Estonia uses a flat tax and the Economist is freakin' happy about this.
Nice oped by Viviana Zelizer about why it's considered so bad to give money as a gift.
"In popular mythology, the impressive performances of America’s blacks, especially Owens, so infuriated Hitler that he refused to shake Owens’s hand after his victory in the 100-meter dash. It’s a good story, and one widely disseminated at the time to show that the Olympic spirit had triumphed over Nazi racism. The problem is, it never happened."
I'm also a devotee of the Amtrak quiet car.
Nice little gloss on the TAL take on software patenting.
"Why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?"
"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit")."
"Google is not the Eye of Sauron, finding all that is good on the Internet and corrupting it. Nor, despite its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is it humanity's informational savior. Google is a company that provides an enormously significant online service. When that service raises serious legal questions, we should ask whether it is good for the users or bad for the users."
Using the Wikipedia logo seems to be pretty lame for an article about Intrade and prediction markets. But the rest of it seems reasonable. The summary is something like: Prediction markets aren't good when there isn't good publicly available information. Which I suppose shouldn't come as a huge suprise.
Here's the spoiler: The answer is "not you."
Very cool oped by Posner on the state of the patent system. He thinks its totally broken but, because he's Richard Posner, he has some ideas of what to do about it.
A huge argument against a position I have never heard but, we are told, has been very effective. I think this is kind of card to unparse becase VC are essentially arguing for the status quo. Like, VCs haven't successfully had bike lines removed anywhere, have they? If so, I think he's giving a kind of fringe theory more credit than it really deserves.
