Quotulatiousness

October 1, 2009

Twitter lists

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:12

I’ve been using Twitter for the last few months, and I’ve actually found it rather useful. Useful, in the sense of providing me with a wider range of information, which often leads to something blog-worthy. But the down-side is that for every new Twitter account I follow, I increase the ‘noise’ in my Twitter feed, making those gems sometimes harder to spot.

John C Abell looks at a new feature under trial for Twitter to allow grouping feeds together into lists which can be shared with other users:

Twitter is trialing a method to sub-categorize the people you follow into “lists,” making it possible for the first time to systematically organize — and recommend — feeds you follow.

Once rolled out to everyone Twitter lists will make allow you to create dynamically-updated timelines of your favorite news sites or opinion makers, celebrity administrative assistants, congressional Republicans and all those guilty-pleasure spoof accounts. If you’re already a somebody, you may be able to bestow upon some unknown a bit of Oprah-like fame.

The lists will be public by default — the better to increase viral discovery of an account you might like because your friend likes it — and can be made private. This is the nearly best of both worlds, but we always think that services which convey one’s thoughts and leanings and predilections and intentions ought to be opt-in, since failure to drop the curtain can cause inadvertent embarrassment or eliminate what would have been a competitive advantage.

I like the idea of lists, but I’ll have to wait to see how they’ve implemented this (it’s not available to my account yet).

Back to the ’70s . . . it’s the return of the Population Bomb!

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Ronald Bailey addresses the most recent outbreak of Globally Terminal Malthusianism from the Wall Street Journal‘s Paul B. Farrell:

Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.

Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.

It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one.

But, in the same way that bad news always crowds out good news for headline space or television minutes, looming disaster stories will always attract attention . . . especially when they’re wrong.

Canada as prescription drug “parasite”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:07

I guess the discussion on medical costs got boring without bringing international issues into play. Senator Bob Corker got into it with Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett:

An American legislator called Canada “parasitic” on Wednesday for siphoning U.S. dollars to Canada with low prescription drug prices while his country does “all the innovation.”

Canada benefits financially from America’s role as a world leader in medical advances, Republican Sen. Bob Corker charged in an exchange with a Liberal MP as she testified before a U.S. Senate committee.

“One of the things that has troubled me greatly about our system is the fact that we pay more for pharmaceuticals and devices than other countries, and yet it’s not really our country so much that’s the problem, it’s the parasitic relationship that Canada and France and other countries have towards us,” the Tennessee lawmaker told Carolyn Bennett.

Canadian provinces have a financial lever that is a direct result of the single-payer model: if you want to sell your drug in Canada, you have to sell to the government monopoly for each province. The market is small, and there are only a limited number of buyers, so the best price you can get for your product will end up being the price all of the geographical monopolies are willing to pay . . . or you don’t sell into that market at all. Under the circumstances, it’s rational for the companies to sell at close to cost: the bulk of their costs are already sunk in the R&D effort and the regulatory effort to get the drug on to the domestic market.

That doesn’t make the charge any more palatable, but there’s some justice to making it.

Ephemera

Filed under: Railways, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I think this is the first time I’ve seen some of my old work for sale on eBay:

THBHS_back_issues

I was the original editor for TH&B Focus, finally burning out on the job midway through the fifth year of publication.

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