Sundries.
- Warren Buffet is often attributed as saying, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked" referring to how a bad economy exposes problems in a business. After reading too many comment sections on New York Times articles on the financial crisis, I think it should be "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's a real communist." (Note, dear reader beginning to flame me in the comments, that I didn't say whether I thought this was good or bad or neither good or bad.) Hard economic times really bring out the daggers in economic ideology. I love to watch (is that wrong?)
- Brad De Long argues for Silicon Valley compensation schemes for Wall Street. New phrase: brain dog ("They're not dumb--but there is a reason they hire physicists as their brain dogs.")
- I was in Pittsburgh for most of the AIG bonus eruption. Joe Nocera has the guts to chastise the flogging.
- An interesting paper on repeated success in entrepreneurship here. Main conclusion is that success bread success and that there is a certain myth in the Silicon Valley ideal that failure can be increase odds of succeeding. Actually it seems to me that the later conclusion isn't quite correct even from the data: if you argue for a persistence of success, then you should probably argue for a persistence in failure, and thus the fact that the odds of succeeding after a failure are the same as before is probably evidence for the truth of the myth.
- Mt. Redoubt in Alaska is erupting. Insert Jingal and Palin joke here.
- My bracket is a mess and the two teams I most closely associate myself with, UW and Cal, are both out. My west coast bias now has me rooting for Arizona and Gonzaga. At least I don't have to root for USC ;)
- Seattle is a sparking city.
- Two, count them, two of my friends called me in the last week to report something they heard while listening to a Christian radio station in the middle of nowhere. Why am I the first one that people think of when they hear Christian radio?
- On energy secretary Steve Chu: "'A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,' Mr. Leistikow said."
- The dog is disappointed in evolution:
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Will Bunch of Attytood recently published an interesting and important book - Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.
On his blog, Will provides an excerpt and commentary:
Twenty years gone - but Reagan still matters. About this time one year…
Under the fold:
Ex-Cheney aide: Bush won't hit Iran:
US President George W. Bush will not attack Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program before his term ends in January, David Wurmser, a key national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney up until last year, has told The Jerusalem Post.…
I've decided to take a break from hate-mongering. Instead, I want to discuss two interesting posts about the state of economics by Brad DeLong and Tim Duy. Before I get to them, for those who wonder why I discuss this stuff, I find it fascinating that such an important discipline has had such…
Last week, The AP described what living the life of Palin is like:
Among the perks laid out in the contract, the former Alaska governor will fly first class from Anchorage to California - if she flies commercial. If not, "the private aircraft MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger ...," the contract specifies…
So is that a loldog?
More like a boldog.
> More like a boldog.
Very Churchillian.
now, when driving across Kansas or some other place with nothing on the radio, I know who to call...
I thought that driving I-80 across Nebraska was a boring 700 miles. Then I drove diagonally on I-90 across Montana, and it was a scenic but long 900 miles. For a while, NPR from Butte or Billings or Bozeman or somewhere, and then much more about Jesus than I wanted.
"only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked -- and who's been walking on water."
More cold fusion in the news.
Jack: I saw that. Why is all cold fusion reported from Salt Lake City?
Because of all the Big Love in the polywater.
> Because of all the Big Love in the polywater.
Or is that Poly-love in the Big Water? [Yes, yes, I got the HBO reference - just making a lame attempt at a very obscure joke.]