Title: “The Road to Serfdom”

Author: F.A. Hayek

Rank: 4

Blurb: “Originally published in 1944 — when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program — The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production.”

Review: “This guy is well spoken and insightful. But beyond that his style makes his writing hard to follow. Preferably books ought to be written in the most easily understood and comprehended form. This author’s style is one where the sentences are long and filled with commas and interjections. Also the text is somewhat old so the phrasing and expressions sometimes were extremely hard for me to understand.”

Customers Also Bought: “Ayn Rand Box Set”

Footnote: Hayek in the Amazon Top Ten? Glenn Beck, of course. Let’s see Oprah do that.

The Road to Serfdom [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

Hey, it was either this or a detailed explanation of why you have to nil your asynchronous NSURLConnection instance delegate when deallocing a view, lest the spare thread create a zombie and crash your app when it finishes its work in the background and discovers that its callback protocol left the building.

Because that’s what we spent Friday night thinking about.

[via 27b/6]

Utah firing squad death announced on Twitter [BBC]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFv3z7Q6tsI

Today’s Blogger Buzz appears to be Nevada’s Sharron Angle walking out on reporters while her campaign manager calls one an “‘an idiot’ and another term that can’t be repeated.” (Nominations welcome!)

We’re having a hard time getting worked up about that, but then we found another Angle video that we think is much more illuminating.

We understand a bunch of skinny dudes will be kicking around a misinflated ball in a half-hour. Have at it.

Longtime Stinque detainees will recall that once upon a time, before the Not the MSNBC Ad, there was an MSNBC ad. And a purty ad it was, with rotating headlines and a sponsor who actually paid for the privilege of raping your eyeballs.

That’s the part we recall fondly at Stinque World Domination Headquarters and Discount Vuvuzelas: the twenty-dollar check that arrived in the mailbox every month. The MSNBC ad paid per “impression” (each time you visited a page) and not per click. The substitute Google ad isn’t nearly as beermoneylicious, and we only keep it running for the occasional context-dependent amusement.

So what happened to the MSNBC ad? Simply put, one day they told us to fuck off. We were using very naughty language on our site, distressing the advertisers who preferred less competition for their expensive eyeball-raping. We could either tone down the salty talk, or kiss that monthly Jackson goodbye.

We’re not sellouts. At least not for that price.

We’ve kept the ad title long past the gag’s expiration date, simply because we’ve grown quite fond of it. Also, you never know when it might prove handy.

Like, well, now.

Read more »

“Bank of America Corp. and other banks are preparing new fees on basic banking services as they try to replace revenue lost to regulatory rules, in a push that is expected to spell an end to free checking accounts for many Americans… ‘Customers will have a choice,’ Bank of America Chief Accounting Officer Neil Cotty told analysts in April, of ‘bringing more relationships to us or paying a maintenance fee.'” [WSJ]