22
May
Archive for May, 2009
You see that headline and go huh? What? I know. It’s even funnier considering I wrote this piece when the Royals were 18-11 and everyone was talking about how they were on top of the world and had finally arrived. But, considering that the team has gone 5-16 since then, I feel a lot better about my accuracy level.*
*Note that this probably means my accuracy is about to drop off a cliff.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: alex gordon, ddj, disabled list, Royals, zack greinke
I was watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night and his guest was former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Gingrich spent a fair amount of his time describing the Obama administration as being the most Socialist government in the history of the United States. One of the points he kept mentioning to back up this idea was the fact that the UAW apparently now owns 55% of Chrysler. I think that’s probably the worst example he could have picked.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Daily Show, gop, jon stewart, Newt Gingrich, stock ownership, UAW
The winner of the second edition of “Who reads this website?” is Time.com’s Justin Fox* for this essay on cnn/money about shareholder value. I covered nearly the exact same territory except without the professional reporter type citations and quotes in this piece written March 23.
*Actually, we already new Mr. Fox was a reader given that he’s linked to this site before, and since the essay was taken from his new book I can’t really take credit for it, but we’ll pretend like thats the case anyways.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: 124monkeys, cnn/money, justin fox, time.com
20
May
Komeback at the K
Sorry about the cutely mispelled title of this one. The game was just to awesome and I’m too high on endorphins not to do it. I also have to give another shout out to the military half-price discount. It’s definitely allowing me to go to more games this summer than I would otherwise.
Just got back from the K a little bit ago. Went with a huge group of friends (I think there were 22 of us total - we went through a box of burgers, four packs of brats, and a couple cases in the parking lot) and to be honest, going into the ninth, the actual game experience had kind of paled in comparison to the tailgating party.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: 9th inning, david dejesus, indians, mike jacobs, Royals
15
May
Friday Music Video
Today’s video is Encore by DJ Dangermouse.
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Tags: beatles, dj dangermouse, encore, jay-z, music video
I never knew a whole lot about Eliot Spitzer before he got busted for keeping a prostitute as a sort of mistress last year. I knew that he’d been an New York DA who’d taken on and beaten up a lot of the big Wall Street firms for basically being greedy, law breaking d-bags. And won every case big time. Then it was discovered he kept a prostitute and had to resign. The next thing I heard from the guy was when I saw that he had a column at Slate.com. I clicked on his first article more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. That was an eye-opener.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: aig, eliot spitzer, financial institutions, wall street
A few weeks ago a bunch of major papers in big American cities made headlines by closing up shop. Many other newspapers have cut down on the number of daily editions they print. Lots of stuff about this has been written, blaming the internet or declining reading habits or the internet or tv or the internet or greedy/moronic media moguls for the problems. To a large degree (especially the bit about the internet), this is an accurate assessment of the problems facing print media. But it misses a core flaw in the revenue structure of all advertising supported enterprises.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Add new tag, advertising, google, newspaper
I watched the new Star Trek movie today. Pretty entertaining, but they completely and totally disregarded how physics actually worked and really, really ignored the chain of command in order to make their plot work. But since all these contrivances were in the service of making the plot work and didn’t really matter that much in terms of the story, I’m happy to let it go. But the stuff they were doing did get me thinking about some of the more interesting aspects of quantum mechanics I’ve read about, and that got me thinking about how some of them apply to - and explain/solve - some of the more vexing problems of behavioral economics.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: behavioral economics, game the system, quantum physics, star trek
Continued from this post.
The new neo-classicist economic theories now in vogue in D.C. (circa the 1980’s) rested on a couple of key principles in order to work. 1) Investor and management interests could be properly aligned. 2) A mostly free market would function the same as a truly free market. 3) In order to support #2, all markets should be de-regulated as much as possible. 4) Free markets are always the most efficient way to allocate any resource. 5) People are willing to accept the downside and losses of risk when it goes bad. 6) People are rational economic actors. 7) Everyone will always have optimal information.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: de-regulation, finance, free markets, neo-classicist, republican party
