Assorted Links

  • “Your body’s resistance to an activity isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, it’s a message that you’re being an idiot, just like when your hand hurts after you punch a wall. The right solution isn’t to start punching the wall harder, it’s to look around for a tool to help you do the job . . . With losing weight, the key is things like the Shangri-La Diet.” Aaron Swartz argues that if something needs a lot of will-power to do, it’s a mistake. I agree.
  • Reed Hundt on “Bandwidth, Jobs, and the Future of Internet Freedom”.
  • Art DeVany interviewed on Econtalk. Agrees with Aaron.
  • In China, “what censored actually means”. “One day last summer, an anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the online game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky, mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments on the first day. . . . Around the time the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng was arrested [by the Mawei police] for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the brutal rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a district in the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries. . . . Bloggers began calling on people to send postcards to the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A few days later, Guo was released.”

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

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