joshuago’s Bookmarks

When you make something you make something else. Find it, package it, and sell it. There’s money to be made everywhere.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.

The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

Journalism's problem isn't with supply. It's with demand. We'll need to transform ourselves from passive consumers of media into active users. To accomplish that, we'll have to instill throughout our society principles that add up to critical thinking and honorable behavior.

A simple introduction to using PStore, a built-in key/value store that comes with Ruby.

What you should remember when you hand out “free” software is that if that software doesn’t work as advertised, it’s unreliable or the documentation is non-existent or misleading then you are doing its users harm. While you may not be legally liable for such deficiencies you have an ethical responsibility to ensure what you deliver does what it says it does.

Imagine the economic value of knowing, with mathematical certainty, exactly what the law is. If organizations could calculate legal risk as efficiently as they can now calculate financial risk (recession notwithstanding), millions of dollars in legal fees could be rerouted toward economic growth.

We need to send a clear message that we value the contributions of immigrants to this country. We need to condemn those elements, including those in the media, who use race-baiting as a political strategy. We need to harness the power and the passion of those who love Sarah Palin in ways that build a well-rounded, balanced and forward-looking party, one that’s built not on the politics of fear but, rather, on the politics of future prosperity.