SF: Jay, you’re also wise enough, or big enough, where you don’t mind sharing billing with Eminem or Bono.

JZ: It’s fun for me, for one thing. I don’t have that ego where I have to be the only guy on the bill. I’m cool with going out with other artists. I’ve been doing it my entire career. Before Eminem, before Bono, it was R. Kelly or 50 Cent or DMX. I just believe in giving people a better package so when they leave the concert hall, they want to come back again. A lot of people make that mistake when they’re hot. They just sell off the name and sell off the moment. We’re over-delivering on the experience

I’m tempted to simply say we ought to end the subsidies altogether, but I don’t know what the counterfactual is.  When my parents were in college, it was possible to work your way through a good four year school; these days, that’s difficult to impossible.  Have loans really increased access?  Or have they simply made it more expensive?  Is the marginal supply those loans created–like the for-profit diploma mills–actually adding value, or merely allowing naive students to beggar themselves for a worthless degree?  I’m fairly comfortable diagnosing the problem.  But I’m less sure of what the solution should be.

The law of unintended consequences in play here.

India, within the limitations of its financial resources, workforce skills, pressing competing demands and probable corruption, has done the best it can to organise the the games.

Will everything be as good as it would have been in Edinburgh, Adelaide or Auckland? Clearly not.

Will it be good enough? There’s no straight answer for that. Rather, like any traveller entering truly foreign lands, some times you just have to cross your fingers, step over the precipice and make the best of whatever happens.

People in India have been doing that for generations.

A balanced and mature article.

The first real challenger to Apple’s iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, will launch in Australia in November for $999 for the 16GB version, the company has confirmed.

How can this be any competition? For AUD 1049 you can get a 64GB, 10 inch iPad with 3G. Much better than the Samsung TAB. In the Tablet wars Apple seems to be the leader in terms pricing. Quite unusual.

I’ve told this story many times since. I get a lot of reactions, because it’s a strange tale — to think you could find out so much online about a thief, to think what a bizarre wormhole I found into one stranger’s life. But what took me a long time to realize, what I missed at first amid my drama of violation and vengeance, was the remarkable displays of kindness I experienced from absolute strangers — people who retrieved scraps of paper from lawns, picked up piles of discarded cards from a dirty train station floor, drove miles to restore someone’s belongings, searched Facebook to find me. If I were mathematically inclined, I might even observe that in my tale, the good guys outnumbered the bad guys, by about 10 to one.

Great story!

“If all you do is download the same stuff – only faster – how can you justify that as an investment?

“If the mix of the normal usage – email, music, video, Facebook, gaming, stays the same, but just happens faster – is there an economic or social benefit in that for the private user?”

A 350km/h very fast train line (”VFT”) linking Melbourne to Brisbane via Canberra and Sydney is back on the agenda, with the federal government committing to a $20 million study.

Suggested VFT routes include along the eastern seaboard or following the existing Melbourne-Sydney rail route, modified to include Melbourne Airport.

This is great news

The Coke Machine” is about a lot more than just high fructose corn syrup. Blanding roots his tale in the birth of the advertising era, and he is particularly effective in telling the story of how Coke fought to monopolize the sale of soft drinks to school children. There’s really no way to uh, sugar coat it: Coke profits by making Americans fat. High fructose corn syrup is a crucial weapon in its arsenal. We should consume less of it, no matter what we bother to call it.