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Leveraging the total and well justified outrage at the banks over their massive bailouts, The Robin Hood Tax project rebrands the Tobin Tax idea (and prior to that Keynes’ idea of a tax on all financial transactions) to try to divert bailout money and questionably speculative activity (rather than wealth creation) to assist in social causes, combatting climate change and other social priorities.

Totally love this idea, even as a former economist. I’d love to see it pushed despite practical difficulties. Oh, and absolutely fantastic performance by Bill Nighy in the Curtis directed short (and how can you not love seeing the Gherkin in the background?).

Missed this video when it was making the rounds a while back. Interesting way of viewing the history of human rights, but I think its initial question that is posed is a valid one; how many of us could name the human rights we and the rest of the people on the planet are heir to ?

via my brother (of all the people you’d never think would send something like this.)

My new place is moving from being a startup to having to put in places some things you need for the longer term running of a charity. So, I’ve been fiddling with a few apps. I’d deployed one which works perfectly in dev and test and one of my staff, when I said i was about to spin up an EC2 instance to host it, mentioned it was small enough we could run probably run it for free on the everyone-gushes-about-it Heroku (which is something I’ve thought about some of my other personal apps).

OMG, this is awesome. Yeah, ok so that first degree of mine is in Economics and Political Science, so I’m totally geeking out on this, but it’s actually really good as well as theoretically accurate. So, listen close.

If you don’t know anything about economics, the scary thing you should take away from this is how heavily opposed in advice these two approaches are and that supporting one or the other is fundamentally a question, when you strip everything down to fundamentals, of belief. Pretty spooky, huh ?

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

Most astute thing I’ve heard about Apple’s success yet.

While I think it may be a wee bit over the top, you have to love Umair Haque’s latest “The Builder’s Manifesto” on the need for Builders instead of Leaders. Definitely an idea here.

This relationship isn’t working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We’ve tried to make it work. But it’s not us — it’s you (really).

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately. Specifically: why, today, when a wave of crises is sweeping the globe, does leadership seem to be almost totally absent?

OMG, I cannot tell you how much I love seeing this article. There is hope for me yet that just isn’t me being optimistic about being half as cool as my grandparents in later life. Cause if anyone thinks I want my life to be much, much different from the progress I’ve made up to know is going to be sorely disappointed.

Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure

And this is, in fact, dedicated to my super cool Nan and GrandDad, whatever “Monkey Island” they may be on at this moment, as they confound their children trying to locate them. ;-)

Hands down the best (and most fun) Development Manager I’ve ever worked with and former Riptown peep, Core, doing a presentation at Ignite Toronto on how Software Development is like Kung Fu (I should point out that my first ever lunch with Corey first day on the new gig revolved around Asian cinema in a way that frightened both existing staff and newcomers alike who were present).

I am so stealing slides from this presentation. Awesome job Core!

How embarrassing for us all internationally. Not just a Fossil of the Day award, but we beat out all the other shamed attendees to win the overall Colossal Fossil of the Year award (dead link). Will someone please call an election and his ridiculous, lame duck Bush-esque government out of office, please ? It’s making us look like schmucks internationally.

‘Fossil of the Year goes to CANADA, for bringing a totally unacceptable position into Copenhagen and refusing to strengthen it one bit. Canada’s 2020 target is among the worst in the industrialized world, and leaked cabinet documents revealed that the governments is contemplating a cap-and-trade plan so weak that it would put even that target out of reach.

This is unfathomably amazing. A digital map of our known universe by the American Museum of Natural History going all the way from the Himalayas to the edge of our senses and the afterglow of the Big Bang. Humbling hugeness.

If you’ve got a really big screen I recommend going to the AMNH YouTube site and watching this in hidef. It’s incredible on my cinema display.