So many people mindlessly repeat the line that “buying a house is better, because when you rent, you’re throwing your money away.” That’s true in some cases, and false in others, so check your assumptions at the door. This calculator from the NYT is great. Click Advanced Settings to play with the underlying assumptions.
(Quick reminder that, historically, the stock market beats the housing market in the long run. Your current bubble may vary.)
I just finished reading “Apple iPad 2 is here and tablet rivals need to hit the drawing board”, Andy Ihnatko’s article on the iPad 2.
One sentence really resonated with me, because I think Apple’s very busy right now getting the world used to the next generation of computer interfaces (lots of OS X Lion’s upcoming interface is borrowed straight from iOS):
I hate editing video, but this app intuitively felt better and easier than even the desktop edition of iMovie.
Let’s assume you’ve got a file (or a directory full of files, doesn’t matter) that you’ve been working on, and have committed it to the repository. Whoops, you’ve just overwritten something good with something bad. How to get the old one back?
I thought it would be a variation on the svn revert command, but no. It’s svn merge. This makes sense on some level, but not a lot of sense.
—This image is all over, but it seems to have come from Hope/Glory in Berlin.
( Cached here if theirs goes away.)
Why have so many conservatives forgotten the rational, compassionate foundations upon which they have built their current hateful ideologies?
Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision. —Friedrich Hayek
The Road to Serfdom is an iconic conservative, anti-big-government text, a “passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production”. And yet, the author argues that social insurance is not only acceptable, but a very good idea. Single-payer health insurance is the classic example of “providing for … common hazards of life”.
If you want to know where Starbucks’ emerging markets are, there are probably worse places to start than right here:Current Worldwide Annual Coffee Consumption per capita from ChartsBin. Current meat consumption is interesting, too.
Click through and play with the map for a lot more detail, but here’s a screenshot to get you started:
Apple launches long-awaited subscriptions for App Store (Macworld)
Seems to me that this is a pretty fair model for subscriptions. And yet, I keep seeing articles and blog posts claiming this will be “the death of Pandora” and other crap like that, due to Apple taking 30% of the revenue, and the publishers can’t afford that. As I read it, publishers have two options: in-app subscription purchases with 30% to Apple, and outside-the-app ( e.g., on their website) subscriptions at 0% to Apple. The agreement is that they have to offer the in-app subscription at a price no higher than the outside subscription, but I don’t see anything that says they must provide an in-app subscription option at all.
Apparently, these bits are used in current Apple hardware (mid-2009 MBPs, some iPhone 4s, probably others). I think my MacBook Pro is old enough to not have any, but at least I know where to get the bits if I need them…
