December 2009
20 posts
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown.
—Krugman
The research that Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer previewed for David Brooks has finally come out: Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem. [Via: NBER]
we exist in different worlds
It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories. I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.
—Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company
So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers. They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news...
It is clearly a much better picture, and appears to be mostly genuine. It shows employers have come back so much and are starting to rehire.
You create this class of people who essentially become permanently unemployed and can’t get back in. You have people who have lost contact with the labor market, whose skills are not relevant for jobs for the future, who employers regard with skepticism...
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
—Tony Judt, What is...
But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.
—O’Reilly
I’ve outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the “small pieces loosely joined” model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.
One of the points I’ve made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better...
This is an important turnaround after the free fall in world trade, industrial production, asset prices, and global credit availability which threatened to push the global economy into the abyss of a new Great Depression in early 2009.
—Preview of UN Report on the world economy
Nice Bikez →
Even though he kind of plays with the facts, it’s more about the overall message.
—Erin Power, 21, of Long Island, N.Y., on Oliver Stone, during a class [HIST-288: Oliver Stone’s America] dedicated to his work at American University by Peter Kuznik.
that's what property taxes are for
The gravy train continues to roll without impediment for select groups of employees on the public payroll…Startling amounts of taxpayer-funded booty continue to be dispensed across New Jersey without regard for the common good.
—State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation: The Beat Goes on, waste and abuse in local government employee compensation and benefits
Counties are...
How to compromise your ethics for $110
JustAnswer.com - breaking new ground in homework for hire and plagiarism. Now, for $110, provide answers of 225 to 300 words each to sixteen questions on business ethics!
Question
225 - 300 words to each question COURSE TEXTBOOK: Ferrell, O.C., Fraedrich, J., & Ferrell, L. (2008). Business ethics: Ethical decision making and cases (7th ed.) Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company Unit 1: The...
I am seeking to get out because of what’s happening. Not that I see a crisis, but people seem to be loving it too much.
—Paul Krugman on selling assets in Brazil
ginning content from their audiences
The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore.
—David Carr
we live in public
Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.
—Tiger Woods
Copyright, Fair Use, and the Perils of Legislation
Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown commented in the WSJ on “Google and the Copyright Wars” (11/12). Many are focused on the status of orphan works in the Google Books project, but Sanford and Brown argue that the idea of fair use and its application by search engines is the controversy’s center, not orphan works. Sanford and Brown would say that a search engine’s use of the...
We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.
—Marcus Brauchli on the Washington Post
He has to convey the fact that his strategy is not an open-ended one for an indefinite war. In different ways he’s going to have a hard sell with both Republicans and Democrats, simply because the country is in a kind of state of unease.
—Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter
there’s a real chance that, soon enough, Chinese economic weakness will be a bigger problem than was Chinese economic strength.
—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, via Economic View: NYT
November 2009
47 posts
is he right...
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security.
—David Brooks on healthcare reform
We have seen broad improvement in home prices for most of the past six months. However, the gains in the most recent month are more modest than during the seasonally strong summer months. Fewer cities saw month to month improvements in September than in August in both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted figures. Nationally, the U.S. National Composite rose by 3.1% in both the 2nd and 3rd quarters...
This is the big growth strategy for I.B.M., the company’s next big play for this decade. SAS comes from the legacy world of statisticians and programmers. The real opportunity is in deploying this technology broadly in corporations.
—Ambuj Goyal, a computer scientist who is general manager of I.B.M’s business analytics software unit
We must reform the international monetary system. A good monetary system should make us confident. But we don’t have confidence in the US dollar now.
—Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank adviser, on 17 Nov
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
—Max Frisch, Homo Faber (1957)
Double your rate of failure
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.
–Thomas J. Watson, (1874-1956), former President...
“the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
"the Igon Value Problem"
when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
—Steven Pinker on Malcolm Gladwell
China
We are in a fairly advanced stage of economic mutual interdependence. I think the Chinese can pull the rug out from under our economy only if they want to pull the rug out from under themselves…I think it is neither of our interests to see that unravel. If we can find ways to manage our differences and cooperate where we can, we both win. If not, we both lose.
—Kenneth Lieberthal, a...
Look for the stories about Lou Dobbs’s departure from CNN to say that he was controversial figure. No doubt he is. But that’s not really the main point about Mr. Dobbs. The main point is that he has a long history of not telling the truth.
—David Leonhardt
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has danger, sorrow and an awareness of mortality.
—NYT
Language Log →
US Trade Deficit, up 18%
Sometimes what looks bad on the surface is actually quite good and I think that’s the case this time around. Exports are growing strongly and imports are turning up because domestic spending has turned the corner.
—Sal Guatieri, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, on the 18% rise in the US trade deficit to $36b, the highest since January
Not now, but later
There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate. It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free] so something needs to happen. I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way….The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not ...
How to be an expert →
Foreclosures over 300k, 8th straight month
The foreclosure problem is still with us and will keep prices down. The real issue is we don’t know what inventory banks are holding that they have yet to put on the market.
—Stephen Miller, chairman of the economics department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas
The fundamental forces driving foreclosure activity in this housing downturn — high-risk mortgages, negative...
“small talk is the grooming of the mind”
Martin Cohen on Wikipedia
To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought.
—Martin Cohen, who would go on to say, “If anyone disagrees with the Wikipedian consensus, their edits are “reverted” and they can be banned -...
More on the debate?
Christie inherits a state that’s in arguably the worst financial condition in its 233- year history. Last year’s $7 billion shortfall, closed with stimulus dollars and tax hikes, has resurfaced at an even larger $8 billion for 2010. Residents face crippling property taxes (an average of $7,000 per capita), high income and sales taxes, $45 billion in debt and the net loss of 400,000...
Some concerns about the asset-price inflation are overstated. Policy makers want to reflate asset prices as part of the recovery; if that starts getting out of hand, then you can get worries about future asset bubbles. These concerns I think are somewhat premature.
—David Riley, head of global sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings
You got people out there saying the bear market rally’s...
Structural Constraint / Individual Intentionality →
It’s just a reversal of excessive pessimism. We still have a lot more bull market to go because we had such a huge bear market…The economy is not recovering at a slow pace. America is faster than people think. Third-quarter GDP numbers knocked the socks off of expectations.
—Kenneth Fisher
Are you forgetting Bilski?
I think this case is the case of the century for patent law
—John F. Duffy, a professor at the George Washington University Law School
It’s not very often that some obscure issue of patent law can excite so much attention.
—Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information management at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Her brief argued that the State...
The Cash Nexus
[The bourgeousie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that...
Goats →
Heidegger / Praxis
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
—Heidegger, from his Letter on Humanism. Richard Rorty would go on to say, “You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account,” but ”the smell of moke from the crematories...
Paranoid Style
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.
—Paul Krugman: another instance of Richard Hofstadter, cited again, and again
journalist and publisher
And he was one of the first at the paper to realize the centrality of the web and also one of the first to realize that on the web, a journalist’s personal brand can sometimes be more valuable than that of the institution that employs him.
—on Andrew Ross Sorkin
Jon Corzine showed a lot of courage in doing what will benefit New Jersey for years to come and he paid a price for it.
—Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania
A good chunk…could be down to fundamentals. But it’s become so rapid and so correlated across the world that there’s evidence of it getting out of hand. There’s a clear case that part of these increases is the beginning of a bubble…Given the dollar weakening, you can actually borrow at significantly negative rates, minus 15 or 20 percent. This asset bubble we have seen since...