaddy continues to astound me with it’s epicly shitty customer service. The only light at the end of the tunnel on these chats is the knowledge that one day soon, I’ll be moving my servers elsewhere.

Poor guy. Probably not his fault, but wow, that’s some crap service.