Some links to recent articles with an economic theme. Hopefully they’ll help you get through Christmukkah:

• Inside the world’s most annoying economic crisis
• The future of cities: why Glasgow and Edinburgh should consider a joint future
• A world enslaved: how slavery thrives in the modern global economy
• How opium can save Afghanistan
• Edward Hugh’s impressive economic analyses of Europe’s prospects in the next few months. Essential reading for those interested in the new EU-25/27 entrant states. My woeful understanding of macroeconomics doesn’t allow me to evaluate these fully, but they do seem thorough.

Have a look at this article at InformIT. Useful, well-written content - but it’s laid out so badly that you’re put off reading the whole thing by the ad-ridden multi-page badness that is their site design.

On the linked article’s page, you have to look past a network banner; a full-size ad banner; a header/login bar; a set of navigation ‘tabs’; a bread-crumb trail; a title; a set of descriptive metadata to do with the article; a toolbar (save/discuss/print/email); and a table of contents box before you get to the actual content. That’s 750 vertical pixels of page to look past - in other words, an entire screenful on a 1024×768 screen. I have a 1680×1050 screen on my iMac, and I can still only see the first six lines of the story in my RSS reader.

The article is spread over ten pages. Why? It’s only two thousand words long. This is something I see a lot on technology sites, Tom’s Hardware being the worst offender (example). To make matters worse, the table of content box (pictured left) is right where the actual content should be. It’s got a stupid AJAX collapsable header - the need for which just exposes the fact that it gets in the way. Personally, unless the story was extremely important to me I wouldn’t tend to read more than a couple of ‘pages’ from an article like this - clicking through just gets tiresome.

[Note: I'm about to put in a 'more' tag, which means you'll have to click through to read the rest of this story. This may seem hypocritical, but remember that you'll only have to click-through if you're on the home page of this blog, where it exists for brevity of the blog entry list. On the permalink page, which corresponds to something like InformIT's article page, the entire blog entry is displayed.]

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I just found out via TUAW that The Economist has a podcast [Podcast XML feed].

Also worth listening to in this list are Grammar Girl [Podcast XML feed] [iTunes subscribe]; Mark Kermode’s film reviews [Podcast XML feed] and NPR Music Podcast [Podcast XML feed] [iTunes subscribe].

I love the internet.

Sad news - J.K. Galbraith has died.
Galbraith memorial thread:
John Kenneth Galbraith, an influential and unorthodox economist, has died, at age 97.
(Via MetaFilter).
(…)

The Economist ensures that rationality rules, once again.

BSA disgusted with critiques of their inflammatory piracy loss methodology:

The BSA’s claim were considerable, and they were taken to task for disingenuous tactics. Now they respond with an air of indignation. Oh, Scarlet!

(Via Ars Technica.)

Original Economist article here (day pass or subscription required).