http://therumpus.net/2010/04/the-founding-fathers-and-corporations/
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html
To me, this decision is one more coffin nail, albeit a particularly significant one. The coffin nails abound. Recovery? There is no recovery; just yesterday, the lead story in the Reno Gazette-Journal was the extraordinarily high level of personal bankruptcies, in Nevada and nationwide -- and this is coming after the bankruptcy laws were tightened. People have no choice. Forty years after the "lessons" of Vietnam, we are embroiled in not one but two unwinnable wars. Between the Supreme Court, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Presidency (under both parties), the Congress (under both parties), state governments, local governments, the corporations, the lobbyists, the mainstream media, the universities -- between them all, there are no promises left for America to break; they have all been broken.
And so my imminent departure from the country for a job overseas is not just a hide-saving maneuver, but also in the nature of a "bug-out." Whether or not Korea proves to be the right long-term location, I have no intention at this point of ever living or working in the United States again. There are plenty of other countries to try if the first one doesn't pan out. It is sad but undeniably true that for an American of my specific qualifications and training -- and probably for Americans of many different specific qualifications and trainings -- the world as a whole presents much more livable and exciting opportunities than staying stateside. Well, they did say it was going to be a global era.
I sold my SUV a couple of weeks ago, because I needed the money to live on pending my move, and I wasn't planning on keeping the vehicle in storage. Fortunately, since I live in a small downtown, I can handle most needed activities on foot, and there is a local bus system and a local taxicab company. Walking the streets of Carson City, I have noticed in a more forceful way than I ever did whizzing by in my car how down on its luck the area seems. The amount of vacant retail and office space is staggering. Local merchants start grousing about the lack of business if you give them the slightest opening. No one seems even mildly surprised that I would be leaving the state or the country; it makes complete sense to them. As a long-time student of history, I can now say that I have a fair inkling of what it felt like to live in 1931. Despair stalks the nation. And I have no desire to stick around and see how bad it can get, either for me personally or for the country as a whole.
OK, enough negativity for today. Now for something completely praiseworthy: Golfer Brian Davis calling a two-stroke penalty on himself for accidentally grazing a reed during a tough play-off shot at the Verizon Heritage -- and losing the tournament in the process -- is one of the classiest actions I've ever seen in sports, and shows why golf is still a great game. Davis should look at it this way: He may have lost a title, but he just increased his fandom by an incalculable amount, and completely deserves to have done done so. Good going! Whenever you see someone take the honorable path, it restores your faith a little.
http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/Davis-calls-penalty-on-himself-gives-up-shot-at?urn=golf,234963
Manisha Verma at 3QuarksDaily confirms what I had long suspected, that many would-be Internet "businesses" are in fact nothing of the kind, and Internet "advertising" (I'm having to use a lot of scare quotes here) is not going to save them:
In this pursuit of "eyeballs", a series of new internet stars emerged: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Each provided a free service in order to attract a large audience that would then—at some unspecified point in the future—supposedly attract large amounts of advertising revenue. It had worked for Google, after all, and ought to work for the others. But the reality, it turns out, is that the number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising is much smaller than many people thought. Not one of them has really become an advertising success in its own right....Ultimately....every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and free services are a fanciful idea.....This is actually nothing new in the world of business. But it is a bit of a shock in the Web world, where "attention" and "reputation" are the currencies most in demand, with the expectation that a sufficient amount of either would turn into money someday, somehow.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/the-future-of-online-ads.html
I am rather glad that what I do here at PMD lacks any chance of ever being "monetized," since I don't even have the eyeballs -- if I have as many as a dozen dedicated readers, I'd be thrilled (but I'm not even sure it's that many). Of course I'm contributing to the "hobbification" I mentioned in an earlier post, but there is no help for it.
A journalist I met who is trying to get a "hyperlocal" website off the ground explained to me that even when there is a possibility of profit in such ventures, it is small change compared to the dollars that newspapers used to rake in. So while some out-of-work journalists will be tempted by these new media opportunities -- because they need to do something, and actually believe in journalism -- most newspaper publishers will turn their noses up at the very minor money, amd move on to fresh fields and pastures new (if they can find any, which I wouldn't bet on). The level of potential "take" really matters in these contexts: You tell a Wall Street guy that he can get in on an exciting concept but that at most it will net him in the high five figures, and the scorn will blow you into the next state. Louis Menand once shrewdly wrote:
The logic that prefers an F to any grade except an A plus is the logic behind an enterprise like Kozmo.com. Its founders will be happy if they become billionaires; they will be happy (less happy, maybe, but still happy) if they are failures. What will not make them happy, it seems, is if they turn out to have created a respectable business that satisfies its customers, pays its bills on time and returns a modest income to its owners, enough for them to meet the mortgage payments and take their spouses out to dinner once in a while. This is America! What kind of success is that?
Everyone is looking for the "big score." So a problem for starry-eyed Internet entrepreneurs is not just whether they can turn a profit, but whether they can turn a humongous enough profit to hold their own interest -- and in 99 cases out of 100, of course, the answer will be "No."
Among notables born on this date are novelist Richard Hughes, playwright Jose Echegaray, composer Germaine Tailleferre, soprano Natalie Dessay, pianist Murray Perahia, pop musician Alan Price, painter Fernando Botero, lawman Eliot Ness, broadcaster Forrest Sawyer, economist David Ricardo, and actors Hayden Christensen, James Franco, Ashley Judd, Barry Brown, Tim Curry, Dudley Moore, and Jayne Mansfield. I am so fond of Eliot Ness, the well-dressed lawman par excellence, that I have actually used him as an avatar in web groups. It is rather ironic that this defender of the Volstead Act later developed a drinking problem!
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