Month: April 2009

Susan Wise Bauer gets a rejection notice – seven years late:

There are two possible morals to this story.

1. Get an agent. Make use of your agent. Ignore all those publishers who say that they read unsolicited MS. They do, probably, eventually.

2. Develop eternal patience (a.k.a. FIND ANOTHER BREAD-AND BUTTER job).

A British take on Keith Olbermann – and the strange comparisons between British and American TV news anchors. Wait till a Brit gets to discussing Fox News:

Dan Conover urges patience:

…the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily….That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

Tom Lee sighs:

It’s been horrifying to watch Twitter evolve into a medium used for important (if not serious) communication. First and foremost, I am appalled by our legislators’ embrace of a time-suck communication medium that is necessarily superficial, and (more perniciously) one that is so convincingly fake-democratic while actually just facilitating communication with rich, Apple-computer-owning white people like myself.

Suderman is also appalled. Drum asks:

…is Twitter a bubble?  For those of you who think bubbles are easy to spot while they're happening, you need to answer Right Now.  And show your work, please.  In a couple of years we'll find out which of you was right.

Henry Blodget is on the record saying that Twitter will be worth more than a billion eventually. My sense is that it jumped the shark the minute John McCain started tweeting about beavers. Or, if not then, whenever it became possible to measure your "Twitter e-penis." I'm generally an early adopter of new technologies. But this one: not so much.

A reader writes:

Here's why YouTube is not doomed:

1. Storage costs are falling exponentially.  So while users keep adding content, the cost of storage is declining at an even faster rate. 
2. Older videos while still costing storage space, do not cost bandwidth because nobody is looking at them. 

If it ever became a problem, google could just start charging users who upload more than a certain amount.  Countless sites have policies like this and it would be pretty reasonable to do that.  So this would provide another way for Google to make money off of YouTube.

Matt Taibbi is amused by the controversy stirred up by Jon Meacham's article.

Dan Riehl responds:

Yes, there are major financial challenges in America's future precisely because of the issues [Medicare, Medicaid, social security, defense] Sullivan cites. Therefore, isn't it logical that driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did is worthy of protest? And all that while mortgaging our children's futures with more and more bail outs and a budget that will break generations of tax payer's backs? And all before we've even begun to think about tackling the big ticket items Sullivan so half-heartedly laments?

But Riehl's notion that Obama is "driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did" doesn't make any sense. Take the biggest tranch of the future debt – $32 trillion of a new Medicare drug entitlement – that Riehl ascribes to Obama. Nuh-huh. Obama inherited that commitment, with no provision for funding it, from the Republicans. To blame Obama for it is like blaming him for the future costs of the Iraq war. Yes, they will be incurred after Obama took office – but they were guaranteed before then, when the GOP legislated the spending explosion, with the avid support of Fox News.

But again, if this is a protest in favor of slashing Medicare, Medicaid and social security, great. Where do I sign up? But those rallies do not exist. Which leads to an inescapable conclusion:

These people are unserious. But we knew that already.

A never-ending war without rules:

There is no such thing as winning in this new kind of war. The war is ongoing, with periods of more violence and periods of less violence, during which the enemy regroups and plans his next attack. When we feel the enemy is getting strong, we must be prepared to make preemptive strikes, hard and fast at key targets, with viciousness, as the enemy would do to us. Only then can we acquire, not peace, but sustained periods of relative calm.

Rod finds examples. One of his commenters interjects:

This concern is not really about gay marriage, as others have noted. It's about whether those who are opposed to homosexuality itself on the basis of their religious beliefs have a right to discriminate against gay people in the public sphere. Even Rod agrees, confirming that this concern is not about whether churches have to marry gay couples or whether priests can get in trouble for anti-gay sermons.

Sorry, folks, but this issue is settled. Romer v. Evans has been the law for 13 years now. This sort of discrimination is not allowed.