John Hempton on NYT v. WSJ

I think they would argue that the Tea Party crowd are dumb, white, rural, uneducated and that that is backed by fact..

Editorializing as news sells papers - especially when it matches the reader prejudice.

I am sure I can find a fair dumb, white, rural and uneducated contingent in the tea party crowd. I can also find - in the SAME CROWD a smart, savvy, worldly, scared of government because their last interaction was with the IRS, but otherwise self reliant small business crowd. And they will be the same crowd (though sometimes different members of the crowd).

Depending on who you are selling to you editorialize differently.

Krugman - who is usually data or model driven - fell into the same crap with that blog post. And he did it entirely non-self-reflectively...

He made that same "cohabitating teens" joke last year

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report

Albums I have enjoyed

Do imagine how scary it's going to be to raise kids in 30 years? Here's a thought CHINESE SEX ROBOTS.

"Recently, I found out my 13-year-old son had been visiting glove fetish Web sites with pornographic glove pictures." Is it great that the Internet gives us glove fetish websites for our children?"- The Awl, ever wonderful

Dear Prudence,
My 13-year-old son, a well-behaved, sweet boy, already has what I perceive as a strange fetish. He loves and is fascinated by latex gloves. When he was little, he would stop in front of the rubber glove display at the supermarket and just stare at the packages of dishwashing gloves. He wanted me to buy them for him, but he would never tell me why. Now that he's older, he goes online to medical supply Web sites and "shops" for rubber gloves. Recently, I found out he had been visiting glove fetish Web sites with pornographic glove pictures. I installed content filtering software to block him from being exposed to such images. He was horribly embarrassed and guilty, and he promised to give up gloves forever. Apparently, it's not so easy. He still asks me to buy latex gloves for him when we go to the drug store, and he keeps piles of them around his room. He worries that he might not be able to find a girlfriend or wife who will be interested in sharing his glove love. Should I try to stop him, or should I just chalk it up to a personality quirk and worry no longer?

Links to items of interest

Yes, it was. “All right, go ahead and take your snack. I’m sure it would be good, but I wouldn’t know. I prefer a snack of electricity.”

The most famous park, the Nationalities Park in Beijing, is a combination of museum and fairground. Ethnic workers from across China dress up in their native costumes for mostly Han tourists. (For a while, English signs there read “Racist Park,” an unfortunate translation of the Chinese name.

Where does this man get his support?

RAAAAAAAANDY AND DAVE SITEK - AAAAAAAANGRY

Shit Covered Bear

WELLS FARGO, YOU NEVER KNEW WHAT HIT YOU.

A family about to lose their home. A legitimate check in my hand. Actual clients who had voluntarily agreed to let me represent them. And a trustee sale in two days.

I closed my eyes. I said a prayer. I exhaled. I opened my eyes.

And in front of me there stood a shit-covered bear waiting to wrestle. This was what a battle with a billion-dollar bank would be: a fight with a creature far bigger than I, and covered in feces.

Query

As a footnote to the previous post, does anyone know how to deal with intense shame? Murderous rage perhaps?

Wikipedia on shooting sprees

Chan-Wook Park on revenge

Oh no.

I have precious little advice of any practicality to give to anyone on any subject. That said I have a few things to bring to the readers attention. Things that I wish someone had told me 45 minutes ago.

1. Never get emotionally attached to a girl with literary ambitions who outmatches you in recreational drug use.
2. Never reveal to said individual deepest fears, self-doubts, aspirations, sexual inadequacies etc.
3. Remove all trace of her from your mind as quickly as possible. Consider inflicting severe head trauma on yourself to speed up the transition.

Now this is why dear friend. Say perchance one evening bored after a long day you happen to think of that person that drove you completely fucking insane a few years ago. No problem right? Just thank God you bought a laptop for Christmas instead of that Glock. Oh but wait...
I was lucky enough to be born in the age of Google, WHERE EVERYTHING THIS PERSON HAS EVER WRITTEN IS AVAILABLE FOR ANONYMOUS VIEWING ONLINE. Within seconds I have a college folio...a short story submitted to some independent publisher in 2005...An essay submitted to the New York Times..an entry on urban dictionary with my last name by someone named "evil plan". Now I realize everyone who has an active social life on Facebook or whereabouts probably has this experience from time to time. But alas I was unprepared for the trove of writing this person amassed using me as a character.

How about some excerpts!

Here's a selection from a New York Times essay contest by the class of 2009:

When my schoolmates scattered across America to continue their educations and I stayed in Georgia, unbeknownst to me I became the homeward bound hub of summer break – a helpless observer to the breakdown of the American higher education system.

I wonder who I will use to represent this breakdown?

By the time Tommy came home for the summer, he had not made a single new friend from school. Thanks to the proliferation of technology, a more appealing alternate world of videogames and downloadable movies sequestered him in his dorm, in front of his computer. The rest of college was a nuisance to be tolerated until he could return to his room...

Spanning states and standards, John’s overconfidence, Hannah’s over-eagerness, Tommy’s insulation, and Claire’s indifference intersect at the modern university’s inability to provide students with any sort of formative experience distinct from the contributions of the rest of the world.

Does this condescension go to 11?

We know Johnny Depp and not James Dean, James Dean and not young Werther, and young Werther and not Hamlet. A classroom that teaches Plato and not PR does more to create an educated citizenry because a people well-versed in vocational skills and unable to utilize the wisdom of the ages are the first to become cogs in a wheel rather than true leaders and trailblazers. Students now do not have the necessary information to spend nights awake arguing, and the shallowness of our knowledge manifests itself in what can be ostensibly labeled apathy..

Statement of Intent

I'm going to go burn my copy of a Purpose Driven Life. I believe this act will lead to some sort of catharsis.



Rick Warren's power is broken!

Links to things I found

It would take only about 28 seconds for hummingbirds to suck all the nectar out of a human body.

On Wednesday, the day before Andrew Joseph Stack III left his suicide note and crashed the plane into the building in Austin, the Obama administration proposed a widespread crackdown on all types of independent contractors in an effort to raise $7 billion in tax revenue over 10 years.

There are, of course, limitations on the practice. One is that not one joke mocks a woman; in fact, it would be considered a monstrous offense even to ask a Dagestani if his wife was in good health. And if you are thinking of offending a Dagestani, consider that full-on brawls are so common that some restaurants in Makhachkala list the cost of replacing chairs and tables on their menus.

The unfolding scene was a semiotician’s fantasia. (259)

Charlie Munger is sick of your bullshit America.

The title of this piece (which he probably didn't write) is much better than what the old man has to say.

Oliver Stone understands the need for financial reform.

Questions

How will the Tea Party attack the introduction of the VAT in the near future? More importantly what language will Frank Luntz develop to describe it?

Is Obama meeting the Dalai Lama like Hu Jintao inviting an American Indian chief to Bejing?

Why does the average Jepordy contestant have a greater knowledge of art history than I do? Is it because of required classes in colleges, increased international tourism?

Do professional skateboarders self-insure?

Is the CIA capable of assasinating terrorists without Predator drones or other military assistance?

What is the future profitability of the company that makes Northface Jackets? Why did I see a homeless man wearing one yesterday?

Who the fuck buys e-books?

Did my grandfathers business fail from Asian competition, overambitious expansion, employee theft, uncooperative customers or poor inventory control?

Is there a state park in North Georgia that has good trails for hiking this time of year?

Did I stop liking music because of substance abuse, boredom, lack of internet connectivity or the declining quality of new musical acts?

Does constant iPod use destroy one's socialbility, academic performance?

Do I write like a fat guy or 14 year old girl?

Why can't they invent a robot that can stop deflation?

Eyeball controlled headset

Robot Snowplow

Bronte Capital on Japanese political economy

General Asshattery

But here in the United States, schizophrenic home to both the largest number of elite universities in the world and the broadest-based strain of anti-intellectualism known to Western democracy, the aggressive debating style of lobbing witty insults at your opponent only plays well on reruns of Monty Python. If you doubt me, just look at the inarticulate clods we elect to public office. Most of these morons cannot even deliver a coherent speech, much less bandy about gerunds and subjunctive clauses in the midst of a heated argument. Most Americans would probably try to impeach them if they did. This is just not a country where you can use words like "egregious," "febrile," and "chimera" in public without running the risk of being lynched for general asshattery.

-Lucas Van Praag smackdown courtesy of the Epicurean Dealmaker

Insights from a Greek Banker

The newspapers have us think that bankers were the winners. We did not do too poorly, but we are not the big winners. The big winners here are the baby boomers. That's because they have their name against some 80% of the value in all pension funds and insurance policies......

And if the banks had gone down, that's who holds their debt and much of their equity. Bottom line, had the banks gone down, no insurance product would be worth a penny more than the paper it's printed on. So basically, the 2008 bailout sacrificed business, i.e. our generation, but saved our parents. The US bailout was intergenerational transfer, pure and simple. Now, our parents did not have enough kids......

The past 10 years has been the story of their struggle to sell us their homes and their equities at the price that will allow them to retire conveniently as they turn 65. They've thrown low interest rates at us to induce us to borrow against the homes they are selling us, but that backfired because low rates have pushed down their bond returns and their dividends. And their stocks have not gone up in ten years. The final straw was going to be the decimation of their insurance contracts and pension plans, but Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner jumped in and saved them......

Talk about the bankers is fashionable, but in the bigger scheme of things it was a side-show. It's pretty much the same with the Greek situation. Yes, we Greeks have been naughty. Yes, we are overindebted. Yes, we live above our means. But, much like the evil bankers, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Greece. That is my main thesis here. The Greek saga (for I refuse to see it as a tragedy) is all about saving the French and German baby boomers' retirement......

I hope we default and the country is freed from the curse of free money that befell it in 1980. Once our politicians have no more money to disburse to the oligarchs, we can start to be proud Europeans.

h/t-Paul Kedrosky

TV Movie

I still want to get back to the movie "The Day After" a second. This is the movie that, you know, made-for-TV movie that depicted a nuclear attack on the United States and how horrible it would be. I'm always a little confounded and disturbed when I hear how moved President Reagan was about that. And here's why: Everything that was in that movie about what would happen, I'd already heard that from so many experts, from doctors, from physicists, from, you know, political experts. Journalists were writing about it. And to think that Reagan didn't know this, that he hadn't thought about the extent of that devastation until seeing a made-for-TV movie, when the information was already out there. What does that say?

-Terry Gross interviewing author of new Cold War book h/t-NPR

Werner Herzog Things

1. Der Spiegel Interview
   
2. The only way to truly come close to Herzog is to follow his self-mythologizing as a lonely combatant, fighting, to the point of total exhaustion, for his films and his convictions. In 1974, when film historian Lotte Eisner, one of Herzog's idols, was ill and near death in Paris, the director walked from Munich to the French capital in the middle of the winter."It was clear to me that if I did it, Eisner wouldn't die," he says. "It wasn't superstition, however, but something the Catholic Church calls assurance of salvation -- an expression one should treat with great caution. I wasn't surprised that Lotte Eisner had already been released from the hospital when I arrived in Paris."
3. People have understood more and more that I'm not the maverick -- the rest of the world is maverick. I'm not eccentric. I occupy the center and all the rest is bizarre and eccentric, but not me. I'm clinically sane. I think I have much more sanity than the entire film industry in the US, for example.
4. Through imagination, stylization and invention, we become much more truthful. Take, for example, my 1992 film "Lessons of Darkness," which featured the fires in Kuwait after the Iraqi army set the entire country on fire. It begins with a quote from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor." What a wonderful sentence! Of course, it is not Pascal -- I invented it. Pascal couldn't have said it better himself, let's face it. To those with the mind of accountants, this looks like a fake. But ultimately it is not a fake because I elevate the audience onto a very high level before they have even seen the first image of the film, and you are stepping into this film with a different level of preparedness. In this respect, even though the quote is invented, it is not intended to deceive or mislead or defraud you. It's exactly the contrary: to fill you with a certain awe and to prepare your soul for something that has never been seen in the history of humankind. So it is not a lie, it is an intensified form of truth.
5. 
   

Sad America Story Time

How the status quo can kill: the example of free trade

I have a friend who has been helping “liquidate” the actual machinery of America’s industrial base for the past three decades. A factory shuts down, and what happens to all the lathes, milling machines, planers, shapers, power presses, and other equipment that sits on that factory floor?

He can, and has, told stories about cavernous, vacated building in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and in the industrial zone stretching from Patterson, New Jersey, to Reading, Pennyslvania, containing dozens or even hundreds of machine tools and other equipment so huge that no one wanted to buy it. Not even for scrap. It would cost more to rig it and move it than the scrap value of the metal in the machine.

Just a few months ago, he was down south, where an elderly gentlemen – let’s call him Russ - had decided to shut down his company. It was the largest manufacturer in the world of shaped cardboard boxes. You know – the boxes shaped like hearts holding a pound of Valentine’s Day candy, or the boxes shaped like a big fat guy with the big Santa Claus chocolate inside. As corporate America goes, it was not a huge operation – it employed around 150 people, including all the people on the production line, all the managers, all the sales people. It wasn’t high tech, but there was always a good demand for these shaped boxes, and it provided a good living and benefits for its workers, by far the best in the private sector in the area where this company was located. It was a large, but not giant, facility, and there was some interesting machinery in there. My friend walked around inside, studied the machines on the production line, and concluded that most of the machines were just too specialized; designed and built for precision cutting and shaping of cardboard, not plastics, or composites, or metals. How many other people were there in the U.S that had use for these types of machines?

Russ was truthful, and in answering that question and a few others, provided my friend a pretty good picture of what the shaped cardboard box industry in the U.S. looks like (this one company was pretty much it, at least for big production runs of 1,000 to 1,000,000 boxes) how it was doing (not well), and what had happened to it (read on for the details).

The boxes this company made were, as you can imagine, sold mostly to candy companies that used them to package candy according to seasonal themes, or sometimes topical themes, like a box shaped like a NASCAR racecar stuffed full of what are claimed to be Richard Petty’s favorite pralines. Over the past twenty years, Russ explained, there had been a noticeable shift in the buyers of the candy in these specially shaped candy boxes. This shift had accelerated the past few years, and now one large national retail chain, notorious for the pressure it puts on vendors and suppliers to sell to the chain cheaper, cheaper, and ever cheaper, was the largest seller, and hence buyer, of candy packaged in specially shaped boxes.

Back sometime in the summer, representatives of one of Russ’s largest customers, a candy manufacturer, visited to place its order for the boxes it needed to package its Christmas candies. An annual tradition. Russ gave them a quote, and the candy maker representatives frowned. The price had to come down; the large national retail chain, notorious for the pressure it puts on vendors and suppliers to sell to the chain cheaper, cheaper, and ever cheaper, had demanded that it buy its packaged candies a few cents cheaper than last year, and was not budging. In fact, Russ’s customer had even signed the contract, and now were looking to suppliers, such as the maker of shaped cardboard boxes, to also knock down their prices a bit.

Russ picked up his pencil, and ran through the numbers again. This kind of pressure was not new; he had held down his prices for many years, even while the costs of manufacturing inputs, especially fuel and electricity, had soared. In fact, he had not really given himself any pay the past two years, and had deferred a lot of maintenance on the factory and its equipment. Sighing resignedly, he said he would try to work up some new numbers, and get back to them. No, sorry, he would not sign a contract right now. He really needed to work on the numbers. Yes, he knew he had signed during this visit for the past twenty-something years, but now they were asking him to sell at a price he was not sure he could. So, sorry, no, he was not signing anything right now.

A few days later, the representatives of another large candy maker arrived, also with contracts in hand. And with the same demand for lower prices. And for the same reason: the large national retail chain, notorious for the pressure it puts on vendors and suppliers to sell to the chain cheaper, cheaper, and ever cheaper, was putting the squeeze on them to. Russ told them the same thing he had told the others a few days before: sorry, he would not sign a contract right now, but would get back to them.

The next day, representatives from another large candy maker arrived, and the scene repeated itself. In between these increasingly painful meeting, the Russ had walked the floor of the factory he had built and run for nearly three decades. He looked at each machine, and considered. This line of cutters were losing their tolerances, and should have had their shaft bearings replaced a year or more ago. He had saved $3,500 by not doing that. This gluing machine had become very variable in the thickness of the bead of glue it applied; the entire hydraulic pressure system needed to be checked and parts of it probably replaced. It would cost $150 just to get a good technician to walk in the door, then $100 an hour in billable time, plus whatever the parts would cost. A thousand dollars, easily. Same with this gluing machine. And that folding machine. And that label applicating machine.

There really was no where else Russ was willing to cut costs. He had worked hard, like many owners, putting in 60 or 70 hours a week. He had enough to retire on now, but that nest egg would rapidly dwindle if Russ tried to keep the company going at the prices his customers were demanding. His kids, thank god, had no interest in manufacturing – who wants to get their hands dirty in this day and age? Sadly, Russ concluded his life's run had reached the finish line. Either he would sell the company, or liquidate it.

There were no buyers for the business, so Russ called my friend. After my friend visited, and told Russ there basically was no market for these box making machines in the United States of America, Russ was pretty much forced to sell everything for its scrap value.

Here’s the kicker. My friend told me this story a few weeks after he had visited Russ’s plant. Since he had left, the riggers had come in, ripped out all the electrical, hydraulic, and water connection, put all the machines on flatbeds, and hauled it away. A few days after that, a large candy maker called Russ in a panic. The large national retail chain, notorious for the pressure it puts on vendors and suppliers to sell to the chain cheaper, cheaper, and ever cheaper, had helped them find a maker of shaped cardboard boxes in China. The candy maker had placed a rush order for a half million boxes, and were delighted when the order arrived in time.

How fast can you make us 500,000 boxes? They asked Russ. You name the price. Even last year’s price.

What’s wrong? I thought you were getting your boxes from China.

We did. But all the boxes smell. Of solvent, or glue, or something. We can’t use them.

Russ explained that he couldn’t help. His factory was shut down, and literally, the machines had been pulled out of it and sent to a scrap dealer.

Of course, my friend wanted to know what the candy company did with its smelly boxes. According to Russ, they unpacked them all, separated them all, then spread them all over the candy factory to air out, while candy piled up in standard cardboard boxes. When the shaped boxes only smelled so bad that you had to hold them close to your nose to notice, then they paid the workers overtime to fill all the shaped boxes, still smelling slightly of solvent or glue or whatever, and finish the production run and ship them to the large national retail chain, notorious for the pressure it puts on vendors and suppliers to sell to the chain cheaper, cheaper, and ever cheaper.

I generally disaprove of Matt Taibbi

However this 2005 piece on The World Is Flat is mostly awesome,

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever beenbut the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

This makes me want to revisit the vampire squid feature.

But one must remember in the wild, "Vampire squid are very small and harmless to humans."

I can now say with confidence that watching CNBC has made me dumber

I like this concept of “low volatility, interrupted by occasional periods of high volatility”. I think I will call it “volatility”.-dsquared via Brad Delong

The Death of Global Warming

From The American Interest-

The global warming campaigners got into this mess because they had a deeply flawed political strategy. They were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its goals in the context of the existing international system. The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.

“BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath says the accord lacks teeth and does not include any clear targets on cutting emissions. But if most countries at least signal what they intend to do to cut their emissions, it will mark the first time that the UN has a comprehensive written collection of promised actions, he says.”

Gosh! A comprehensive written collection of promised actions! And it’s a first!!

The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences; we’ll be exploring them together as the days go by.

Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System

He explains that as a Christian Scientist he is comfortable relying on prayer rather than formal medicine. I guess that doesn't hold for the banking system.-Tyler Cowen

Good Sentences

"If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Davos is the road crew keeping it smooth and fast"-Felix Salmon

Above all, the story of the co-op tells you that economic slumps are not punishments for our sins, pains that we are fated to suffer. The Capitol Hill co-op did not get into trouble because its members were bad, inefficient baby sitters; its troubles did not reveal the fundamental flaws of “Capitol Hill values” or “crony baby-sittingism.” It had a technical problem–too many people chasing too little scrip–which could be, and was, solved with a little clear thinking. And so, as I said, the co-op’s story helps me to resist the pull of fatalism and pessimism.

-Paul Krugman for Slate in 1998