Monthly Archives: March 2010

A great bottom-up conversation between Reihan Salam and Chris Hayes: The key parts: Reihan Salam:That’s what I find most vivid and exciting, and it’s also what I find most important, because it also involves going beyond the nation state. It … Continue reading →

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes a strong case against the startup visa: Investors already have too much power in the investor-entrepreneur relationship. If this act is passed, fundraising won’t just affect an entrepreneur’s company, but his or her life. You have to … Continue reading →

Arnold Kling has posted his list of influential books. The first one is The Best and the Brightest, the book I’ve been blogging about the last few weeks: My take-away from that book might be described as “The Exclusive Country … Continue reading →

Matt and Will are tough acts to follow, but here is my list of books that have most influenced me, in roughly chronological order: Free to Choose: My father had this on his bookshelf, and it’s the first serious book … Continue reading →

Reader Bob Hawkins left a really excellent comment that I’m going to quote in full: There’s also the fact that the civilian departments don’t take their war responsibilities seriously. The military ends up doing jobs that are theoretically the responsibility … Continue reading →

To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No … Continue reading →

In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain … Continue reading →

Cord Blomquist did a good post over at TLF about the USTR/open source software issue. It set off a lively debate in the comments that, I think, reflected a common misconception about what free software is and why it’s valuable. … Continue reading →

Via Techdirt, David Levine spots an interesting breakdown of Metallica’s revenues: Along with touring revenue — the band pulled in $22.8 million from 55 arena shows reported to Boxscore that drew more than 968,000 fans — Metallica sold 694,000 albums … Continue reading →

Eric Raymond predicts that smartphones will disrupt the traditional PC market: Here’s what I think my computing experience is going to look like, oh, about 2014: All my software development projects and personal papers live on the same device I … Continue reading →