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I’m not the first person to point out that choosing between consumer products is not at all the same thing as having control of your life in any real sense. Or that meaningless consumer choices are used as a distraction from real choices, even a substitute for democracy. For instance, we can get a cheap […] I created the quiz here. Check your Mussolini IQ! The piece began as a discussion about how surprising it is that a Mussolini hasn’t arisen in the US yet. After all, we have the two necessary ingredients: broken politics and an angry, desperate population. All you need is a politician who directs that anger at […] The NYT economix blog has a post about how people view their jobs. Specifically, whether they think their job is making the world a worse place. Speaking as a guy who’s spent years in drug advertising, which ranges from (in my opinion) occasionally useful to sometimes harmful (mostly it’s just a waste of resources that […] So Love2Learn on Reddit pointed out a silly video giving the economics of Valentine’s day. It’s a fun little piece, done in a dry deadpan that the presenter must know is hysterical. It’s also wrong, most especially when he says that Valentine’s day spending doesn’t stimulate the economy because, after all, the money would be […] So apparently there’s yet another bad cover letter making the rounds. It’s pretty bad. But sorry, it doesn’t beat one I have. Some background: This isn’t some friend of a friend thing: It really came to me when I worked for a medical advertising agency. So this person was applying to be an editorial assistant […] So I’d never heard of John T. Harvey, but he’s got a blog over at Forbes, and it’s really really good. His February 6th post, How Economists Contributed to the Financial Crisis, shows, with admirable clarity, just what’s wrong with economics. In fact, I’m jealous–I knew the facts he mentions, but I wish I’d laid […] With all the recent attention on copyrights, it’s worth checking out this article by Nina Paley: it details how Pyrex, once a brand name for a particularly strong, heat-resistant type of glass, is now being put on all sorts of glass. So people who see the Pyrex brand and expect the glass to stand up […] Krugman does some fine skewering here, showing how several pundits, instead of honestly backtracking on their anti-Keynesian positions, pretend they never held them in the first place. But it raises the question–how did we get to the point that apparently smart, nationally known pundits think they can just say whatever they want, with nobody questioning […] “Being poor is a mindset. And it’s one that, if given the chance, will make your ass poor again.” From today’s Cracked.com article, “The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor.” In honor of the PIPA/SOPA boycott, our first quote of the day is from Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, in 1982: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Yep. The VCR came out, and […] |
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