A question I’m pulling out of a comment on another post, from Return of the Bees: — Here’s the Highway Traffic Act: Pedestrian right of way (28) Every pedestrian who lawfully enters a roadway in order to cross may continue the crossing as quickly as reasonably possible despite a change in the indication he orcontinue reading
March 2009 Archives
Your brain likes to let your financial advisor do the thinking
N of only 24 on this study, but very interesting stuff: Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk A simple financial decision-making task involving risk was employed in the current study to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms by which financial advice, provided by an expert economist, affected decisions under risk. Behavioral resultscontinue reading
When did “large, bureaucratic telephone company” become “Bay St.”?
Star today: How I lost my Bay St. job and found true happiness It’s a familiar story — to me, at least:-) Girl gets MBA, pursues high-paying job, is laid off/gets a bonus that makes it easy to walk away, soul-searches, finds lower-paying dream job. OK, her story has a Marley-and-Me-esque dog involved. But let’scontinue reading
Ideas that shouldn’t be controversial but are
Part one: Basic French-English language skills needed or citizenship denied, federal minister says I’m happy that the city of Toronto has services available in many languages, and I love the fact that I hear at least five languages spoken in any given day. But do I think newcomers should make an effort to learn onecontinue reading
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
On a train during a family vacation a few years back, with the carriage filled almost entirely by my large, chatty, argumentative, politically-charged American Irish Catholic family, my aunt-by-marriage explained to another by-marriage relative that it had taken her years to adjust to our style of conversation, which, according to her, consisted of endlessly assertingcontinue reading
I need a drink
More cocktails for the recession/depression, courtesy of the New Yorker online: Nasdaiquiri Add a dozen I.P.O.’s to portfolio, wait until bubble bursts, drink all day every day. BlackBerry Sling Discover that your BlackBerry doesn’t work because you haven’t paid the bill. Sling it against the wall, then buy a prepaid phone and make some rumcontinue reading
Why business television exists
The Globe’s John Doyle sums up one of the problems that plagues business television in his enjoyably tart column from Thursday: All-business television and business news segments had to create their own iconography, mainly because business news is essentially boring and difficult to illustrate. The natural, real-world imagery of business TV is footage of somecontinue reading
Fast melt
The current issues of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair both have good features on the end of Iceland’s short tenure as finance superpower. Both are worth reading, but if you only have time for one, Vanity Fair‘s piece, by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis, better captures the insanity that took hold: I spoke tocontinue reading
Graphological democracy
Democracy, Russia-style, from the Moscow Times: One of the most commonly used methods for eliminating undesirable candidates is to disqualify on “legal” grounds the authenticity of signatures that are required to register a candidate. “Handwriting experts” from the Interior Ministry find mistakes on lists submitted by opposition candidates, and this provides the pretext to disqualifycontinue reading
Eating and drinking in Florence
We are both fans of Italian food and wine — J. being especially addicted to good pastas — so we tried to eat well when we were in Florence, without entirely breaking the bank. Depending on where we went and how much wine we ordered, we were generally able to sit down to leisurely dinnerscontinue reading