When the rich are highly concentrated in wealthy enclaves, they’re less likely to give as compared with the rich living in more economically diverse neighborhoods. The report found that in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of taxpayers reported earning $200,000 or more, the average giving was just 2.8 percent of discretionary income. In other words, concentration of wealth is also isolation from the less fortunate….It’s not too shocking that some people give less than others, even among the rich. But it’s interesting to see how neighborhood location and composition can limit the power of the wealthy to give.
Isolated and Under-Exposed: Why the Rich Don’t Give - Neighborhoods - The Atlantic Cities. Limit their power to give? Seriously? How sad, this prison of wealth, which renders those within it incapable of knowing that others have needs. We can but pity their helplessness, I suppose. I mean, how lamentable that they ended up in those “wealthy enclaves,” through no fault of their own.
On the other hand, there’s the explanation Daffy Duck once gave of his lust for “doubloons, and triploons, and, uh, quadruploons”: It’s “on account of I am greedy.”
One of my favorite cultural critics, Albert Murray, began publishing his writing at age 46. I imagine him during his 19-year career in the Air Force, mulling over the ideas that one day would dazzle me and many others. I imagine him practicing thought riffs and idea phrases so that when he decided to set words to the page, they sparkled with their elegant composition and elucidation. It strikes me as beside the point to call him a late bloomer. I’d rather call him a man who wrote on his own time — the right time. If we are open, we can see that possibility in us all.
Your side stirs up hate against the people on my side. The horrible signs your people hold up at their protests, the venom your spokesmen spew on television: It’s scary. I wonder how you can go through life with all that anger inside you.
Your side is simplistic. You never stop and think things through. That’s how you end up with your ridiculously inconsistent positions on abortion and the death penalty. You even fight against legislation that would make your own life better! How crazy is that?
Honestly, I don’t know whether to be sorry for you or mad. Sometimes I wish we could just free you from these awful leaders and their dumb ideas. Sometimes I wish all the people on your side would just secede and form your own country.
I don’t know if your side even believes in democracy. Your people are willing to do whatever it takes to win. That’s all they care about. They don’t care about how much damage their incivility does to the tone of our national life. It makes me sad.
— I’m Right, You’re Wrong and Other Political Truths
New Statesman: Are you writing anything at the moment?Diana Athill: I’m not. I do a bit of book reviewing and write the odd article, but I haven’t got another book going.
NS: Why is that?
Athill: If something comes out, it has to have gone in first. By the time you’re 94, not a hell of a lot goes in. I’m not a novelist; I haven’t got the imagination to be a novelist – I’ve always written about experience, but I’ve had it all now and have said it all.
It’s shameful that Apple has asked its users to put so much trust in its cloud services, and not put better security mechanisms in place to protect them. AppleIDs are too easily reset, which effectively makes iCloud a data security nightmare. I’ve had person after person after person report similar instances to me, some providing documentation showing how easily their Apple accounts were compromised.And due to Apple’s opacity, I have no way of knowing if things have improved. Apple has refused to tell me in what ways its policies weren’t followed “completely” in my case. Despite being an Apple user for nearly 20 years and having generally positive feelings toward the company, I no longer trust it to do the right thing in terms of protecting my data. I’ve turned off its Find My services and won’t turn them back on.
Amazon also had a glaring security flaw, and although it has fixed that exploit, the flaw’s mere existence should serve as a warning to all of us about all of our other accounts. We don’t often know what’s required to issue a password reset, or have someone get into our account through a company’s tech support system.
But hackers do.
All Cambridge editions of the Book of Common Prayer made sure that the Communion of the Sick finished at the foot of a right hand-hand page, so that the eye would not be caught by the heading of the service which, logically if unhappily, immediately followed – the Burial of the Dead. But neither the Oxford nor the Queen’s Printer showed the same delicacy.
I’m not the least bit surprised that a cat would be proofreading the secrets of the Bible.Inky cat footprints!From p. 170 of Clavis Bibliorum: The Key of the Bible, Unlocking the Richest Treasury of the Holy Scriptures by Francis Roberts (1675). Original from Princeton University. Digitized August 12, 2008.
I was in a diner the other day and picked up a printed newspaper. To be precise, I picked up the comics section. The thought that occurred to me was: Now this, here, is a fully dead format. But what fun, while it lived! The comics page! Shouldn’t there be some new-school version of this? Some webcomic aggregator that pulls a bunch of the best together and lays them out in a great big liquid wall to fit phones and tablets and big broad monitors alike? And pays a bit back to each creator?