Posts Tagged ‘Bernie Madoff’
And Somehow Even More Still for Friday
* Cut from the top to save UC.
The current University of California Office of the President, or UCOP, is a labyrinthine bureaucracy that takes money from the 10 campuses where actual teaching and research happen. Instead of investing more authority in a president whose ambit is already absurdly huge — an annual budget of $24 billion, 230,000 students, 191,000 faculty and staff — the regents should scale back UCOP and empower each campus to make even more of its own decisions.
* The case for S4 of Arrested Development as masterpiece.
* Why Didn’t the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To.
* And MetaFilter has a big post up about major universities running afoul of the Clery Act.
Good News for Mets Fans
While the hated Yankees look likely to win the World Series, Mets fans can take solace in the fact that at least the Mets may not have lost money to Bernie Madoff.
Thursday!
Thursday!
* I’ll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.
* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.
* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson’s review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.
* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.
* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you’re two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.
* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can’t find them. Meanwhile, this year’s Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.
* So you’ve invented a board game. (via)
* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.
* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.
Kim Stanley Robinson and ‘We Are All Madoffs’
‘We Are All Madoffs’: David P. Barash writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the relationship of technological civilization to the natural world is that of a Ponzi scheme. Kim Stanley Robinson makes the same point in the interview we conducted with him for the upcoming Polygraph issue, which will eventually wind up on the website and likely also on this very blog:
KSR: …I’ve been trying to use standard economic terms to describe the situation in ways capitalists might have to come to terms with, that might serve as entry-points to a larger discussion: that the implicit promise of capitalism was that a generation would work so hard in the working class that its children would be in the middle class, and that if extended this program would eventually lift everyone on Earth; but now, resource analysis makes it clear that for the three billion living on less than two dollars a day, this promise can never be fulfilled; so that capitalism is really nothing but a big Ponzi scheme, and would be illegal if run in a single state or community.
Then also, the pricing we put on things, carbon especially, does not include the environmental costs of making the thing, so that we are practicing systemic predatory dumping, and the competitors we are predating on are our own children and the generations to come. So we are predatory dumpers, out-competing non-existent people, which is easy enough; but they will suffer when they come into existence, and we are cheaters.
More on the Polygraph issue soon. (via)
Monday Night Links
* After a brief flirtation with “top five” status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.
* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware’s Chicago. Via MetaFilter.
* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.
* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.
* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature’s right to exist.
* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina’s newest resident.
Higher Education and the Recession
Higher education and the recession: thirteen reasons colleges are in this mess. (Requires subscription or university IP.) My upcoming review of How the University Works for Polygraph 21 tackles some of these points as well, particularly “1. Took on Risky Investments.” When it shows up online, I’ll link to it.
Sunday Night
Sunday night.
* Patton Oswalt says if you didn’t like The Watchmen you should just shut up. Fair enough, but you know, that’s not really the title… (via Bill, who promises via Twitter both a blog post and a Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast on this soon)
* We all want to flee to the Cleve: a new Bruce Springsteen exhibit opens at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 1. (Thanks, Brent!)
* Science fiction set in 2009. The Postman and Dark Angel are legit picks—but when your list needs three movies from the last two years, Family Matters, and an episode of Charmed to work, it’s time to rethink.
* Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme, are we all Bernie Madoffs, and what comes next?