This week's cartoon reminds me of what Warren Buffett, who knows a lot more about how money works than just about anyone, had this to say on the subject:

[G]ive reductions to those who both need and will spend the money gained. Enact a Social Security tax "holiday" or give a flat-sum rebate to people with low incomes. Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.

When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires — now or down the line — that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Not much more to say than that!

He ran a bad campaign in 2000, unsure about how populist to be, running away from the Clinton legacy, but it was still good enough to have made him president.

It seems to me that against a bunch of two-bit hucksters like Bush and his team, "good enough" would have delivered a solid, cheat-proof victory in 2000, not the fingernail-clawing muddle that Gore was too powerless to even really anticipate, let alone react to.

I don't believe that Gore was liberated by exile — in the sense of freedom from politics allowing him to speak more boldly. That's a convenient myth, but it's not the truth. What Gore's loss (tactical if not electoral) did was snap him out of the trance that he had been in along with so many of his fellow Democrats and members of the liberal establishment. He realized, as so many of the rest have yet to, how weak the mechanisms of democracy have become and what the consequences of civic neglect really are.

And since then he's been doing his quiet, Gore-ish best to prod his colleagues out of their somnolence. For that reason alone, in my mind, he deserves the Nobel.

If two people were out in public talking, would you hate them because they were carrying on a conversation within earshot? Would you hate a person talking into a payphone? Or someone sitting next to you at a restaurant sending text messages?

Or look at it another way: is it any more boorish to talk loudly in person than on the phone? Is it any less polite to interrupt table conversation and begin gossiping with the person at your elbow, rather than over a telephone?

People who were rude before cell phones haven't gotten less rude with them, but if two people are pleasantly chatting and minding their own business, what's it to you if one of them isn't actually there?

Cell phone haters are as vapid as cell phone show-offs.

It's not clear why so many people regard municipal pounds as a "last resort" for adopting animals. Pound animals generally have much shorter lifespans owing to the combination of limited resources and open-ended obligation to take all comers inherent in a civic service. You're not rescuing a pound animal from a sorrowful life in a cage — you're rescuing it from certain, scheduled death.

Something about the obsession with private animal shelters reminds me of the way people buy their water in bottles now, as if public services are somehow suspect simply by virtue of ... what? Being public? Not being run by precious staffers anxiously wringing their hands and charging you for the privilege of going through them?

I've never gotten a pet from a shelter, always the pound. The folks there have their own kind of insensitivity — as Heather Havrilesky points out, it's not like the system is conducive to a lot of optimism about human nature — but the animals are just as real and the experience hugely less stiflingly bourgeois.

Unless, you know, bourgeois pet shopping is your thing, in which case quit your crying.

"I don't exactly believe in the power of panties over the diplomacy of the United Nations ..."

And this from Broadsheet, even! What is the world coming to?

A lot of people doubted that writing letters to free prisoners of conscience would ever work, either. Fortunately, enough people did it anyway. If it were ever to work, the pragmatists at Amnesty International would doubtless run with it even if Tracy Clark-Flory's can't bring herself to.

Although it would be dark humor of a sort to read the caption: "After the first two hundred panties arrived, they gave me back my clothes..."

This article is the sort of thing with which Salon made its name back in the day — topical, well-researched but concise, articulate, and uncompromised by the kind of craven shock and awe that one often sees in business technology reporting.

Like many of your readers, Editor, I hope to see more of this kind of writing from Farhad Manjoo.