jimray pretends like he's blogging here

There’s a temptation when tragedy hits–especially violent tragedy–to use it to prove a worldview right as people take to Twitter to transform dead and mangled bodies into scaffolding under a preexisting belief. It’s execrable. Whether it’s a rush to assign blame, a speculation regarding motive, or an I-told-you-so matters little. That kind of stuff can play badly enough in a next day op-ed, but in an unedited 140 character tweet issued shortly after some terrible thing has just gone down, it’s pure poison.

Just like the major Schedule A deductions, most of the thousands of other tweaks to the tax code reflect the influence of special interests—whether they be rich people, the Metropolitan Museum, or the National Association of Homebuilders—rather than rational economic or social policymaking. And it has created one other group that benefits from a miserable tax day—the army of attorneys, tax preparers, and tax software creators who hunt for deductions and exemptions on our behalf. These people create a strong lobby against efforts to simplify the tax code and the tax filing system—including the idea of the IRS preparing a draft return that you could simply accept or amend as necessary.

Remove all the deductions and exemptions, and you’d be able to reduce top tax rates, reverse the impact of the sequester, or draw down the deficit—all at once. You’d also considerably reduce the angst of tax day for millions of Americans and even allow for a downsizing of the IRS and the tax industry itself. On April 15, surely that should be an idea with immense political appeal.

Overall, the reaction to political events on Twitter reflects a combination of the unique profile of active Twitter users and the extent to which events engage different communities and draw the comments of active users. While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide.

Let’s get some perspective here: Summly wasn’t reading Ulysses by James Joyce and extracting the fact that the three-masted ship Leopold Bloom sees on the horizon is a metaphor for the Holy Trinity and therefore represents the Catholic Church. It wasn’t reading a 12 page article in Harper’s and extracting the cleverest puns and pop culture send-offs lovingly embedded by a writer who is good at his craft and earning below his potential. And it wasn’t taking my blog posts and somehow conveying the nuanced ennui I harbor for bolt-on engineering.

It was summarizing news. Articles that are already written with a TL;DR in the first paragraph.

E. Gün Sirer on one of several things that are actually wrong with Yahoo’s purchase of Summly.

Don’t miss the wonderful mini-rant on TL;DR culture.

I can’t imagine anyone outside of an affluent family pursuing a career with so little room for financial growth. And I wonder: Would that well-to-do reporter shake hands with the homeless person she interviews? Would she walk into a ghetto and knock on a door to speak with the mother of a shooting victim? Or would she just post some really profound tweets with fantastic hash tags?

Maybe that’s what people – editors and readers – put at a premium now. Maybe a newsroom full of fresh-from-the-dorm reporters who stay at their desks, rehashing press releases and working on Storify instead of actual stories, is what will keep newspapers relevant.

But I doubt it.

While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. [They are] more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.

you have a lot of young, hopeful, unrich people, and a lot of older, less hopeful, but orders-of-magnitude wealthier people who want to invest in the young, hopeful people, often in the same way an older man with a videocamera wants to invest in a porn starlet.