""Just this week, in various meetings on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, I found myself reiterating four of my major uses of del.icio.us. 1. Answering a question with an URL. 2. Del.icio.us as a database. 3. Collaborative list curation. 4. Feedback monitorin"

via http://bensoncc.com/classic_navigator_088.htm "faces a total shortfall over the next 75 years of 0.56 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is slightly less than the estimated cost over that same period of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts just for the top 1 percent of households: 0.6 percent of GDP.[i] (Currently, households in the top 1 percent make more than $450,000 per year.) This striking fact should serve as a much-needed “reality check” in discussions over entitlement programs and the nation’s long-term fiscal future. Too often, such discussions assume that Social Security faces a titanic shortfall that will require radical restructuring of the program, while paying little or no attention to the enormous fiscal damage that would result from extending the tax cuts without paying for them."

I heard Nate Harrison at the Berkman Center Mashup conference a few years ago.

"Our inclinations secure a private advantage to us at a social cost. When an incorrect bias is fostered, the results can be damaging to the society at large -- from the selection of an incompetent government to projects going amiss. The problem is vicious and deep-rooted. With a sense of urgency, Hanson suggests interesting approaches such as prediction markets to promote honesty and overcome the pernicious effects of bias."

"1. The conquest would secure the entire trade in fur and fish. 2. The French would be prevented from supplying their West Indian islands with lumber, which would drive up the price of French sugar, to the advantage of our sugar merchants. 3. France would lose a market for manufactures. 4. France would no longer be able to build ships in America or acquire masts and timber. Their naval armament would be limited. 5. The expulsion of the French would give security to British North American colonies. The last point carried the most weight with Newcastle, but not enough. He was haunted by the increasing cost of the war, which had led to a sharp increase in taxation, with consequent grumbling from the landed interest in Parliament. To embark on a costly expedition which would gratify neither the King nor Parliament, but only a handful of merchants in America and London, seemed folly and waste to Newcastle. The project was dismissed, but carefully preserved by Pitt."

"the key to the predominance of the United States and England has been the individualistic ideology of the prevailing Anglo-American religion. Mead explains how this helped create a culture uniquely adapted to capitalism, a system that brought both English-speaking powers to a pinnacle of global power and prestige. Where some see an end to history and others a clash of civilizations, Mead sees the current conflicts in the Middle East as the latest challenge to the liberal, capitalist, and democratic world system that the Anglo-Americans are trying to build. What we need now, he says, is a diplomacy of civilizations based on a deeper understanding of the recurring conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes."

"We received hundreds of essays in response to our query about what anchors and unsettles our Catholic audience. So we asked some of you to speak about your tradition. The moving reflections we heard prompted us to depart from our usual format and bring you a fabric of voices from the Church itself."