Yes, CFA hires LGBT people. No one’s been fired for being gay or coming out. It’s a job. A job that can’t be taken for granted when work is scarce across the country. We have to eat too.

Boycotting Chick-fil-A doesn’t hurt the company. It hurts the employees.

She makes a point.

The CEO of Chick-fil-A is a very rich man. The boycott, well intentioned and righteous, will not affect him, or his opinions.

Read the entire piece though, to see why she changed her mind.

An experiment giving people the chance to know what it feels like to be a freelancer by offering them $5 for a drawing.

It’d be funnier if it weren’t so accurate.

Over the next three weeks, Lehrer stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied to me.

[…] When, three weeks after our first contact, I asked Lehrer to explain his deceptions, he responded, for the first time in our communication, forthrightly: “I couldn’t find the original sources,” he said. “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.”

Popular authors lying to us has become far too common a story.

I just do not understand why anyone, in this age, would think they could get away with it.

They’re still trying to stabilize advertising and that hasn’t been wildly successful yet. But the digital subscription effort has been more successful than many people wanted it to be.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.

The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us.

Odder, it doesn’t seem specific to a generation. It is the hallmark of our culture.

When I talk about my company, I see the same glean of envy, the twitch of oh-lucky-you, across every age. I see every person I know thinking and dreaming in terms of their turn on the signing-side of the check; to be the name on the door.

No one I know thinks of their job as anything other than a rest stop. They have somewhere else they want to be; somewhere their own; somewhere small and free and without the confines of a schedule and a boss and an employee handbook they didn’t write. Wealth as an afterthought to the notion of self-sufficiency and self-determination.

I wonder when, or why, that change happened. Has it always been like this? Is the myth of the career something, like so much else, due more to nostalgia than to experience?

It’s seen St. Helen’s erupt, and watched as the earth recovered.

It’s seen Beijing rise and the rain forests fall.

It’s recorded as our cities have grown, spreading out like a virus into the surrounding landscape.

Search Google News for “fluoride” and you’ll find a shocking article showing that, holy shit, fluoride lowers your IQ! The stuff in your toothpaste! The stuff cities put in drinking water!

Submitted without commentary.

CEO Dan Hesse said in his call this morning that this was the first quarter Sprint became a net gainer of subs from its rivals rather than a leaker to them.

What changed:

Sprint activated 1.5 million iPhones in the quarter, pretty much in line with expectations. Some 40% of the new iPhone activations were new customers to Sprint, and these come with lower churn and support costs than other handsets it sells. Sprint boasted more new customers coming via the iPhone than AT&T and Verizon had…

Hesse bet big on the iPhone, believing it would be the key to staving off his company’s accelerating decline and irrelevance. While it’s too early to say it was the right move, so far, so good.

Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you’re taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.

Of course, this would never, ever work.

The reason should be obvious; if we only tax consumption, the wealthy will find ways to consume things in a way which avoids the tax. A cash economy will flourish, and the middle class, increasingly reliant on credit to make ends meet, will be caught in the middle.

If we can’t figure out a way to reliable tax millions of dollars in income, how exactly does anyone think we’ll be able to reliably millions of dollars in goods?

Still, utopian thinking is fun.

Thanks, Jason.

Mountain Lion is not the Mac OS of the past, but it also sets a course to a destination that is quite distinct from iOS. Despite the oft-cited prediction that Mac will eventually be subsumed by iOS, that’s not what’s happening here. Apple is determined to bring the benefits of iOS to the Mac, but it’s equally determined to do so in a way that preserves the strengths of the Mac platform.

Gruber makes a similar point in his review:

Mountain Lion and iOS 6 certainly share a slew of features and code […] But they are very much two different and distinct systems, one for traditional keyboard and pointer device personal computers, and another for touchscreen mobile devices.

On the probable consequences of economic reforms, though, leading economists are more likely to be right than politicians running for re- election. Their solidarity needs to be taken seriously. Too much of what passes for economic debate in Washington is the product of faith, not evidence.

In the 60 days between April 8th and June 7th, I’d estimate they made less than $30k, a run rate of just $180k a year. The release of 1.3 and subsequent price drop in mid June generated another surge in the charts, but look how quickly that trailed off.

The revenue spikes can help provide runway, but sustained revenue in the neighborhood of $30k a month doesn’t bode well for a funded company with a full-time team of 5.

While his overall analysis is interesting, and I’m sure incorrect, it’s his summary that caught me:

The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect.

There’s an interesting interplay between these two spots. Obama is accusing Romney of wanting to give too much to the most successful. Romney is accusing Obama of being insufficiently appreciative of the most successful.

On some fundamental level, in other words, the two campaigns agree on the broad narrative of this race, and are even reinforcing the other’s messaging.

While they’re each distorting the truth, each campaign is also being, to some extent, honest.

Meanwhile, in central Florida, a 71 year-old man drew and fired his concealed weapon on two would-be robbers at an internet cafe, stopping the robbery and maiming the criminals.

Combined, the iPhone netted 61 percent of smartphone sales from the two largest US carriers, which share two-thirds of the US mobile market. Most of the remaining sales were shared among various Android device makers.

It annoys me that this type of comparison is only possible by totaling up the carriers’ numbers. Why doesn’t Samsung, HTC, LC, et. al. report units sold – not units shipped – like Apple?

I just cannot fathom a reason to hide that information, or why their stockholders allow them to.

(F)or most Americans, Yahoo is where they get news.

Yahoo reaches more than 75 percent of the total Internet audience in the United States, with 167.2 million unique users in June. On any given day, 30 million or more people stop by. Globally, about 700 million people visit the site in 30 languages every month.

It can be argued that Yahoo is burning out, but slowly, and has been for awhile. It can be argued that while they maintain a large presence of content, they lack any type of moat, or niche, to protect that presence; that any upstart could unseat them from any category provided the right momentum. They are a shrinking giant.

I’d argue that Yahoo is simply a very boring company, with a very simple business model. What Yahoo lacks is a shiny bobble with which the technology press can attach their collective fixation.

You can argue that strict gun laws may reduce the number of gun related assaults and murders, and this is worth discussing, but it does not seem plausible that it would stop people like this shooter.

Meanwhile, Dan Baum reminds us of how intractable both violence and guns are in America:

If tomorrow President Obama signed the ultimate gun-control law—a total ban on the sale, manufacture, and import of guns—we would still be awash in firearms for generations to come.

The next few weeks will bring a plethora of opinion, diatribe, and sanctimony from all sides of the perpetual gun rights debate in America. Whenever possible, one should try to consider all sides. It’s far more complicated than our emotions want it to be.

Thanks, Andrew.

Hugely popular in the early 20th century, tanagra theater thrilled audiences by using a series of mirrors to transform the image of an actor offstage and project a tiny version onstage. Tempest felt that tanagra theater offered the perfect visual sleight-of-hand to introduce audiences to the sad story of Nikola Tesla.

After watching the video, be sure to read how Tempest and his team crafted the illusion.

“Our grandchildren will say that we died not because of heart disease, cancer, or stroke, but instead that we died pathetically out of ignorance and superstition” — by which he means the belief that there is something fundamentally unknowable about consciousness, and that therefore it can never be replicated on a computer.

The world needs a few more mad scientists.