Slashdot Mirror

Goddamn it. Punched "Submit" on my way to hit "Preview".

Here's what the links should have looked like:

• The IMF
• The World Bank
• Some anti-IMF (etc.) articles courtesy of Global Exchange
• Example of a pro-IMF (etc.) etc article at he Economist

And now slashdot can't handle my html (though, Netscape 4.5 has no problem with it). So you've got to cut and paste those last two: http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/rulemakers/ http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/libr ary/index_special_collection.html

(Slashdot's alpha-quality is pissing me off today. They sold this shit?)

I've been an Economist subscriber for a few years now, and despite some problems I've been pretty impressed with it, particularly it's technical reporting. So I've been submitting Economist stories to slashdot off and on (because I'm sick of all the pointers to zdnet, cnn and msnbc)... I thought about submitting this one, but it looked like pretty lame business-think stuff to me, so of course, this is the one that made it. Whatever.

However, it is true that they can be a bit naive about computers (e.g. I remember a particularly funny article about how wonderful Object Oriented programming is because of all the code that gets reused, thereby saving oodles of programming dollars).

Anyway: the primary strength of the Economist is that they really do report on global news (unlike, say "US News and World Report", where the "world report" half of their title typically refers to one page). The Economist, on the other hand has lots of stories about things like competing consititutional conventions in Zimbabwe (have you heard about that one? Why not?).

It's a bit misleading to call it a "conservative" publication, because it's British and it has different biases than American conservatives do. They're rabidly opposed to the right to bear arms, regard the death penalty with suspicion, and they're opposed to the "War on Drugs". They're also nowhere near as hostile to the UN as American conservatives... and they're positively in love with the IMF and the World Bank (I would guess that the average American doesn't even have a clue as to what the IMF does.)

Just for the hell of it, some links on that subject:

• The IMF
• The World Bank
• Example of a pro-IMF, etc article at he Economist
• Some anti-IMF, etc articles courtesy of Global Exchange