Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Whit Stillman

The films by Whit Stillman are excellent, and underestimated. Metropolitan (1990) owns much to Woody Allen, but renders Allen's humour younger and more socially and critically inspired. Stillman attempts to be relevant, and situates himself far left of American society, which admittedly, is close to the extreme right end cliff. Barcelona (1994) is the tale of a trapped outsider, fumbling for love, and the recent Damsels in Distress (2011) is a sharp and clean undercutting of the American college dream, telling the mind adventures of the Suicide (Prevention) Center on the college campus.

These films are up there, with American Movie, Sherman's March and Best in Show.

Thanks, Whit.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

NSA, Google, Facebook et al.


It seems to have become standard practice in the United States that large corporations freely share our private data with intelligence agencies (presumably in return for support on the international, legislative and other fronts).

My Facebook account has been deactivated and deleted.

As one counter measure to the pervasiveness of Google in my life, I plan to use http://www.duckduckgo.com most frequently for my searches.

Google discontinued Google Reader : http://www.feedly.com is a reasonable alternative (though it bugs me tremendously that I cannot search through my articles - any recommendations ?).

Further changes of practice will presumably follow.

Economic theory and mutual funds


A few more decent books on economy :

* For those who wish to understand better why our intuition about standard economic theories being wrong is correct : "How Markets Fail" by John Cassidy. [Summary : the invisible hand does not automatically take into account all types of global social effects on and in society.]

* Extremely useful for anybody who considers investing in (mutual) funds: "Common Sense on Mutual Funds" by John Bogle. [Summary : invest in low cost index funds.]