Two clips via The Big Picture. Consider yourself warned.
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Dmitry Orlov: Predictions for the next decade
You have to love this guy. He goes out on a limb and predicts the next ten years. Sobering in the extreme. Here is a partial exerpt:
Distressed municipalities throughout the country will resort to charging exorbitant fees for such things as dog licenses. Many will experiment with imprisoning those unable to pay these fees in state and county jails, only to release them again as the jails continuously overflow and resources run low. The citizenry will come to regard jails as conveniently combining the features of a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. Some towns will abandon the idea of having a fire department and decide that it is more cost-effective to just let house fires run their course, to save on demolitions. In an effort to plug up ever larger holes in their budgets, states will raise taxes, driving ever more economic activity underground. In particular, state liquor tax revenues will drop for the first time in many decades as more and more Americans find that they can no longer afford beer and switch to cheap and plentiful Afghan heroin and other illegal but very affordable drugs. Marijuana smoke will edge out car exhaust as America’s most prevalent smell.
Jesus is everywhere
Must be the season or something. (via Wonkette)
Harvard Business Review: Steve Jobs is number 1
The Harvard Business Review has just published a list of the top 100 CEOs in the world, based on their full tenures (or through September, 2009 if they are still CEOs). Who is number 1? Bet you’re not surprised to learn it is Steve Jobs.
The perfect last minute Christmas gift
Obama’s big switch
Call it bait-and-switch. Obama ran on a platform that included stronger financial regulations and changes in the behavior that caused the economic collapse.
What has been the reality? Obama has filled the ranks of financial regulators and his economic advisors with Wall Street insiders. Matt Taibbi explicates:
Read the full details in Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone. Excerpt:
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.
Time for Apple to say good-bye to AT&T
When the iPhone is subject to this type of joke, a move to at least one additional carrier in the US is well overdue.
Rich: Tiger Woods as man of the year
I can’t disagree with Frank Rich’s column this morning. Tiger Woods is a terrific personification of an entire decade of people making money (and going to war) based on a false persona and fantasy.
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us . . . have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).
The known universe
Amazing video showing the full known universe, to scale. Click through the video to see it full size in HD.
Franken shuts down Lieberman (updated)
Too bad it couldn’t have kept him quiet for a much longer period. By the way, McCain says he can’t remember this ever happening but it happened earlier on the same day. (h/t Wonkette)
Update: Even worse, McCain did it himself in 2002. Not surprising he can’t remember.
The Who – Sing Off
The Beezlebubs. Excellent.
Facebook privacy actions challenged before FTC (updated)
What’s up with Facebook now? Well, today the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a cyber-privacy civil rights group, has filed a formal complaint against the recent Facebook changes to their privacy settings and policy. Here is EPIC’s press release and here is their complaint.
My advice: Drop Facebook like a bad habit unless you post to Facebook only information that you generally post the Web and seriously do not care if everyone sees. Keep in mind that none of Facebook’s changes were put in place to help users. The financial reason for the changes was to open all users’ information in order for Facebook to more effectively compete against Twitter for searchable information. The more information that you post that gets indexed by the search engines, the more traffic there is to Facebook and the more advertisements they can sell. They are selling you and everything you say and post, even though you signed up to share information only with your friends. Is this the way to build a legitimate business? Is this a business that exhibits the kind of customer protection you want to share your private information with?
Did you know that under the new settings a listing of your Facebook friends is shared with the entire Internet unless you take special action?
Check out this article from MSNBC highlighting the fact that even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, could not correctly apply the new settings.
If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can’t figure out his social networking site’s privacy settings after they were ripped open earlier this month, what hope is there for the rest of us?
For a brief window of time, the whole world had an opening to check out (and get screen grabs) of Zuckerberg’s previously private Facebook photos, in which the young CEO is seen, as Valleywag describes, “shirtless, romantic, clutching a teddy bear, and looking plastered.”
Do you want someone to be able to search for you and get your picture, your location and a list of your online friends and their pictures and names? Do your friends want you to to do this? At a minimum, do what is recommended in the MSNBC article linked above.
Still don’t believe me? Well, your Facebook profile will show friends faces and names to a user not on Facebook (i.e., Google) if your settings otherwise are at the highest privacy settings allowed with Facebook “search results” set to “only friends” but “public search” approved.
I am willing to wager to virtually all Facebook users are now sharing friends names and pictures with the universe. Is this what you think you agreed to? When you turn off this behavior, this is the ominous “warning” you are shown by Facebook:
Important Privacy NoticeWorried about search engines? Your information is safe.There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.
Does this disclaimer/warning tell you that you will be showing pictures and names of your friends? No. But you will be if you don’t turn off this setting.
Update: More coverage in the New York Times.
RIMM kicks serious ass
I am not kidding about that. They blew away analysts projections for the quarter and gave very strong guidance for the next quarter.
What does this mean? Well, two companies right now own the smartphone space: RIMM and Apple. The RIMM news came on the same day that a market research firm reported that Apple iPhone now has a bigger share of the users in the smartphone market than Windows Mobile.
Disclosure: I am long in AAPL. Nothing on this blog should be construed as investment advice.
Operation Chokehold: FCC statement
Operation Chokehold has drawn the attention of the FCC. The FCC chief of public safety and homeland security:
Threats of this nature are serious and we caution the public to use common sense and good judgment when accessing the Internet from their commercial mobile devices… To purposely try to disrupt or negatively impact a network with ill-intent is irresponsible and presents a significant public safety concern.
Operation Chokehold: AT&T response
In an earlier post, I described Fake Steve Jobs call to protest AT&T’s crappy data network at 12 noon, PST, this Friday, aka Operation Chokehold. Now AT&T has responded.
We understand that fakesteve.net is primarily a satirical forum, but there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers. We know that the vast majority of customers will see this action for what it is: an irresponsible and pointless scheme to draw attention to a blog.
Fake Steve has responded to their response.
As for Chokehold, people keep asking me if I think it will succeed. My answer is that it already has. Have you seen the coverage of this thing? It’s all over Twitter. Tonight it hit the Wall Street Journal. Who knew there was so much anger out there? As far as I’m concerned, it’s mission accomplished.
I think the reason people are so angry goes beyond AT&T and the iPhone. I think the anger stems from the fact that we’re living in the United States, which used to be considered a First World country, and yet we’re dealing with a wireless system that feels like something you’d find in Port-au-Prince during hurricane season. In fact the developing world is racing past us, building out new wireless networks while we’re stuck with this POS legacy infrastructure run by POS legacy behemoths that either can’t or won’t bring it up to snuff.
I mean, consider this fact:
AT&T, a huge wireless provider in the United States, cannot reliably connect calls in New York City.