September 2011
50 posts
The Sheraton Sofia is definitely the grandest hotel I’ve ever stayed at which has free wifi. Only, it’s not entirely free. You have to log in with a username and password; both of them are your room number. And, once you’ve logged in from one device, you can’t log in from another. You have a phone, a tablet, and a laptop? Only one can be online at any given time. Your...
“The company says that it only shares the mobile identifiers with companies that...”
– Wall Street Journal Revises Its Privacy Policy - Digits - WSJ
Wherein Julia Angwin, crusader against exactly this kind of behavior, attempts to report on her own company, and ends up writing in incomprehensible jargon. Is this meant to be somehow reassuring? Can someone translate it into English...
“Mr. LaChance was union president from 1976 to 1980, when he resigned to go to...”
– Douglas LaChance, Who Led Newspaper Deliverers’ Union, Dies at 69 - NYTimes.com
“In no way were our actions on Southwest Airlines excessive, inappropriate or...”
– UH HUH HER: Camila Grey and Leisha Hailey Respond to Southwest Airlines Incident | Mitch Schneider Organization
Connected Travelling: Did you know that the... →
connectedtravelling:
In 2004, due to typhoons, the Shinkansen total annual delays were 42 seconds. It was a disgrace to Japan. (source)
If a train were to be late for 5 minutes, everyone receives a free journey and an apology from the conductor. If a train is delayed 10 minutes, it would be in the newspaper.
So to say train delays are serious business would be an understatement. And last...
One unanswered question is just who Hailey was being affectionate with as media reports are quite conflicting. About half of them report the woman was musician Camila Grey (e.g. here, here and here), while the other half report it was fashion designer Nina Garduno (e.g. here, here and here)—all of them, interestingly enough, pegging the second woman as Hailey’s girlfriend.
(Via)
“Southwest’s official statement is that the crew had received several...”
– “L-Word” Star Leisha Hailey Booted Off Southwest Flight For Kissing Girlfriend
This statement is damningly self-contradictory. The crew can approach the kissing passengers based on other passengers’ complaints, or they can approach the kissing passengers based solely on behavior....
“People often call out Business Insider for our “linkbait” headlines. The problem...”
– PEG 2.0
This is well-written and coherent. But, BI does have a lot of linkbait. And I think that a good working definition of linkbait is something you realize, after clicking on it, that you really didn’t want to read in the first place. BI headlines turn tiny non-news into earth-shattering...
Michael Kogeler of Microsoft reckons that in five years, there will only be four cloud service providers: Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. And I’m not sure about Microsoft. This is like cellphone networks: you need monster scale and size.
How low-cost airlines revolutionized online...
Martin ten Houten of Visa Europe just made a very interesting point: why is it that the UK leads the world in the percentage of people online who have made online purchases? (It’s 73% in the UK, more like 33% in Spain.)
The answer: low-cost airlines. People want those plane tickets, and if they want those plane tickets, they have no choice but to pay online. And once you’ve done it...
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The Wrong Way to Eat at The Four Seasons
baddeal:
During lunch at The Four Seasons, you sit in the Grille Room. At dinner, you sit in the Pool Room. That’s the rule. So if you aspire to be a person of note among the older class of financiers and the divorcees who court them at The Four Seasons, you’ll follow that rule.
That brings us, as always, to Gilt City, a daily deal site that purports to be in the know. Gilt is offering a...
“As a constitutional matter, Scalia’s assertion is not wrong. The court has...”
– Why It’s Constitutional to Execute an Innocent Man - The Daily Beast
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“Bottles of Madeira wine should be stored in an upright position. A small gas...”
– Vintage Direct - The Madeira Wine Guide
This is just wonderful.
“The music always manages to circle back to feel-good pop ballads. Through them,...”
– It’s rare that a musical’s promotional copy makes you feel sorry for it.
“To be honest, I really didn’t learn too much from his explanation, because...”
– The European debt crisis explained, Lego style | DVICE
You just can’t satisfy some people.
“About three-quarters of the energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions from washing...”
– Cold-Water Detergents Get a Chilly Reception - NYTimes.com
“one way or another, the current paradigm, where it’s cheaper and easier than...”
– Yglesias (via pegobry)
“An invaluable resource to help companies pivot forward by embracing sustainable...”
– This is a real blurb, from a real person (a CEO, no less), on the back of a real hardback book that just landed on my desk. Fortunately, the desk comes with a wastebin underneath.
“Mr Adoboli’s last update to his Facebook page, dated September 6, simply reads...”
– UBS trader Adoboli held over $2bn loss - FT.com
“I am very excited about the opportunity to join Elizabeth Spiers, Jared Kushner,...”
– Megan McCarthy Named Observer News Editor | The New York Observer
in which @Megan moves from Techmeme to the Observer, and is immediately revealed to be a robot
Another thing for Christopher Hitchens to be... →
pegobry:
The extremely talented writer Christopher Hitchens wrote an astonishing column at Slate explaining that it’s rude for waiters in restaurants to fill diners’ wine glasses because it interrupts the flow of the conversation.
Of course, it is the exact opposite that is true: the reason why waiters fill guests’ glasses with wine—indeed, the reason why we have waiters at all—is precisely so...
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“Readers who type “Central Basin Municipal Water District” into Google News get a...”
– LA Times, Water district taps Google for good coverage (via markcoatney)
“A run on the Greek banking sector would result bringing economic activity in the...”
– What happens after a Greek default - The Term Sheet: Fortune’s deals blog Term Sheet
And that’s just Greece…
“advertisers are increasingly less interested in buying eyeballs by the ton than...”
– News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites - NYTimes.com
I’d love to see some actual evidence for this assertion. Especially the “increasingly” bit.
“Mr. Arrington received permission to personally invest in technology companies...”
– AOL’s Management Clash Runs Deep - WSJ.com
Is this true? I always thought that Arrington just did whatever he wanted, and never asked permission from anybody to do anything. When AOL said that “Arrington operates from a unique position”, I thought that was a simple descriptive...
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“Southwestern Pennsylvania is whiter even than the Amish country around...”
– Pittsburgh metro area named one of nation’s least diverse
File under “unexpected but unsurprising”: the NYT’s special 9/11 section, called “The Reckoning”, is chock-full of corporate ads. CBRE, Boeing, Himmel & Meringhoff, Aon, Nucor, Lockheed Martin, NYSE Euronext, Northrop Grumman, Fiduciary Trust International, Marsh & McLennan, Sandler O’Neil, PANYNJ, Newmark Knight Frank, The American Hellenic Educational...
“Dirty coal plants also emit aerosol pollution — sulfates and other particles...”
– Study: Replacing coal with natural gas would do little for climate change - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post
It’s never easy, is it.
“Nor did anyone explain what this new commenter system is like. It runs...”
– Inside Gawker Media’s First Company-Wide Meeting | The Awl
Obama's speech
Remarks of President Barack Obama in an Address to a Joint Session of Congress Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, and fellow Americans: Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that has made things worse. This past week, reporters have been asking...
In which Jay Parkinson refinances a $5,000 loan...
jayparkinsonmd:
It’s a damn fine day. After four years of trying to consolidate my medical school loans, I just received in the mail my approval. I graduated from medical school in 2002 with over $270,000 worth of educational loans just from medical school. As of today, I currently owe $204,823.12.
I’ve been stuck in a ten year repayment plan and my monthly bill was over $5,000. Obviously,...
““One of the things I feel a little bit ambivalent about is that I think the site...”
– Felix Salmon’s brain, Drudged: Meet Counterparties, a personal linkblog with Reuters branding » Nieman Journalism Lab
“As for Levine, the future is unknown. The opening night of “Die Walküre” last...”
– News Desk: The James Levine Era : The New Yorker
He’s been very frail for a while now. Realistically, he won’t be conducting much if at all for the foreseeable future. The Levine era looks, for most intents and purposes, as if it’s over.
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It's Not A Mirror, It's A Crystal Ball
soupsoup:
The New York Times has the same disclosure issues TechCrunch has, NYT invests in startups, Daylife being one of them. How much has ever been made of that conflict in their tech reporting?
No, this is a false equivalence. Big companies invest in small companies. Reuters, as Soup well knows, invests in lots of startups: that’s the reason he’s working here. (We bought the...
“Emirates is one of a half dozen airlines, including Virgin Atlantic and...”
– Emirates Airline Bets on Glamour - NYTimes.com
This is one of the weirdest sentences I’ve read in the NYT in a while. Are they really trying to say that there are exactly six airlines — Emirates, Virgin, Singapore, and three others — which aspire to having an elegant cabin crew?...
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WD-50'S $308 Menu, Seven-Day Dinner Service
baddeal:
WD-50, Wylie Dufresne’s avant-garde eatery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hasn’t raised the price of its tasting menu since the fall of 2008. The 11-course meal, which now includes tongue-in-cheek creations like “foie-lafel,” has remained at $140 for nearly 36 months. So that’s why we at The Price Hike and The Bad Deal are honoring WD-50 in our EVEN STEVEN series, which highlights...
brianvan:
So, really, Sony and Disney are going to totally play along with this Starz plan to withhold access to content digitally to the public unless they pay for one of the least-watched premium cable TV channels ($10 a month for the bundle in which your cable company provides it)… and they think this is better for their business than offering content on the larger digital content providers...
