The SEC is probing Apple's handling of Steve Jobs health. After years of letting banks get away with all sorts of egregious behavior, after missing out on blatant scammers like Madoff, now the SEC is going to make a big deal of investigating Steve Jobs health? What a joke.
The SEC is like the security guard who was on duty while your house got robbed clean.
How Porsche made a killing in the financial markets by creating a short squeeze on VW stock. That is just crazy.
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Why Obama's tax rebate may work to boost consumption where others have failed.
The key factor in these kinds of distinctions, Thaler’s work suggests, is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income. If they think of it as wealth, they’re more likely to save it, and if they think of it as income they’re more likely to spend it. That’s because many people tend to base their spending not on their long-term earning potential or on their assets but on what they think of as their current income, an amount best defined by what’s in their regular paycheck. When that number goes up, so does people’s spending. In Thaler’s words, “People tend to consume from income and leave perceived ‘wealth’ alone.
As soon as I watched this moment of the Inauguration, I knew it would be on The Daily Show, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. Here's the bit I'm referring to:
I was watching an ABC interview with Beyonce last night, and she was asked about how it felt to sing "At Last" at one of the balls for Barack and Michelle's dance, and Beyonce said it was hard to answer because she was tearing up just thinking about the moment, and then she did start crying and gushing about Obama like a teenage girl, and I confess I teared up a bit because, well, damn, our awesome President is awesome.
Here's that Beyonce interview:
And here's that first dance. Watching it feels like being at the best wedding ever.
Hulu will carry a live stream of the Inauguration, as will many sites, but you can embed Hulu's stream on your own website. Build a big tribute page around the stream, add chat on the side, mount the player in a a custom designed piece of web art in tribute to Obama, go wild my friends. Share the history.
Here's his letter:
Team,
I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.
In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.
I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.
I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.
Steve
Very concerning. I hope he comes back healthy and strong.
Maybe 2008 is the tipping point in my ability to maintain a regular posting schedule here. Hulu and rehabbing my Achilles and the little bits of free time here and the cup runneth over.
Still, some of this may just be inertia. My first few times out to run since being cleared by the doctor have been painful and slow--run a few minutes, then stop to stretch out the Achilles, then run a few minutes, then vomit, then pass out, then regain consciousness, then run a few minutes, then flag down a taxi to take me home, or to the hospital, or some variant thereof--but as someone once said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or is it a good travel agent?).
We posted inaugural addresses from years past at Hulu today. Here's the one from George W. Bush.
Okay, I jest. We have those Dubya masterpieces, too, but here's one from JFK.
Or maybe, since Obama is taking office in similarly troubled times, we should hearken back to the first Inaugural Address by FDR, who also took office with an economy in shambles. You can bet Obama and his speechwriters have listened to this one a few times ("...the only thing we have to fear...").
There's this shot in The Wrestler, a steadicam shot behind Mickey Rourke as he walks through the back offices of a grocery store out to the deli counter. It echoes many other shots in the movie, from better times for Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and the visual reference is unmistakeable and poignant.
But just in case you're oblivious, the sound designer slowly mixes in the sounds of a raucous wrestling crowd chanting his name, just as he hears it when he prepares to walk out through the curtains at a wrestling event. It rises to a crescendo just as he's about to walk through the hanging plastic flaps out to the deli counter.
I wish they'd had the restraint to leave the shot as is and leave out the audio clue. What was an understated and lyrical moment is transformed into something overly sentimental, and I felt that way about many instances of the score in the movie which is otherwise shot in an unfussy, documentary style.
Besides that, though, it's a very moving film. You don't just feel for Randy "The Ram" Robinson but for Mickey Rourke who is nearly unrecognizable, at least to me. This is the guy from Diner and 9 1/2 Weeks?
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The Israel Consulate is using Twitter to manage their message during this military campaign against Hamas. It's a challenge, trying to communicate complex messages with a 140 character limit, as many organizations are learning while trying to use Twitter for unmediated communication with users. Lots of URL shorteners and common online abbreviations are used, lending an oddly casual air to what are serious messages.
Two perhaps adventitious consequences of this medium: the character limit forces a concise and often more forceful statement of a message, and users who write you are forced to adhere to the character limit also, so it's a level playing ground.
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Jay-Z crossed with Radiohead = Jaydiohead (from DJ Minty Fresh Beats)
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A movie trailer that is just one scene, perhaps not truncated or edited down from what appears in the movie itself? Effective.
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Given NYC's economic dependence on the finance industry, you'd expect Manhattan real estate to have taken a disproportionate beating in this recession.
In fact, New York's real estate market is proving more resilient in this downturn than that of other U.S. cities.
Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.
Despite Wall Street’s suffering, the New York area’s unemployment rate, 5.6 percent in the latest figures, is lower than that in many other major cities. The comparable unemployment rate for Los Angeles is 8.2 percent. The comparable number for Chicago is 6.4 percent.
What's going on? Economist Edward Glaeser attributes it to faith in the city's talented citizens and concentration of said people.
New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.
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The first album of 2009 that's gathering critical buzz and mp3 blog lust: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion
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The statistics behind the B.C.S. are not just inscrutable but fundamentally flawed.
Statistically, the system is such an abomination that at least one expert — Hal S. Stern, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine — advocated that no self-respecting statistician should have anything to do with it. In an article published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports two years ago, he wrote that the B.C.S. computer rankings serve as little more than a confirmation of the results of the two opinion polls the system also uses to create its rankings. The people who run the computer rankings, he noted, have never been given any clear objective criteria to design their programs, and they are not allowed to use the score or site of a game in their calculations. Stern urged a boycott, a refusal by the community of statisticians to lend credibility to a system he regards as scientifically bankrupt.
In the end, it comes down to money.
“The six big conferences don’t want to share money with the smaller conferences,
Hulu will carry a live stream from Times Square in NYC tomorrow, er, tonight, New Year's Eve. You can watch it on Hulu or here in this embedded video. Feel free to grab the embed code from the video player below and paste it on your site if you know of some poor souls who are without a TV but want some ambient party companions as the calendar turns over to 2009.
For the first time in my life, I'll be in Times Square for the big night, but not on the street among the poor, huddled masses, but up in a friend's corporate apartment, overlooking the madness.
"I want new ones."
"What do you want them to say?"
"The Boy from Oz."
Swimming Pool, besides featuring lots of footage of a scantily clad and nubile Ludivine Sagnier, is a clever little meditation on the writing process.
Hulu is the greatest thing to happen to the Internet since girl-on-girl pornography.
The writer goes on to complain about the Edge Shave Gel ad featuring four bikini models. I'm so confused.
Evidence is accumulating that we've passed the tipping point in the global warming crisis.
"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," it said, "paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
Later...
DIY conservation makes great practical sense, but we won't save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to...not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick.
One of the reasons I'm looking forward to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas Day is the opportunity to hear the new score by Alexandre Desplat, my favorite film composer working today.
Jeremy Piven is making an early departure from the Broadway production of Speed-the-Plow, which I saw when I was in NYC to watch James run the marathon in November, because of elevated mercury in his blood. Doctors blame his diet of two sushi meals a day.
The production team was sympathetic, for the most part, but the playwright David Mamet was less so. In true Mametian fashion, the playwright told Daily Variety, “My understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.
Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, a few of us self-declared LA refugees went to check out the opening party for Dakota Lounge, formerly Temple Bar, in Santa Monica. I wanted to catch Janelle Monae who I'd seen perform at the Viper Room previously.
Though we had to stand outside in line for a bit, we managed to get inside before her set began. Despite our late entry, we managed to walk right up to the front of the stage for her set.
Just as in her set at the Viper Room, Janelle was a dynamo on stage. At one point, I looked down at my camera to adjust the settings, and WHAP! Something hit me in the face. It was her white sportcoat, which she'd flung into the crowd.
Afterwards, we were at the bar grabbing a drink when she walked out. Someone saw us looking her way and asked if we'd like to chat with her. Turns out he was her manager.
I showered her with effusive praise. She thanked me and said, "Keep me in your prayers."
I had her manager snap a photo of us with her.
James Surowiecki writes in this week's New Yorker about the decline of newspapers.
The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.
This pattern of increased influence but decreased revenue due to the fast and cheap distribution enabled by the internet has been seen in the music industry also, and we'll see it again in the tv and movie industry.
Sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote about Rickey Henderson, whose excessive batting crouch helped him to draw lots of walks:
Rickey Henderson's strike zone is smaller than Hitler's heart.
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A recent New Yorker article in the Food Issue examined the knife-making industry and profiled Kramer Knives of Seattle. Bob Kramer is one of a select group of Master Bladesmiths in America (as credentialed by the American Bladesmith Society); there are only about a hundred. To pass the test, one's knife must undergo a grueling series of tests, from rope cutting to wood chopping to shaving hair.
There is a multi-year waitlist to buy one of Kramer's knives, used by the likes of super chefs like Thomas Keller (I myself am on that waiting list). He has collaborated on a more widely available series of knives that are sold exclusively by Sur La Table. The Chef's Knife from that series is a beauty (if you're looking for a last-minute gift idea that will just dazzle a loved one who loves to cook, that's a great way to go, though my mother always shunned giving knives as gifts because of the Chinese superstition that giving such a gift foretold the severing of that relationship).
Upgrading the dull chef's knife is one of the best investments a home cook can make. Dull knives make cooking a lot of work and leads to injuries when a knife slips. Proper knife technique is the other simple lesson a chef should learn. To properly capitalize on your knife's edge, the blade should be moving horizontally across the food being cut. Too many people just press down, and that's not how a knife is designed to work. Doing so exerts a lot of needless effort and is slow. Think of your arm and knife moving in a continuous elliptical motion, like the horizontal metallic bar on the outside of a train engine car's wheels.
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I don't recall what things were like four years ago, but it feels to me like there are many more "letters to the President-Elect" in the media this time around, on topics from bailouts and reviving the economy to drugs, food policy, and education. I suspect this is the consequence of having a President we regard as well-read and thoughtful.
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An old article from The Morning News, as seen back on Reddit today: How do you know if a girl loves you?
If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.
This post is being written from 30,000+ feet on a Virgin America flight from NYC to LA. The PA announcement was fuzzy, but I think it noted that this was one of 3 Virgin America planes outfitted with a wi-fi service they've dubbed GoGo.
Unfortunately my power outlet isn't working, so my online time may be limited. But for now, I've got wi-fi on my laptop, ESPN on Dish Network on my seatback entertainment system. Just connect my cellphone and my overstimulation is complete.
