Archive for February, 2009

nom nom nom
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I’m providing a little back-end information, for whom it may be helpful. I’m in a ‘what’s your process’ kind of mind lately, so if you’re in it for the straight-up socio-marketartechno-academicology, you can skip right by. I host this blog on my own site, as opposed to my university’s or through wordpress. The upside is...
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My undergraduate class mostly self-hosted a really terrific (in my opinion, I don’t know if they thought so) discussion of Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Karen Hossfeld’s “‘Their Logic Against Them’: Contradictions in sex, race and class on the Silicon Valley shop floor.” (a chapter in Ward’s 1990 Women Workers and Global Restructuring). They...
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Rick Santelli, some white dude on TV, made news today by dissing Obama’s mortgage plan. He stood on the floor of the CME Group and said: Santelli: … And in terms of modification, I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. You know, the new administration’s big on computers and new technology, how about this,...
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I’m working on a piece that tackles more directly the sociological causes of the financial crisis. Here is a marker in the sand, my overall assessment. Short, probably cryptic, but what I believe is going on. Yes, I think every section needs elaboration. It will eventually be about abstract finance: The financial crisis was driven...
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I think this is a way to do it, though I would be annoyed to no end if I didn’t agree with the president’s position. It comes off the White House blog, a photo slideshow of the stimulus bill’s process, told in photos from the presidential perspective: *update* You know, the more I look at...
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So here’s my guess as to endgame for the ‘bad bank’ plan: 1. Banks, backed by the federal reserve, will buy some of the crummier so-called toxic assets – CDO’s backed by (worthless) mortgages, (wildly overinflated) lease agreements, (defaulted) credit card debt, and other juicy bits. 2. They’ll pair these assets with something looking a...
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gak. The Guild, the Name of the Wind, plus this photo of Rothfuss, wearing his Joss Wheedon t-shirt. So, don’t stop, go: read the Name of the Wind, watch the Guild, breathe in the Wheedon-y goodness. And if you know not that of which I speak, I pity thee and thy self-styled academic, status-masturbatory, Frankfurt-school...
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Mike at the Online Photographer, makes an elegant point (with graph!) about the relationship between time and economic value. In looking at photographic archives and collectibles, he notes that there is a transformation from use-value in the short term, to no use-value/no-exchange value in the middle term, to no use-value/high exchange-value in the long...
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I’m not totally sure my question for Mr. Wheedon is going to pass the moderator bar over at the NYT site, so I’ll just share it here:
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This kind of article, a straight-reporting job on how tough it is to live in NYC on half a mill a year, reminds me of why New York sucks. The dirty driving reality of this town is that we are all supposed to be shocked and outraged, but we’re supposed to envy them too....
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heh
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