Health care costs in the US

Some pretty astounding graphs comparing health care costs in the US with those overseas, from the NYTimes.

Post-mortem of the Harlem Shake

The history of a flash meme. Fascinating reading.

C.S.Lewis's inner ring

C.S.Lewis had an interesting speech here about the Inner Ring.  I know I've fallen into this trap before.

Welcome to the future

Amazon is a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

I'm so there.

A paean to global Coca-Cola production

What Coke Contains — Food for Thought — Medium - the money quote being this:

The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

That's poetry.

Loss of manufacturing capability in the US

Forbes has an interesting article on how short-sighted profitability strategies can easily harm the long-term viability of a company, and the effects of this on the US economy.

Ron Garrett on stock price reporting

Ron Garrett always has interesting things to say.  This time it's about how silly it is to look at a single number and think that says anything meaningful about the deep sea of data that is a stock market.

Survival of the stupid

This explains a lot.

Laser-targeted atomic phishing

This stuff is fascinating.  Social engineering is really getting to be something impressive.