friend of the built environment

Haha:
Q. Is Continental Airlines becoming United Airlines?
A. Continental and United are combining in a merger of equals to form a new airline which will be called United Airlines and will use the Continental logo and colors as its marketing brand. The planes will be painted in Continental’s livery, including the globe tail. No changes will [...]

Randy links:
The point that Jon Stewart recently made on his show, about how disturbing it is that Bill Gates is a humanitarian hero giving children clean water while Steve Jobs is calling the police on bloggers, bears repeating. Daniel Lyons in Newsweek wrote about how Apple’s desire for control as epitomized [...]

Calculated Risk links to a recent 60 Minutes spot on “strategic defaults”, which repeatedly focuses on the fact that those interviewed are “able to pay”.
However, something I always have a problem with here is the definition of “ability to pay”. Now, I personally feel that the “percentage of income” method of calculating one’s ability to [...]

Reading Sean and Anatoly’s analyses of Victory Day and its association with Stalin’s rule in Russia today made me ponder the future impact of 9/11 on the minds and morals of a future US.
In many senses, 9/11 began a series of events that culminated, in the latter days of the first GWB term, in what [...]

GoTriad discovers free music downloading. Time travelers from 1996 are shocked:
Musicians and record labels contend that consumers have grown comfortable with what amounts to stealing. As a result, they say, musical careers and the music business itself are in peril. Others counter that the overly greedy corporate music industry is getting what [...]

David has accepted a tenure-track position with UNCG Jackson Library, which is really cool, and means we will be planning to stay awhile in the Triad.
It also means I now know where to start job-hunting, though I’m a little iffy on what I want to do with my life at the moment.
Some things I know [...]

What the bigots are saying about the mosque proposed for Lower Manhattan:
As I lost my firefighter brother in the south tower on 9/11, the last thing I want to see is a mosque on that site.
Personally, I agree. I also think we should ensure that Catholic churches are removed from the viscinity of all [...]

The Chicago Tribune: The news media death spiral in microcosm.
In the last couple of years, I connected through Chicago on planes or buses many times. One thing that struck me circa 2008 was that the Tribune had reduced its footprint to tabloid format, slashing effective news space significantly and making it easy to mistake for [...]

James Kwak on Facebook:
Facebook is just bad software. This manifests itself in various ways. The performance (speed of response) for many user actions is terrible. The user interface manages the improbable dual achievement of being both non-intuitive (it’s not obvious why the page is organized the way it is, nor how [...]

Paul Krugman makes a good case that, on a macro scale, the US (and much of the industrialized world) are experiencing a deflationary recession with significant downward-pressure on the prices of industrial goods.
All well and good. No real argument.
But the things that others are screaming about when they talk about hyperinflation, however, does not even [...]