Paris Deligiannakis

Comedian Jon Gnarr recently won election as mayor of Reykjavik and has already gotten to work on his campaign promises of free towels at public swimming pools and a drug-free Parliament by 2020. Gnarr founded the The Best Party late last year, and other Best Party candidates, including members of the Reykjavik punk rock community, won 6 of the 15 seats on the City Council. The best part of all is that Gnarr "needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of 'The Wire'." That seems like sound policy to me.

On The Best Party, Gnarr has this to say:

No one has to be afraid of the Best Party, because it is the best party. If it wasn't, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.

(Via Balloon Juice)

BEFORE being sent off anywhere deemed to be dangerous, Economist correspondents undergo a not-especially-gruelling week of first aid and fine dining in a hotel on the Welsh borders. I had my suspicions that the course was as much to reassure our insurers as it was about safety. But I picked up two offbeat safety tips that have stuck in my mind and which I now pass on in case they might save the life of a subscriber or two.

The first concerns how not be blown up when in Kabul, and comes courtesy of an American TV journalist who was on the course with us. You do not need Kevlar, or night-vision goggles, or an armoured car to evade the Taliban, he said: your secret weapon is to have a jolly good long lie-in every morning. In Kabul, at least, suicide bombs apparently almost always go off early in the morning. Have a leisurely breakfast and, once you venture out after 11am or so, your chances of being killed are drastically reduced. The explanation given was that the bombers spend all night psyching themselves up, then say their prayers at dawn, and go off to murder. A second helping of Corn Flakes could save your life.

The second tip is useful even for those of us who don’t travel to warzones. When booking a hotel, we were told, try to get a room between the second and sixth floors. Being on at least the second floor means you’re a little further away from whatever dangers may lurk near reception: opportunist robbers won’t venture deep into the hotel, and if things get nastier—car-bombs, shootouts and so on—you’re a little further away from the action. So far, pretty obvious.

But why not go above the sixth floor—wouldn’t that be even safer? Apparently not. More likely than a bomb or a shootout is a plain old fire, in which case you will want to make a hasty exit. More storeys mean more stairs and more delay, of course. But the killer, literally, is this: if the stairs are blocked, you will need rescuing from your window by a ladder. And in many parts of the world, the sixth floor is as high as the local fire-engines can reach.

I’m not going to lie. I was never a Microsoft fan. Not even when I was using Windows (that I begrudgingly moved to after the Amiga). But at least you used to have some awe and respect for the gorilla that was Microsoft. Bill Gates might have been an evil genius, but at least he was a genius.

Now contrast this to Steve Ballmer. Who’s certainly no genius and calling him evil is to belittle evil. He has turned the gorilla into a buffoon. And frankly, it’s sad. Gone are the feelings of rage (except when they patent troll people for being web apps) and left is pity.

None of this is new, of course. Ballmer has be running Microsoft for more than a decade now, but when you don’t hear from the guy directly for a while, it’s easy to get lulled into the belief that he’s probably running alright. Not.

See this video from D8 of Ballmer babbling about “productivity is going to be important, consumption is going to be important”.

Now contrast this with Steve Jobs speaking about a much, much tougher issue at the same conference:

Jobs is lucid and reasoned. Ballmer is… Hell, I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s all over the place. No clear definitions, just randomly running his mouth. Compared to Jobs, I think it’s charitable to call him pathetic.

Jobs needs worthy opponents and Ballmer isn’t it. Look at this chart of Microsoft’s market value from the Gates to Ballmer hand-over:

Chart by Erik Pukinskis of Sprout Robot

Now look at this picture of Apple stock since Jobs returned:

It matters who’s at the top. It sets the company tone. Microsoft is undoubtedly full of very smart people, but as long as they are being run by Steve Ballmer, they’re going to be shackled by his ineptitude.

I wish Microsoft had their evil genius back.

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banksimple.net is the new project co-founded by Alex Payne who previously co-founded Twitter. From Twitter to banking, huh, now that's a career path change.

SIGNS of hope are rare in Greece these days. And you might think the last place to look for evidence that the Greek economy can reform itself would be Olympic Airlines, once a hidebound and seriously troubled state carrier. Like the country, it was horribly inefficient, deeply in debt and in desperate need of a radical overhaul. One particularly unhappy mid-flight memory of the old Olympic is of a flight attendant, summoned for help by a passenger, precariously dangling her half-finished cigarette on a plastic cup to await her return.

But in 2009 Olympic was sold to Marfin Investment Group. To judge by three flights taken last week (disclosure: to an event for which the airline was a sponsor), the new, privately run Olympic Air is a delight. The check-in staff in Athens were excellent, the cabin crew smart and efficient, and the aircraft itself on the London-Athens route brand new.

The transformation has been swift and remarkable. If only the whole country can follow suit.

Despite having no natural enemies and belonging to a species that completely dominates its ecosystem, local IT manager Reggie Atkinson opted to consume the processed corn snack Bugles Monday.

Another bullseye by The Onion.

Alley Insider:

While Apple has just 7% of the share of revenue, it’s grabbing 35% of the operating profit. Deutsche Bank attributes it to the strength of the Mac/Macbook lineup. Other companies are losing profit margins because they have to pay Microsoft for software.

Tell me again why HP doesn’t have its own PC operating system?

Manufactured demand.

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The awesomeness of this comment is beyond words

Over at Reddit, an epic answer to the simple question "if you became the last person on Earth, what would you do?"

Hone your skills. You're now the worlds only Mechanic, Electrician, Farmer, Hunter, Gatherer and Doctor. Books are a remarkable resource.

As previously noted, I love this kind of thing.

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via @lamnatos

Petty bribery is common in India, but the introduction of a zero rupee banknote has given some would-be bribers pause.

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

Two worrying common threads can be discerned in all this. One is that the natural desire for social cohesion is being abused to justify the protection of “insiders”—those in permanent jobs, in trade unions or in privileged professions. But the cost of protecting insiders falls largely on “outsiders”—the unemployed and those in temporary work, especially young people and immigrants. The gulf between insiders and outsiders destroys the very social cohesion that the policy is meant to preserve. And in the long run it is bad for everyone, because employers do not train temporary workers—a particular problem in economies like Italy and Spain, where new permanent contracts are rare. This lack of training is one of the main reasons why Europe’s productivity growth over the past two decades has persistently lagged behind America’s.

The second common thread is that social cohesion has become a reason to defend the privileges and perks of the public sector, which is also now the last bastion of trade unions. Across Europe many private-sector workers have seen their pay, pensions and other benefits frozen or cut by cash-strapped employers during the recession. Yet most governments, even Britain’s, have been reluctant to apply similar treatment to the public sector. One result is that the state is taking a rising share of GDP, which is sure to lead to heavier taxes. Another is that public-sector pay and benefits have shot ahead as a cosseted caste extends its privileges.

Photos of Dubai in decline are the new photos of Detroit in decline.

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The awesomeness of this is beyond belief.

Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.

(via @caterina)