social opportunity is on the run too. in early december, businessweek noted that significant social mobility had dropped by two thirds from 1978. the nation poses the question if you wanted to create a caste society how would you go about it… One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could…
Leave a CommentAuthor: alec
today i needed to find some moving boxes and a car to rent. first i tried to find uhaul for the boxes. impossible to find a company website. the top thirty google listings for uhaul toronto have almost all been spammed by a single company. what’s worse that company has a talking doll as its spokesperson. i have written google to let them know about the spammer. next i decided to rent a car, preferably from national as i had some good experience with them in the past and they were not expensive. no luck there either. no company website…
Leave a Commentsince i’ve been back in toronto, i’ve received two newspapers each day. the globe & mail which is known as a national paper (although it is based in toronto) and the toronto star which is proudly a city paper. the star has its role on the national stage as well as it is sole major liberal voice in canadian newspapers. all the other major canadian papers are part of canwest or southham. canwest’s major contribution to canadian culture has been the rebroadcast of american hit tv shows with canadian ads. they no longer allow independent editorial in their dozens of…
Leave a Commentrussell smith talks about virtual beauty – a new beauty contest of virtual models. more interesting is the point he makes about the body image of women. it certainly is no longer men who are at fault for women’s compulsion towards self-starvation. Contrary to popular belief, it is not men, on the whole, who determine the beauty ideal in fashion magazines. The readership of fashion magazines, like the editorship of fashion magazines, like the audience for fashion shows themselves, is female. Fashion models tend to be much skinnier in women’s magazines than they are in men’s magazines. Compare the curviness…
1 Commentriding through the vine fields on the way up to kahlenburg today i was just thinking what preposterous prices newspapers like the nytimes charge for archived articles. i mean if you’re preparing a client presentation in an advertising agency sure maybe you’d spend the company money at $3/pop (for a newspaper article?). but nobody is going to spend their own money at those rates. thus an enormous amount of knowledge is effectively lost to humanity. or at least buried. if we are to rebuild the alexander library in cyberspace, it must be possible to access copyright materials for minimal cost….
Leave a Commentthe americans are in need of democracy aid from the rest of the world, say two young swedes. i’m not certain whether charity towards the americans is in order, but if a little bit of money might bring about regime change in washington… better than bombs.
Leave a Commentwhen i was in moscow, i knew many people who had lived through the stalin period. mainly the parents and grandparents of my friends. it was a fearful time and people did what they could not to be fingered. they never knew who might report them, what the consequences might be of a loose word here, an incautious observation there. as one of the writers from the nation boldly notes, this seems to be the direction that the united states is taking now. As a legal concept, can someone explain the difference between George W. Bush’s “enemy combatant” and Josef…
Leave a CommentIf you refuse where you have always granted you invite to theft. some days you just look up from your book and find that the world is rich in reflection and sense. for me such a day was when i discovered one of the maxims of publilius servus, the first great author of mimes (circa 80 BC). very little of his writing survives apart from his maxims. but they are as applicable today as when he wrote them. the roman world was perhaps the most similar of all the ancient ones to our own. what makes us so similar? good…
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