13 posts tagged “clipped”
Jon Taplin pointed his readers to Bill Gross's June 2008 Investment Outlook. This quote calls out the American people and our presidential contenders for fooling ourselves.
What this country needs is either a good 5¢ cigar or the reincarnation of an Illinois “rail-splitter” willing to tell the American people “what up” – “what really up.” We have for so long now been willing to be entertained rather than informed, that we more or less accept majority opinion, perpetually shaped by ratings obsessed media, at face value. After 12 months of an endless primary campaign barrage, for instance, most of us believe that a candidate’s preacher – Democrat orRepublican – should be a significant factor in how we vote. We care more about who’s going to be eliminated from this week’s American Idol than the deteriorating quality of our healthcare system. Alternative energy discussion takes a bleacher’s seat to the latest foibles of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears and then we wonder why gas is four bucks a gallon. We care as much as we always have – we just care about the wrong things: entertainment, as opposed to informed choices; trivia vs. hardcore ideological debate.
It’s Sunday afternoon at the Coliseum folks, and all good fun, but the hordes are crossing the Alps and headed for modern day Rome – better educated, harder working, and willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. Can it be any wonder that an estimated 1% of America’s wealth migrates into foreign hands every year? We, as a people, are overweight, poorly educated, overindulged, and imbued with such a sense of self importance on a geopolitical scale, that our allies are dropping like flies. “Yes we can?” Well, if so, then the “we” is the critical element, not the leader that will be chosen in November. Let’s get off the couch and shape up – physically, intellectually, and institutionally – and begin to make some informed choices about our future. Lincoln didn’t say it, but might have agreed, that the worst part about being fooled is fooling yourself, and as a nation, we’ve been doing a pretty good job of that for a long time now.
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
New York Times, February 20, 2008, Book Lust.
This piece ostensibly calls Steve Jobs out for his wrongheaded remarks about the state of reading in America, but what I really liked are the ideas about books, like the one above, found in the piece.
This story from Rolling Stone is a few issues old, but can be found online. In the War on Terror, it seems there is
"The hope is that they will nab an actual terrorist or prevent a putative jihadi from becoming one," says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Less Safe, Less Free, a new book detailing the ways 9/11 has transformed domestic law enforcement. "It makes sense in general —but when you're pressing people to undertake conduct they would have never undertaken without an informant pushing them along, there is a real question if you're creating crime, not preventing crime." -- Rolling Stone, The Fear Factory, Feb. 7 2008.
The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: “Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?” -- Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 18, 2007.
I keep bringing this up because I think the current condition of America's economy is worse than anyone is willing to let on. I work for a large super-regional bank, and none of the stuff coming down from on high for 2008 indicates a problem. Trusting CEO's to speak the truth has never been a wise move though.
More smart analysis from Jon Tapin's blog.
An honest politician would tell the country the truth. The era of cheap oil, easy credit and spending more than you earn is over. America cannot exist with 70% of its economy based on consumers spending at the mall. We will actually have to rebuild our manufacturing base and that means we will have to rebuild our infrastructure. We can no longer be 16th in the world in Broadband Diffusion, 26th in the world in 12th grade science scores and pay our teachers like they were flipping hamburgers. This transition is going to be painful as people pay off their credit cards, reduce their silly spending for things they don’t need and become more resistant to the 5000 commercial messages a day they are bombarded with. I am reminded of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book, The Affluent Society
. Galbraith’s assertion that the perfection of modern advertising in creating desire for products we didn’t know we needed puts the modern American member of the middle class in the position of the gerbil on the tread wheel: running faster and faster, but making no progress in relation to his neighbors.
I'm glad I'm debt free with savings in the bank, but I wish I could convince more friends and family to do the same. The problems we're facing aren't going away. The stimulus package being batted around on The Hill is a stop-gap measure at best. This is the new America, folks.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”-- New York Times, May 22, 2007 [link]
As a person who has been sharing his life story on the web for a few years now, and a journalist and writer telling other people's stories, I enjoyed the perspective in this article.
[Updated: Realized I forgot to link to the article.]
“People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”
“The Newspaper Association of America has a staggering amount of data on people who read newspapers. The book business has, basically, nothing,” said Professor Greco. “They’re not going into the marketplace and doing mall intercepts and asking people, as they leave the bookstore, ‘What did you buy? Did you find what you’re looking for? What motivated you to choose that book?’ ”--New York Times, May 13, 2007
From the New York Times a great piece about the problems facing the publishing industry. Funny thing is, they know what the problems are, but "it's the way this business has run since 1640,” according to the article. Publishing companies have no real data on who's buying and reading their books. Seems like if a publisher would embrace the ideals of Web 2.0 they could turn the industry on its ear.
When it launches this summer, Hasbro, Inc.'s (NYSE: HAS) new THE GAME OF LIFE: Twists & Turns Edition will
be the first major board game in America to replace cash with a Visa-branded card as the preferred form of currency. Visa will also provide financial literacy enhancements within the game to teach children and consumers of all ages the benefits of proper money management.
"The flagship version of THE GAME OF LIFE has been updated many times since its launch in 1960 to ensure that it matches modern-day life," said Matt Collins, Vice President of Marketing. "When we started to design a completely new edition of the popular game, we knew it was also time to reflect the way people choose to pay and be paid - and replacing cash with Visa was an obvious choice."
This is disturbing to me. Credit card debt is a huge enough problem for Americans as it is, do we really need to train our children in bad habits? Hasbro has also changed the goal of the game from accumulating the most money to accumulating the most "LIFE points." Eerily similar to points programs offered by VISA, don't you think?
“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”
--"There and Back Again," Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker
This New Yorker article on commuting has me thinking about a larger post on the value of time and how it is often squandered.
Now that the three young women in Candy Hill, a glossy rap and R&B trio, have signed a record contract, they are hoping for stardom. On the schedule: shooting a music video and visiting radio stations to talk up their music.
But the women do not have a CD to promote. Universal/Republic Records, their label, signed Candy Hill to record two songs, not a complete album. --New York Times [link]
That's right two songs. iPods and the iTMS have helped create a culture that values tracks over albums. Call me old school, but I still buy all of music by the album. I like to think that the artists making these albums put a lot of thought and effort into the song sequence, and that they want their listeners to hear them in that way in order to have a better, richer experience with their music. One of my favorite albums last year, The Decemberist's Crane Wife, definitely has to be heard as an album.
This singles mindset will only hurt artists, fans and music in general.
