Bucking the trend
President Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that said “The buck stops here”, a gift from an avid poker player. Yet whilst we might appreciate the imagery and the sentiment, should we really rely on there being a ‘buck‘ to pass? Is there always a man in charge, someone with whom the ultimate [...]
Capital for the third world
I recently came across a wonderful idea for providing peer-to-peer lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries. The idea seems akin to the principles of the Grameen Bank, providing microcredit in this case primarily as a form of aid. The system allows people with spare cash to browse potential applicants and offer them money in the [...]
Market games
There are very few today who would deny that the quality of our food has dropped, partly as a result of the change embodied by the death of the local shop and the rise of the supermarket. Where once the only change was that our food was pre-grown, now we find it has been pre-grown, [...]
Advertising Takes The Logical Next Step
We should be clear about one thing. In-game advertising isn’t new. And not just the self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek form of advertising epitomised by the Loom™-toting pirate in LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island. Anyone who remembers Zool from the early 1990s might recall the Chupa Chups sponsorship deal, and the FIFA series has been using advertising [...]
Skype’s revealing customer policy
Apparently, getting what you paid for isn’t necessarily the name of the game any more. Although I was well aware of it at the time of purchase, no niggly smallprint or obligatory T&C which no one reads hid this caveat, it still comes as something of a surprise to be informed that something I paid [...]
Currently Reading
Planned books:
- The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin
- The Age of Capital, 1848-75 by E.J. Hobsbawm
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
- Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw by Norman Davies
Current books:
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Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Band 1 by Oswald Spengler
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Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Recent books:
- Uni-Wissen Anglistik /Amerikanistik: Introduction to English Language Teaching by Andreas Müller-Hartmann, Marita Schocker-von Ditfurth
- The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick
- Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod by Bastian Sick
- We the Living by Ayn Rand
- Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod by Bastian Sick
Links
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