Month: April 2009

Rupert Murdoch vs. Godzilla

Ol’ Rupert is angry that Google keeps linking to him and sending him valuable web traffic.

“Google devalues everything it touches,” he said. “It divides content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”

That’s wrong in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. On the one hand, Google’s algorithyms do indeed have an amazing knack for judging the likelihood that people will be interested in a particular set of data. On the other hand, to the extent that Google doesn’t make value judgements, that’s beneficial to News Corporation. If Google were able to truly judge the quality of News Corporation properties, nothing Rupert Murdoch produced would ever sully my search results again.

The Price Of Metal Makes No Sense To Me

Until I started shopping for jewelry this past week I didn’t pay much attention to the price of precious metals. Certainly not to the relative prices of precious metals, although I was vaguely aware that gold was very expensive these days and that certain less-than-trustworthy characters were cheering it on.

But today I learned that gold is almost three times as expensive as palladium, and in fact almost as expensive as platinum. The price of non-precious metals like copper and aluminum has sunk with the economy, and the price of platinum, which has both industrial and jewelry applications, is cheaper than it was a year or two ago. Only gold, which is not really that useful, has risen.

This seems totally wrong to me. Can anyone explain?