littlelazer's tumblog

littleknownblackhistoryfacts: BARLOW HOPKINS: First person to...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:01:50 -0600

BARLOW HOPKINS: First person to be down with O.P.P.

Mitt Romney and the car industry: A Detroiter in his own mind | The Economist

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:53:05 -0600

Mitt Romney and the car industry: A Detroiter in his own mind | The Economist:

What’s amazing to me is that Mitt Romney seems like a combination of the worst aspects of Al Gore and John Kerry. Stretching the truth & exaggerating, seeming to change his position daily, being wooden/mechanical and unlikable, and being filthy rich, out of touch, & part of a political dynasty. He can’t even be the moderate that he really is in that party.

So Mr Romney must find a way to re-write history, lest he fall further behind Rick Santorum in his state of birth. Mr Santorum didn’t support the auto bail-out either, but he evinces a genuine compassion for blue-collar workers. And he didn’t pen an op-ed predicting, ”If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” That’s a difficult statement to walk back.

Some Generalizing about Specializing

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:25:05 -0600

Some Generalizing about Specializing:

Even though Khoi Vinh is specifically talking about designers and IAs here, this is exactly the same reason that I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a front-end developer, rather than just a developer.

Now, things have swung around the other way. The technology remains complex, of course, but it’s been successfully abstracted enough that it’s once again possible for a single person to create a very robust product, and for just a small handful of people to create a very robust company. And accordingly this has also become what the market expects; big company budgets are shrinking, and startup investors are expecting more out of smaller teams. That makes specialists look more expensive than they have in the past.

The Panama City skyline (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:29:26 -0600

The Panama City skyline (Taken with instagram)

What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « naked capitalism

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:29:05 -0600

What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « naked capitalism:

Maybe we should listen to the anthropologist here:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

Gordon "Gopher" Davies

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:47:56 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

First person to break out into a sprint simply because everyone else was running.

littleknownblackhistoryfacts: WALKER BROWN: First person to...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:47:24 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

WALKER BROWN: First person to bust somebody’s head to the white meat.

Janet Miles-Quarry

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:23:06 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

First person to tell someone they play too much.

Gotta love small towns in the tropics (Taken with Instagram at...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:57:07 -0600

Gotta love small towns in the tropics (Taken with Instagram at Palma Royale)

Fortune Finance: Hedge Funds, Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity, Venture Capital, Wall Street, Washington

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:18:06 -0600

Fortune Finance: Hedge Funds, Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity, Venture Capital, Wall Street, Washington:

So difficult to know who to listen to with investing for the future. You hear something different every time,

Investing is often described as the process of laying out money now in the expectation of receiving more money in the future. At Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) we take a more demanding approach, defining investing as the transfer to others of purchasing power now with the reasoned expectation of receiving more purchasing power — after taxes have been paid on nominal gains — in the future. More succinctly, investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date.

You’d better believe these three bottles of pepper sauce...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:50:37 -0600

You’d better believe these three bottles of pepper sauce (and possibly more) are coming with us back to Chicago. (Taken with instagram)

Herschel "Junior" Jansen, Jr.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:31:39 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

First person to inquire as to what’s crackalackin’.

venusmeetsearth: I’m going to frame it

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:30:57 -0600

venusmeetsearth:

I’m going to frame it

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-wall-street-should-stop-whining-20120208

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:29:05 -0600

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-wall-street-should-stop-whining-20120208:

It’s funny how much your perspective informs things. When I read the New York Mag article that Taibibi is referring to, it didn’t even cross my mind that he was trying to be sympathetic to the bankers, because the whole time I was thinking “Good, I’m glad things are getting back to some semblance of normalcy. I guess Obama’s financial regulations worked more than I gave them credit for.”

Listening to Wall Street whine about how it is misunderstood is nothing new. It’s been going on for years. But if Sherman’s piece heralds a new era of Wall Street complaining about how it is not only misunderstood but undercompensated, you’ll have to excuse me while I spend the next month or so vomiting into my shoes.

My mother’s house (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:18:42 -0600

My mother’s house (Taken with instagram)

Munson Archie

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:33:14 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

First person to yell “awww sookie sookie nah!”

littleknownblackhistoryfacts: HERALD “BOONIE” BROWN: First to...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:14:39 -0600

littleknownblackhistoryfacts:

HERALD “BOONIE” BROWN: First to invite someone who is feeling froggy to jump.

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:13:05 -0600

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It:

I was somewhat down on the president because it seemed like the financial rules didn’t have any real effect. Guess I may be wrong.

But for now, the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties. And those laws kept banking reliably risk-free and dull until the deregulation mania of the eighties and nineties unleashed finance. The system is being designed so that Wall Street grows only as fast as Main Street. “The bubble can’t happen again,” Jack Bogle told me. “The underlying reason is, corporations make money. We do things that make society better. But they grow, and this won’t surprise anyone, at rate of GDP.” On Wall Street, recent history was the exception. “Reversion to the mean is the rule of the financial market.”

Slate - Dismal Scientist - March 20, 1997

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:29:06 -0600

Slate - Dismal Scientist - March 20, 1997:

Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land—or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap? The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit—and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions. This sounds only fair—but is it? Let’s think through the consequences.

It’s usually hard to argue with Krugman, and he’s about as liberal as they come. So this is somewhat surprising, but I guess it shouldn’t be.

Photo

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:28:21 -0600