Fluffy Links – April 10th 2007

Fianna Fail are putting DVDs instead of leaflets in our doors? Snazzy.

Walter gives a Cliff notes version of the “Microsoft is dead” essay. Please buy Snipshot – it’s going for a song.

The Union of Students in Ireland cut their links with SIPTU and instead align themselves with drink industry astroturf group MEAS and also with IBEC. Jesus. I can’t stand IBEC for their eircom sponsored crap through the years like: 2″we are the cheapest in Europe for telecoms prices and that those official EU reports are wrong” or “we’re not second last for broadband” or the real doozy: “we are poor for broadband because nobody wants broadband”. This excuse was flipped when the new eircom said it was availablity not demand which was the problem. USI and IBEC. These kids are the future of our country? I’d hate to be poor when they take over.

Farmers Market supplier in the UK found to be ripoff merchants. Hope the came is not the case in Ireland, though I notice some organic veg sellers seem to add a 100% hippy tax on to their good. Organic foods should not be luxury items, right?

So, The Economist will give me a discount and I can get a yearly subscription for just €92 a year. Saving 63% on the cover price. Or, thanks to this UK crowd, I can get the magazine for €72 a year. Quite a saving. Now, do I have time to read The Economist?

Here comes more monetization in Second Life. You can now pay for your real name to be shown in Second Life. I quite like being Casio Tone in Second Life. I can see some issues though for those with the same names as famous people. God love David Hasselhoff of Leap, Co. Cork if he tries to use that name. (Person may not actually exist. Just like KITT.)

Nice timeline of Twitter and Jaiku.

9 Responses to “Fluffy Links – April 10th 2007”

  1. Damien B says:

    I’ve just started my second year as an economist subscriber. It’s a great magazine (they only thing I try to deliberately set time aside to read) but I’ll say two things:

    1) There’s far too much in it. The articles are all of a readable length, but there’s so many articles in so many sections that it is difficult to finish one before the next arrives.

    2) I started reading The Economist by buying it in the airport on the way out on weekend breaks. The problem with subscribing is that you receive the magazine on the Monday or Tuesday after the Friday of publication- meaning when I’m going through the airport on a Friday I can either read last week’s edition or spend ~E6 on a magazine that I’ll be getting a new copy of as soon as I get home. Fair enough, this is less of a problem now as I Haven’t been in an airport since starting the mortgage payments 🙂

    So, enjoy. I’m sure you’ll find time for a few articles every week. The Economist have a few good blogs as well. I’m assuming someone who reads The Economist is also reading MarginalRevolution.com and the Freakonomics blog?

  2. Mark Dowling says:

    FF DVDs – well I suppose they’re good as coasters. At least leaflets can be recycled (like FF/FG/Lab etc policies)

  3. Simon McGarr says:

    I’d skip the Economist. It provides a superficial gloss of information to its readers (and I was a subscriber for a good few years) but in the end it isn’t worth the time it takes to read. Also, I don’t really like the unsigned writing.

    Get a subscription to the New York Review of Books instead. I look forward to it every fortnight- instead of the feeling I got with the Economist that I’d been delivered a chore.

  4. Damien B says:

    I’d accept what Simon says a bit – it’s only when you see reports on Ireland (or particularly the North) that you see the shortcomings in some of the pieces. Simon hits the nail on the head with “superficial”. Still accurate, just not always very probing.

    I must say, though, that I appreciate the introduction it gives to so many global topics in a short sitting. And the reporting on business/finance and UK/US issues is very good.

  5. bernard says:

    Get yourself a subscription to the Economist, and maybe New Scientist (if you swing that way).

    I started reading it the same way as Damien did – that and Newsweek (it didn’t take me long to figure the differences out).

    4 years later I actually enjoy it arriving in the letterbox-the opposite feeling I have to Wired (Note to self: cancel it next year)

    Simon, I would say the complete opposite. It is much more indepth than any newspaper I read (or don’t as the way it goes now).

    I agree with you about the unsigned writing (tbh, I don’t have a problem with it, but my girlfriend, as an ex-journalist-can you say that?- has a big problem.). Funnily enough their Economist Review magazine is not unsigned.

    WRT the FF DVDs – well as a collector of 1990s Irish ISP CDs, they will be a welcome addition to my coaster and clay-pidgeon shooting trips.

  6. Tipster says:

    My approach is to rotate across a set of magazines: The Economist once in six or seven weeks, New York Review of Books maybe one in every four or five issues, New Scientist less frequently, New Left Review once (maybe twice) a year, New Internationalist every other month (there’s a lot of “New”s in my magazine titles!), Scientific American once a year, Prospect once a year, Granta when it does a political issue.

    (Oh, and mulley.net at least once a week :-))

  7. Damien B says:

    Did you go for any of these options in the end?

  8. Damien says:

    Not yet Damien, but I’m enjoying the different opinions about what to read. I subbed to the Phoenix a while back and so far have read about 2.5 issues. Maybe I need to bring them on my travels a bit more.

  9. Damien B says:

    I’ve always meant to subscribe to that too, but it tends to appear on the same day as a few of our local papers (apparently there’s twenty-two in Mid/North Donegal, and we’ve one a day except Saturday in Letterkenny) so it’s easy enough to pick up.

    I enjoy the Phoenix, but like anything it loses a certain mystique when you see how it works!