Barry Ritholtz:

Years ago, the expression was “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel” (meaning newspapers).  The modern, updated version is “Never pick a fight with people who have acerbic, award winning comedy writers, a broad TV reach, and a strong internet presence ...”

From last year's best-of:

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

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

CNBC is about helping companies to present and manage their public image. CNBC endeavors to instill in viewers the sense that they are well-informed, but this is mostly just a tactic designed to keep them tuned in. The 'viewers' are really just eyeballs for advertising -- the paid placements, of course, but also the 'coverage', which is only another form of advertising.

Television programming that actually made you a more effective investor would probably look a lot like graduate school. If that's what you want, there are places to get it, and you don't even have to sit through the ads.

From the archive, P.J. O'Rourke:

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Nouriel Roubini, in a recent interview with Maria Bartiromo:

When the best minds of the country are all going to Wall Street, there is a distortion in the allocation of human capital to some activities that become excessive and eventually inefficient.

Daily Show vs CNBC | The Big Picture

Professional 3D animation, accurately reconstructed to match the event.

Hudson River Plane Landing (US Airways 1549) Animation with Audio

Jeffrey Gettleman:

"Pirates? Pirates?" he exclaimed, staring at me like I was an idiot. "This jail is full of pirates! This whole city is pirates!"

I quickly learned the pirates had special status here. One after the other told me about how rich he was, how rich they all were, how they had so much money they could have whatever they wanted.

One of them, Jama Abdullahi, was a tall, lean pirate with a checkered, Arab-style scarf and a serious case of ADD. "We got more than 500 people working for us," he said. "We make millions."

Who knows, maybe this was true. Maybe for a bunch of them it was true. Maybe they had million-dollar homes in New Boosaaso with Land Rovers parked in front of them. Maybe when they went into town, the women swooned around them and gave them whatever they desired. Certainly this was the case for some of Somalia's pirates, but the more I talked to these guys, the more their bravado struck me as an act and the sadder it began to seem.

The real pirate money was going elsewhere, to men who wore suits and had secretaries and went to offices in towering buildings, men who would never see this jail and likely never even see the shitty, lawless city of Boosaaso. The notion that the Somali pirates were Robin Hoods fighting back by going after the boats that have raped their seas--that notion is nothing but a sentimental fantasy to lay over the much uglier reality of Somalia. At best, the richest men in Boosaaso are just the current iteration of the country's infamous warlords, making millions off the chaos around them and spreading some of that wealth to the grunts beneath them. That wasn't these guys. These guys were fighting just to survive. They picked up a Kalashnikov and got on a boat because it was their way to eat.

More Jeffrey Gettleman:

Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy failures, it has known just six months of peace in the past two decades. Now, as the country’s endless chaos threatens to engulf an entire region, the world again simply watches it burn.

"The Pirates Have Siezed The Ship"

Eric Holder:

As a lifelong advocate for the protection of privacy rights, I agree that government should not have the ability to intrude unreasonably on an individual's privacy. But I also understand that law enforcement must have the technical tools to keep pace with the more sophisticated criminals we now must confront. The recent wiretap change is a relatively minor adjustment to an existing statute that serves to protect privacy rather than intrude upon it.

Noam Cohen's friend:

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

Bush:

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

Josh Dugan:

Despite what many are content to believe, the American experience with quartering may not be over. It might have just begun.

Clear and Roving Danger of Wiretaps

Maggie Jackson:

When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.

These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we've created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.

In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

Neal Stephenson:

There's a gap emerging between the kind of thinking that requires long, uninterrupted, serious concentration on something and superficial surfing behaviour.

Mark Bittman:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life.

William Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains

William Deresiewicz:

The most striking thing about the way we talk about science these days is just how little we talk about it at all. And if we talk about science very little, we talk about the scientist even less. No Einstein or Pasteur anymore, no Frankenstein or Strangelove. Science has become so pervasive a part of the way things run that, like the servants in a Victorian household, the people who actually make it happen have disappeared into the wallpaper.

Does the injection of the profit motive into scientific research distort the kinds of questions that get investigated and degrade the quality of the results that get produced? There are strong reasons to believe that it does.

The system works well for everyone except patients. This is what comes of thinking that scientific integrity can survive the assault of the profit motive.

We do not have to acquiesce in the notion that scientists and the institutions that employ them are necessarily the wisest custodians of our technological future. The choice is not between the disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake of the common good and the meddling of ignorant laypeople. The choice, as it always is, is whether corporations will control our collective fate, or we will.

Marcia Angell:

There seems to be a desire to eliminate the smell of corruption, while keeping the money.

Steve Shapin on Craig Venter:

When academic bureaucracies are said to protect intellectual orthodoxies, when cumbersome and politicised government bureaucracies harbour cults of personality, and when corporate bureaucracies build on business models that stultify both science and commercial growth, the only person you can trust is an edgy hybrid of self-confessed ‘bad boy’ and self-advertised humanitarian who thinks he has a spoon long enough to sup with all the institutional devils and sacrifice his integrity to none.

Who Profits From Scientific Research?

How much uglier can it get?

Many market participants think capitulation -- when investors take their losses and get out of the market altogether -- must precede a major market recovery.

Why not Teach for America?

One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it.

To quote Rory Stewart out of context:

They will soon be tempted to give up.

Peter Schiff:

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things.

I think things are going to get very bad.

Nouriel Roubini:

Let's pull out the bazooka and be done with it.

Bear Market's Bite Could Go Deeper

Steven Johnson:

The software also acts as a kind of connection machine, helping to supplement your own memory. The results have a certain chaotic brilliance.

I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste.

Before Devonthink, I used to lose weeks, stalling before each new chapter because it was an empty sea of nothingness. Now, each starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

Jonathan Lethem (but not really):

The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

Cut-and-paste writing

Christian Marc Schmidt:

The city is a composite of impressions. Beyond the built environment, it is a constantly changing pastiche of associations and experiences—not just of the people who inhabit it, but of the larger community. New York City, in particular, has two realities: the reality of the physical environment, and the reality of the idea—of what the city and its diverse neighborhoods signify. Inseparably intertwined, these two realities constantly continue to inform each other. Pastiche is a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. Keywords are assigned based on relevance and recency, surrounding their corresponding neighborhoods. The result is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives.

From the archive:

Stefanie Posavec's maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space.

Also:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map.

Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth.

Pastiche: A Collective Composition of New York City

Aaron Swartz:

Everyone wants to be effective; a manager’s job is to do everything they can to make that happen. The ideal manager is someone everyone would want to have. So herewith, a guide to effective non-hierarchical management.

Peter Drucker:

The critical question is not, "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

Warren Buffett:

Do what you love, or your boss will decide for you.

Paul Graham:

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

Pointy-Haired Boss:

"I need to be managing a sexier project to boost my career."

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

A final thought:

Deflation is only a problem if you're the one trying to sell the cheap thing, or if the incredibly cheap thing is your salary, and your boss can't decide between paying you peanuts and finding someone else who will do your job for even less.

Non-Hierarchical Management