Jeff Rubin, CIBC:

US auto sales, already at a 34-year low, will likely drop another 30 to 40 percent and may never recover to previous levels.

Roughly half of the 51 light vehicle plants in the US will be permanently closed in the coming years.

There will be 25 million fewer cars on the road in the US in the next five years.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Recently:

A survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

Riding the Blue Highways

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading.

This is handy, although it fails to address the most troubling forms of clutter:

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

New from Gregory Treverton:

This report presents the findings of research into the involvement of organized crime and terrorist groups in counterfeiting products ranging from watches to automobile parts, from pharmaceuticals to computer software. It presents detailed case studies from around the globe in one area of counterfeiting, film piracy, to illustrate the broader problem of criminal — and perhaps terrorist — groups finding a new and not-much-discussed way of funding their activities. Piracy is high in payoff and low in risk, often taking place under the radar of law enforcement.

The case studies provide compelling evidence of a broad, geographically dispersed, and continuing connection between film piracy and organized crime, as well as evidence that terrorist groups have used the proceeds of film piracy to finance their activities.

Counterfeiting is a threat not only to the global information economy, but also to public safety and national security.

Milhouse Van Houten:

We're through the looking glass, here, people ...

Jeff Gettleman, from last year:

Pirates, pirates, pirates. This whole city is pirates.

James Surowiecki:

The pirate system was based on an important insight: leaders who are great in a battle or some other crisis are not necessarily great managers, and concentrating power in one pair of hands often leads to bad decision-making.

Pirate governance, peculiar as it may sound, offers an intriguing example of how limits on executive power can actually make an enterprise more successful and, because workers are convinced they’re being treated fairly, can deepen their commitment.

Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism

Amid the global economic meltdown, companies continue to announce significant job cuts. Below, take a look at some of the largest layoffs in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 in selected industries.

List of Layoffs and Job Cuts by Major Employers

Michael Lewis:

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it.

There are plenty of women, but this is a men’s history.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicon version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned. The striking thing about the future the Icelandic male briefly imported was how much it resembled the past that he celebrates. I’m betting now they’ve seen their false future the Icelandic female will have a great deal more to say about the actual one.

From the archive:

The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments.

From a year ago, Barry Ritholtz:

You're supposed to raise your standard of living by working harder, being clever, earning more income -- not by using your long-term savings. And now this current generation is pretty much fucked.

From last December, Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Wall Street on the Tundra

Martin Feldstein and Simon Johnson.

If economic analyses earned ratings like movies, this two-fer would receive an X for extremely disturbing.

Two of the field’s most prominent voices spare any sugar coating in their unsettling accounts of the world’s unfolding economic crisis.

From the archive:

Cookies have long served as economic icons.

Challenges to the Global Economy | MIT World

Robert Baer:

How long can the NSA sit on a line, figuring out whether it is of real interest, before applying for a warrant? I'll leave that one up to the constitutional lawyers, but I'll be eagerly listening for their answer.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

On Patrick Radden Keefe's book:

Chatter is a journey through a bizarre and shadowy world with vast implications for our security as well as our privacy.

From six years ago:

The found words and sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the display monitors or made to race across the screens in constant streams, like a Times Square zipper, giving the thing a Jenny Holzer-like gnomic and oracular quality.

The Risks of Relying on 'Chatter'

From an interview with John Yoo:

Q. Have you done anything interesting since moving to Southern California?

A. I'm getting in shape, which everyone here seems to be in.

From an NYT story last November:

An extremely fit woman of indeterminate Los Angeles age pulled her Mercedes up to the curb on Adelaide Drive, popped open her trunk, pulled out a five-pound weight and began lifting.

Geoff Parcells, who was running along the street, said that he sympathized with residents but that the area “is a public place” and that he did not quite know how to view the enhanced enforcement.

“If I lived here and there were all really good-looking people working out, I probably wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Parcells, 45. “So I guess it depends on who parks in front of your house.”

From a few years ago:

Sometimes an idea comes along that is so stupid, all you can do is stand back, give it some room, and stare.

Yoo Too

Joseph Epstein on Malcolm Gladwell:

The first step in the bestseller formula is to tell people something that they want to hear.

Bill McKibben on Thomas Friedman:

Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they're in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease.

From the MemeStreams documentation:

The whole point of recommending an article is to tell other people to take a look at it.

Cory Doctorow:

The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned.

Michael Hopkins on Chip and Dan Heath:

The stickiest ideas, regardless of intrinsic merit, have a lot in common. Or, more accurately, the ways they are presented have a lot in common.

Jack-Out-of-the-Box

With his enigmatic masterpieces Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, the director created a dark, disturbing vision of America. Now, he says, he is done with films in favour of making art from paint, cameras and 'toxic materials' – and practising transcendental meditation.

Gaby Wood interviews David Lynch