October 2011
20 posts
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The Worst Business in the World
Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money. You knit ten different types of wool socks. Seven don’t sell enough to cover the cost of the wool, while the other three are so popular they’re capable of keeping the whole enterprise afloat. This is the basic math of book publishing, a business model that’s evolved over the course of the last couple centuries and has...
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“The performance of a geologic repository over such long time periods—longer than...”
– The Department of Energy on Yucca Mountain, 1998. Last night’s GOP debates opened old wounds.
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Do You Have a Flag?
“I found very many islands, inhabited by numberless people, all of which I took possession without opposition in the name of our most fortunate king by making formal proclamation and raising standards.”
—Christopher Columbus, proving once again that colonization is little more than the cunning use of flags.
