The song chosen for the background of the following series of interviews about the housing bubble?
“Pawn Shop” by Sublime. Kind of fitting, really, to have the anthem of collapse be the tale of a ratty thrash band whose lead singer kept pawning their equipment to buy heroin.
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?
Michael Arrington: “Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.”
I beg to differ. Finding the balance between your ideas of what users ought to want, data-driven research about results and usage, and subjective user feedback is what makes you a winner. Too much dedication to any one will lead to failure.
It’s not fair to judge the level of national discourse by blog or newspaper comments. I know this.
And yet I can’t help but make broad generalizations when something that is basically a complaint about cliche and exaggeration in political writing draws a comment like this:
I got it I find I queation my own mind the Obama in office I see him trying to bankrupt the country I see him wanting to put our kids education camps It not just financial its every thing My family just loves him I tryed but I cant I hope I am nuts because our country seem be in deep shit.Free trade worked all this long I hate this new world order They will have to drag me I think he is a communist.
Megan’s friend John knows a guy whose parents have a farm west of town with a few head of cattle. They’re pastured, grass-fed, not pumped up on anabolics, generally not drugged unless they need it. Uncertified organic, if you will. Every year, John and a few of his friends pool their money and buy one of them, and split it five or six ways – they butcher it locally . If you’ve got a deep freezer it’s a serious bargain.
Of course, delivery is a little tricky. John’s schedule didn’t match up with ours, so he gave our share to his friend Giovanni who lives in Newton, and we planned to go by his place and get it, but put it off til the next weekend, and then the next, and the next.
And then Giovanni got laid off. I guess he’s on an H1B visa, because he’s now moving back to Italy with his family, and selling his appliances on Craigslist. He had an offer on the freezer, so I had to go get the meat right away. Midweek rush-hour driving in Boston isn’t exactly my idea of a great way to spend a Wednesday evening, and of course I got totally lost (I’ve learned Somerville’s little warrens of one-ways and missing street signs, but Newton?), but now I have seventy-some-odd pounds of grass-fed local protein.
And a sore back from carrying it.
And a sinking feeling about the global economy.
The big question is: Euro or Dollar?
I keep thinking of signing up for a class at Harvard Extension or wherever, maybe in economics or statistics – subjects I sort of wish I’d learned more about in school. But you know, I just don’t want to deal with the homework. I think I’ll go for Academic Earth and Wikibooks.
Oh, right. Planet Murdoch. It’s been five weeks! How come he hasn’t fixed the economy yet? Maybe because you can’t fix in five weeks what nearly a decade of your abuse has wrought?
Message to the denizens of the WSJ editorial page: You had your turn. You were proven to be lying, cheating, scumbags. And now you’re blaming the good guys for failing to fix your mistakes instantly. Shut up and go away.
Your average newspaper these days has added a comment section to many of its articles. That’s basically an invitation for extremists, trolls, and jackasses. A Boston Globe story about taxes, transit, or the MBTA is generally followed by several comments insisting that bloated corrupt unions are the cause of all its problems and that only a repeal of the income tax will solve anything. In the New York Times, every article about the economy will draw approximately equal numbers of comments George W. Bush and Barack Obama for the parlous state of global finance, plus at least one blaming George Soros and one advocating a return to the Gold Standard and the abolition of fractional-reserve banking systems.
But the best whackadoo comments are to be found in the dedicated financial press. For example, check out this article about oil-price fluctuations. The entirely reasonable premise of the article – that oil prices are volatile and we should plan for such volatility – leads to six hundred comments in under a day. About half are totally dismissive of a possibility of oil returning to high prices, or insisting that only speculators (George Soros again playing the role of bogeyman) caused oil to cross $100/barrel mark last year. Others of course play the opposite role and insist that ammunition, not oil, is where you want to be investing right now, and at least one commenter pops up noting that he’s stockpiling diesel, ammunition, honey, and clean underwear for the coming apocalypse.
Secretly Ironic 