EdCone.com

GPD does a very good job of pushing info out to the public, but has not listened to feedback asking that press releases be pasted into email bodies instead of requiring recipients to open attachments. Mobile users may find this especially onerous, so the usability problem could actually be getting worse.

Also, stuff like "1130ID-ROB-CT" does not make for a terribly helpful subject line.

But the fact that apps must routinely face approval masks how extraordinary the situation is: tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world. Why would we possibly want this to be how the world of ideas works, and why would we think that merely having competing tech companies—each of which is empowered to censor—solves the problem?

A slightly different rhythm, but the same drum Zittrain's been banging for a while now.

Gayle Anderson, the chamber's president, said it is "unfortunate and disappointing" that Occupy Winston-Salem members plan to protest [Wells Fargo chair] Stumpf's appearance.

If by "unfortunate and disappointing" she means "inevitable and all-American," then that's about right.

Or does Anderson, a former tobacco-company mouthpiece herself, think free speech is only for those who pay for it?

U.S. exports of gasoline, diesel and other oil-based fuels are soaring, putting the nation on track to be a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time in 62 years.

Domestic oil production is up; gasoline consumption is down in our crap economy, prices stay high because of exports; plans underway to liquefy natural gas for sale elsewhere (WSJ, paywall).

UPDATE: Some perspective on the numbers here.

I'm starting to think that Cain/Bachmann ticket may not happen after all.

He loved the rituals of the Episcopal Church, the elegance of his wife Joyce, the glow of a good table in a five-star restaurant, and the hum of a Cadillac on the open road headed toward bistros and stadium lights.

Also, trash talk and aggressive poker play. RIP, Ansley Brown.

My position as Landmark’s motorsports writer will be eliminated, and I will not be retained. Thursday is my final day. This is my final blog entry.

If Landmark has a plan beyond cutting costs, that plan is no clearer to me now than it was when the bloodletting began.

Isn't a popular writer who covers a popular sport the kind of person you would want to keep around?

Anyway, best of luck, Dustin Long.

I like the host's intro on this one.

Inspired by this; thnx to PLN for the pointer.

Sacred cows and tax codes.

Put another way, the government will spend $47 million so that Ronald Lauder can transfer a painting from his own ownership to that of a museum he controls. The painting doesn’t even need to be moved into the museum: it’s there already, and has been there since the day the museum opened. As far as the public and the art world are concerned, nothing will have changed — but as far as Lauder is concerned, he has a “reduce your tax bill by $47 million any time you need to” card just sitting in his back pocket.

I'm no expert, but the words "felony" and "obstruction of justice" can be used to indicate serious problems, yes?

From the German perspective, it doesn’t seem fair. And that overwhelms even the most powerful economic arguments that bailing out Greece and the other distressed countries also helps Germany.

Moral hazard über alles.

Also not fair: people who saved their money getting punished by interest rates designed to bail out profligate bankers, people losing jobs when other people blow up the economy, kids being punished when their brothers hit them first, etc.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

Worth it, though, because regulations are bad, as proved by the fact that deregulation was followed quickly by a collapse so severe that the lying about its severity was the only way to prevent reregulation.

Few -- possibly three -- Indian names designate any physical features within the confines of the county.

According to the book I was reading at lunch -- The History of Guilford County, North Carolina, U.S.A. to 1980 A.D., by Blackwell Robinson and Alexander Stoesen -- those three include the Osceola community; the Haw River ("probably so named by the inhabitants of present Alamance County for the Sissipahaw or Saxapahaw Indians"); and maybe Alamance Creek, with the word "Alamance" itself perhaps derived from an Indian word meaning "blue clay."

Greensboro Sports: "At some time this morning, we will have our 4 Millionth Page View."

I was hitting those old-school blog updates for HS football playoff scores this weekend.

As North Carolina Republicans tell it, the Obama for America volunteers stole in under cover of night and stayed, undetected — noticed belatedly only because of election results across the state.

Crediting (or blaming) the Obama organization for its role in the big Democratic wins in NC earlier this month.

Here is my rule: Never sneer at another person's taste in reading. Never make another person ashamed of a story that they love. You don't know what hunger that book is satisfying. And the book you despise today may be part of their personal canon in ways that you are simply unable to understand.

So writes Scott Card in the Rhino, but not before doing exactly the thing he says we shouldn't do:

...what academia considers to be the "canon" has become absurd...the whole process was kidnapped by idiots.

The result was pretentious twaddle like James Joyce's Ulysses...Whatever insights into the human condition James Joyce had to offer were trivial compared to the labor of receiving them.

...I mean really – do you take Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom into your heart and life?

Well, yes, very  much so. And no less an authority than OSC tells me that I shouldn't be ashamed of it, and that people who despise this particular taste may simply be unable to understand it.

Also, this question -- "why in the world would you need a university to teach you how to read the literature of your own language?" -- is answered in part by his own lucid explanation of Austen's status as an innovator, which is the kind of thing one might not glean as a solo reader.

UNC needs a football coach; details here.

This is the hard part:

All functions of the position will be performed in compliance with the rules, regulations, policies and guidelines of the NCAA, ACC, The University and the Athletic Department, and will be conducted with integrity and high ethical and moral standards.

There really is a powerful secular force undermining the traditional values of the season, but it's not the one Fox News talks about.

Comforting the comfortable, afflicting the afflicted.

This is somewhat better.

The overarching rule of “journalistic objectivity” is that a journalist must never resolve any part of a dispute between the Democratic and the Republican Parties, even when one side is blatantly lying. They must instead confine themselves only to mindlessly describing what each side claims and leave it at that.

Schieffer's sneering misrepresentation of Ron Paul's positions is pretty incredible to behold. Greenwald's criticism of the establishment-fluffing corporate media is closer to the truth than the tired old liberal media meme, and thus completely unacceptable (thanks to FS for the pointer).

Warped but still thankful, just like the rest of us.

Cuts are for poor people, not the crypto-Keynesian "defense" machine.

Lyndon Street Artworks in trouble? Story here.

The last 2 1/2 years have been a stimulus-induced interregnum in a global depression...

...The real problem/question is how to prevent the deflating of the credit bubble and the attendant deflationary spiral from leading to civil unrest, nationalism, and geopolitical tension.

Drop that into the dinner-table conversation tomorrow, and see how it plays.

Busy time, many people are headed out of town for Thanksgiving, but please don't forget the people in this community who need your help.

Thanks to Fred for the pointer.

"I am concerned about the loss of trust that this incident has precipitated. I share the concerns of many of you," said council member Sally Greene.

The raid on the Yates building in Chapel Hill was different in some important ways from the situation at UC Davis, but the militarized response seemed excessive at the time and looks all the more so in light of events in California.

Newt Gingrich has long been on my list of People Who Won't Be President But Are For Some Reason Taken Seriously as Candidates (charter member: Donald Trump).

Despite his surge in the anyone-but-Mitt race, I feel good about that prediction.

Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web.

Anil proposes a solution, too.

Sovereign Transmitted Debts don’t have to be embarrassing or keep you from other financial relationships…

Contagion-Ex works by releasing a powerful dose of austerity on troublesome workers, reducing your risk of financial infection so your wealth can be preserved.

It's funny because it's true.

"Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president."

Yeah, that must be it.

Not Obama's decision to stick with the Wall Street clique that shat the bed in the first place, or the outcomes of that decision, or his lack of passion on jobs, failure to fight for the public option, and so on.

In case you're wondering who counts as a liberal: "The assessments appear equally morose among the most left-wing and the most moderate of Obama’s supporters." So that really narrows it down.

Frum's companion piece is his familiar lament about the GOP leaving him. It will convince nobody who is unconvinced.

"Our current needs list (made by homeless people, with help from GPD)."

What's needed on the streets of GSO.

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence.  There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one.  The situation was not hostile.  And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid.  And exhausted.  And human...

...Why did I walk the Chancellor to her car?  Because I believe in the humanity of all persons.  Because I believe that people should be assisted when they are afraid.  Because I believe that in showing compassion we embrace a nonviolent way of life that emanates to those whom we refuse to see as enemies and in turn leads to the change that we all seek...

Thanks for that.

Again:

I don't know that I'd describe the silence as "contemptuous," or maybe I'd hope there was something more profound intended along with any well-earned contempt. Said of the pepper-sprayed crowd, and true of this one as well: "You don't have to idealize everything about them or the Occupy movement to recognize this as a moral drama that the protestors clearly won."

It was so nice outside when we left for Chapel Hill yesterday that we briefly considered ditching the ballgame to play golf. We had talked about eating at Fiesta Grill on the way but decided on Hursey's instead, but Hursey's was closed so we stayed on 87 to Saxapahaw, around which we poked a bit, then took the back road to 54 and ate at Fiesta Grill after all. I had the Burrito de Chile Verde; it was good. We finally showed up at the Dome about five minutes after tipoff, which still put us a couple of minutes ahead of the home team. It was a desultory win, if a 26-point victory that includes BISCUITS can be desultory, and there were flashes of nice. JMMc is for real and Hairston has a lovely shot that is going to start falling; free throws are to some large degree a matter of concentration and nobody but the visitors had much of that yesterday. Long season, people. Things get more serious soon with Badgers and Wildcats on the horizon.

"It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America."

This is headed in a very bad direction.

Good old Sunday morning, bells are ringing leafblowers whining everywhere

Goin' to Carolina it won't be long and I'll be there going to breathe in all the gas fumes there...

It is a lovely day here in GSO, but a little noisy.

The ban on video presentations by speakers from the floor at meetings of the Guilford County commissioners makes no sense.

The issue here isn't the technology used to present a message. The questions are about the limits -- if any -- to be set on speech in this venue.

If C4GC had showed a clip urging everyone to get out and vote, there would be no problem. Instead, the group used its time to show a straight-up campaign ad for particular candidates.

Would a speaker be allowed to recite the script of that ad at a meeting? If so, how is a video different? 

And just what are the rules on speech from the floor at these meetings? Could a speaker recite an ad for a commercial business? Is it fair to require the public cable channel to replay a partisan political ad repeatedly, without offering equal time to other candidates?

These are the real questions at hand, and they deserve to be vetted in a better forum than the quickie meeting used to decide this issue.

There is a lucid moment at the beginning of The Rhino's muddled election post-mortem, when John Hammer argues that it would be foolish to close the White Street landfill outright, because then "private waste haulers can charge Greensboro whatever they want."

But of course the same logic applies to filling the landfill up without having a long-range plan in place, and that's what the mini-majority's hurry-up strategy for reopening the dump could have done.

After some twaddle about women voting for handsome Robbie and runners voting for track-star Robbie, John defends the routed incumbents from a charge precisely nobody has made: "One thing that has been unfair is the criticism that [they]...never gave any reason for [reopening White Street]. That is not true. They gave their reasons over and over again."

Right. Everyone heard the claims about cost savings. It was everything beyond that number that needed to be explained, but never was -- little things like possible alternatives, related costs, and of course that pesky long-range plan.

This outcome wasn't a simple referendum on whether or not we should ever use that landfill again. But it was in large part a vote on the process by which the mini-majority attempted to ram through a deal to reopen it, and the results were a resounding defeat for the backers of that plan.

Feel free to ignore him, because he has a beard (thnx to GH for the pointer).

Not unrelated.

Manager's weekly report includes staff recommendation against rolling out a free prescription drug discount program for GSO residents ("we currently have no budgeted resources"), trash-contract details, and purchasing guidelines.

Home. The dog seems glad to see me.

It's a beautiful brisk day in New York, and I really want to see the new Islamic galleries at the Met, but I think I'll sit inside and type instead.

The good news is that yesterday's conference-room lunch turns out to have been a healthy one, at least according to Congress.

More here. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sauce guy, just not for nutritional reasons.

Going to be one of those days.

Please keep your government out of my internet.

Wait, it took a scary pronouncement from Fitch to make investors worry about bank exposure to Europe?

This is stuff everyone kind of just knows after 2008. Even pissant local bloggers understand it.

Luna and I walked to the new Hibachi Cafe at S. Elm and Smothers. We'll be back.

A customer who had been a fan of the owners' previous ventures (Aztec Dragon and Asiano) drove downtown to check out the new place; he seemed happy.

Nice day for a stroll, too.

GSO makes the short list (with Detroit, OKC, and Toledo) of cities with "biggest rises in income segregation in the decade."

Thnx to reader JB for the pointer.

Part of our occasional series, It's Rarely Good News When We're In the New York Times.

"Despite its consensus on overall dog adorableness, the dog-loving community remains sharply divided on the question of who is a good boy."

I read this is when it published 11 years ago, still think of it roughly twice a week.

Events will reveal the winner of this Krugman/Summers debate, although as Salmon points out, "We’re already four years from the beginning of the U.S. recession, and we’ve certainly been going nowhere over that time."

But this part is bankable:

Summers’s optimistic sentiment went down well with the well-heeled Toronto crowd: people who are wealthy and healthy and happy, like the Munk Debate audience, tend to be attracted to arguments saying that there’s no need to feel guilty or fearful.