Love The New York Times

I never had much appreciation for The New York Times in the past because I didn't subscribe to their online or printed material. Now that they are providing all their content online for free, I can't say enough about how much I love and respect their work. Their articles are well-written; their content is presented in a clean format without too many ads; their servers work smoothly. The New York Times embodies journalism and presentation at its finest.

I particularly enjoy their op-ed material from full-time columnists like Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman, as well as regulars like economst/journalists like Steve/Stephen Levitt/Dubner, and Austan Goolsbee. My discovery and appreciation for The New York Times is still in its infancy, but it will definitely grow as I stuff myself with all their free and rich content.

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Correlation Between Taxes and Social/Economic Programs

I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....

Microsoft Gone Wild

NBC and Microsoft have formed an intricate partnership in which Microsoft serves to expand and maintain NBC's presence in the online news and entertainment market while promoting its products. NBC online integrates many of Microsoft's products. MSNBC is co-owned by GE's NBC universal and Microsoft. I have no problem with the partnership, except for the way Microsoft pushes people to use Microsoft products while other alternatives do just as well or better. Let me provide some examples. You can't access NBC online videos unless you have a Windows media plugin. What about using Flash like everybody else. If you want to access Olympics games online at NBC Olympics, you better be using a Windows or a Mac because Microsoft does not have a Linux version of the Silverlight plugin that it is pushing hard in competition with Adobe Flash, the industry standard. Suppose you are using Windows, you pay a huge penalty for not using Internet Explorer!! Try watching videos with In...

Victim of Asylum Roulette

Not too many stories resonate with me as much as the plight of legitimate asylum seekers whose desperate plea to find refuge in the US is ultimately decided by the questionable preference, judgment and mood of a single asylum officer (with some oversight from a regional asylum director) on one fateful day. That decision, according to numerous credible and through studies, depends largely on the location of the regional asylum center, the legal representation of the the applicant, the gender of the asylum officer just as much as the merit of the asylum case, while in fact the legitimacy of the asylum case should be the only relevant factor. This phenomenon has become so real that researchers at the Georgetown University law school have dubbed it the Refugee Roulette . Why am I so sensitive about this subject? My most devastating tragedy of late has been the denial of my legitimate and honest application for political asylum at the Chicago Asylum Office. When I applied believing the ...

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