January 2011
124 posts
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The three real reasons why Americans are more... →
The culprit for this soaring stress, the stories unanimously declared, is the horrendous job market—a thoroughly lame explanation. I don’t know about your college experience, but when I got to school a dozen years ago, my classmates spent about as much time pondering the future “job market” as they spent leafing through calculus textbooks for fun. These news stories have missed...
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“The result of this is that judges aren’t going to know when and how they can...”
– Law professor Rick Tepker on Oklahoma’s bill to ban Sharia law last November. Today, it was reported lawmakers in South Carolina are considering a similar order.
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Tomorrow In Egypt, There Will Be Trouble
negevrockcity:
February 1 is payday in Egypt. Banks are still shut down across the country and internet access is still sporadic. Egyptians won’t get their paychecks on time. Most Egyptians are living hand-to-mouth in a country where most are very, very poor. This won’t be good.
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“I can say she has at least three factual errors in a paragraph that only...”
– Ezra Klein is having some numbers salad for lunch.
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Political Blogs Are Ready to Flood Campaign Trail →
The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don’t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.
With an eye...
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Q+A: Key elements of the U.S.-Egyptian... →
caraobrien:
WHY ARE THE UNITED STATES AND EGYPT ALLIES?
Egypt’s decision in March 1979 to become the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel cemented its relationship with the United States and has resulted in its receiving an annual average of $2 billion in U.S. aid in the years since.
The treaty has been vital to Israel, a close U.S. ally, allowing it to worry less about its...
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mikehudack:
squashed:
If Egypt’s government falls, Saudi Arabia’s government is in serious trouble. If Saudi Arabia’s government is in trouble, we’ll have a serious oil crisis. My guess? Gas breaks $5.00 a gallon. Easily.
I’m still for it. Bad for us. Good for the world.
And good for us long term. No better way to accelerate energy independence.
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Hurry Up and Wait.
I’ve spent more time than not during the past week waiting.
Last Thursday saw work take me from my apartment to the financial district and then back to work, then to Union Square and to Hoboken, and then to someplace near Gramercy Park and finally to my apartment again. Four hours of subway time, waiting to get to where I needed to be. Friday I flew to Atlanta, intending to fly from there...
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Clay Shirkey’s recent essay, The Political Power of Social Media, is today especially apropos:
A slowly developing public sphere, where public opinion relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the environmental view of Internet freedom. As opposed to the self-aggrandizing view that the West holds the source code for democracy — and if it were only made accessible, the...
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“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw...”
– Banksy (via Karen Nicole Costa)
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What the bloody hell:
Financier and cricket mogul Sir Allen Stanford was unfit to stand trial on charges of running a $7-billion fraud and needs treatment for a drug addiction, a US judge ruled.
Stanford’s trial had been due to begin this week but was postponed indefinitely until he could be considered fit to prepare his defense.
To plagiarize Kanye West, Jerome gets more time than...
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I'm listed in Tumblweeds under media,...
I’m listed in Tumblweeds, a user-generated community directory that rates Tumblr bloggers by their number of followers. Find me listed in #media, #progressivepolitics, #newyork
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countcenci:
joecoscarelli:
Here’s how a reporter loses credit for his work:
On Monday, dude who made phone calls reports exclusively in Women’s Wear Daily that Kate Winick, a senior editor for Worth magazine, crashed a $250,000 Bentley during a test drive for members of the press.
That same day, MyFoxPhilly.com reports the same story, using the phrase “Women’s Wear Daily reported Monday” in...
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An agency I’m associated with as a consultant is doing some pro-bono work for a unique philanthropic event. Mashable wrote about it this afternoon:
The idea is not to create a website or code a seamless graphic, but to use the skill sets of a UX [user experience] designer to analyze social issues. “They’re really good systems designers, I don’t know if they knew that,” says Jeff Leitner,...
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* Punctuating headlines
* Using childhood axioms as ledes
* Making up words
* Tagging
* Writing in mark-up language hypertext
* Limiting stuff to a few paragraphs
* Keeping bulleted lists in a parallel structure
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Jury duty: Reminding folks that yawning is indeed contagious.
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A digital news service I'll actually pay for.* →
* Disclosure: I’m getting it for free for three months, so I’ll begin paying for it in April.
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“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
– Harry S. Truman (via crookedindifference)
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Squashed: The Slanted Playing Field →
squashed:
Monopoly is a good game for libertarians. Everybody starts out in the same spot. The rules are clear and understandable. There’s a lot of luck—but enough skill that you can feel good about winning. And it’s just a game. We don’t need to shed any tears for the losers. To succinctly demonstrate my…
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joshsternberg:
Politico is reporting on the merger of Public Relations and News, with the arrival of Dan Abrams to ABC News:
[Abrams is] expected to see an expanded role at ABC as a legal analyst for “Good Morning America” (joining chief legal correspondent and anchor Chris Cuomo), some fill-in anchor duties on the weekend broadcast of “Good Morning America” and other opportunities across...
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We can see the future of a better economy already emerging.
Over the past twelve months, we have created more than one million net new jobs in the private sector — while government employment has shrunk by more than 250,000.
Corporate profitability has reached record highs, meaning that companies can afford to hire as demand revives.
Including dividends, the stock market has gained more...
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rubenfeld:
“Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.”
—...
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elizs:
“[T]he Republican Study Committee, made up of about 165 GOP members of the House of Representatives, on Thursday announced a budget-cutting plan aimed at slashing federal spending, and it calls for the elimination of the nation’s two leading makers of government arts grants: the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Also on the chopping block...
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Cab drivers who listen to Tchaikovsky.
Cab drivers who listen to Tchaikovsky.
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“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
– Edgar Allan Poe, whose birthday is today. In his honor, take out some books by or about him from NYPL. (via nypl)
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“People voluntarily working less isn’t the same as employers cutting jobs.”
– Economist Paul Fronstin, from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. It’s practically old news now that the GOP lied mislead people about the CBO’s estimation of job loss from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. However, Fronstin’s point is the best one-sentence summary of this issue...
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azspot:
The Illusion of Money: What’s the Difference Between Real and Phantom Wealth?
Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include fertile land, healthful food, knowledge, productive labor, pure water and clean air, labor, and physical infrastructure. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and are unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy...
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I attended a party hosted by a new newswire service a couple of weeks ago, and aside from the free wine and good company, I received a coupon code for the free distribution of one news release.
This excites me much more than it probably should. It’s basically an invitation to put something insidery on the newswire that’s so profoundly non-newsworthy that it becomes notable because of...
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The New Republic seeks a reporter/researcher →
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today:
A JP Morgan Chase official tells NBC News that 4,000 U.S. service members may have been illegally overcharged on their mortgages and that as many as 14 military families were wrongly foreclosed on. [Full story]
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today:
A JP Morgan Chase official tells NBC News that 4,000 U.S. service members may have been illegally overcharged on their mortgages and that as many as 14 military families were wrongly foreclosed on. [Full story]
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FACT CHECK: Shaky health care job loss estimate. →
A recent report by House GOP leaders says “independent analyses have determined that the health care law will cause significant job losses for the U.S. economy.”
It cites the 650,000 lost jobs as Exhibit A, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as the source of the original analysis behind that estimate. But the budget office, which referees the costs and consequences of...
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A municipal area in Oregon last year hired a former journalist to write reporty-like things for it to disguise as news. And it’s not working out so badly.
“It’s an unusual and, to some, a troubling arrangement. Reporting on government is a big part of the news media’s self-appointed watchdog role, and it’s suspect for government to cover itself.
“But as...
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Are Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and... →
When you listen to people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and the rest of the gang – it’s easy to see – these men and women are guilty of something called stochastic terrorism. That is – the use of mass communication like radio or television to encourage individuals to commit random lone acts of violence. It’s what Glenn Beck was guilty of when he encouraged Byron Williams to...
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No thank you, Internet. I’ve already cried today.
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“So we find ourselves in a political moment when for the first time it is...”
– Jeffrey Leonard, chief executive of the Global Environment Fund, on ending energy subsidies altogether.
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The swashbuckling banking institutions that were deemed too big to fail before are today much bigger than they were when they were already too big, if you follow.
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Forbes.com reports that Freakonomics, the wildly popular spawn of an economist and a reporter, is leaving The New York Times:
Chad Troutwine, producer of the “Freakonomics” documentary released last fall, recently sent around an email soliciting candidates for an “editor and media strategist” to run the new site, Freakonomics.com. “As Employee #1, this person will have the chance to take an...
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“I think that the new devices and the new Android-based devices will be as good...”
– Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast, is hopelessly optimistic.
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Incarceration Up, Education Down →
When a society allows for more than $45,000 a year to be paid to incarcerate each of its many, many inmates, $1,000,000 dollars a year on each of its soldiers invading a foreign country, and only $11,287.50 per year on each of its students the resulting social dilemma is inevitable.
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littleorphanammo:
andrewgraham replied to your post:kayfabe replied to your link:6 Badass Movie Scenes…
I think Fight Club is a romantic novel, with the anti-authoritarianism/anti-consumerism being the subtext to one character involved in a love triangle.
I disagree.
I think Marla was used primarily as a plot device through which Brad Pitt Tyler Durden could be exposed. Typically the woman...