There's active twittering going on in the audience at the Internet Identity Workshop (#IIW). In order to read it, I had to break down and create a twitter account, and in for a dime, no for a dollar, so I'm going to do the (very occasional) tweet, jst to see what it's like.
But much as I and my SRI-fingers love the telegraphic, 140 characters may be too short. But meanwhile, look for mfroomkin at Twitter, and #IIW for micro-summaries of the conference.
The Guardian sent someone to cover the annual (super-secret) Bilderberg meeting, in which the worldwide power elite are said to hang out together. Even the guest list is a secret. Most media don't even bother trying to cover it.
The result of the exercise is somewhat farcical, and a bit sad. It involves a lot of Greek police. Charlie Skelton's Bilderberg files
Economics is at its best when making the counter-intuitive seem obvious. For example, Paul Krugman explaining China and the liquidity trap:
Right now we’re in a liquidity trap, which, as I explained in an earlier post, means that we have an incipient excess supply of savings even at a zero interest rate. …
In this situation, America has too large a supply of desired savings. If the Chinese spend more and save less, that’s a good thing from our point of view. To put it another way, we’re facing a global paradox of thrift, and everyone wishes everyone else would save less.
Or to put it a third way, the argument that a reduction in China’s dollar purchases would be contractionary for America because it would drive up interest rates is equivalent to the argument that fiscal expansion is contractionary for the same reason — and equivalently wrong.
But what if China doesn’t spend more, but just reallocates its reserves from dollars to, say, euros? The answer is, that’s also good for us: a weaker dollar will help our exports, at Europe’s expense.
I'm off this afternoon to California, where I'll be at the 8th Internet Identity Workshop, which will take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
I've never been to one of these before, but people who do this stuff — that is, make the tools that do and use ID — say it's the place to be, and there's an impressive list of attendees, so I'm giving it a try.
This will also be my first out-of-town unconference, I think, in that I don't count the chaos which was the first ever DNS-related meeting I attended almost exactly 10 years ago, the International Forum on the White Paper, in Reston, Virginia. (I've also been to local barcamps, but they're small.)
I'm back late Wednesday. No idea what blogging will be like in the interim.
Actually, I did get through eventually, but I couldn't figure out how to get Wolfram Alpha to give me a graph of the the national debt in dollars / GNP in inflation-adjusted (real) dollars over time.
I'm sure it will be a Very Cool tool once I get the hang of it.
Statistical Proof that You Hate Freedom: Daily Kos has a textbook takedown of a hack study purporting to show a correlation between the lack of freedom in a US state (measured, it turns out, according to a somewhat peculiar metric) and the propensity to vote for Democrats.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw