Highlighted by ry
— Steven Greenhouse, The end of summer vacation [Slate Magazine] ¶“I was surprised to learn that the United States is the only industrial nation that doesn’t guarantee its workers any paid vacation at all—which explains why, amazing as it may sound, one in four workers in the private sector doesn’t receive any. In the 27 nations of the European Union, by contrast, workers are guaranteed at least four weeks off. (In France, most receive six weeks.) The United States is also the only industrial nation that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days to its workers, and as a result, nearly 60 million workers—43 percent of middle-class workers and 77 percent of low-wage workers—don’t get any, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.”
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— Tim Burners-Lee, A 'more revolutionary' Web - International Herald Tribune ¶“I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”
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— Tom Waits, NPR: Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits ¶“Q: What is a gentleman?
A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.Q: Favorite Bucky Fuller quote?
A: “Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood”.” -
— Sam McPheeters, The Loom Of Ruin: Van Halen @ Staples Center ¶“If I thought there was even the remotest possibility of David Lee Roth mocking my lack of sexual experience in front of twenty thousand people, I would have jumped in front of a bus. Then again, my last name isn’t also the name of America’s greatest rock band.”
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— Giles Bowkett, Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die? ¶“The Cory Doctorow Problem is worse for me than the Tim Bray Problem, because Tim Bray is a glass of water when I’m not thirsty, and Cory Doctorow is a winning lottery ticket buried under a hundred thousand yipping chihuahuas who all need to pee. I could really use that lottery ticket, but I really don’t want to deal with those chihuahuas.”
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— Ron Lieber, 5 Basic Guidelines for Managing Your Finances (New York Times) ¶“Index (mostly). Save a ton. Reallocate infrequently.”
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— Roland Woodbe, Siltblog: 3 Little Guys What Stunk ¶“Even with global warming I doubt it’ll ever rain hard enough to pine for this one again.”
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— erika, Twitter / erika: When Obama wins...Kozmo wil... ¶“When Obama wins…Kozmo will be back in business.”
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— Fake Steve Jobs, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: The problem with Facebook ¶“Facebook is Webkinz for adults.”
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— Interview: Jason Pierce of Spiritualized | Arts critics | guardian.co.uk Arts ¶“They were hampered by the sort of business decisions only people taking vast quantities of drugs can make.”
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— PJ Hyett, Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? - (37signals) ¶“Having lived in Chicago for 22 years and San Francisco for the last 3, I can say definitively that the weather in Chicago is far worse than the VC chatter in San Francisco.”
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— Jack Stiles, "Return of the Dragoon" ¶“I would have knocked, but my fist had other plans.”
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— Dan Hill, cityofsound: Monocle: design notes ¶“So in terms of how to move between these disciplines, I think you have to lead it with a holistic, multidisciplinary perspective– being aware of all platforms, environments, business models and context as possible, with as much distinct technical understanding as you can cram in– but then step back and let specialists do their work, working more as a conductor or arranger.”
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— Michael Slackman, A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream - New York Times ¶“This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.”
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— Rachel Donadio, Essay About Love and Literary Taste (New York Times) ¶“Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said.”
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— Last.fm: Free music streams turn into increased music sales ¶“Last.fm’s free, ad-supported music streams have resulted in a 119 percent increase in music purchases through Amazon, the company said today. The service, which launched just over two months ago, has also brought on a number of new users, although old users are contributing to the trend as well. Last.fm believes that, while the service is still young, the proof is in the pudding: allowing users to have full-track previews drives music sales, both digital and physical.”