Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Economic and property doom in Ireland
The Sunday papers were awash with property articles today. I guess I am in a similar position to fellow blogger Una Mullaly in that I am of a similar age (or slightly older) and never bought a property. Although this was also partly because I could never afford one. Una’s piece is the most read…
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Rush Limbaugh's new contract
How bad, as we say in Cork. Rush Limbaugh just agreed to an eight-year, $400-million-plus extension with Clear Channel to stay on the air. Limbaugh’s deal includes an upfront $100-million signing bonus, which means the annualized average salary will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $37 million through to 2016. Shame he’s such an idiot.
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Websites To Save You Cash During The Irish Recession
DoubleViking makes a list of 11 websites that will save you cash. Can we create a similar list for Ireland? My first suggestion would be: Pumps.ie – A collaborative website that allows users to input the price of petrol and diesel at any petrol station throughout Ireland, thus giving you the cheapest places to fill…
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Giant telescopes could be built from Moon dust
A novel idea: Dust – often thought of as an impediment to lunar exploration – could be put to good use to build giant telescopes on the Moon – perhaps some large enough to fill entire craters, says a team of US researchers. The team, led by Peter Chen of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center…
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Hitchens is waterboarded
Believe me, it’s torture, says Hitchens. Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they…
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Subs go a wanderin'
Roy Greenslade talks about more subs losing their jobs. CITYAM are sacking their entire subbing team. I linked to the Orange County story earlier this week. Jeff Jarvis talks about it here. So I’d suggest that publications should put all their articles online before publication in wiki form and enable the public to edit and…
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Betancourt rescued
The Colombian authorities say they have rescued Ingrid Betancourt and three American hostages held by Farc rebels. Good news, for a change.
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TV viewers average age hits 50
Good news for digital natives, bad news for newspapers and TV stations. According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a…
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Mugabe's millions
The ‘crackdown’ on Mugabe continues, laughably. Now he might not be able to print his zillions of dollars: The Munich-based company that has supplied Zimbabwe with the special blank sheets to print its increasingly worthless dollar caved in to pressure on Tuesday from the German government for it to stop doing business with the African…
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A Nation in Debt
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has a nice roundup of the US debt mess in the current issue of the American Interest. She has some startling statistics too: Between 1989 and 2001, credit card debt almost tripled, from $238 billion to $692 billion. By fall of 2007, the amount of revolving consumer credit had reached $937.5 billion,…
Got any book recommendations?