Chance Favors the Concentration of Wealth, Study Shows – What’s Torah’s Alternative?

Just saw this: Chance favors the concentration of wealth, study shows [PhysOrg]. Quite interesting and convincing, that save for corrective government action, over time, chance favors few people becoming mega rich while others become poor.

Contrast that with the biblical idea of Sabbatical and Jubilee years. In the beginning, land is distributed evenly. Then, every seven years, everyone effectively goes bankrupt (overdue loans are forgiven), and every fifty years, all agricultural land reverts to its original estate. That way, expertise, human capital can allow for accumulating wealth (no, you won’t lose your accumulated expertise on the Sabbatical year), so people can still get rich, work pays, but a limit is put on the systemic bias that may otherwise develop in favor of large, super wealthy landowners.

How could such a system be implemented in our financial (rather than agrarian) economies?

Homosexuals, Tolerance, the Apple App Store, and Freedom of Speech

Mobile phone “app stores” have become the new sociocultural battlegrounds. Apple, which owns and operates its iTunes application and media stores, maintains relatively tight guidelines as to what may or may not be sold through their platform. Recently, they banned an application that purported to help homosexuals become heterosexual, through what is known as reparative therapy.

Without taking any particular stand on reparative therapy (about which I should share some ramblings in the future), I found the following comment on a technology web site [slashdot.org], which strongly leans left socially, very much on the mark:

Thanks for injecting some rationality here. This is the thing I can’t understand: if someone wants to change their gender, that’s something that’s seen as acceptable, even if a bit unusual. If someone wants to change their sexual orientation, it’s presumed that someone with an agenda must have brainwashed that person and the community that shares their (original) orientation takes offence. No-one should be pushing this sort of thing on anybody, but I can’t understand why it’s an issue for such software to exist.

What’s More Meaningful Is More Easily Remembered

Many a bar mitsva boy, or even a seasoned ba’al qeria, has spent countless hours trying to memorize the proper vowelization and cantillation of a text spanning sometimes well over one hundred verses. Is there a secret to make this process easier? Is there a golden bullet, a holy grail?

Scharfe Analyse der Gaza-Flotte auf ARD

How German built the Hebrew language

Languages evolve constantly. New technologies, new philosophical concepts and ideas, and new social organizations and interactions necessitate new words. Cultural encounter also leads to incorporation of foreign loan word for foreign phenomena, whether to label them as something desirable, or as pejorative influences to be rejected.

Mishnaic and Talmudic Hebrew brought Greek and Latin terms to Hebrew (Apotika=Hypotheka, Dinar, Drachon, Itztaba=Stoa, Sanhedrin, Siqriqon=Sicarii, Biberin=Vivarium; other examples in the Jewish Encyclopedia). Mediaeval Hebrew incorporated Arab and Greek philosophical terms (just leaf through Maimonides’ Guide for abundant examples), and the twentieth century, technological terms.

In recent decades, such words have often come from English – in all languages, including Hebrew. However, earlier in the20th century, German dominated, and, as DPA documents in Haaretz, Hebrew not inly includes many Yiddish terms, but outright German loan words, too:

When an Israeli gets out of bed on a dark morning, she will flick on a light Schalter (switch in English) and wash down a Biss (bite) of toast with a Schluck (sip) of coffee – all Hebrew words that stem from the German language.

Endlich ein Mass Gerechtigkeit

Wie Vosizneias berichtet, wurde letzer Donnerstag William Hill, der Mann, der die Verantwortung trägt für den Tod des Herrn Jacob Gerstle ע”ה, vom Gericht für schuldig erklärt. Das Urteil wird am 11 Februar ausgesprochen werden.

Ich möchte der Familie von Herrn Gertle innige Gefühle der Sympathie mitteilen. Wir hoffen, dass mit diesem Rechtsspruch die Familie Closure empfinden wird. יה”ר שתתנחמו מן השמים.