Ladies and gentlemen, the people we elected to Congress are idiots. Maybe we should protest this?
The copy-editor in me would cover the story as follows: Three House members vote against taking away right to speak
February 2012
41 posts
Sorry Goldstandardians: Gold Is Not Money
Gold is a naturally occurring substance that human beings choose to dig out of the ground or pick up on the surface, usually in or near riverbeds in which running water has exposed previously subsurface gold. It has historically been valued for its perceived beauty, its malleability, and its comparative scarceness. It is because of this last condition, its scarceness, that some economic systems have decided to use gold as a medium of exchange.
In any role—as a pretty object, as a thing that can easily turned into something else, or as a medium of exchange—gold’s value is socially invented and enforced. Gold is not money in some ontological sense of the word.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Let’s just redefine money to be whatever I, and I alone, have.
WSJ: Time for a Good Old-Fashioned Nervous Breakdown?
After ending an unhappy marriage and getting laid off twice, Hannah Shapiro last year found herself alone with two small children to support in Miami, far from her family in England. “I was so scared, I was paralyzed,” she says. “My heart was racing. I would take the kids to school and get back into bed.”
After a week like that, Ms. Shapiro, age 33, says she had a “light bulb” moment. “I thought, ‘What the heck am I doing in bed? I can turn this around.’ And I did.” She put her writing skills to work and set up a communications consulting business. …
As someone who has a communications consulting business, this leaves me filled with optimism is terrifying.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, let’s all remember that what Rick Santorum calls “indoctrination,” normal people call “knowing facts.”
Morality, Not Markets, Is The Heart of Healthcare →
blogforarizona.com
Deregulation to make market work ‘better’ in healthcare, and to ‘empower’ consumers in the market, really only **serves one purpose: to strengthen the position of those market participants with the most power and information, the insurers. **
When politicians talk about applying free market principles to our healthcare system, therefore, what they are really trying to do is further empower the insurance middlemen of the system who are able to manipulate the system in order to extract a profit from the suffering and death of the American people. This is morally repugnant and deeply inefficient.
The role of insurers is to extract rents by restricting access to care. This is morally repugnant.
In our system, the insurance middlemen can make actuarial decisions that minimize cost in order to maximize retention of premiums. It is what they do, and they are good at it. The problem is that those insurers are working solely to maximize their private profit, they haven’t any other metric to measure their success.
“I don’t believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute.”
—Rick Santorum, who, it is relevant to point out, is leading the GOP primary polls.
“The system doesn’t work, it’s broke today. The end of insurance companies, the way we’ve run the business in the past, is here.”
—Mark Bertolini, CEO and Chairman of Aetna Insurance.
New thought: Is the time you spend writing an opinion column inversely proportional to how good it ends up being?
A company retained me to help publicize its lawsuit against its bank that alleges fraud and breach of contract. Here is our statement.
25% of super PAC money coming from just 5 rich donors →
usatoday.com
Five wealthy people, led by Dallas industrialist Harold Simmons and Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, have donated nearly $1 of every $4 flowing to the super PACs raising unlimited money in this year’s presidential race, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
Why I hired a journalist to run my company blog →
venturebeat.com
He reigns me in when it comes to tooting my own horn. He helps me practice some restraint and diplomacy when I feel compelled to blast my competitors. He makes sure that I’m not just repeating headlines but focusing my thoughts around particular news events.
He’s making me relevant.
More importantly, he’s charging me a fraction of what a PR firm might charge me for a bunch of other services that I might not really need. Because he’s juggling a number of other clients, he’s not devoting 40 hours a week to my blog strategy and content, and that’s OK with me. My blog is an important part of my business but it’s not a full-time element.
Austan Goolsbee publishes op-ed about Jeremy Lin. →
online.wsj.com
There are at least three things in that sentence that I like.
The Latest Market Craze: Stock Trading Robots Reacting To Stories Written By... Robots →
zerohedge.com
It appears that while we were busy over the past month spreading the Greek pre- and post-bankruptcy balance sheet, and otherwise torturing Excel (something we urge other financial journalists to try once in a while - go ahead, it doesn’t bite. In fact, it is almost as friendly as your favorite Powerpoint) our peer at such reputable financial publications as Forbes, and many others, were laying of carbon-based reporters and replacing them with… robots. As Mediabistro reports, “Forbes has joined a group of 30 publishers using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. Here’s more about the program, used in one corner of Forbes‘ website: ““Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”” In other words, with well over 70% of stock trading now done by robots, we have gotten to a point where robots write headlines and stories read, reacted to and traded by robots. Surely, what can possibly go wrong. And here we were this morning, wondering why the market is not only broken but plain dumb.
Career choice number one was auto mechanic. Then I went to college, and after that to work in the media industry. And now mainstream news outlets have outsourced their reporting to robots.
