Via Language Log.Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979.
But now that it's been pointed out, the lobbying coalition might want to rethink using an acronym in the logo. To anyone online, WTF has a different meaning these days. And it's not the kind of thing you want visitors thinking about when they think Wisconsin.
Here's the conventional wisdom about Radiohead in the 2000s:
Alec Longstreth, a 30-year-old comic artist from White River Junction, Vt., won't buy a smart phone with a standard keyboard. "I wanted to punch my fist through the computer monitor" every time an advertisement for such a phone popped up, he says.Via WSJ.
Forget Wilco. Please. Ever since Summerteeth, a wonderful record, Jeff Tweedy has tried to make his band into an American Radiohead. The results have been sometimes underwhelming, but mostly boring and pretentious. Thankfully, nature hates a void. Louisville's My Morning Jacket came along, stole Wilco's M.O., added the Big Sky vocal of Jim James, and made some of the best alternative country music of the decade.
Ever since the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique and Beck's Odelay, the kaleidoscopic mixture of rap, rock, funk, and fill-in-the-blank genres has been seen as a gold standard for excellence. It's become a cliché to praise "genre-bending" music. On the surface, it seems to make sense to applaud an artist or band, who is more comfortable in one style of music, for widening their palate and integrating styles to create something novel. Yet, novelty is not enough. Paul's Boutique and Odelay were notable for the assured and seamless fusion of styles that it made them almost uncategorizable.
The Federal Communications Commission in Washington currently prohibits in-flight cellphone use on planes, partly because of some unresolved questions about the potential for interference with aircraft navigation equipment, but mostly because of phone industry concerns that airborne cell signals radiate widely, randomly contacting different ground stations. That would create interference between systems and cause logistical problems for things like billing.From the NYT. Resistance to allowing cell phone use is still strong in the U.S., though it's becoming common overseas.
When I announced last week that I was leaving ABC for Fox, some readers complained about my "bias." I replied: "Every reporter has political beliefs. The difference is that I am upfront about mine."
Look at today's burning issue: President Obama's pledge to redesign 15 percent of the economy. Virtually every reporter calls his health care plan "reform." But dictionaries define reform as "improvement." So before they present any evidence, reporters pronounce Obama's plan an improvement. Isn't that bias?
The New York Times took its bias to an absurd length. Its page-one story on the big anti-big-government rally in Washington, D.C., referred to "protests that began with an opposition to health care. ..."
Apparently, in the Times reporter's and editors' view, opponents of the Obama health care plan oppose health care itself. (The online article was later changed.) [...]
I admit that my guiding political and economic philosophy—libertarianism—now shapes my reporting, in this way: It prompts me to ask questions that others don't ask.
I don't claim to be the expert. But some of my colleagues who write about business know nothing about economics. Many are comically hostile to profit—they dismiss it as "greed" (although they bargain for the highest salaries possible). [...]
I'm surprised that the self-described enemies of intolerance can't tolerate even one MSM reporter who doesn't share their statist premises. The interventionist state has been the status quo for generations, so I must be something other than "conservative." "Liberal" is what my philosophy used to be called. It's the statists who are the reactionaries.
By giving dubious mortgage-backed securities top ratings, and by dramatically underestimating the risk of default and foreclosure, the agencies played a key role in inflating the housing bubble. If we’re going to reform the system, fixing them should be high on the list.Yet, the regulatory context that granted their status as nationally recognized is spared from the same harsh criticism he has for the NRSROs:
Rating agencies have been around for a century, and their ratings have been used by regulators since the thirties. But in the seventies the S.E.C. dubbed the three biggest agencies—S. & P., Moody’s, and Fitch—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, effectively making them official arbiters of financial soundness. The decision had a certain logic: it was supposed to make it easier for investors to know that the money in their pension or money-market funds was going into safe and secure investments. But the new regulations also turned the agencies from opinion-givers into indispensable gatekeepers. If you want to sell a corporate bond, or package a bunch of mortgages together into a security, you pretty much need a rating from one of the agencies.True, but Surowiecki doesn't mention that the regulations, by granting the NRSROs oligopoly status, consequently misaligned their incentive structure. Their ratings held so much weight because competitors were barred from entering the market and offering alternative advice. As the current issue of Critical Review shows, "no competitor could take advantage of [the NRSRO's] mistakes."
The net result was that while the three rating “agencies” remained in private hands and could use whatever rating techniques they wished, their financial success did not depend on the ability of these techniques to produce something that somebody would have wanted to buy (in the absence of the earlier S.E.C. regulations)—such as accurate ratings. Instead, their profitability depended on government protection. If the rating agencies used inaccurate rating procedures, they would not suffer for it financially—let alone go out of business.Worse, many investors were ignorant of the fact that the NRSROs held their hallowed position by regulatory fiat, not because of how good they were at what they did:
One can only speculate about what other methods might have been used by competitors to the rating agencies had it not been for the legal barriers to entry. All one can do by way of example is point to the vibrant market in equities-investment ratings, which includes not only firms such as Morningstar and publications such as Investor’s Business Daily and Forbes, which publish competitive ratings of stocks and mutual funds; but which encompasses many different approaches, ranging from “technical” analysis(which is somewhat akin to historical-probability assessment) to “value” investing (which is somewhat akin to fundamental credit analysis).Surowiecki doesn't offer a solution to the problem. He mentions that the idea of "uncoupling the rating agencies from the regulatory system" was a suggested answer, but he fails to mention the reason why: it would have encouraged competition in bond rating. Thus, he throws his hands up and concludes with the obvious:
Of course, competing bond raters need not necessarily have obtained NRSRO status: Like many equities “raters,” they could have offered their ratings to the investing public for a price. But the price was limited by the investing public’s apparent ignorance of the fact that legal protections, not the accuracy of their predictions, were the basis of the Big Three’s continued existence and profitability. Thus, there was no demand for an alternative. The fact that the bond-rating agencies were shielded from competition is, even now, not widely known among scholars, let alone financial reporters—and such obscure matters are unlikely to be well known to bond investors if they are not reported.
Oddly, the ratings system, broken as it is, remains attractive to many investors who have been burned by it. For one thing, it provides an easily comprehensible standard: without it, we’d need to come up with new ways of measuring risk. More insidiously, the ratings system provides a ready-made excuse for failure: as long as you’re buying AAA-rated assets, you can say you’re being responsible. After the housing crash, though, we know how illusory those AAA ratings can be. It’s time for investors to face reality: working with a fake safety net is more dangerous than working without any net at all. [Emphasis mine.]Agreed. But, the best way to find these "new ways of measuring risk" is not from top-down regulation. Instead, we should allow competition to discover the best method. A novel idea.
What Obama may not have recognized before he arrived in the White House is that hating presidents is an irrepressible American tradition. The haters hung George Washington in effigy. They called Abraham Lincoln a dictator. They said Franklin Roosevelt was a Bolshevik.
Dwight Eisenhower's enemies suggested he was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy." Shortly before John Kennedy arrived in Dallas in November 1963, where he was assassinated, an ad ran in the local newspaper with his picture over the legend, "Wanted for Treason."
Looking back, all these claims seem bizarre and unwarranted. But that didn't count for much at the time. The furious denunciations against Obama are simply the latest installment in a custom that seems to have gotten more extreme as methods of instant communication have spread.
Gov. David A. Paterson defiantly vowed to run for election next year despite the White House‘s urging that he withdraw from the New York governor’s race. [...]This guy has been vexing Obama since he took office last year. Though I couldn't care less about NY politics, this bit of Democratic in-fighting is so fun to behold.
President Obama and his political team is worried that Mr. Paterson cannot recover from his dismal political standing, and have signaled to him he should not run, two senior administration officials and a New York Democratic operative with direct knowledge of the situation said Saturday.The move represents an extraordinary intervention into a state political race by the president, and is a delicate one, given that Mr. Paterson is one of only two African-American governors in the nation.
The decision to ask Mr. Paterson to step aside was proposed by political advisers to Mr. Obama, but approved by the president himself, one of the administration officials said.Top Democrats have grown increasingly worried that the governor’s unpopularity could drag down Democratic members of Congress in New York, as well as the Democratic-controlled Legislature, in next fall’s election.
Whatever Ernie Anastos, the longtime New York television news anchor, was trying to say, it did not come out right on Wednesday night. His inadvertent use of what could literally be called a barnyard epithet made him an unintended star on the Internet all day Thursday.All the news that's fit to print, indeed. Hurry, call the FCC!In the course of one of those familiar jocular exchanges, Mr. Anastos, the co-anchor on the 10 p.m. newscast on WNYW (Channel 5), seemed to be referring to the old commercial for Perdue chicken when he suggested to the weatherman, Nick Gregory, that “it takes a tough man to make a tender forecast.”
That was not the objectionable portion of the broadcast, but it may have befuddled some viewers because Perdue has not regularly used that phrase in its advertising since 1993. But then Mr. Anastos added a suggestion for what Mr. Gregory could do with the chickens, using a term that qualifies as the sine qua no-no of live television.
Mr. Anastos’s co-anchor, Dari Alexander, looked stunned, and Mr. Gregory tried to grin through the moment. Mr. Anastos appeared not to have noticed that he had said anything wrong.
The expected impact of an evil genius is often smaller than the expected impact of a wonderful genius. There are lots of would-be mass murderers and the bigger the population, the bigger the absolute number. But their ability to murder lots of people is limited by the fact that most people try to stop them. Yes, in some systems (Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union), a mass murderer is able to enlist lots of people to help him. But that is rare. Most of the time, people try to stop them, and in some systems it is especially difficult to kill lots of people over any long period of time.I think Roberts is correct, though he is downplaying the fundamental impact of ideas in this struggle. The march toward statism in America has been slowed by the (however implicit) American political philosophy originally identified by Jefferson, Madison, and, ultimately, Locke. Conversely, it was the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Marx that allowed Wiemar Germany and Czarist Russia to largely embrace the rise of Nazism and Communism.
Influential indie rock band Pavement will reunite for a world tour in 2010, 11 years after the lo-fi quintet broke up.Hallelujah!
The first confirmed show is a September 21, 2010 benefit concert at New York City's Rumsey Playfield in Central Park. Tickets go on sale on Friday.
If you are going to repeatedly refer to "my plan" or "this plan" or "the plan I'm proposing," then unless you have a plan you are lying. The only question is whether it is a little lie or a big one. Obviously, most people think it is only a small lie, or the President would have been called out on it. However, I think that health care policy is an area where there is too much temptation to promise results that are economically impossible to achieve. In that context, my opinion is that giving a speech in favor of a nonexistent plan is a really big lie.
Scratch one off the bucket list.Three rides will form the center of the new park. Universal still will not talk much about the biggest one, a high-tech experience inside the castle called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey that involves the likenesses of the heroes from the films.
Flight of the Hippogriff is described as a family coaster that simulates a Hippogriff (the half-horse, half-eagle beast from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”) training flight over Hogwarts castle. Dragon Challenge is a twin high-speed coaster that will feature elements from the Triwizard Tournament.
[I]f bankers criticize the Treasury or the Fed, they risk losing their gilded cages and could get a bad deal when the next bailout comes. When major economic sectors can be influenced in this way, are we really very far from the nightmare depicted by Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged”?This reminds me of an off-the-cuff statement Obama made earlier this year while giving a commencement speech at Arizona State University. Commenting on the fact that ASU refused to grant him an honorary degree, Obama quipped:
I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.The president was trying to be cute, by making light of the coercive power of the federal government. But he was also reminding us all of the power he wields. It was plain and simple intimidation: the method of thugs, not presidents.
WSJ on the great Norman Borlaug, who passed on Saturday:On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that "more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world." The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.
Borlaug, who died Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.
Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of "semidwarf" wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug's "Green Revolution" began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.
In later life, Borlaug was criticized by self-described "greens" whose hostility to technology put them athwart the revolution he had set in motion. Borlaug fired back, warning in these pages that fear-mongering by environmental extremists against synthetic pesticides, inorganic fertilizers and genetically modified foods would again put millions at risk of starvation while damaging the very biodiversity those extremists claimed to protect. In saving so many, Borlaug showed that a genuine green movement doesn't pit man against the Earth, but rather applies human intelligence to exploit the Earth's resources to improve life for everyone.
I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960's, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.
Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.
I wouldn't want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and [...] knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers' fears.
I come back to my view that this is white, small-town America making its last stand. However, I think, also, that the progressive elite is making a last stand. My guess is that doubts are mounting among many independent voters about whether they want such a highly-charged politics. I am sticking with my bet that the Democrats will hold onto their House and Senate majorities as well as the Presidency through the elections of 2016, but relative to six months ago I feel that I am depending more on Republican incompetence than overall political trends to win that bet.
One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.
Some people sincerely like monogamy; other people sincerely don't. Under the circumstances, it seems wise for everyone to just reveal their proclivities and pair up with people who share their expectations. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening. There is a fundamental flaw with monogamy, but it's not human nature. It's asymmetric information.I think his last sentence is obviously true, given the anecdotal evidence of divorces and breakups resulting from infidelity. But Caplan's theory doesn't explain the full story, for the following reasons:
My key assumption: Most people - even most commitmentphobes - prefer a person who will be true to them. When you announce your religion, you make yourself less desirable to people who reject your religion, but more desirable to people who share it. When you announce your rejection of monogamy, in contrast, you make yourself less desirable even to people who share your rejection.
In a world of symmetric information, this wouldn't matter. People would know as much about your proclivities as you do, so there'd be no reason to pretend to be something you're not. But in the real world, no one knows your own preferences better than you do. The result: People pretend to be more monogamous than they really are.
1. Increase the social sanction against concealing your type. Most obviously, we should take any outrage we feel toward "promiscuity" and redirect it toward hypocrisy.I think his first point is already the case. The problem with cheating isn't that people don't understand how some would prefer sexual variety, but that they conceal their infidelities. It's the breach of contract that is the issue, which is, in a sense, hypocrisy. What else would you call entering into a contract you know you are going to break?
2. Lower the social status of monogamy. As far as I can tell, this is basically Micha Ghertner's proposal. If people cared less about monogamy, there would be less incentive to pretend to be more monogamous than you really are.
3. Encourage - nay insist upon - disclosure from potential mates. With the advent of Facebook, this is far from utopian. When people announce - and update - their relationship status, for example, it's a strong and informative signal. All their friends know what they're up to - and what they've been up to. Even better, the information is just sitting there in cyberspace, so it's easy to avoid the social awkwardness of point blank questions about people's relationship history. Admittedly, it's logically possible that insisting upon disclosure would lead to a pooling equilibrium of massive deception, but it seems unlikely. Lying about yourself to isolated individuals for short-run gain is a lot less costly than lying about yourself to everyone you know, all the time.
Though it was written for Christopher Guest's comedy A Mighty Wind, "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" is no joke.
Therefore, today I apologize for defending the absurd health care bills that have emerged from your committees—proposals that would add trillions of dollars of additional debt to an already unsustainable system.
Instead, I propose that we raise the Medicare eligibility age. I propose that wealthy seniors receive Medicare only until they recover as much money as they paid in. After that, you rich people should pay for your own damn health care.
These measures will delay but not prevent Medicare's bankruptcy. You Democrats and Republicans both better get your heads out of the sand. There will never be enough tax money to pay for everything that everyone wants. If we expect the state to pay for care, a bureaucracy must tell people, at some age, "No, you can't have that." You might call it a death panel.
There's a better way. I remind you of my speech to business leaders in March. I said, "America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress. ... And I believe that our role as lawmakers is not to disparage wealth, but to expand its reach; not to stifle the market, but to strengthen its ability to unleash the creativity and innovation that still makes this nation the envy of the world."
Only the vitality of the private sector—a truly free one, unencumbered by the crippling stranglehold of burdensome government regulation—can lift America out of the unsustainable mess that we liberals created.
U2's lead guitarist, the Edge, recently admitted, with a bit of embarrassment, that he almost plagiarized the main guitar riff of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army." It's a testament to how a great guitar lick becomes part of the musical language, like a word in the spoken language (for example, "Satisfaction," or "Louie, Louie"). You forget that it had to have an origin. It's an eloquent example of how a mere seven notes can be swallowed by a great canon.
District 9 aims to be IMPORTANT, while wearing the skin of science fiction. Hey, it's about Apartheid...sorta! Look at how it exposes the utter villainy of humanity! Wallow in the victimhood of the film's insectoid aliens! The soundtrack even features dramatic choral music!
I don't know if I count 99 of them, but Jay Z certainly has a cornucopia of gripes: critics, the police, rival rappers, the rap media, a racist district attorney. The number doesn't quite reach the triple digit: he makes it clear that a "bitch ain't one" of those titular problems.Officer: "License and registration and step out of the car. Are you carryin' a weapon on you I know a lot of you are?"While Rick Rubin's album version is great, Danger Mouse's mash-up of the song, with the Beatle's "Helter Skelter," is brilliant. Unfortunately, as Danger Mouse didn't actually secure the rights to the two songs, it's also very illegal.
Jay-Z: "I ain't steppin out of shit all my paper's legit"
Officer: "Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Jay-Z: "Well my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back. And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that."
Officer: "Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something? Or somebody important or somethin'?"
Jay-Z: "Nah, I ain't pass the bar but I know a little bit. Enough that you won't illegally search my shit"
This is the sound of Madonna begging her fans for forgiveness, a 120 BPM act of contrition.
"Cry Me a River" is surprisingly baroque for a pop song, even by modern pop standards. Justin Timberlake's producers, Timbaland and Scott Storch, layer the song with texture upon texture, making it more appropriate for headphones than a car with its windows down.
It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.Ouch.
In a spectacular feat of miscasting, the star plays a California fruitcake named Mary Horowitz who lives with her parents, constructs crossword puzzles for a living, and never stops yammering about the trivia that fizzes around her brain. Mary is supposed to be adorable. She’s not. She’s possibly the most irritating character I’ve ever encountered in a Hollywood movie. Five minutes in her presence produces only a searing pain in one’s frontal lobes and a primal flight response. The other characters understand this. Why don’t the filmmakers?
The WSJ reports on how store receipts are getting preposterously long.Seems excessive, sure. But stores are benefiting from using the extra paper, or else they wouldn't do it.Many shoppers have noticed with chagrin store receipts getting longer and longer as retailers tack coupons, return policies, loyalty points and other bits of information and advertising onto narrow pieces of paper that are supposed to be a record of what you bought and how much you paid.
The purchase of a pack of gum from a Duane Reade Inc. store in New York generated a foot-long receipt. Single-item buys made recently at RadioShack Corp. stores around the country each yielded 19 inches of paper. The purchase of a Hula Hoop at a Chicago Kmart produced a receipt two-and-a-half feet long.
NCR said redemption rates for coupons printed on receipts can run as high as 3%, about triple the rate of coupons mailed to customers or included in advertising circulars. Retailers "find it's one of the most effective places to communicate with their customers," Mr. Bogan said.
It's hard to believe that, earlier this decade, the Strokes were heralded as the saviors of rock music. Of course, rock didn't need saving. Radiohead had already released what was widely seen as their (still overrated) second masterpiece, Kid A. And indie rock was alive and well, as it usually is, creating great music under the radar. But popular rock was dominated by chest-bumping rap rock, pedestrian acts like Matchbox 20, and the last gasps of neo-grunge. The Strokes, with the White Stripes, ushered in a new aesthetic: the return of popular, stripped-down garage rock. (With that they also brought vogue to the definite article, with lesser bands like the Hives, the Vines, the Mooney Suzuki, and so on.)
