Desde 1998 que a gente escreve alguma coisa por aqui. Era um blog, mas não tinham inventado o nome ainda.
De entrevista de Richard Dawkins ao site livros Goodreads:
GR: Moving into the religion debate, do you think that the human race would be better—do you think that people would be more compassionate and more productive—if religion didn’t exist?
RD: Yes, is the short answer. There’s not a lot of that in the book (Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
), is there? But I do think that the world would be a better place without religion.
Me too.
E disse Levandowski, presidente do STF:
“… São, pois, ilegais quaisquer incursões investigativas sobre a origem de honorários advocatícios, quando, no exercício regular da profissão, houver efetiva prestação do serviço. ”
Não entendi. O Brasil é realmente complexo. Um sujeito rouba loucamente a Petrobras. Junta algumas dezenas de milhões de dólares da rapina que praticou. Se ele separar, digamos, dez milhões de reais para seu advogado, esta grana fica automaticamente lavada e se torna inviolável. Ninguém pode correr atrás dela. O advogado que embolsa a grana do ladrão da Petrobras ou de um traficante, tem seu bolso protegido pelo STF. A parte do dinheiro roubado que é canalizada para o advogado (quase um sócio intocável) não volta mais.
É bonita nossa justiça. Os bandidos da corrupção têm direito aos melhores advogados, os mais caros, que estarão sempre disponíveis e interessados em defendê-los, sabendo que os honorários que eles esquentam não volta mais para quem foi roubado. Continue lendo “Pagar advogado é melhor que depositar dinheiro na Suíça”
Colin Green, a professor of water economics at Middlesex University, wrote in an email that he tells his students three things: “(1) they will not be able to retire until they are 75; (b) they will need to become vegetarians because we don’t have enough water to support a high meat based diet; and (c) that when they go to the supermarket, they will need to take their urine with them which will be analysed and then they will be able to buy food with the same phosphorus content as the urine they bought in.
Keep calm e aproveitem o momento.
(de newrepublic.com)
Achei no Digg um artigo da Vanity Fair sobre a Rússia, que expõe as mazelas da república expansionista de Putin. O tópico sobre álcool confirma o senso comum de que a vodka move os russos:
Twenty-five percent of Russian men still die before the age of 55, many from alcoholism and the violent deaths, plus other diseases it fosters. A protégé of Feshbach’s, Mark Lawrence Schrad, has recently published a book called Vodka Politics, which analyzes how vodka has been used throughout Russian history, from tsars to dictators, as a means of social control. Cheap vodka and cigarettes were among the first free-market products available after Communism. When a partial government crackdown regulating sales of alcohol in 2009 occurred and vodka’s price went up, some hard-core alcoholics simply switched to perfume or antifreeze. The government also jacked up prices on beer, often imported or owned by foreigners, and further drove the population to harder stuff. Schrad, a political scientist at Villanova, has also written that 77 percent of kids between the ages of 15 and 17 drink vodka regularly; in rural areas, the percentage can be as high as 90.
Obama quer aumentar salários dos pobres. Warren Buffett acha que salários maiores levam os empresários a contratar menos.
Obama has proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour as one way to lift Americans out of poverty. While some research shows that a minimum wage hike would boost the economy and eventually create jobs, some argue that a minimum wage hike would discourage businesses from hiring workers because of increased payroll costs. Buffett noted in his interview with CNBC that “there’s tradeoffs on the minimum wage and you can do all these studies but they don’t know.” (Huffpost News)
Boa dica do que é essencial para se ter sucesso escrevendo.
In short, if you want to know how to be a successful writer, there is specific advice, general advice, logistical advice and spiritual advice. But in all this advice, the most important element, the one, true, absolute key to personal, financial, aesthetic and every other kind of success as a writer, is invariably left out. Work ethic, knowledge, skill, perseverance — none of them is as important as the one, single most important thing.
Which would be luck.
Nobody likes to talk about luck. If you’re a successful writer, you, of course, like to think that you got where you got by work and skill, grit and talent. Similarly, if you are trying to break into writing, you want to know what you can do and how you can do it. You don’t want to be told that, to some fairly consequential degree, your success, or lack thereof, is beyond your control.