www.theatrelimina.org
I can't figure out an artful way to blog this, so I'll do it artlessly:
James Fallows of the Atlantic took a trip to the remote western provinces of China.
After trekking for hours across a stark, lunar desert landscape awesome in its harsh beauty, our bus rolled into a former Silk Road waypoint where today's craftsmen still specialize in hand-knotted rugs. We passed through a beaded curtain to see, on the place of honor on the main wall, this:
Barbara Ehrenreich dissects the ongoing financial crises:
Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.
First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were “NINJA” loans, for example, awarded to people with “no income, no job or assets.” Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of “economic literacy” that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn’t these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don’t they have personal financial advisors anyway?
I think it's because I'm now a parent and (temporarily) our family's sole breadwinner, but the ups and downs of the financial markets are suddenly riveting to me. Not in the check-the-tickers-all-day-long kinda way, but in the will-my-401(k)-survive kinda way. As such, this column in the Financial Times is an especially good overview of the market meltdowns that started last week:
Financial markets, and particularly the big players within them, need fear. Without it, they go crazy. Moreover, it is impossible for outsiders to regulate a global financial system riddled with conflicts of interest and dominated by huge derivatives markets, massive trading by highly leveraged hedge funds and reliance on abstruse mathematics and questionable statistical models. These markets must regulate themselves. The only thing likely to persuade them to do so is the certainty that the players will be allowed to go bust.
It’s a minor triumph of Apple’s that all AT&T plans for the iPhone include unlimited data services. After all, Blackberries and Treos alike have spendy access plans that dramatically increase their cost of use.
But as Justine Ezarik (a designer based in Pittsburgh known as iJustine who is also a “lifecaster” on Justin.tv) learned recently, AT&T still has a very old-world view of billing for data services. The company broke out as a line item every data transfer her iPhone made, including 30,000 texts, most of which come up as a huge series of $0.00 transactions. The total heft to the package? 300 pages. And it shipped in a box, which can’t have been cheap, even leaving aside the environmental impact of a few hundred thousand folks getting extra-big bills printed on paper.
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed's blog:
Sounds terrible, right? Actually, apparently not.If top business-school applicants need a break from GMAT prep and essay writing, they should browse the Web for inspirational quotes and clip art.
The admissions office at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business is requiring for the first time this year a PowerPoint presentation — or something like it. "In four slides or less," the online instructions say, "please provide readers with content that captures who you are."
This seems like a great idea, if it's carried off right. Of course, at lower-tier schools I'll bet you'd see lots of shite like Aleksey Vayner's video resume:Those readers, it turns out, are sort of bored with essays. The new requirement will give admissions officers a better sense of their applicants, says Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean of admissions and financial aid. Plus, she says, "it will make my job of reading a million applications much more enjoyable."
She has been thrilled with what she’s seen already: lots of photos and poetry. One current student, in a test run, wrote a play featuring a Greek chorus questioning him about his application, according to the Associated Press.
Via Merlin Mann, Geekologie features a great set of ads for a German job-hunting service.
Finally, someone understands me well enough to offer a serious way to finance a new gadget.
I'm not quite immune from the rising fever of the Apple crowd for the new iPhone, which launches on Friday, but John Scalzi seems to know how to lower the temperature:
Anyone who's getting a first-gen iPhone is signing up to be a guinea pig anyway; practicality shouldn't enter into it. Fair enough, and I wasn't exactly camping out to get one anyway. But I feel the same way I did when the first iPod came out, actually. When it happened I watched all the cool kids stab each other in the eye to get to it, and meanwhile I, who had had a CD-player-sized Creative 5GB Jukebox for over a year at that point and had paid substantially less to get it than what the first-gen iPod went for, thought it would probably be best just to sit out the fracas for a while with my perfectly serviceable, pre-existing alternative.
From the Washington Post:
Warren E. Buffett was his usual folksy self Tuesday night at a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as he slammed a system that allows the very rich to pay taxes at a lower rate than the middle class.Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.
Buffett said that was despite the fact that he was not trying to avoid paying higher taxes. "I don't have a tax shelter," he said. And he challenged Congress and his audience to see what the people who "clean our offices" are taxed, to loud applause...
Clinton acted as moderator. Topics included Buffett's views on the impact of the real estate slump on the economy (he doesn't see it spilling over to the broader market) and how to get started in investing (you are more likely to find diamonds in the rough among small companies).
Clinton finished by asking Buffett, "Why are you a Democrat?"
Buffett said he thought Democrats would do a better job in evening out the field for those who had drawn the unlucky tickets in life.
Sitting here at my desk, albeit in the offices of a remarkably humane employer, I'm impressed by Best Buy's experiment with clock- and place-free work routines, or ROWE, for "results-only work environment." In short, it doesn't matter if you're in your cubicle, in your car, at your house, or in the woods so long as you get done what you need to get done.
It's remarkable, and judging by this (admittedly boosterish) BusinessWeek article, pretty successful. ROWE has even led one curmudgeonly manager to conclude, "For years I had been focused on the wrong currency. I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."
A month or so ago, I was interviewed by a Minnesota Public Radio reporter for a story about Capella University, a former employe of mine (and the other two After School Snack bloggers, as it happens). I had volunteered my perspective on Capella's addiction to student loans when MPR sought information from its listeners after the recent student-loan scandal erupted. A scrap of my interview survived in the final story, which is, as they say, "fair and balanced."
Unlike my eyeballs, which seem to have relocated to one o'clock on the dial.
Apparently the only thing the Chinese won't pirate is pirates, and maybe that's not even true: Norwegian fish is highly prized in China, where they are taught in school that Norway is a country of unspoiled natural beauty, with fish free from worries of pollution. But false Norwegian fish on the Chinese market is worrying import companies interested in dealing with the real thing, financial daily Dagens Næringsliv reports. The listed company Shanghai Dazhong Public Utilities is hesitant about importing expensive Norwegian fish. "Consumers unfortunately do not manage to taste the difference between real and counterfeit Norwegian fish," company vice president Kong Wei told industry magazine Intrafish. Kong Wei claims that fish imported from all corners of the world is labeled as Norwegian, and this allows the importer to charge a premium. This in turn means that there is little profit in importing genuine, expensive Norwegian fish. Kong Wei said the company is considering importing Norwegian seafood to sell to the top tier of Chinese consumers, but is now doubtful after examining the results of a market survey. "Too much counterfeit fish is being sold as Norwegian in the Chinese market," Kong Wei said.
From Aftenposten.
This has already been covered by the New York blog mafia (Jason Kottke, godfather), but it's worth a look: an analysis of how a few dozen businesses in New York make their money. The entries range from a family pizza joint (where most of the money comes from a $12 pizza with $3 in ingredients) and the Yankees to a sex shop and a yoga studio.
Of course, all that naturally leads the vast After School Snack readership to wonder how I make my money. The old-fashioned way - by stealing candy from kids and selling it to the elderly.
Making summer vacation plans? Go ahead and skip Finland - you wouldn't like the pristine forests, clean lakes, or excellent culture. Plus, they have blood-sucking moths.
A blood-sucking moth is becoming a frequent sight in Finland. The nature journal Suomen Luonto published what it said were the first pictures of a vampire moth feasting on human blood. The moths (calyptra thalictri) were first detected sucking human blood in the Russian Far East. Vladimir Kononenko, a moth researcher from Vladivostok, said that when undisturbed, the moth can feast for several minutes. The vampire moth has a stronger sucker than most moths. Generally moths obtain nutrients from water or plants. In Finland, the moth was first detected in the year 2000 in Simpele, near the Russian border. Since then, the insect has been spotted over 100 times in Finland. Researcher Kauri Mikkola, who wrote the journal article, said it's unlikely that the moth would spread disease in Finland.
File this under "What is this country coming to?" (right next to most of the rest of our posts, I guess):
Northfield blogger/mover-and-shaker Ross Currier just wrote up a piece on ethanol production, which is a hot topic here. Before your eyes glaze over and you fall dead asleep, bear with me for a minute. Currier's post opens with the already-famous remarks by investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on whether ethanol's a good idea (Munger: "Running cars on corn is about the stupidest thing I ever heard of. Our government is under tremendous political pressure even though it makes no sense."), but goes on to describe an interesting aspect of the recent ethanol-driven rise in corn prices. With corn too costly (or valuable) to literally throw to the hogs, livestock farmers are finding cheaper ways to feed their animals - and indirectly, to feed us:
One farmer is now feeding his cattle a blend that consists of about 17% “candy meal”, a blend of chocolate bars and large chunks of chocolate, 3% of “party mix”, a blend of popcorn, pretzels, potato chips and cheese curls, 8% corn gluten, and the remainder corn and barley that he grows himself.Currier describes this situation as one in which "it’s not just the pigs that are eating like high school students."
I don't use my Mac's "Dashboard" application much since ye olde PowerBooke is too slow for the app to work well. But the "Corporate Ipsum" widget for the Dashboard makes me feel like it might be time to upgrade. All it does is generate corporate-speak that's nonsense but at least as smart of what was in that last PowerPoint:
Synergistically engage cross-media human capital for out-of-the-box convergence. Objectively generate fully tested meta-services via market-driven sources. Interactively underwhelm long-term high-impact convergence rather than future-proof convergence.(Link and text via 43 Folders.)
From BusinessWeek:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has been recruiting former military and government intelligence officers for a branch of its global security office aimed at identifying threats to the world's largest retailer, including from "suspect individuals and groups."Instead of trying to ferret out whistleblowers, critics, and unionizers, why don't they just, you know, stop acting like jerks? People would complain less about the company if it stopped buying too-cheap stuff from China, paying its employees too little, harassing people interested in unionizing, and generally acting like a robber barony.
