Felix

May 30

“If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about your content, then it is not because you lack these magical buttons.” —

I’m going to disagree here. I use these buttons a lot - nearly always when I’m browsing the web on my iPad. Copy-and-pasting a URL into Twitter is still decidedly non-trivial on the iPad, and these buttons make sharing sites on Twitter a lot easier. I like ‘em!

Sweep the Sleaze | Information Architects

May 29

Big, Fat Cognitive Illusion (and all of us are more Greek than we think)

markdow:

Here’s the table that was screaming of self-deception:

Look at the first column. Once the giggles have subsided, and you’ve shown it to your colleagues so that they can share in the derision, don’t you wonder how it is that Greeks—and only the Greeks—believe they, and not the Germans, are the hardest working people in the Eurozone? Okay, you may be tempted to think it’s somehow a mistake. Or you might consider for a sec whether tax evasion and statistical manipulation is somehow considered work by the Greeks surveyed. But, most likely, the answer is Greeks at this stage of the crisis are deep into a siege mentality. They increasingly see themselves as victims, with their suffering exacerbated by the demands of outsiders. They are simultaneously trying to buck themselves up by convincing themselves of their stoicism in the face of this onslaught and lashing out at those who they perceive are doing them harm. Perfectly in tune, the report finds that “Anti-German sentiment is largely contained to Greece, at least for the moment”. We know the Greeks have long been lying to the EU. The table shows that they are now lying to themselves as well.

There’s

But, are they really lying? Check out the OECD’s average annual hours actually worked per worker table. Germany: bottom of the list, at 1,419 hours per year. Greece: top of the list, at 2,109 hours per year. (The US is right in the middle, at 1,778 hours per year, right in line with the OECD average.)

I know a lot of Germans (I’m half-German myself), and they’re always travelling, or taking days off, or visiting family, or somesuch. I was told once that it’s been impossible to take a proper census in Germany for decades, since at any given time 10% of the country is abroad on holiday.

It’s entirely possible — indeed, I’d say it’s certain — that for the 1,419 hours that Germans work each year, they work harder, in total-factor-productivity terms, than their Greek counterparts do. But if a chap works really hard for 4 hours a day, would you say he works harder than another chap who works less hard for 14 hours a day? I have no idea how to make such determinations. And if you’re measuring inputs rather than outputs, I think the Greeks have a decent claim to being right here.

“Why does Peter Wolfgang get to toot his own stupid bugle for two paragraphs? The answer: “Balance.” “Objectivity.” Gayness is a “controversy,” you see, and all controversies have two sides. I know it’s just two throwaway paragraphs in a wire story—it’s a small miracle for the industry that the AP is even willing to send a reporter to Storrs, Conn.—but this kind of craven shit is how the weasels get invited into the national living room. This is how we get a little bit dumber. A reporter or editor somewhere decides that all real knowledge can be found only at a point equidistant between two competing claims, no matter if one of those claims deserves as much attention and respect as the guy with the shopping cart screaming at the contrails in the sky. Crazy gets normalized. Stupid gets a hearing. You know how you can tell we’re in an election year? Even the sportswriters are acting like Politico.” — The AP Is Gay For Stupid

(via Decoded: The Most ‘Breathtaking’ of Apartment Listings - The Brokerbabble Glossary - Curbed NY)

Pirate martini, Garrison, 6/27/2012. The glass on the right contains a little vermouth, a lot of vodka, and a pickled ramp. The pirate ship on the left contains pirates. Duh.

(Art by Jay Batlle, who likes to put things on other things.)

(Source: restaurant-restaurant)

sallykohn:

What we learned this weekend (Taken with instagram)

That you can mix spots and stripes, if you’re young enough?

May 25

“Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.” —

Now that’s what I call fiscal responsibility.

A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama

“

Research is a Wall Street product. Back in the days of the dot-com bust, the charge was that this product was worthless – designed to sell shares, not provide a true picture of the health of companies or the likely prospects of making money by investing. The charge in the Facebook case is that the research is valuable – and therefore should have been made generally available, not only to select clients. The logical end-point of this kind of reasoning is that the Wall Street houses shouldn’t provide research – they should just offer product and let the clients decide what they want to buy, without “selling” it on the merits. Except this is exactly what the major Wall Street houses did with the mortgage-backed CDOs and other structured products that destroyed the world economy. And they have been criticized for that as well.

All of this rumination is not intended to serve as a defense of Wall Street’s practices. It’s intended to argue that trying to insure that information disseminated by Wall Street is both accurate and generally available is a fool’s errand. Accurate information is valuable, and therefore expensive. You can police the margins – and those margins may well have been crossed in this case – but the problem in intrinsic to the fact that information asymmetries arise naturally all the time, and information asymmetries are the main way people make money.

Ultimately, the way to make Wall Street work better for everybody is probably just to tax it more heavily.

(via pegobry)

“One of the big questions from readers, Hardiman said: “What can you do to get me to my favorite content types as quickly and efficiently as possibly?” —

First clue that you’re not dealing with a representative NYT reader: that they use a term like “content types” to refer to journalism.

NY Times updates iPhone/iPad apps for customized reading » Nieman Journalism Lab

May 24

(Source: soupsoup)