The race to build a better business class

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Probably my heightened awareness, but I’m seeing stories like this every time I log on. Airlines are racing to find a way to make business class seats more appealing. I found this NYT story especially interesting (and informative).

Lufthansa has a new business-class seat that can be yours for about $5,000 if you are traveling round trip from Frankfurt to New York. (Yeah, I think I’d pay that assuming I have the money)

Why so expensive? The story does a good job of explaining that, including:

“Each seat is hand-made and cost as much as a luxury car to produce. Business. First Class seats can cost between $250K and $500K.”

The Blast Shack: Part 2

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Bruce Sterling has written a follow-up to his 2010 essay on Wikileaks. Here are a few of my favorite snippets:

The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.

Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

iMovie Themes

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I’m exactly the sort of amateur Apple’s iMovie was created for. A set of simple, easy-to-use tools for editing those home movies. And it has some nice features I rarely use. Like themes. Here’s a minute of video and stills from Singapore (that I might have posted already) with one of the iMovie themes. Adds a little class I could never do on my own.