firehose

Even designing just one simple, clean, good-looking icon is not an easy task. Multiply that by 25 and there was a ton of work to do in the 8 months since Forstall was booted, which led to certain things being overlooked.

I have never seen a comic book shop with 75% of their inventory directed at children and 17% of their inventory directed at superhero readers. It's not even that those numbers are reversed, it's more that -- in the average comic shop -- 90% of its stock is superhero-related or genre comics that are basically superheroes without the costumes, and maybe 5% or less of the comics displayed are directed at young readers. Even if your local shop bucks the trend and stocks what feels like a ton of kids comics, I bet the superhero books far outweigh everything else. And the FCBD selections don't reflect that. So Free Comic Book Day is not particularly helpful to its own audience of readers, who will find it difficult to actually acquire any future issues of the young readers' comics they just walked away with. The shop they visited for Free Comic Book Day probably won't carry them. Maybe the Barnes & Noble down the street will. Barnes & Noble, you'll note, doesn't participate in Free Comic Book Day.

A former McDonald's worker in Pennsylvania is suing a franchiser owner saying she was required to receive her wages through a debit card that charged fees, resulting in some hourly employees receiving less than minimum wage. Gunshannon said she asked her employer if she could receive her wages through direct deposit at her credit union, which she said did not accept payments through the payroll card. She is suing under the Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection Act for unjust enrichment.

Vice's Women in Fiction issue is an interesting package. There's a short story by Mary Gaitskill here, an interview with Marilynne Robinson there, and a short story by Joyce Carol Oates over yonder. And then...there's the fashion spread. Featuring models styled and posed as famous female writers who have killed themselves. At their times of death.

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Who drinks most vodka, gin, whisky and rum?

ASIA'S growing middle classes are driving demand in the global spirits market. According to IWSR, a market-research firm, consumption last year grew by 1.6% to 27 billion litres—and China, the world’s biggest market, quaffed 38% of that. The national liquor, baijiu, accounts for a whopping 99.5% of all spirits consumed there, so China does not even feature in rankings of the best-known internationally consumed spirits, below. The most popular of these is vodka, mainly because it is drunk in copious amounts in Russia. Russians downed nearly 2 billion litres of the stuff in 2012, equivalent to 14 litres for every man, woman and child. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Russians are among the biggest drinkers in the world, according to the most recent World Health Organisation data.) The Filipinos' taste for gin can be attributed in part to good marketing and to the spirit's long-established toe-hold in the local market. Ginebra San Miguel, a firm that makes the world's two best-selling brands, started operations there in 1834.

Jezebel I Got Drunk on All Kinds of Celebrity Liquor So You Don't Have To | io9 Everything You Know About Jules Verne is Probably Wrong | Jalopnik Meet The Amateur Rapper Who Got Fired For Trying To Ruin New BMWs | Lifehacker Use Facebook's Mobile Site for a Faster, Battery-Friendly Facebook

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Montreal Gazette

Quebec premier says Montreal mayor should resign CBC.ca Quebec Premier Pauline Marois says Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum should step down following his arrest this morning. "He does not have a choice, he should resign," said Marois at a news conference. "No members of my government had a choice ... Interim Montreal Mayor ArrestedABC News Quebec watching Montreal developments carefullyMontreal Gazette Montreal mayor faces 14 charges including conspiracy, fraudGlobe and Mail National Post -CBS News -Jewish Telegraphic Agency all 178 news articles »

Continue reading May NPD: 3DS steals top console spot

May NPD: 3DS steals top console spot originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yes, you are, Wii Fit Trainer

I’m not sure about the original source for this. And I don’t know why there’s a hashtag here, or why this is a blinking GIF instead of a straight-up JPG. But I do know that when I play as the Wii Fit Trainer, I’m going to be yelling out “Bitch I’m fabulous!” whenever I dodge attacks.

PREORDER Super Smash Bros. for Wii U & Nintendo 3DS, upcoming games

crackspackle writes "The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the State of Texas earlier today in a murder trial where the defendant , prior to be taken into custody, had been questioned by the police and chose to remain silent on key questions. This fact was bought up at trial and used to convict him. Most of us have seen at least enough cop shows to know police must read a suspect their Miranda rights when placing them in custody. The issue was a bit murkier here in that the defendant had not yet been detained and while we all probably thought the freedom from self-incrimination was an implicit right as stated in the Constitution, apparently SCOTUS now thinks you have to claim that right or at least be properly mirandized first." It appears that if you are "free to leave at any time" you lose a few rights. Fancy trick, up there with getting kids to write apology letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's easy to see that our feelings change our facial expressions. But can your facial expression change how you feel? Previous studies have suggested that this is the case, and that getting botox might actually make you happier because your resting facial expression is more pleasant. This study explores whether the frown-like face you make in bright sunlight can make you more aggressive. Turns out, it does--but fortunately, this effect can be prevented by wearing sunglasses. Sun-induced f

APPARENTLY someone, perhaps John Kenneth Galbraith, once said that the way to debate Milton Friedman was to wait for him to say "Let us assume..." and then immediately interrupt and say "No, let's not assume that." (Via Clay Shirky, via Dan Davies.) I thought of this quip on Saturday while reading a draft paper by Gregory Mankiw entitled "Defending the 1 Percent". Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?

Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce. But you don't even need to say "No, let's not assume that" to see what's wrong with this analogy, because Mr Mankiw has done a strange job of selecting his John Galt figures. Let's go along with Mr Mankiw's thought experiment: Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling and Steven Spielberg are about to create their staggeringly popular products, which will increase inequality because everyone wants to buy them. But now let's imagine that just before these geniuses are able to bring their creations into the world, they die. No iPod, no Harry Potter, no Jaws. What happens then?

Here's what happens then. Instead of Apple dominating the market for MP3 players in the early 2000s, Sony and Samsung do; a little later, when smartphones come along, the battle for mobile operating ecosystems revolves around BlackBerry, Samsung/Google and Nokia/Microsoft. Instead of Harry Potter, some other children's fantasy book becomes the dominant franchise of the 2000s. And instead of "Jaws", some other movie becomes the first immense blockbuster of the 1970s, and a different brilliant director's career is launched. All of the money that was spent over the past few decades to make Mr Jobs, Ms Rowling and Mr Spielberg immensely wealthy would instead have gone to three other hard-working creative geniuses, of which the world has no shortage. There would be just as much inequality as there is now.

In other words, Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim. Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems, a trend that would have taken hold over the past decade even if Apple had flamed out in the late 1990s.

It's conventional wisdom that the entertainment industry has been in the vanguard of our increasingly superstar-oriented economy, with network-effect industries like IT and software close behind. Alan Krueger, head of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, gave a talk about this last week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large," Mr Krueger said. "We are increasingly becoming a ‘winner-take-all economy,’ a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented—and it is often hard to tell the difference—have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up." (Via Neil Irwin.)

So why does Mr Mankiw pick three figures from the entertainment and computer industries, where everyone knows the "superstar" phenomenon is strongest? Because if he used examples from other industries, it would be even more difficult to convince the reader that the immense rewards being reaped by those at the top had anything to do with their unique contributions to the economy. Last year the highest-paid chief executive in the country, at $131m, was a guy named John Hammergren, who runs a medical and pharmaceuticals business called McKesson. If he hadn't been running McKesson, some other guy would have been. If Michael Vascitelli ($64m) hadn't been running Vornado Realty Trust, somebody else would have. Perhaps those other guys wouldn't have been as good at their jobs; in that case, these firms would have lost market share to competitors. So what?

The social purpose of high executive pay is to create incentives for hard work to maximise profit. But these guys are being paid double what their predecessors were making in the 1980s, which was not exactly a period known for its stodgy egalitarianism. Are we seeing startlingly better corporate performance today than we were back then? Is there greater productive innovation in, say, medical technology or commercial real estate? Is our economy growing faster? Are general standards of living rising faster? No, no, no and no. What public interest is served by the fact that these CEOs, as a class, are earning a multiple of what their predecessors did a generation ago?

Mr Mankiw's analogy stacks the deck by making it appear as though great creative entrepreneurs create the consumer demand which leads to inequality. This is not how things work. Inequality is rising for structural reasons that have nothing to do with the social value produced by the labour of the top one percent of earners. If the government were to, for example, return top marginal tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the 1990s or the 1970s in order to compensate for the superstar effect, there is no reason to believe that the top one percent would produce any less value for society than they do now. Mr Spielberg would likely have worked just as hard at 1970s tax rates as he does at 2013 tax rates; indeed, he did so when he made "Jaws". Similarly, Mr Jobs worked very hard on the Apple 2e in the 1970s and on the iMac in the 1990s, and Ms Rowling worked quite hard on the Harry Potter series even though tax rates in Britain are much higher than those in America.

To avoid accusations that I'm just picking out an ill-thought-out analogy while ignoring Mr Mankiw's main thrust, I'll add a few more points.  Mr Mankiw argues that the calculus of progressive taxation is based on a confused utilitarianism. Whether high tax rates discourage productivity among the top one percent is the wrong question, he writes. Redistribution as such is misguided, he thinks, because we don't have any good way to measure the increased utility which redistribution aims to create for low earners: "there is no scientific way to establish whether the marginal dollar consumed by one person produces more or less utility than the marginal dollar consumed by a neighbor." This is strictly true, but I can't see how it's relevant in any normal society, where such compromises are made every time a law entitles citizens to equal treatment without trying to determine each person's exact individual preferences. And it's a particularly strange point to make in a paper called "Defending the 1 Per Cent". We can be pretty sure that a dollar is worth more to someone who earns $30,000 per year than to someone who earns $3 million.

Mr Mankiw's preferred alternative is a "just deserts" theory, in which people should retain the value of their labour beyond whatever is needed to provide public goods and compensate for externalities and market failures. "Confiscatory" tax rates, he says, should be avoided. This is one reasonable approach, but at the least, it suffers from the same calculation problem as the utilitarianism he derides: how much is a "confiscatory" tax rate, exactly, and according to whom?

But I think the worst weakness in the paper comes in Mr Mankiw's brief treatment of the Rawlsian justification for redistribution. Rawls's argument is that if people were asked what kind of society they'd want to be part of, without knowing whether they'd be rich or poor (ie behind the "veil of ignorance"), they would choose one where the rich paid taxes to fund social insurance for the poor. Mr Mankiw objects that this approach would also probably lead people to choose a society with mandatory organ donation, since they wouldn't know whether or not they'd need an organ. He thinks this a serious flaw in Rawls's argument:

If imagining a hypothetical social insurance contract signed in an original position does not supersede the right of a person to his own organs, why should it supersede the right of a person to the fruits of his own labor?

Why indeed? And how come when I break your window it's just vandalism, whereas when I break your nose it's assault? Because your rights over your own body are more fundamental than other kinds of property rights, that's why. If Mr Mankiw is looking to dismiss the Rawlsian social-insurance argument, he's going to need a better argument than this.

Daily Mail

Eating red meat may boost Type 2 diabetes risk CBS News People who eat red meat may be putting themselves at risk for Type 2 diabetes. A new study published June 17 in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that eating red meat over time was associated with a higher chance of developing the most common form of ... Eating more red meat raises risk of type 2 diabetesInsidermedicine all 39 news articles »

» Ughck. Images.

In a follow-up to his ALA article Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems, Dave Rupert talks about all the progress we've made toward responsive image solutions — by which he means no progress has been made.

Demonstrating supreme faith in its ability to keep the franchise going in the opposite direction of Marvel Studios, Sony has confirmed two more Amazing Spider-Man sequels—the third on June 10, 2016, and the fourth on May 4, 2018, a date so far-off, who knows what futuristic medium we’ll be using to watch it? Perhaps by then summer blockbusters will come in a concentrated serum that’s injected directly into our eyeballs, wrinkling our cortex to simulate enjoyment in an experience only slightly less intrusive than sitting in a family-crowded theater.

Anyway, regardless of the specific formulaic means by which these sequels will be manufactured, the announcement confirms the rebooted franchise will accomplish what Sam Raimi couldn’t by getting to four films. It also lends credence to those rumors regarding an eventual Sinister Six showdown—a storyline that’s already well on its way to fruition, considering the ...

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Neil’s Puppet Dreams with Nathan Fillion. (x)

The first episode of the documentary series “The Art of Punk” takes a look at the art of hardcore punk band Black Flag. The band’s stylized flag logo, poster and cover art, and even its name were created by artist and early band member Raymond Pettibone. The video was created by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Bo Bushnell for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

via ANIMAL New York

KMOV.com

Three Naval Academy Football Players Facing Rape Charges KTIC (ANNAPOLIS, Md.) -- The U.S. Naval Academy says it has plans to charge three football players in connection with the rape of a female midshipman that allegedly took place in April 2012. After a lengthy investigation, the school's superintendent has referred ... Naval Academy football players to face sex assault chargesNBCNews.com (blog) Victim of alleged Naval football assault speaks out: 'He thought it was funny'Raw Story all 59 news articles »

Shortly after his return to Community was made officially official, Dan Harmon said that part of his prep for returning to work would be to finally watch the fourth season—first making the prospect sound like an exercise in morbid curiosity and/or self-torture, before more diplomatically promising not to “be a jerk about it” to the writers he’d once worked so closely with. “The worst thing I can do is fart in their direction at all,” Harmon said in his cautiously optimistic youth of 10 days ago—a hopefulness that was slowly eroded, as it was for so many, over the course of 13 episodes, judging by the assessment he gave on this week’s Harmontown podcast:

“I watched season four. I guess I already knew this, but apparently, I’m quite a genius … I think I feel pretty comfortable expressing any kind of 'Eh, not my cup ...

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How To Install iOS 7 (by HowToBasic)

In this security camera footage posted on YouTube by the Marin Independent Journal, a 93-year-old woman careens backward down a sidewalk in San Rafael, California, narrowly missing two Guide Dogs for the Blind trainers. One blindfolded trainer was assessing O’Neil the 18-month-old guide dog’s skill while accompanied by another trainer when O’Neil turned around, alerting the non-blindfolded trainer who then pushed the trio out of harm’s way.

via Marin Independent Journal, Boing Boing

Odin the German Shepherd and numerous other dogs enjoy car rides in “Wind In My Ears,” a compilation video of dogs hanging their heads out of car windows.

via Most Watched Today

A normal laugh has the structure of “ha-ha-ha” or “ho-ho-ho.”

Link

The three highest paid people on the Pentagon budget aren't who you'd expect.

Washington Post

Turkish government could use armed forces against protesters, senior official ... Washington Post ISTANBUL — Turkey's leaders are prepared to use the armed forces against protesters if they consider it necessary, the deputy prime minister said Monday, raising the threat of military intervention for the first time during the current unrest, in a country that has ... and more »