Monday, February 16, 2004

for the whole article Posted here Monday, February 16, 2004 at 8:58:21 PM     Innovation does not always come first to the US. Later this year, Legend Group - China's largest PC maker, also known by its Lenovo brand - will include the E.M.A. display technology in the release of its Vela notebook in China. Asian companies tend to run first with Intel's concept designs, about a year ahead of American PC makers, said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's mobile platforms group. "In general, I find there is a lot more innovation and trial-and-error taking place outside of the shores of the U.S.," Mr. Chandrasekher said. "The U.S. consumer is not getting the same advantages as some of the other consumers overseas." ********

Economic support at the bottom- (for article..) Posted here Monday, February 16, 2004 at 1:28:07 PM     On removing the danger of economic free fall.. Back to Basics The most controversial of the plans is the universal basic income, whose best-known contemporary proponent is Philippe van Parijs, a professor of economic and moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. In his 1995 book Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford University Press), Mr. van Parijs argues that the liberal value of freedom presumes that humans have an array of realistic choices. And having such choices, he says, depends in turn on having at least a certain level of resources. Therefore society should guarantee everyone a basic income, which would be financed through progressive taxation. The basic income, Mr. van Parijs says, should be as large as the economy can efficiently sustain. The most common objection to Mr. van Parijs's model is that it would represent an unjust transfer of resources from people who do productive work to people who choose not to. (Scholars like to refer to this as the "Malibu-surfer problem.") Mr. van Parijs replies that the liberal principle of neutrality among conceptions of the good life, as articulated by such philosophers as Ronald Dworkin and the late John Rawls, demands that the state not favor the industrious (the "crazy," as Mr. van Parijs facetiously calls them) over the lazy. Mr. van Parijs also makes a more subtle point: He says that a universal basic income might actually draw certain unemployed people into the labor market. "Part of what motivated this plan," he says, "was an awareness that the existing benefit schemes tend to create dependency traps." In means-tested benefit programs like the U.S. welfare system, you can often immediately lose all of your benefits if you take a job. "But if you have this floor of income that you're entitled to no matter what," he says, "that's a way of getting you out of that trap." (The same insight lay behind the conservative economist Milton Friedman's early-1970s proposal for a negative income tax, which would be structurally similar to Mr. van Parijs's universal basic income.) ********

news strategy.. Posted here Monday, February 16, 2004 at 7:21:46 AM     Re how to get news.. One is to realize that frequency does not equal strategy. I may look more frequently at the NYT on line but my real strategy is to watch agonist.org   Likewise my frequent encounters with friends does not equal my strategy for finding out what is important.   So what is that other element?  Maybe it is to recognize the difference between gossip and solid difference making news.   Affinity does not make for a good difference strategy.   Note that career minded folks want high affinity. Real scientists, artists, .. want high yield contact with what is left out of current thinking.   ********