Listening to a BBC Documentary on the George W. Bush presidency, and it suddenly occurs to me: appointing John Bolton to be ambassador to anything is about as idiotic as appointing me to be ambassador to anything.

DISH Network says: “Fuck Big Bird.”

Benton.org: Satellite TV company DISH Network sued the Federal Communications Commission on July 1 in a bid to block enforcement of a law requiring it to carry the high definition programming of public television stations around the country.

Finland becomes first country to say broadband is a basic right

Benton.org: In Finland, the Ministry of Transport and Communications said that as of July 1 the country’s citizens have a basic right to broadband speeds of 1 Mbps and suggested that for operators who have to supply such a service a reasonable charge would be between 30 to 40 Euros ($36.70 and $48.90) per month. Finland also has an ambitious goal of connecting every citizen to a 100 Mbps connection by 2015. So should the U.S. follow suit?

Dear Consumer Electronics Association,

Too much to ask that your press releases do not fail utterly on my consumer electronics?

Republicans: a party of unemployment

From now until 2 November, the Republican party will be the party of unemployment. The logic is straightforward: the more people who are unemployed on election day, the better the prospects for Republicans in the fall election. They expect, with good cause, that voters will hold the Democrats responsible for the state of the economy. Therefore, anything that the Republicans can do to make the economy worse between now and then will help their election prospects.

While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans’ behaviour.

The federal government takedown of pirate Internet domain names succeeded… for a few hours. This site has an interesting review of the jurisdictional and legal issues raised by the case—and essentially concludes that government action is a complete waste of time.

The sting of poverty | Boston Globe

Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work. To an economist, this is irrational behavior.

Traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated.