Events

James Fallows today suggested a parlor game you can play at home: This is distilled from a longer item earlier today, at the suggestion of my colleagues. It's a simple game you can try at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which: First, a presidential election is decided by five people, who don't even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained...

I have just spent an hour of my life—one that I will never get back—trying to figure out why I couldn't install any software from .msi files on one of my Windows 7 machines. Every time I tried, I would get a message that the installer "could not find the file specified." I'll spare you all the steps I went through to figure out why this was happening, and get to the punchline: > Yeah, you see, the SYSTEM account needs full control over any file you're trying to install on Windows. Here's how it should...

Continuing my general theme the last few days, the New York Times reminds us what Mitt Romney's biggest backer really wants: Mr. Adelson’s other overriding interest is his own wallet. He rails against the president’s “socialist-style economy” and redistribution of wealth, but what he really fears is Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on companies like his that make a huge amount of money overseas. Ninety percent of the earnings of his company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, come from hotel and casino...

I fretted earlier this week about the pattern that has emerged in the U.S., driven primarily by the the Republican Party (though my party isn't guilt-free), to return to the golden age of fiefs and barons. Paul Krugman provided another clear example: Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone...

To readers who couldn't care less about my Exchange migration post, here is Parker reacting to the cleaning service's vacuums: They're about to vacuum under my desk, which will make him a very unhappy dog for a few minutes. He'll survive.

Last weekend I described moving my email hosting from my living room home office out to Microsoft Exchange Online. And Thursday I spent all day at a Microsoft workshop about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform on which my employer, 10th Magnitude, has developed software for the past two years. In this post, I'm going to describe the actual process of migrating from an on-site Exchange 2007 server to Exchange Online. If you'd prefer more photos of Parker or discussions about politics, go ahead...

The email migration I did over the weekend so far has made my email experience better, in part because the server rack temperatures have dipped a full degree C (despite really hot weather outside). More details about the migration will follow this weekend. Since 10th Magnitude has become a 100% Azure shop, Microsoft has invited us to participate in an all-day summit here in Chicago about the Azure cloud-computing platform. I'm leaving for it anon; I'll report this, too, weekend.

What do you call a system in which: Massive and increasing private wealth; Increasing inheritance of that wealth, reducing social mobility; Private control over traditionally public resources; Debts to private interests that persists after death, sometimes burdening families for generations; Increasing economic growth in non-productive ("rentier") sectors with declines in productive sectors, like manufacturing; Public officeholders continuing to use their former titles of office long after leaving...

The view from my office window:

The Affordable Care Act has helped 3.1 million people get health insurance: As a result of the law, the proportion of insured adults ages 19 through 25 has increased to nearly 75 percent. The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to allow young adults to remain on their parents' family plans until their 26th birthday, even if they move away from home or graduate from school. This policy took effect on September 23, 2010. "Today, because of the health care law, more than 3 million more young adults have...