Maureen Tkacik:

"In this economy," the network’s promotional spots remind viewers at every commercial break, "the most valuable asset you have is information."

CNBC: Now more than ever.

How valuable is it now to be told America is screwed? (Now more than ever?)

They said they were ensuring the “efficient allocation of capital,” but they were allocating a suspicious amount of capital to themselves. Class warfare has been the subject of several CNBC segments already this year, not that the network seems to have a clearly defined view of what class warfare is, simply that the market doesn’t like it.

These days on CNBC strategists incessantly advise viewers to rotate their holdings from stocks to bonds. But other than through bond funds, that’s easier said than done, and so CNBC doesn’t spend much time detailing the specifics of bonds, except inasmuch as they pertain to the broader market. And why should they? Home viewers can’t trade bonds, and CNBC viewers who can know better than to rely on it for anything other than what the broader “market” is doing.

The notion that what’s good for the Dow is good for America is inextricable from the network’s corporate culture. But with investors suddenly jolted back to the late nineties, CNBC seems, slowly, to be reevaluating what it thinks is good for the Dow ergo America.

From March, in a thread about Cramer-Stewart:

You are more likely to become a better athlete by watching ESPN than you are likely to become a better investor by watching CNBC.

See also, from Nassim Taleb:

Large institutions are disproportionately more fragile to Black Swans.

This paper establishes the case for a fallacy of economies of scale in large aggregate institutions. The problem of rogue trading is taken as a case example of hidden risks where rogue traders and losses are considered independently and dependently of the institution’s size. Both independent and dependent loss and hidden positions are shown to lead to the paper’s conclusion, that size and economies of scale have commensurate risks that mitigate the advantages of size.

A final thought from Paul Krugman:

While bankers may find the results of the stress tests “reassuring,” the rest of us should be very, very afraid.

Waiting for CNBC

Nate Silver:

This is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse: Americans aren't driving as much as they used to. The downward trend last year was stark.

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

The exceptionally sluggish pace of new-vehicle sales in the face of extremely attractive incentives being offered by the automakers might imply that Americans are considering making more-permanent adjustments to their lifestyles.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

The End of Car Culture

Right before Apple finally implemented variable pricing in iTunes it wasn't hard for many to predict that it would backfire badly on the major record labels as they tried to jack up prices. So, it should come as little surprise to find out those predictions appear to be entirely accurate. New reports say that the major record labels are losing revenue from variable pricing. Unit sales are dropping to the point that revenue is less as well. That's just bad business no matter how you look at it -- and totally preventable if they knew their own business. Plenty of people made it clear that sales would drop with higher prices, and it's amazing that the execs were unable to accurately predict how much.

From my comment on NYT's January report on the introduction of variable pricing:

If you think this is great news, you are doing it wrong.

Did you read the part about the 30% price hike on the songs that most people buy the most?

Labels Losing Money With iTunes Variable Pricing

The Onion:

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Two kids on a school bus:

Lisa: Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second.

Saul Hansell, from last year:

How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers

Recently, The Economist:

Darker days lie ahead.

Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian":

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

Barry Eichengreen has some penetrating questions.

We now know that much of what we thought was true was not. As a result we are now in for an economic and financial downturn that will rival the Great Depression before it is over.

The question is how we could have been so misguided. The problem is not so much the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it -- a selective reading shaped by the social milieu.

Where were the intellectual agenda setters when the crisis was building? Why did they fail to see this train wreck coming? More than that, why did they consort actively with the financial sector in setting the stage for the collapse?

From the archive:

Freelance journalist Karen Abbott's vibrant first book probes the titillating milieu of the posh, world-famous Everleigh Club brothel that operated from 1900 to 1911 on Chicago's Near South Side. While lesser whorehouses specialized in deflowering virgins, beatings and bondage, the Everleighs spoiled their whores with couture gowns, gourmet meals and extraordinary salaries.

Recently, Gretchen Morgenson, on Tim Geithner:

The New York Fed is, by custom and design, clubby and opaque.

Geithner ate lunch with senior executives from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley at the Four Seasons restaurant or in their corporate dining rooms. He attended casual dinners at the homes of executives like Jamie Dimon.

Here's another worthwhile Q&A:

Lisa: Uh, are you sure that's safe?

Kearny: Well it ain't gettin' any safer.

And another Q&A, this one from Jane Smiley's review of "Intercourse":

Jack: Is it erotic?

Jane: Not at all, really. In fact, most of the time it's anti-erotic. It's about the things you were thinking about when you should have been paying attention.

A pair of final thoughts:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Remember: There's no medicine for regret.

The Last Temptation of Risk

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Nanochick:

Defending my thesis ... on May day! W00t!

Marge:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Chris Anderson:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. "Foreign everywhere" was the mantra.

Jonah Lehrer:

The baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation -- they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.

Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Anyone can become an expert in anything by practicing for 10,000 hours.

End the University as We Know It

In Computer Science we face a rather special challenge: We Build What We Measure. We don’t really have Nature to test our theories for the structure of systems. This makes it very difficult to know what is principle and what is an artifact of the engineering decisions.

This has lead to a somewhat "anything that works is good" attitude and has contributed to the master craftsman approach that seems to dominate recently. History indicates that artisan approaches come to rely on tradition and ultimately stagnate. We are already seeing this.

This is not science.

For the last decade or more, the research community has been considering the problem of a new theory or architecture for networking. They seem no closer now that they were when they started.

The Pouzin Society, named after Louis Pouzin, the inventor of datagrams and connectionless networking, announces its initial organizing meeting. The society’s purpose is to provide a forum for developing viable solutions to the current Internet architecture crisis.

The Pouzin Society

Preston Gralla does his best to sell Greg Conti's book without mentioning it:

If you care about your privacy, your best bet is to find ways to hide your information from Google.

Decius, on the end of privacy:

In my view the combined effect of the third-party doctrine, which states that what you tell Google you've told the government, and the notion that machines cannot violate your privacy, will enable the rise of a total surveillance society in which everyone is watched by law enforcement all the time.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Cyberwar's first casualty: Your privacy

Aaron Swartz:

I've spent the past year and change working on a site that publishes government information online. In doing that, I've learned a lot. But I've also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general.

The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.

The problem is that reality doesn't live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government.

So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what's really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a "success": an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Recently:

The Sunlight Foundation Labs has announced the winners for their transparency coding contest.

Transparency is Bunk

The Economist:

Welcome to an era of diminished expectations and continuing dangers.

This will be a long slog.

Darker days lie ahead.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Barry Ritholtz:

This current generation is pretty much fucked.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road":

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian":

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

A glimmer of hope?