Month: May 2012

They put out this piece of propaganda as news this morning:

You know how egregious this is because even Fox has now distanced itself:

"The package that aired on Fox and Friends was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network. This has been addressed with the show's producers."

In some ways, however, I think this piece of open, unvarnished propaganda is one of the more honest things on the network. The rest is the same, but masked by a tiny fig leaf. I prefer my propaganda naked. We sensed they were an outgrowth of the GOP. Now we know for sure.

Alexis Madrigal argues that Zuckerberg's site is valuable if the web is valuable:

It has long been trendy to compare Facebook to MySpace and Friendster, two social networks that were once dominant. But let's get real here. There's dominant and there's DOMINANT. No social network has ever commanded a greater share of Internet users, their time, or their shared media. And it is not even close. MySpace got passed by Facebook when they had something like 120 million worldwide visitors a month. That makes Facebook 7.5 times larger than MySpace ever got. Friendster? They were in the single-digit millions.

The story is the same with engagement. MySpace peaked at something like 240 minutes a month. Facebook's over 400 minutes. Repeat this same analysis for media sharing or any other metric of your choosing. Facebook is not the same kettle of fish.

Michael Wolff, on the other hand, believes that Facebook will crash and "take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it": 

The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding  page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn't Google; it's Yahoo or AOL.

From the tone of his piece, you might imagine someone had really committed a "gaffe". A gaffe is when someone says what they actually believe and it embarrasses them. No, this was quite obviously a speechwriter's fault, or "an ignorant error," as David concedes. And yet when you read his piece, it is brimming with outrage, spluttering, and vituperation, as if some deliberate harm had been wantonly done. No one "slaps" someone "in the face" by accident. Look: I can understand why Poles are deeply upset about this. But it was a mistake, it seems to me, an error of cultural insensitivity – in a bid to honor someone – not a deliberate act of animus, for goodness' sake. Blowing it up into the greatest insult ever committed by an American president is bizarre.

Beto O'Rourke, a marijuana legalization advocate, just beat Rep. Sylvestre Reyes in a Texas Democratic primary. Reyes tried to use O'Rourke's drug sanity against him:

Erik Altieri cheers:

Let’s hope this is just another in an ongoing wave of pro-reform candidates being elected into office, replacing those who employ tired drug war rhetoric to continue the costly failure that is cannabis prohibition. The people want it. If the politicians aren’t willing to take a stand and change the policy, it is time we start changing the politicians.

A more pessimistic take on drug war politics here.

Nate Silver contrasts the 1980 economy with the 2012 one:

[T]here is really no comparison between Mr. Obama and Mr. Carter, who faced an economy that was still bottoming out into a severe and broad-based recession. Mr. Obama, by contrast, faces numbers that are improving but perhaps too slowly. It would probably require an economic shock, instead, to put Mr. Obama in Mr. Carter’s shoes. This could happen, of course – for instance, if there were a meltdown in Europe. 

Epic:

(Hat tip: Devour)

Romney is sinking serious money into the state. Nate Cohn analyzes:

If North Carolina is close enough to merit considerable GOP expenditures, then Obama might have a meaningful advantage in Virginia. Romney’s victory path gets pretty narrow without Virginia, so it might be fair to say that Obama currently has an Electoral College advantage by the margin of Virginia, so long as the two campaigns are locked in hand to hand combat further south.

Why ants may be able to teach us more about modern humans than chimpanzees can:

With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery.

(Photo by Andrey Pavlov via Buzzfeed and LensArt.ru)

Ethan Zuckerman invents a unit of measure, the Kardashian:

Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

It’s possible to receive far less attention than Somali famine receives in this analysis – enter your name into Google Trends alongside Kardashian, and you will likely generate a zero… or, at least, I do. I command microKardashians, perhaps nanoKardashians of attention, as do most of us.

Eric Mack measures tech blogosphere stories in Kardashians:

I wagered that the mythical iPhone 5 is our only hope to compete with the undeniable and incomprehensible star power of the Kardashians. In fact, over the last 12 months, the Kardashians and the iPhone 5 have captivated our days an equal amount. On average, the tantalizing next-generation Apple phone has generated one full Kardashian of attention. Narrow that range to just news stories, and the iPhone 5 actually generated 1.8 Kardashians.

Kevin Vallier wants his fellow bloggers to stop name-calling:

[T]hat’s one problem with being mean: it often indicates that you aren’t a reliable judge of argumentative quality. Bloggers get mad and nasty when they’re emotionally invested in the outcome and emotional investment signals potential bias. After all, being mean isn’t the only way to help people sift through good and bad arguments. You could simply stick to the argument or state a clear, dispassionate judgment about whether a particular argument is legitimate or not … [W]e bloggers mostly encounter one another only in blog form, with all the relevant personality and historical information that leaves out. In the blogosphere, I’m not sure we even have enough evidence to reduce our epistemic credences in cases of epistemic peer disagreement (assuming we can even justify our judgments about who our epistemic peers are!). We just don’t know the ultimate sources of disagreement in specific cases. And in the absence of sufficient evidence of vice, we should be respectful and kind.