Posts Tagged ‘bubble economies’
Friday Morning Links!
* CFP: Anticipations: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions.
* It’s basically become a standing assignment at the Marquette Tribune to ask me about some weird thing I like once a semester. And while we’re on that subject: a preview of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Hard times at Mizzou. This new enrollment decline — seemingly on top of the demographic dip nationwide — looks like a complete disaster for the troubled campus, which the administration has effortlessly managed to weaponize in pursuit of its own goals. Meanwhile: Melissa Click Breaks Silence, Backs AAUP Inquiry.
* Luxurious College Apartments, Built on Debt.
* The end of tenure in Wisconsin.
* Fukushima: Tokyo was on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, admits former prime minister. Miami’s oceanfront nuclear power plant is leaking.
* What happens if there’s a supervolcano?
* Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English.
* Alternate title: Bernie Sanders has no path to a delegate majority. Even so, that Michigan win was pretty great.
* Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias: How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* In stories of classroom sexual harassment, popular teachers are often the perpetrators.
* Dystopia now: United confirms 10-abreast seating on some of its 777s.
* …just another instance of the bipartisan “smell weakness, then mercilessly swarm” routine that everyone has apparently decided is a healthy and beneficial norm for online life.
* At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump. It’s Getting Harder For Donald Trump To Deny That His Top Aide Assaulted A Reporter. Donald Trump Encourages Violence At His Rallies. His Fans Are Listening. Legitimacy and violence. The plan.
* The arc of history is long, but Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked.
* “Magic in North America”: The Harry Potter franchise veers too close to home.
* Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income. (via)
* 100% absolutely yes: Janelle Monae Will Co-Star in a Movie About the Women Behind the Space Program.
* Former College Student Wins Lawsuit After Being Told Men Were ‘Turned On’ By Her Pregnancy.
* xkcd: Map of the Repositioned United States.
* As a result, the complaint stated, Choudhry was disciplined with a 10 percent reduction in salary for one year and required to write a letter of apology to Sorrell. Sorrell alleged in the lawsuit that she was told by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele that he had “seriously considered terminating the Dean” but had decided not to because “it would ruin the Dean’s career.” Berkeley’s handling of sexual harassment is a disgrace.
* U.N.C. Football Player Who Ended Up Homeless Had C.T.E.
* Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF.
* How many LEGO would it take to…
* A brief history of allergies.
* google spiderman sounds weird truth
* The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age.
* The making of Cosmic Encounter, the greatest boardgame in the galaxy.
* Sleep is important, apparently. I know I miss it.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Orpheus.
* Y’all ready for a tech crash?
* And the worst part is, now they won’t even let us complain!
* And this is very promising: Huntington’s disease gene dispensable in adult mice.
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Weekend Links!
* Nice treat: my LARoB piece got namechecked in an Unexpected Stories review at NPR.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine the polar vortex making it unseasonably cold, forever.
* New Data Says Huge West Virginia Chemical Spill May Have Been More Toxic Than Reported. But don’t worry: Freedom Industries has been fined a whopping $11,000.
* The OECD says the party’s over.
These are that growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will increase massively; and that there is a big risk that climate change will make things worse.
* Here’s what the world would look like if we took global warming seriously.
* A Brief History of the Humanities Postdoc.
* On the huge screwed-uppedness of “studies show.”
* An oral history of LucasArts.
* A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
* What disapproving friends don’t understand about cesarean births.
* If A Man Takes Paternity Leave, His Coworkers Will Probably Take It Too.
* For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
* Analysis: Over Half of All Statements Made on Fox News Are False. I sincerely hope they included statements like “I’m Bill O’Reilly” and “You’re watching Fox.”
* Five Thirty Eight and screwing up predictions.
The measurement error in the World Cup case was simple: FiveThirtyEight and other sites had marked Brazil as having a strong defense, and a solid offense anchored by its star, Neymar, as measured by a statistical amalgamation called Soccer Power Index. In reality, Brazil had been aggressively fouling its way as a means of defense, elbowing and kicking its way, and not getting called for it by referees. I’m not just making this up as a day-after-big-loss armchair analysis: pretty much most punditry on soccer had been clear on this before the game.
In other words, the statistics were overestimating how good a team Brazil really was, and the expert punditry was fairly unified on this point.
In other words, this time, the hedgehogs knew something the fox didn’t. But this fox is often too committed to methodological singularity and fighting pundits, sometimes for the sake of fighting them, so it often doesn’t like to listen to non-statistical data. In reality, methodological triangulation is almost always stronger, though harder to pull-offs.
* What happened to the super-rich of yesteryear?
If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
* Let this AskMe post from an academic spouse ruin your morning!
* College Graduates and the Great Recession by The Numbers.
* Over Duke U.’s Protests, Estate of ‘the Duke’ Asks Court to Approve Use of ‘Duke.’
* The next-generation F-35, the most expensive plane ever built, may be too dangerous to fly. Why is Congress keeping it alive? What could possibly explain it!
* “Superhero stories are really about immigrants.”
* Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?
* Change.org petition inviting Department of Labor investigation into adjunct labor. I’m very skeptical there’s anything actionable here, unfortunately.
* Having Your Sleep Interrupted May Be As Bad As Not Getting Any at All.
* Losing to Germany Wasn’t Actually the Worst Thing to Happen to Brazil This World Cup.
* Colorado’s legal pot market is bigger than anyone anticipated. First person to legally purchase pot in WA fired after being seen on local news buying it.
* DEA Officials Responsible For Nearly Killing College Student, DOJ Watchdog Finds. Daniel Chong is the entirely predictable result of dehumanizing drug offenders.
* In ‘sexting’ case Manassas City police want to photograph teen in sexually explicit manner, lawyers say. You’ll be glad to know police have withdrawn the request.
* Two hundred years into the social experiment of modern imprisonment, and 40 years into the expansion of what is frequently called “mass incarceration,” America’s system of jails and prisons arguably constitutes the most prodigious system of torture the world has ever seen.
* …while Swartz’s death was a mistake, destroying him as a lesson to all of us wasn’t a mistake. It was policy.
* Tough Louisiana Catholic Church case goes to the heart of mandatory reporting law.
* The Atlantic has a challenging piece on helping intersex children, albeit with an absolutely terrible headline.
* What the Potato Salad Kickstarter Campaign Says About Tech, Silicon Valley, and Modern Life.
* On giving Title IX teeth. It does surprise me that no school has ever received a Title IX sanction for its approach sexual violence.
* SMBC on kind aliens. XKCD on a wraith called Timeghost. The adventures of Process Man.
* Predicting the end of Game of Thrones from George R. R. Martin’s repeated requests for a big-budget epic finale.
* Ideology at its purest is ripe for disruption: “Inside tech’s latest management craze.” Meanwhile: Silicon Valley wage fixing: Disney, Lucas, Dreamworks and Pixar implicated.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* 16-Year-Old’s Rape Goes Viral Because Human Beings Are Terrible. Awful story.
* Syfy orders a pilot for its adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
* The wisdom of markets: Social Network With No Revenue or Assets Somehow Worth $4.75 Billion.
* When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, Sebald said, “No serious person thinks of anything else.” On still trying to come to terms with the Holocaust.
* Trigger warning: breakfast. A confessional comic about the night after the artist’s rape.
* A Webcomic About A Time Traveler Trying To Comprehend Terminal Illness.
* A Field Guide To Unusual (And Hilarious) Harry Potter Patronuses.
* And Ian McKellan just won’t leave any franchise un-awesomed. He simply won’t!
Tuesday!
* Well, it was nice while it lasted: Guatemalan Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Ex-Dictator.
* College sports as investment bubble? Reform or Retreat?
* MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used.
* One of 500. Come for the thoughtful and reflective essay, stay for the shit-stirring, dickish comments…
* How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists. The headline is a bit misleading; this is about word games prosecutors play.
* ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show.
* And over at Dear Television Lili Loofbourow has a good thing on the latest Mad Men episode, too.
Monday!
* The Brad Delong That Failed: “Things that I think I have gotten really, really wrong so far in my career.”
* TPM games out the early primaries and says Mitt Romney may be in even worse shape than it seems. Of course, with the way horse-race political coverage works in this country, this could just be setup for the inevitable “comeback kid” narrative. Meanwhile, I hope the Republican primary never ends.
* Newt’s Tax Plan: Just give rich people free money. It can’t fail!
* And more Newt: Rick Santorum’s consistency and courage on Iran has been a hallmark of why, if we do survive, it will be in part because of people like Rick who’ve had the courage to tell the truth about the Iranians for a long time. If!
* Military-industrial-academic complex: Blackwater to change its name again to Academi.
* Next year’s Supreme Court schedule should be interesting.
* The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
* The case against charts, Fox News Edition.
* The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Discussion at MeFi.
* The last question American Morning asked the two is what they would call an Occupy Wall Street-themed flavor. “Choccupy?” suggested Ben Cohen. Guys, really, I already solved this.
* When Verizon trolled New Jersey.
* Two from Longform’s Best of 2011: The Movie Set That Ate Itself and This Tech Bubble Is Different. #1:
Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home
and #2:
There’s always someone out there crying bubble, it seems; the trick is figuring out when it’s easy money—and when it’s a shell game. Some bubbles actually do some good, even if they don’t end happily. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ), and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers into millions of businesses and homes—and the stocks of those companies soared. Tech stumbled in the late 1980s, and the Valley was left with lots of cheap microprocessors and theories on what to do with them. The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.
…So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? Perlman grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things,” he says. “We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”
And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? “My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”
* And then there’s Abed Is Joker Now.
Gerry Canavan 
