Gap Minder World
Gap Minder World tracks various world statistics over time. Fascinating.
Where Does your Drinking Water Come From?
The data is composed of two parts: The government’s data on rainfall, overlaid with data about drinking water consumption.
via Fastco Design
W3C Working on Decentralized Web Standard
Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions
via Read Write Web
“ As of February 2010, al-Qa’ida was allegedly contemplating conducting an operation against trains at an unspecified location in the United States on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001”
Where do major airlines fly?
via (flowing data)
Facebook Serves One in Three US Ads
http://prn.to/jHzMJS via Tech Crunch
There is no other web property that can come close to this. Perhaps Facebook’s $50 billion valuation is too low.
“”The United States has really been living in a fool’s paradise, or a phony economy, probably for more than 20 years. But our economy has been growing and getting bigger and bigger.
We have been able to convince the world to lend us money and to provide us with goods that we don’t produce and that we can’t afford to pay for with exports. And it has gotten to the point now where the problem is so big, especially since the real-estate bubble.
We’ve now borrowed so much money from abroad. Our trade deficits are now very big, and our industrial base and our infrastructure have been allowed to decay for so long, that we are now at a point that we can only survive as an economy thanks to the charity of the rest of the world.
They have provided us with all the goods that we can no longer produce because we lack the industrial capacity. And they have to lend us the money because we don’t have any savings anymore.
“”The housing bubble was an entirely preventable disaster. If the economists and other policy professionals who design economic and housing policy had not been asleep for the last decade, it could have been prevented.
Their incompetence will have serious impact on the living standards of a generation.
It would be the height of foolishness to create a house price support program to try to sustain the bubble.
The basic issue is that there is a huge excess supply at current prices. Unless we impose laws restricting construction to constrain supply, prices will continue to drop. At best, we may delay the decline and allow some current homeowners to sell at partially inflated prices so that the new buyers can enjoy the rest of the crash. That is not good policy.
“ Like a boxer, the investor’s first step toward winning is knowing what to expect from his adversary…. He should know that the market goes to extremes in both directions, that it can be both the supportive, caring, seductive lover and the cruel, cold, insidious antagonist; that it can cause euphoria and exhilaration or anger, fear and despair. He should know that the market can change its mood on a dime; that it can be capricious, enigmatic, and ornery; and that mostly it can be dull, listless, and boring.”
