Quilters, drop your needles. Or at least pause and double-check what pattern you are quilting.
From now on, Light in the Valley, a quilt pattern that creates an optical illusion that lends it a three-dimensional effect, can no longer be quilted.
That particular pattern has been copyrighted, and Almost Amish, the company that bought the copyright, has sent letters from its attorney to representatives of Lancaster County quilt shops and nearly every volunteer fire company here that hosts a mud sale, telling them to cease and desist selling that quilt.
Not exactly what quilters and quilt sellers like to hear.
Back in 2011, I said that “the only way to save the Post Office will be to allow it to move into financial services”, seeing as how “banks in the US are mistrusted and disliked and many people would love to be able to just bank at the Post Office instead”.
That’s still true, and has been given a lot more salience since the Post’s Office inspector general released a 33-page white paper, last week, saying that the Post Office should move into what it calls, i
This Sunday, Super Bowl XLVIII (48) will be played in an open-air stadium, built atop a New Jersey swamp, in 2 degree weather, while pretending it’s actually taking place in New York.
I don’t know what confederacy of dunces within the NFL thought this was a good idea. It might be the worst idea. It’s shaping up to be the saddest Super Bowl ever.
For starters, it’s certainly going to be the coldest. Weather guys are talking about 2 to 7 degrees. Ticket prices are dropping by thousands of dollars.
One thing I think is highly apparent and disturbing is the current lack of tolerance for stock market losses. Newbie investors and veterans with selective memory seem to be incapable of quietly coping with downward moves in the stocks they own. It’s like they weren’t counting on not being immediately up in everything they bought, as though unrealized gains were an unalienable right in the constitution.
Financial media and the Twittersphere are wailing as though we’re at a Great Chieftain’s funeral.
The case for marriage promotion begins with some perfectly real correlations. Across a variety of measures — household income, self-reported life satisfaction, childrearing outcomes — married couples seem to do better than pairs of singles (and much better than single parents), particularly in populations towards the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. So it is natural to imagine that, if somehow poor people could be persuaded to marry more, they too would enjoy those improvements in household income, life satisfaction, and childrearing. Let them eat wedding cake!
This interactive map visually plots global outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, and other diseases that are easily preventable by inexpensive and effective vaccines.
When you picture a feminist or an environmental campaigner, what kind of a person do you think of? If you’re like the US and Canadian participants in this new paper, then you’ll have in mind an eccentric, militant, unhygienic person. Nadia Bashir and her colleagues say this commonly held stereotype of an activist is partly responsible for the sluggishness of social change. Large sections of the public agree with activists’ messages, but are put off by not wanting to affiliate themselves with the kind of person they think makes an activist.
…The findings have obvious real-life implications for activists. “…. seemingly zealous dedication to a social cause may backfire and elicit unfavourable reactions from others,” the researchers said. “… [T]he very individuals who are most actively engaged in promoting social change may inadvertently alienate members of the public and reduce pro-change motivation.”
There is no greater compliment to any culture than to be admired by Chinese, who with some justification regard their civilization as the world's most ancient and, in the long run, most successful. The high regard that the Chinese have for Jews should be a source of pride to the latter. In fact, it is very pleasant indeed for a Jew to spend time in China. The sad history of Jew-hatred has left scars on every European nation, but it is entirely absent in the world's largest country.
a techie’s viewpoint into a question which many non-Americans have when they start living in this country: how on earth can can moving money from one person to another be so difficult, expensive, and time-consuming?
The simple answer ... is that we’re suffering from a particularly toxic combination: an outdated payments system combined with a seemingly powerless central bank, which is happy to let the big banks dictate the pace of change (or lack thereof).
Consider your average preschool, which ends each day with parents picking up their kids. But there's a problem: A handful of parents are habitually late. The school sends out a note, urging timeliness: "Please be considerate of our wonderful staff who, after a long day of caring for your kids, are tired and want to go home," etc.
This works with some parents, but there are still chronic offenders. The school finally becomes punitive. Parents who are late start getting a fine added to the tuition bill. What happens?
Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.
How can we explain this emporiophobia—a fear of markets—given the overwhelming evidence that such institutions provide the greatest wealth, health and happiness for humankind?
Economists like myself deserve a part of the blame: The way we use the term competition instead of cooperation fosters anti-market bias. "Competition" carries a negative connotation because it implies winners and losers, and our minds naturally feel sympathy for the losers. But cooperation evokes a positive response: It's a win-win situation with no losers. And in fact the word competition doesn't depict market activity as aptly as the word cooperation. The "competitive economy" would be better described as the "cooperative economy."
Deng Xiaoping was fond of quoting the ancient Chinese proverb “Tao guang yang hui”, which is generally rendered: “Hide your brightness, bide your time.” The idea was to keep China’s capabilities secret until the moment was right to reveal them. Until then, the priority was to raise incomes and integrate the country into the global economic system.
Now China is comfortably the world’s second-largest economy and, quite possibly, on its way to becoming the largest. In Xi Jinping it has a leader whose articulation of a China Dream – “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” – is explicitly aimed at recapturing national greatness. The time for false modesty, it seems, is over.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.
“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and an author of the first of two papers detailing the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”
Sure, plenty of young Stanford graduates are getting rich finding new ways for teens to share selfies, and yes, a few serious IPOs are happening as well, but these examples do not resolve the problem that there has been a breakdown in the societal bargain that comes with market capitalism.
In societies like the U.S., we are supposed to tolerate inequities in wealth and income because the greater good is served by a market system that rewards effort, competitiveness and innovation and which punishes those that fall short of those standards. History has taught us that this model is greatly superior to that of a planned economy like that in the former Soviet Union.
But there are now such distortions in global financial markets that these benefits are all but lost.
In October, Swiss voters submitted sufficient signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would pay every citizen of Switzerland $2,800 per month, no strings attached. Similar efforts are under way throughout Europe. And there is growing talk of establishing a basic income for Americans as well. Interestingly, support comes mainly from those on the political right, including libertarians.
