Google: the best thing to happen to Yahoo

Let's review some of the changes to Yahoo since Google became a force:

• Mail storage increased from 3 megabytes to 1 gigabyte
• Finally, today: secure login to email
• In beta: vastly improved email interface from OddPost
• My Yahoo boxes move with click and drag
• You can add any RSS feed to your My Yahoo page
• Intriguing MyWeb beta

And those, obviously, are only the things I noticed in the services I use. Feel free to point out others in the comments...

The best critical reviews--in terms of the quality of the criticism, not the glowing raves it offers--come at moments when the writer brings knowledge of a related subject to bear. Josh Marshall writes the well-known blog Talking Points Memo, but also holds a PhD in American colonial history. Marshall relates the political instability in those times to the ongoing failure of Congress to police itself in a recent post showing how patronage trumps ideological discipline in parliamentary groups. To balance my previous post on the overlong Empire of Debt, Bill Bonner notes remarkably similar problems with bribery, graft, kickbacks, self-dealing, and a public & political leadership totally uninterested in reports of same...in the Roman Empire. The more things change...

Bill Bonner (no known relation) leads a group of financially conservative (as compared with neocon and other stupid reinventions of the idea) email called The Daily Reckoning. January 13th's epistle includes this gem:

This year, you can hardly throw a stone in any direction without hitting an economist who tells you why the dollar will continue to be strong. Our advice: throw it good and hard.

On the other hand, Bonner & co-author Addison Wiggum recently published a book called Empire of Debt about the profligate ways of the USA. I so wanted this book to rain witticisms and sharp attacks on U.S. financial mismanagement by Bush et al. To its credit, the book offers the interesting thesis that empires inevitably dissolve into overspending bunches of fools with half-baked notions that they must invade other countries at any cost. However, the book takes 500 pages to say that, and shows no signs of having passed near the desk of any editor. The emails are repetitive enough, but at least they're free.