Month: February 2012

Why I’d Rather Shoot Myself in the Head than Ever Own a Home Again – Freakonomics Freakonomics

Many people have said to me in the past month, “I’m going to buy a home.” Or, “What do you think of the idea of me buying a home?” I like the second batch of people. They are my friends and it seems like they are sincerely asking for my advice. And I’m going to give it to them. Whether they meant it or not.

Source: Why I’d Rather Shoot Myself in the Head than Ever Own a Home Again – Freakonomics Freakonomics

Original: Why I Am Never Going to Own a Home Again – Altucher Confidential

 

From comments:

Only a fool ultimately stays a renter, because they are bypassing the very thing that defines western society and law. Real property ownership.

— anonymous

The Right to Be Forgotten – Stanford Law Review

At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation.

Source: The Right to Be Forgotten – Stanford Law Review

 

If someone is tired of their photograph showing up online because they want to be a private individual, or whatever, should they be allowed to demand that Google and Facebook (and by extension, their friends and family) prevent anyone from posting pictures of that person, sharing pictures of that person, or tagging pictures of that person? What if they are possibly not the primary subject in the image? Is it okay to let technology permit revisionist photographs wherein people who do not want to be in the image may opt out of being displayed in it?

Technology should, at least in theory, permit either extreme in this case (anything from amazing privacy to complete free speech), so our collective choice (for a “default setting” plus what we are permitted to opt in to and out of) may fall anywhere along a very long/wide spectrum. The issue is complicated enough that some public discourse should take place, since otherwise policy will likely be pulled only by those who have the most lose (celebrities and other people of public interest) or gain (media organizations) rather than by what is on average best for everyone.

Torturer’s Apprentice – The Atlantic

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.

The Bush Administration’s threshold for where an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.

Source: Torturer’s Apprentice – The Atlantic

The unemployment facts we’d rather not face – Fortune

An alarming view of prospective young employees comes from the Defense Department, which has found that 75% of Americans aged 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces.
…
If America wants its economy to be as good as its armed forces, then the same requirements apply to young people looking for private-sector jobs. And the Pentagon is telling us that some 26 million young adults don’t meet the requirements.

Source: The unemployment facts we’d rather not face – Fortune