Month: June 2012

Here is a striking fact about the human mind: we have great difficulty imagining solutions that have yet to present themselves. It doesn’t matter how often the market resolves seemingly intractable problems, we still can’t become accustomed to this reality. Our minds think in terms of existing conditions, and then we predict all kinds of doom. We too often fail to consistently expect the unexpected.

The voter matching process is still far from perfect. Blaise Hazelwood of Grassroots Targeting, a Republican firm, said that the process is expensive, and that it’s typically only possible to locate 20 to 40 percent of a given list of voters online in a typical matching process.

in 1885 The New York Times urged restrictive legislation and darkly predicted that “if the streets were lined with eight-story buildings, half of the occupants would be deprived of sunlight, and their children would be etiolated like plants grown in a cellar.” You can tell it’s serious when The Times brings the kids into it.