Too big to fail?
Probably. But we loved all the geeky posters and colorful outfits. Special shout out to whoever designed the T-shirt pictured below.
Hat tip: Dylan Hunt
Dear Mark,
Like the Bob Marley song of yore, we continue to wait in vain for Facebook to introduce a “dislike” button. Although it’s your website, it’s very patronizing that you refuse to give us this choice. Nevertheless, instead of endlessly debating the merits of our proposal, here’s a friendly suggestion from your friends at Prior Probability: let us vote! That’s right. Just let all active Facebook users cast a vote on this issue once and for all (one vote per Facebook account). If a majority of users reject our suggestion, we will cheerfully accept the results and never mention this pet-peeve ever again, but if “dislike” wins, then you agree to abide by the results and install a thumbs-down button, as per the will of the majority. Deal?
In the alternative, why not allow users to decide for ourselves if we want to enable a “dislike” button on our individual accounts. After all, you already allow us to decide what privacy settings we prefer. So, why not extend this logic of choice to the “like” and “dislike” icons as well?
Yours truly,
F. E. Guerra-Pujol
What question keeps you up at night? By way of example, in the opening scene of the movie “The Social Network,” a fictional Mark Zuckerberg begins by asking, “How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SAT’s?” By comparison, Peter Thiel opens his book Zero to One (the first page of which is pictured below) with this provocative question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Aren’t these really one and the same question?
Among many other beautiful things, ProtonPaperie of Merritt Island, Florida offers the coaster set pictured below, consisting of vintage ads from the 1908 Sears catalogue (via Etsy).
Credit: ProtonPaperie
The piece pictured below, which was created by the graphic artist Dex, features Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s distinctive silhouette through a mix of typography and illustration. More works by Dex are available here.
Image Credit: Dex
Have you ever been bumped off a flight or received shabby service from a commercial airline carrier? In our next class, we will take a break from “The Social Network” in order to debate United’s fateful decision (see memes below) to bump (or “re-accommodate,” in corporate lingo) several fare-paying passengers–and forcibly remove one of them–off United flight 3411 in order to make room for some United crew members. (By the way, our friend and colleague Eric Rasmusen has prepared an excellent overview of “The United Airlines Forcible Removal Affair”; you can read it here.) This infamous incident will allow us to revisit many of the substantive areas we have studied thus far in this legal and ethical environment of business course, including business ethics (e.g. is it ever unethical to bump a passenger off a flight?), sources of law (such as federal aviation regulations versus state common law), the law of contracts (especially section 25 of United’s contract of carriage), the law of torts (what duties does United owe to its passengers?), the law of agency (how can United be legally liable for the excessive force used by the Chicago Aviation Police?), forum shopping (is the plaintiff better off suing in Kentucky or in Illinois?), and the decision whether to settle or go to trial.
In the 1930s and 1940s, academic economists were engaged in the so-called “socialist calculation debate,” a theoretical quarrel that was not fully resolved until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. (Until then, some economists seriously believed that a command-and-control economy like that of the now-defunct USSR could outperform a free market economy.) Fast forward 80 years. Now, academic economists are squabbling over “empirical economics.” Our friends and colleagues Russ Roberts and John Cochrane, for example, have mounted a powerful attack against empirical economics, arguing that empirical models in economics lack any real predictive power, while on the other side of this empirical debate, fellow economists like Adam Ozimek and Noah Smith have argued with equal passion and vigor that their fancy models are useful. Like the socialist calculation debate of yore, only time will tell who’s right regarding the value of empirical economics, but in the meantime, it’s ironic that Ozimek and Smith’s arguments in defense of empiricism are themselves not empirical-based.
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a personal view of the theory of computation
Submitted For Your Perusal is a weblog wherein Matt Thomas shares and writes about things he thinks are interesting.
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