Another surfin' safari

Entrepreneur or con man? I admire this guy's industry and creative spirit, but it seems that he's a magnet for trouble too. [Seattle Times]

American Caste: A critique of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Kay S. Hymowitz [City Journal]. Single mother-based families just are not able to make a go of it in post-industrial America.

"Solid-state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work" [Ars Techica] SSD's reduce latency between the CPU and the data storage tier.

Washington, D.C. city government needs to stop being a one-party monopoly if it wants to make any progress on its problems says Colbert I. King @ the Washington Post. I've been saying the same thing about Ann Arbor for a while now myself and largely for the same reasons as King.

Dogs use humans as their tools [Scientific American]

The decline and fall of the white working-class American family

From Kay S. Hymowitz's review of Charles Murray's new book on the decline of white society in America published at City Journal.

"In short," says Hymowitz, "America has become a segregated, caste society, with a born elite and an equally hereditary underclass. A libertarian, Murray believes these facts add up to an argument for limited government. The welfare state has sapped America’s civic energy in places like Fishtown, leaving a population of disengaged, untrusting slackers. It has also diminished upper-class confidence: the well-to-do dare not suggest they have a recipe for the good life. 'The underpinning of the welfare state,'  Murray writes, 'is that, at bottom, human beings are not really responsible for the things they do.' ”

It takes a lot of nerve to write stuff like this these days but I suppose someone has to.