Category — Politics

Above: Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division after one of Steve Ballmer’s “angry” days.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft management is cracking down on the use of iPhones amongst company employees. In a recent meeting executives Andy Lees (who is in charge of mobile-phone software development) and Robbie Bach (President of Entertainment and Devices Division, responsible for a.o. the Xbox) were chastised by CEO Steve Ballmer when arguing that [Read more →]

Above: “I am *this* much more awesome than all of you guys!”
Picture from unattributable.com

Attending a small rock concert this weekend (a good one, with the Estonian band Mild), I was struck by tremendous amount of unabashed ego displayed by the lead singer of the band. Now, in the case of an aspiring rock star, this is of course not a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that a big, proud, and unapologetic ego is mostly a very good thing for a most live performers, especially [Read more →]

How about a really big steel plant… right here?

A friend and fellow Technology Governance student here at the Tallinn University  of Technology shared with me two papers by Tatiana Mikhailova from Harvard’s Davis Center and Boston University’s economics department, in which she argues that spatial inefficiency caused by Soviet planning may be costing Russia more than 1,2% of their GDP annually compared to a market-based counter-factual scenario, chiefly because of higher energy costs necessitated by cold weather.

I’ve included the abstract of Mikhailova’s paper The Cost of the Cold: The Legacy of Soviet Location Policy in Russian Energy Consumption, Productivity, and Growth below:

The spatial allocation of productive resources in present day Russia is inherited from the Soviet Union. Soviet system allocated investments without regard to economic efficiency, as the result the colder regions of Russia are significantly overpopulated compared to the market-based counterfactual. This paper estimates the cost imposed on Russia by this excess exposure to cold through excess energy use and loss of productivity. We show that the inherited spatial inefficiency costs Russia above 1.2% GDP annually in extra energy consumption and construction productivity alone.

Thanks to Mihhail, a loyal Evolution-Revolution reader, for sharing the papers.

I just came across a post at the North Korea Economy Watch blog linking to North Korean comic book translations made by Heinz Insu Fenkl, an associate professor in the department of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz . As such, I have spent the last couple of hours or so reading about the Great General Mighty Wing and the Kim Brothers in Blizzard in The Jungle. It is easy for those of us who grew up after the end of the cold war to think of authoritarian dictatorships and ultra-explicit propaganda as relics of the distant past. These North Korean comics sadly remind us that this is not the case. They are, however, [Read more →]

Picture from: http://pressthat.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/reinterpreting-islam/

Most of the links contained in this article point to Norwegian-language websites – as such I hope those of you who do not speak Norwegian and are interested in their contents make good use of Google translate. All the quotes below are translated from the original Norwegian by myself. If any Norwegians amongst you find any wrong or questionable translations, please email me and I will do my best to correct them.

During the last few weeks the homeland of Evolution-Revolution’s authors has been the stage of a fiery public debate after Dagbladet, one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, printed a picture on their front page of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed as a pig scribbling in the Koran with his trotters. However, despite its unpleasantness, the still ongoing furore following the publication has arguably been very valuable in that we have learned a whole lot about the state of immigration, integration, and Islam in Norway.

The picture in question was linked to in a post on the the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST’s) Facebook-page discussion board, amongst other posts containing highly racist remarks. After recieving a tip about it, Dagbladet wrote an article presumably meant to criticize PST for allowing a considerable amount of hateful and racist statements to be posted on their discussion board with apparent impunity. In doing so, however, they put the  - to Muslims – extremely offensive caricature in question on the front page of their print edition.

Predictably, there were heated reactions from many of Norway’s approximately 140 000 Muslims. In particular, many saw [Read more →]

The Grinch Who Stole Twelfth Grade

So argues Republican state Senator Chris Buttars in the Utah State Assembly, who recently proposed to drop the last year of high school altogether in an attempt to balance the state of Utah’s bleeding budget. Of course, an advantage of doing this from state Sen. Buttars point of view would be less time to teach students Biology – the senator has previously sponsored a (failed) bill to change the curricula of the science subject so as to add in “Divine Design” as an alternative to evolution. Last year, Senator Buttars also stated that radical homosexuals are “probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of.” We here at Evolution-Revolution think deteriorating education might be a better guess.

Rescuing a virgin in dire straits

The development of Norway’s soverign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund (GPF), has always been interesting. GPF will this year attend 2000 meetings with American companies, in which they own up to 5 percent, urging them to separate the role of CEO and Chairman. They hope to make the governance structure more transparent and independent. Governance structure in many American corporations is arguably quite old fashioned and this should be a welcome nudge in the right direction. It’s hard to argue this to be a bad thing and it could quite possibly increase returns for Norway in the long run. Even a marginal increase would be significant as the stated investment horizion of the fund is infinite, that is until the collapse of the universe or the world financial system, whichever should come first.

We do what we can to keep the battle of ideas raging.

Here at Tallinn University of Technology, our professor Wolfgang Drecshler pointed out today that as ICT enables more choice in where to get political commentary and analysis, the tendency is that people choose to only get it from sources with whom they already agree. The predictable effect is more political polarization and less real public debate.

To the extent that the authors of Evolution-Revolution are amongst those who humbly provide political commentary and analysis, we pledge to do what we can to help prevent such polarization. By eclectically embracing the ideas of the political left, right, and radical center, we sincerely hope that none of you will agree with us all the time.

Picture from http://www.jimrlong.us/

On our recent and very pleasurable trip the the United States, some of my more conservative friends who we were visiting insisted on showing us one of their new favorite movies - An American Carol. The movie is a railing if highly inconsistent criticism of any and every idea championed by liberal America anno 2008, in particular its anti-war sentiment. The main character of the movie is Michael Moore (“Malone” in the movie), who takes the role as the scrooge of 4th of july – and is visited by three ghosts, amongst them General George Patton and country singer Trace Atkins (proudly playing himself). On his way to salvation and pro-war attitudes, he is slapped in the face repeatedly by an (as always) morally righteous Bill O’Reilly (also played by himself), who warns Moore that he is abusing his freedom of speech by preaching pacifism. In particular, the film echoes conservative America by claiming that Michael Moore and his followers – by questioning the moral superiority of the United States at war [Read more →]