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Interesting article from TIME: “The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell”

Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ‘09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.

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From the great Warren Mosler:

you are addressing a room full of people.

you tell them taxes turn litter into money.

you try to sell your business cards to the group for $5 each.

probably no takers.

you offer your cards to anyone who stays to help clean up the room

no takers.

you then point to the man at the door with the 9mm who’s the tax collector, and no one leaves without 10 of your business cards.

you then repeat the questions.

The Blogosphere 2.0: good post about how the blogosphere has changed since it first exploded. Lots of commentary from old blogging stars too. Hat tip Megan

Fashion in China from Ben Ross

The Mystery of Cheap Lobster via Newmark

Winterspeak returns with a slam dunk: Inflation 2.0

California is getting ready to issue notes promising to pay its vendors at a future date.  According to the theory of tax-driven money, if California just made state taxes payable in these IOU’s they would be on the road to having their own currency.  If it could borrow and spend in its own currency, California would have no “budget crisis.”

Tyler’s litle preview of his new book Create Your Own Economy.  The points about the gains outside of monetary transactions are the most important.  I’ll add that the size of Twitter’s employee base he cites may be misleading.  Many of the essential tools to dashboard and filter twitter are engineered outside of the company.  They offer little more than a new type of social computing infrastructure.  While Ford installed dashboards on cars, Twitter “outsources” more or less the same thing.

Kottke on language and how it shapes your thought.  Of course he gets bombarded by opposition, but the post and argument are interesting.

Some commenters were confused about why Tyler loves Penelope Trunk’s blog, these posts on economizing your time might be why.  Don’t tell me you don’t have time to read them!

Newmark shows us a patch to revolutionize health monitoring.  Add a power supplied RFID chip and some government policies and its Eric’s worst nightmare!

One important thing to recognize about social networks in computing is that they can dramatically lower transactions costs.  With tools like twitter, Flickr, blogs and even text messaging, forming a group outside of traditional organizational structures becomes possible where it wasn’t before.  Its true of different networks and across social, business, and political spheres.  It’s people who went to a specific concert one day sharing photos in a way they never could before, and it’s Iranian liberals rioting like they never could before.  Of course, it can be good and bad.

Clay Shirky boils all this down into some simple, brilliant points in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  For an idea of what its like, you can check out his podcast interview with Russ Roberts.

The Big Picture has photos of the chaos.

Many Iranians are tweeting in English.

Holy shit.

Italy’s financial police has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each.

I personally don’t think the bonds are fake. What would an individual even do with that type of money? Buy every baseball team and force them to wear skirts and clear plastic stripper heels?

What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.

Sounds like Tojo was trying to secretly dump US holdings, and got caught. If that’s the case, this story will probably disappear from the news cycle in a week or so.