James Kwak

Just Saying We’re Great Doesn’t Make It So

David Brooks has competition for the title of most inane New York Times columnist. I generally never read anything by Thomas Friedman — I gave up less than one hundred pages of The World Is Flat because of his blissfully uninformed discussion of workflow…

Why Are We Beating Up on Single Payer?

If you don’t like Sanders’s plan, make it better

Single-payer health care has emerged as the primary symbol of the differences between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. For his supporters, Sanders’s…

Oh My God Outlook 365 Sucks

Or am I supposed to call it “Office 365 Mail”?

1. If my session times out, sometimes it will actually show me my inbox for part of a second before asking me to sign in again. How secure is that?

Hillary Clinton’s Lame Wall Street “Reform” “Plan”

Hillary Clinton is competing for the nomination of a party whose progressive base thinks, with considerable justification, that her husband is to blame for letting Wall Street run amok — and that Barack Obama, under whom she served, did too…

Hey, Medium, Am I Missing Something?

To me, and to a lot of other people, “responses” have always looked a lot like what we used to call “comments.” A few months ago, Ev Williams wrote a post (in response to something else) entitled “Responses are not free-for-all comments.” His point was that…

The False Tradeoff Between Efficiency and Equity

This response was written by Haynes Goddard, a professor of economics.

On the issue of efficiency vs. equity tradeoffs, one needs to be
careful, as the distinction is only superficial, although it is true
that the…

My 2¢ on Game of Thrones

I agree (with Brad), but I think the bigger problem is illustrated by the fact that when I watched the first episode of the current season — which checks in on all of the main characters, more or less — I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them. Maybe Arya, a couple of seasons…