Davos Newbies

Dave Winer on shared-discovery blogging:

I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.

Then search engines can pick up my observations, and make them available to others.

The better search gets, the more valuable blogs become.

Daniel Gross on why it’s unlikely that any heavy hitter from Wall Street would deign to take over from the hapless John Snow at Treasury:

Treasury offers only downside. The Bush presidency is hobbling to the finish line. Republicans may lose control of the House or Senate this fall. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Wall Street types like Donald Regan, Nicholas Brady, and Robert Rubin eagerly served, the Treasury secretary had a great deal of policy power. By contrast, the Bush theory of Cabinet government is that secretaries take dictation from the White House. Snow has survived as long as he has largely because of his willingness to stifle any thoughts that stray beyond the confines of White House talking points.

Peter Stothard on La Trahaison des Clercs: “The first fantasy is that there exists intellectual activity which is entirely divorced from the world, the flesh and the devil. The second fantasy is that even the purest thought can be operative in the world without being at all corrupted or compromised.”

I did my tax return last night, using the well-designed, online TurboTax from Intuit. The one mystery to me was a screen that asked whether I was a beneficiary of the Ottoman Turkish Empire settlements.

Since we’re a long way from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, what on earth was this about? Of course, a Google search for “Ottoman empire tax California” provided a helpful answer: “In 1999, a class action suit against New York Life Insurance company was filed by the descendents of those that survived the unfortunate events of 1915 under the rule of the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The company was sued specifically for not being forthcoming in paying up for policies of those killed in mutual massacres. The suit was settled in 2004 for $20 million, and payouts began to individuals and some Armenian charitable organizations.”