Technology firms have often used April 1 as a chance to play pranks on their customers. Google, for example, is famous for these hoaxes, to the point that its 2004 launch of Gmail (on April 1) was originally viewed as a joke.
In a crowded field of 2011 pranks that includes elaborate videos and even browser extensions, LinkedIn’s prank is perhaps the subtlest and thus the funniest. They added historical figures and fictional characters to their “people you may know” tool, including Albert Einstein, Robin Hood (“Activist/ Chief Fundraiser at Nottingham”) and J. R. R. Tolkien. Unfortunately, you can’t actually add these people to your network, but it’s a fun gesture nonetheless.
Fifty years ago, the states ratified the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed the District of Columbia to appoint electors for President as if it were a state. Yet while District residents may vote for President, they remain without representation in Congress.
Writing in the New York Times, Northwestern’s Kate Masur argues that race and partisanship are the principal reasons why the District lacks representation:
The 23rd Amendment is a reminder that support can be rallied for greater democracy for the district. And yet, in our polarized political climate, the powerful argument for voting representation in Congress seems perpetually stymied.
One problem is indifference; most Americans are unaware of the capital’s anomalous status, the city’s “Taxation Without Representation” license plates notwithstanding. A second is partisanship; to establish a vote in Congress for Washingtonians, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, Republicans would have to place a moral imperative ahead of partisan interests.
Another is race. A half-century after the dawn of the civil rights era, many Americans still have a hard time seeing African-Americans as citizens entitled to the rights that so many white people take for granted. For residents of a place once known as “Chocolate City,” these attitudes are a sadly familiar obstacle to equality.
Even if Masur is right that partisanship and race define the politics of granting representation to the District, Congress still has an obligation to uphold the Constitution. As Andrew Grossman and I explained two years ago, “Congress lacks the constitutional authority to grant the city a representative by legislation; the District of Columbia is not a state, and representation is limited to states alone.” Continue reading »
This may be one of the best job listings ever posted. Best bit: “our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.”
Far from being the malefactors portrayed in the media, Charles and David Koch are idealists committed to a free society, Matthew Continetti reports.
Google researchers discovered that technical ability isn’t what makes a good manager. Instead it’s, well, being a good manager. “What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.” A neat infographic explains Google’s criteria.
Slate explores the dramatic fall of pickpocketing in the United States: “In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing.”
Vasilis Vryniotis offers a list of best practices webmasters should follow before launching a site. These are also good to keep in mind after a site is launched, too.
Smashing Magazine offers up examples of stylish e-commerce designs. Of course, the visual design of an e-commerce site is properly secondary to its main purpose: sales.
I recently presented at the Leadership Institute’s Online Fundraising Workshop. As I wrapped up, I offered a list of four sites I often visit to brush up on online marketing and fundraising best practices.
The Agitator. With its analysis of innovative fundraising techniques, marketing studies and psychology, The Agitator provides online fundraisers with excellent food for thought. Authors Tom Belford and Roger Craver frequently remind us, for example in their recent post on personalized e-mail communication, that online marketing follows the same principles as other marketing.
Copyblogger. Copyblogger provides excellent insight into how to write engaging and effective copy for the web, whether for e-mail, blog posts, landing pages or social media. The series on headline writing, for instance, helped redefine how I create copy for the web and for e-mail.
Media Post’s E-mail Insider. Geared more towards advanced users, E-mail Insider is nonetheless a must-read for those trying to raise funds online. Many posts are gems, like this best-practices checklist that both new and established e-mail program managers can return to again and again.
Congress would do well to heed F.A. Hayek’s warning in The Constitution of Liberty: “[D]emocracy will have to learn that it must pay for its own follies and that it cannot draw unlimited checks on the future to solve its present problems.”
“…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Photo: Wikimedia
“States don’t have rights,” Stephen Green reminds us. “Individuals do. It’s time we went about the business of restoring those rights, without alienating a huge constituency which suffered too long without them.” Green rightly argues that conservatives’ use of the language of states’ rights is not only muddle-headed but, for historical reasons, tends to associate conservatives with Jim Crow.
Nicola Moore and Eric Heis are undertaking an innovative project to raise youth awareness of federal overspending: they’re making a video game caled U.O.Me. They’re accepting contributions through mid-August to fund the game’s programming.
Realizing that spending is an issue of growing salience, progressives are rallying around new gimmicks like advanced rescission to bolster their budget-cutter bonafides. George Will is having none of it: the plan “certainly would not reduce deficit spending: Under the president’s proposal, if Congress kills the projects on the president’s list, the budgetary allocation would not be reduced, so legislators could dream up new things on which to spend the money.”
E.J. Dionne says it’s ironic that conservatives who decry big government are calling for the federal government to more effectively manage the Gulf oil spill. Dionne, of course, is missing the point: there’s a difference between effective government (or energetic government, as Publius dubbed it in the Federalist) and big government. But all too many conservatives allow progressives to make such arguments by advocating for small government rather than a limited government that undertakes only its core responsibilities.
Jonathan Adler argues that many self-described followers of Edmund Burke are anything but: “The institutions [David] Brooks would defend today bear no resemblance to the organic institutions Burke sought to protect. Indeed, they have crowded out and, in some cases crushed, the little platoons upon which social order depends. So the meaningful question for a true Burkean is not whether to oppose a Jacobin revolution, but what to do after such a revolution has already taken place.”
In the latest issue of A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte explains how to use CSS style sheets to create a web site that scales well to varying screen resolutions. For example, he uses CSS media queries to create a single page that renders well on an iPhone, on a standard monitor and on a wide-screen monitor. I’ve implemented some of his techniques on this page to make an iPhone-friendly version.
Europe’s “current welfare state is unaffordable…The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries.”
Technology firms have often used April 1 as a chance to play pranks on their customers. Google, for example, is famous for these hoaxes, to the point that its 2004 launch of Gmail (on April 1) was originally viewed as a joke.
