Yves here. It may seem odd for Michael Olenick, who has lambasted Wikipedia at NC and later at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, to suggest that a Wikipedia offspring, a heretofore half-hearted search engine project that he proposes calling Wikisearch, could serve as a badly-needed competitor for Google. But we live in a world of beauty contests between Cinderella’s ugly sisters.
It’s no secret that Google has become so terrible that it’s unusable for anything but shopping. Not only no more Boolean searches, but you can’t even to “Verbatim” and an exact date range at the same time. And these are supposed to be tech wunderkind?
Yves here. While this article has a lot to recommend it, I have to voice some reservations. The first is that it jumps on the “Biden as FDR” bandwagon, which Lambert debunked yesterday. The second is the New Deal brand expropriation by Green New Deal advocates.
As we’ve stressed repeatedly, the Green New Deal proponents will not acknowledge, let alone promote, far and aways the most important and urgent measures we can take to combat climate change: radical conservation. They aren’t even pushing for some of the measures implemented during the Oil Crisis to discourage fossil fuel use, like setting summer thermometers at 77 degrees to reduce air conditioning use, every other day access to gas stations, and encouraging commuter ride-sharing. These may seem merely symbolic to the level of the challenge, but they send a strong psychological message of needing to change our daily habits to reduce greenhouse gas use. And perhaps most important, if citizens en masse are encouraged o
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure and climate proposal has a lot of people excited, and no wonder. Americans are sick of being stuck with frazzled electric grids, foul drinking water, falling bridges, far too many left out of prosperity, and feeling that the country’s global status is suffering.
On March 31
st, President Biden described his vision to carpenters at a training facility in Pittsburgh: “It’s going to boost America’s innovative edge in markets where global leadership is up for grabs markets like battery technology, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy, the competition with China in particular.”
Yves here. This is a greatly expanded and considerably broader follow-up to an article on Wikipedia by Michael Olenick early this year, Wikipedia: The Overlooked Monopoly. Here, Olenick debunks the idea that Wikipedia is impoverished by showing not only its level of funding but also digging into its sources, a considerable amount of which comes from Silicon Valley titans via intermediaries. He also shows how Wikipedia’s entries (and absence of them) are slanted to favor its tech backers.
There are no polls, but it is a safe guess that the general public thinks of Wikipedia, the ubiquitous online encyclopedia, as one more plucky non-governmental organization in which poorly remunerated, public-spirited scholars and savants struggle to bring enlightenment to an extensively unappreciative world. Feeding this soothing impression are comments by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales that the non-profit is “teetering forever on the edge of bankruptcy,” his assurance that Wikipedia is “
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 04April 2021
The news posted last week for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (aka SARS-CoV-2), which produces COVID-19 disease, has been surveyed and some important articles are summarized here. The articles are more or less organized with general virus news and anecdotes first, then stories from around the US, followed by an increased number of items from other countries around the globe. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.
Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons.
Summary:
There hasn t been much change in the trajectory of US Covid metrics: new cases continue to increase at a modest pace, while US Covid deaths continue to fall. New cases of Covid confirmed over the week ending April 3rd were 5.9% higher that those confirmed over the week ending March 27th, and 15.9% higher than those of the week ending March 20th, while US Covid deaths during the week ending April 3rd were 12.2% lower than