Make your own totally uninspired best and most overrated blogs lists! Just print out the Technorati 100, get two different colored hi-lighters, and go to town! Remember, people are counting on you to introduce them to Andrew Sullivan, whom they would have no other way of discovering, ever.
In the short term, this will probably mean fewer traditional (and expensive) television shows in the mold of Heroes. The digital revolution has been a great leveler. Blogs work better than newspapers. Small bands with passionate audiences do better relative to their predecessors than does mass-market pap. Cult movies find and sustain audiences. Niche rules over mainstream.
—Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic
It is probably true that we’ll see less television with high production values and intricate storytelling, but to couch this development in qualitative terms—that blogs “work better” than newspapers, and to pretend that this judgment has some lesson for other media avenues—is dishonest.
Blogs “work better” than newspapers in the same way that frozen food works better than home cookin’—it is faster and cheaper to produce and consume. There are some frozen products that are absolutely fantastic, and some people’s labored-over meals are quite crappy, but quality isn’t really an instructive way to judge the key differences.
We’ve hit a point where people aren’t willing anymore to pay for content, and there isn’t enough advertising to support the glut of choices to which we’ve become accustomed. (And there aren’t enough benevolent billionaires left to support these outlets at a loss, either.)
We could be on the verge of an incredibly substantial shift in how we consume media and how its creation is financed. For now, however, we’re left with the sad fact that if consumers, advertisers, and billionaires are all unwilling to pay for it, everything we consume media-wise is going to get cheaper. In the case of television that means more reality and game shows, and less sweeping, epic dramas and single camera comedies. It’s all happening, and it is based on real viewership patterns and sound bookkeeping, but that doesn’t mean that it “works better.”
And for all the 2004-style love for long tail niche content, these people are even more broke than the big media conglomerate folks they’re “replacing” so that’s a pretty grim future to anticipate.
For lazy people who like music, which is most, because who otherwise has the time?
This is my brilliant idea of the day: iTunes, or some other digital music provider, should offer a service whereby the user ticks off the albums s/he already owns by an artist/band, then the service automatically assembles a best-of compilation from the remaining tracks in that artist’s/band’s catalog, with no overlapping tracks. User would identify how many tracks the album would consist of. Maybe allow the user to weight track selection between a couple criteria: existing greatest hits compilations, top downloads, a Pandora-like look at the user’s rated tracks and albums to determine which stuff by the artist/band in question to include based on objective qualities, etc. Then give it consistent ID4 tags (nothing drives OCD me crazier than missing track numbers) and a generic-but-appropriate cover image.
Sure, the user could do it manually with like a half hour of work, but seriously, save us (me) the hassle.
Like that one time, he interviewed that guy, and the band leader was like, "What?" Ha.
I have no opinion at all on Joaquin Phoenix. However, it got me wondering: has anything interesting ever happened on Leno’s show? It seems that there are a couple Letterman moments every year that make it into the broader culture and are well known even by many who never saw the broadcast. There are two from this year already—the Bill Hicks broadcast and Joaquin—and we’re only a couple months removed from the McCain snub. Meanwhile, Leno’s couch seems to be a blackhole of “who cares.”
The lamest store ever, opening soon!
Microsoft on Thursday hired a former Wal-Mart executive to open a chain of retail stores, establishing a new front with Apple in the battle for consumers.—FT
A Microsoft store? Run by a Wal-Mart exec? This will not end well.
As the President stressed Monday night, we face an impending financial system collapse of a kind not seen in the US in over 70 years. The situation, both technically and politically, is akin to what - over the past 25 years - we have seen frequently in emerging markets but seldom in more developed countries (with Sweden and Japan as notable exceptions.)
The world’s leading experts on such problems are for the most part not at the US Treasury, which is staffed primarily with people who have spent their careers working in (until now) relatively tranquil markets. Most of the relevant crisis resolution experience is to be found at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF is not comfortable giving advice to the Administration - the US is its largest shareholder and the Fund’s HQ is a few blocks from the White House for a reason - and IMF officials also cannot be called to testify before Congress. But the views of leading IMF banking crisis experts are freely available - off the record.
What they say is this. The right thing to do is reboot the financial system. Find out immediately which banks are insolvent, using market prices. Allow private owners to fully recapitalize, if they can. Have the FDIC take over all banks that cannot raise enough private capital. Try to re-privatize those banks quickly, while making sure the taxpayer has strong partcipation in the upside. The difficulty with this approach is not, in the US or elsewhere, anything technical - it is really quite straightforward. The problem here and everywhere else that has faced a serious financial crisis is: the power of the banking lobby.
I stated below that I’m no expert on economics, and that is doubly true for finance. Still, it makes sense to me that keeping banks alive unnaturally and hiding balance sheets could prolong the pain. And the idea of nationalization isn’t a dealbreaker for me as I suppose it is for many Americans.
What really shocked me about Johnson’s point, however, was that the power of the banking lobby made employing this approach impossible. From whence, at this point, does the banking industry derive this power? It’s not from money, it’s not from their credibility, and its not from their popularity with the public. Is this an instance of politics lagging behind reality? Are the banks getting by on connections? Charm?
Great little chord progression!
I hope that the AOL CDs I used as as coasters in the late ’90s didn’t expose me to this sort of crazy. Just coming in contact with it could cause it to accumulate in my blood stream like mercury.
Partisan economics
The problem is not that Mr Krugman questions the consensus on trade (if indeed he does), or that Mr Barro questions the consensus on fiscal policy (as he certainly does). It is that both set the consensus aside so carelessly. In doing so, these stars of the profession destroy the credibility of their own discipline. Mr Krugman gives liberals the economics they want. Mr Barro gives conservatives the same service. They narrow or deny the common ground. Why does this matter? Because the views of readers inclined to one side or the other are further polarised; and in the middle, those of no decided allegiance conclude that economics is bunk.
This gives voice to my recent concern, i.e. that I do not trust anyone no matter how credentialed to provide sound, scientific economic analysis. I don’t have really any greater formal training in the hard sciences than I do in econ, so why is it so much harder to separate out the junk?
