Went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography yesterday, and saw two of my favorite photos ever, and a contender for #3. They apparently own an amazing collection, many of my favorites were theirs.
Can’t find anything by Keiichirō Gotō online, but his “Displaced History” is my new number 1. Saw a really good print of Bill Brant’s “Portrait of Young Girl, Eaton Place, 1955″
The other was from Mario Giacomelli’s “There are no hands to caress my face” series, a cropped to a very wide format shot of 3 seminarians compressed from background to foreground looking at a kitten climbing a tree.
Mr. Paulson was frequently on the phone with Bear and J. P. Morgan executives, negotiating the details of the deal, the senior Treasury official said. Initially, Morgan wanted to pick off select parts of Bear, but Mr. Paulson insisted that it take the entire Bear portfolio, the official said.
This was no normal negotiation, says one person involved in the matter. Instead of two parties, there were three, this person explains, the third being the government. It is unclear what explicit requests were made by the Fed or Treasury. But the deal now in place has a number of features that are highly unusual, according to people who worked on the transaction.
Well, it’s time to cast those ballots again with this relic of early TV: The Hoot Gibson Show. It “stars” an aging B-movie western figure of the same name. The real meat of this program lies in its sponsor. At the 6:50 mark the sponsor appears in the flesh, a Chinchilla salesman who could not deliver a line of script to save his life.
This paper is a sequel of an article I wrote twenty years ago that I now think can be put more tightly and clearly. That early paper was born of the irritation I felt, and continue to feel, at much of the classical liberal discourse about limited government. At least since Locke, that discourse sets out a normative ideal of government: the protector of “rights” its citizens are in some fashion endowed with, and the guarantor of liberty that ranks above rival values. Such government uses coercion only to enforce the rules of just conduct. This ideal is attractive enough to the liberal mind. The reason why it nevertheless irritates is that it makes it seem that the writing of a constitution of liberty is a plausible means for transforming the normative ideal into positive reality. The message is that “we” can have limited government in the above sense if only “we” understand why we ought to wish it. The “we” is crucial, for it suppresses the essence of collective choice. Collective choice starts where unanimity ends, and involves some deciding for all, where the “some” control the apparatus of government. It is the potential for some to benefit morally and materially at the expense of others that creates the bone of contention and that limits on government are meant to move out of reach. It is odd that little or no awareness is shown of the “incentive-incompatibility” (if we may use ugly but handy jargon) of limits that would exert real rather than illusory restraint.
Fairly simple and easy to read look at the impossibility of legislatively constraining government, and on the other hand the natural economic limits that do constrain all governments (though in a painfully wide band that they can and do tend to oscillate in).
A six-foot-high hedge separated me from the garden next door but not from its voices. It was my first Sunday morning in the house I sublet on Wells Hill Avenue by Casa Loma in Toronto. I couldn’t make out what was being said but one of the voices sounded familiar. I moved closer and parted the hedge just enough for a covert glimpse of my new neighbours. A middle-aged man was lying on his back in a hammock with a book held up vertically above his head as he read aloud. Next to him a young man sat in a deck chair with a book on his lap. The young man said: “Vico’s cycles.” The older man said: “Vicious Circles.” “Viscous cyclones,“ said the young man. I was awestruck. My God, I thought, I must be the only person in the world at this moment listening to what looks like a tag team reading Finnegans Wake. Later I learned I had been witness to a regular occurrence. Eric McLuhan and his father, Marshall, were reading at each other.
Brands has one (of two) lineages of patents on digital blinding, the other one was via David Chaum, and is now lost somewhere in some bank’s hands due to bankruptcy. Though Chaum was working on something new, haven’t heard anything about that . . . Anyhow, this means Microsoft is in control of the current state of the art for digital money, and identity management.
Congratulations - it must have been a fantastic monetary offer to make you withdraw credentials from the open market like this and hand over control of identity to MS.
This just set [Privacy Enhancing Technologies] back many years.
And Kim Cameron (Microsoft) has a great round up of the PR and reactions in the wake of the announcement at identityblog: Reactions to Credentica acquisition
He ends with:
That doesn’t mean it is trivial to figure out the best legal mecahnisms for making the intellectual property and even the code available to the ecosystem. Lawyers are needed, and it takes a while. But I can guarantee everyone that I have zero intention of hoarding Minimal Disclosure Tokens or turning U-Prove into a proprietary Microsoft technology silo.
Sure you don’t, but what about your evil overlords?
