Media Dragon Amber: Successful By Making Other People Rich or Poor

They tried to bury Media Dragons. They did not know we were seeds ...

An ant may well destroy a dam...

~Slavic Saying

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” 

—William Wordsworth 15 reasons I think you should blog

To be a writer is to accept abuse. Here's D.H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell: "The article you send me is a plausible lie, and I hate it." They were friends...  Imagine What Is Said About MD at Crown or # Monkeys on Fridays  :::-)  

Douglas Rushkoff to speak at PSFK conference on how robots and AI can help us recognize what is special about humans Successful making people rich

It's called Joey (Imrich) Crowd, and it's marketing itself as crowdfunding 3.0. Its main goal is to combine a number of aspects of the average crowdfunding campaign — letting you manage your social media from your campaign on Joey Crowd, and even connecting you with influencers in your niche. Antipodean crowdfunding platform for Bohemians and Gypsies

James T. Bennett, Subsidizing Culture: Taxpayer Enrichment of the Creative Class, the subtitle says it all.

Philosophers once needed books, writing tools, and perhaps a glass of sherry. Now they think with the Internet. Cognition itself is connected to the web...  Think with the Media Dragon 

Christopher Hitchens was no admirer of Isaiah Berlin. But the preservation of liberty depends on both types of men: Hitchens for his courage, Berlin for his tolerance... Hitchens for his courage, Berlin for his tolerance

“The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is pleased to announce that Amber, an open-source software tool that preserves content and prevents broken links, has been promoted to full project status on Drupal.org. When installed on a blog or website, Amber can take a snapshot of the content of every linked page, ensuring that even if those pages are interfered with or blocked, the original content will be available.”

Location Trackers Reveal Where Your E-Junk Really Ends Up Wired 

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Gentlemen, put down your razors. The hairy chest is back in style!

It is hard to suppress schadenfreude  as more and more resume writers get into executive position and that Peter Principle Dilemmas ... Sadly, it is not always cream that rising to the top...

Beneath the clinical, flat surface of bureaucratic language — with its terms such as ‘outputs’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘deliverables’ — lies the real world of human activity. 

Public service writing should be clear and direct, active and accountable. Sentences should be action-orientated, lush with verbs. We should use doing words because we are doers, or we should be. The active voice should be the grammatical standard: ‘I decided’, rather than ‘it was decided’. Insist on your staff writing competently, succinctly and accurately. Frankly, any competent officer in the APS should be able to draft a cogent and logical paper of around, let’s say, 2000 words without seeking the text and template of what was prepared before. Regrettably, too often staff papers are a pedestrian and ill-thought out mash of cut-and-paste sections of pre-existing text, which may or may not be relevant to the issue. Words and meaning often part company in such taped-together, textual wrecks. Sadly, too many senior officers end up spending far too much time, often late at night, re-writing such sloppy fare. There are exceptions, but they are too few. 

Michael Pezzullo: an empire of rules or a commonwealth of ideas?   

Following up on last week's post, Grit and Legal Education:  Wall Street Journal, The Virtue of Hard Things (reviewingAngela Duckworth (University of Pennsylvania), Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (May 3, 2016)):

Most people would think of John Irving as a gifted wordsmith. He is the author of best-selling novels celebrated for their Dickensian plots, including “The Cider House Rules” and “The World According to Garp.” But Mr. Irving has severe dyslexia, was a C-minus English student in high school and scored 475 out of 800 on the SAT verbal test. How, then, did he have such a remarkably successful career as a write

Robert Kuehn (Washington University), Clinical Costs: Separating Fact From Opinion: The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” When it comes to expanding clinical legal education, the knee-jerk opinion is that it is too expensive for legal education to follow the lead of other professional schools and ensure that every student graduates with a clinical experience through a law clinic or externship. Even the richest law schools couldn’t resistplaying the cost card to scare the ABA out of requiring additional professional skills training: “Requiring all law schools to provide 15 experiential credit hours to each student will impose large costs on law schools, costs that would have to be passed on to students. . . . Even a law school with significant financial resources could not afford such an undertaking.”

This seems so French: “Man Sues Former Employers for Boring Him” [Atlas Obscura, Paris; but tcompare 1994 Canadian story of attorney Paul Ebbs]

Newspaper chain sending IT jobs 

Don and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World lists more possible uses for blockchains than you would have thought possible

The Telegraph, Churchill a 'Serial Tax Avoider':

Sir Winston Churchill was a serial tax avoider who exploited loopholes and faked his own retirement in collusion with the chairman of Inland Revenue, his biographer has claimed.

“Well, the only reason whyBookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it.”

Vulture 

Memoir Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont notes:

“…so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, ‘Yes!’ And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communion.”

 Do media dragons have better personalities than do wordpressers?

Do vegans have better personalities than do vegetarians?

Gap Between CEOs + Workers Much Bigger Than You Realize Barry Ritholtz 

Uber for Tractors leased by farmers – Website Rents Farm Equipment Popular Mechanics

The Collapse of the Middle-Class Job Truthout

NOAA looks for answers in the mysterious Mariana Trench Christian Science Monitor 

 Lange, Bettina and Haines, Fiona, Regulatory Transformations: An Introduction (2015). Regulatory Transformations: Rethinking Economy Society Interactions, Chapter 1, pp. 1-30, August 2015. Available for download at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract=2777223

“Regulation is no longer the prerogative of either states or markets. Increasingly citizens in association with businesses catalyse regulation which marks the rise of a social sphere in regulation. Around the world, in San Francisco, Melbourne, Munich and Mexico City, citizens have sought to transform how and to what end economic transactions are conducted. For instance, ‘carrot mob’ initiatives use positive economic incentives, not provided by a state legal system, but by a collective of civil society actors in order to change business behaviour. In contrast to ‘negative’ consumer boycotts, ‘carrot mob’ events use ‘buycotts’. They harness competition between businesses as the lever for changing how and for what purpose business transactions are conducted. Through new social media ‘carrot mobs’ mobilize groups of citizens to purchase goods at a particular time in a specific shop.

It turns Queen Elizabeth II was not amused by the behavior of Chinese officials prior to President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the U.K. last year. In fact, she agreed with Metropolitan Police Commander Lucy D’Orsi on Tuesday that the officials were “very rude to the ambassador.” Rude Communist Chinese