load01 10/15/2011

• The End of the Future - Peter Thiel - National Review Online

  I can separate science from superstition or tech from magic, ty.
  
  "Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity. We need high-paying jobs to avoid thinking about how to compete with China and India for low-paying jobs. We need rapid growth to meet the wishful expectations of our retirement plans and our runaway welfare states. We need science and technology to dig us out of our deep economic and financial hole, even though most of us cannot separate science from superstition or technology from magic. In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline."

  tags: worse than failure

• Squeezed Out in India, Students Turn to United States - NYTimes.com

  NEW DELHI — Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

  tags: economics

• Rabbit-Hole Economics - NYTimes.com

  Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

  tags: economics

• A Look at Apple's iCloud - NYTimes.com

  This week in The New York Times, I reviewed Apple’s new iPhone 4S. But the new phone is only one of the big Apple news items this week. On Wednesday, iCloud went live.
  
  This new service is the latest incarnation of what has been called iTools, then .Mac, then MobileMe.
  
  
  The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
  Sign up | See Sample
  There are three bits of good news about iCloud.
  
  First, it’s free. (MobileMe was $100 a year.)
  
  Second, it does more than MobileMe.
  
  Third, it’s solid. Like a rock. It would be understandable if you wanted to steer clear; plenty of people remember the data loss and foul-ups of the early MobileMe — but this time, it looks as if Apple nailed it.

  tags: technology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.