- Barack Obama craves your adulation but unlike Bill Clinton, he can leave it too.
- Warren Buffett on Barack Obama’s stimulus package
- No Republican president since Roosevelt’s death has tried harder than the departing George W. Bush to undo what Roosevelt did
- The Vatican is worried about Facebook obsession: Not to insult my Roman Catholic friends but this seems a little too small for the Vatican to worry about. What’s next, Twitter in the cross hairs of the Vatican?
- Photo that’s 100 meters long, capturing 178 people in Berlin over 20 days.
- How Google and the web may be making us smarter, not stupider.
- Russia is expected to suffer this year; xenophobia, realpolitik, bare-knuckle foreign policy are expected to follow.
- What do you do with all of those unsold cars?
- Used to new Macs, the Obama people found old PCs with Windows 2000 on them when they moved into the White House.
- With the economy tanking in Europe, the riots are starting: The protests went beyond the usual angry reflexes of societies braced for recession. The Greek riots heralded sympathetic actions across the world, from Moscow to Madrid, and in Berlin the Greek Consulate was briefly stormed. The Riga unrest spread rapidly to Lithuania. It is, some say, just the beginning: 2009 could become another 1968 – a new age of rebellion.
- Obama appoints some high level officials to key diplomatic posts
- The War on Terror comes to an end: Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.
- Michael Lewis is writing about the death of Wall Street
- All activists struggle in Russia—and it’s even hard being an eco-activist trying to keep Russian industry in check
- The day will come when the cool kids learn their hipster president is actually a politician
- WSJ: America’s power is declining, all they can do now is smooth the transition.
- Coverage of the Warren Kinsella defamation trial: If the press coverage is accurate, it not only seems like an easy win for Kinsella but it almost seems like he enjoyed his time in it.
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> What do you do with all of those unsold cars?
Rental fleets need about 1.8 million cars a year. All the renting companies want are “new” cars, they aren’t too worried about the model year. Granted, much of the overproduction is cars with option packages, not the usual stripped down models rental fleets usually like. So, they just raise the rental price a few bucks to cover the increased cost.
I have a suggestion for the Auto bailout.
Step 1: Reduce the UAW wages to parity with the average wage of those workers at stateside Japanese and German plants.
Step 2: Reduce the salary of US Congressmen to the average wage of Japanese and German parliament members.
> Michael Lewis is righting about the death of Wall Street
Not sure if that’s a typo, or a Freudian slip?
One of the best lines from this article is:
Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’
*****
In 2000, I was a test engineer for Intuit, the TurboTax people. I was testing the investment part of their products and noticed their stock rating system. Obviously, Intuit did not assign the ratings, the imported them from somewhere, but I noticed that their five number rating system was a bit skewed. I did a search for each rating, and expected them to be either a flat distribution (equal amounts of 1,2,3,4, 5) or sometning that vaguely resembled a bell curve (say, 10-20-40-20-10 percent), or just something symmetric, with equal amounts of 1 and 5, as well as 2 and 4. But I found the average rating was a 3.5 – highly inflated.
I chalked it up to marketing hubris, not realizing, as Dan Gertner said, ‘I can’t figure this thing out.’