Author Archive
Web wrap: must-reads from the internets
February 3rd, 2012 by Alex Moore
No, Donald Trump is not being smug—his face is stuck like that.
Sure your average February only has a measly 28 days—but it also has 15 zany holidays you can celebrate if you’re so inclined.
Hm, South Africa sure has some interesting news.
Budweiser totally punked this recreational Canadian hockey team.
Europe got all the cold that the northeastern US didn’t this year. It looks terrible.
The NFL wants players to sign a waiver prohibiting them from suing for any head injuries that come to light after they are retire. Not that that would happen. Why would that happen?
The Koch Brothers will pony up $60 million to defeat Obama in November.
Bon Iver was asked to play at the Grammys this year. He said, “Nah.”
Newt Gingrich had some words for New York’s “elites” who ride the subway.
Today’s great news on jobs is the worst news Republicans have heard all year
February 3rd, 2012 by Alex Moore
Today’s report on the economy is great news—no two ways about. Unless you happen to be a Republican running in an election in November. Then it’s pretty terrible news.
The economy added 243,000 new jobs in January—a full 100,000 more than the consensus of surveyed economists expected. And unemployment dipped down to 8.3% after economists expected it to hold steady at 8.5%. Overall, today’s report painted a picture of an economy that started to pick up steam at the end of 2011 and kept momentum flowing into 2012, despite fears that the mess of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis could spill over onto our shores. More people are working, the markets are up, and as more have more money they could spend more, ensuring bigger corporate profits, which could in turn spur more hiring.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things the economy is still pretty bad. But there’s momentum. You get enough months of this type of momentum and you start to get a virtuous cycle. Or, for Republicans running against Obama this year: a disaster.
Elections are always referendums on the economy. And this election seems to have started shortly after Obama’s inauguration in January, 2009. For years pundits and Democrats have been claiming that Republicans have been negotiating economic policies on bad faith, pleading a kind of Ayn Rand free-market worship while actually trying to keep the economy down and thus making Obama easier to beat in 2012.
Why else resist extending the payroll tax cut for the middle-class? Why play a game of chicken with the US debt limit that created economic shocks this summer against stern warnings from basically every trained economist in the country?
Apparently, despite Republican efforts to position themselves as the only possible saviors of a still-disastrous economy, the economy is beginning to improve.
But they’re not out of options. There are still ways to spin this thing.
From the New York Times this morning:
The Labor Department estimated on Friday that the economy gained 243,000 jobs. The department also estimated that the economy lost 2,689,000 jobs in the month.
The difference in the two numbers is in seasonal adjustment. Employment always falls in January, as temporary Christmas jobs end. So the government applies seasonal adjustment factors in an effort to discern the real trend of the economy apart from seasonal fluctuations. The actual survey showed the big loss in jobs. The seasonal adjustments produced the reported gain of 243,000 jobs.
Sure, the same article proclaimed, “it is beginning to look as if the economy will be better come fall than many expected it to be.” But come on—2,689,000 lost in a month? That’s campaign gold, right there (as long as you ignore all the other pesky details and hang on tight to that number.)
Lana Del Rey braves the airwaves again to hit ‘Letterman’ (video)
February 3rd, 2012 by Alex Moore
You’ve got to hand it to Lana Del Rey: brushing off the kind of thrashing she took after her SNL performance and going back out on TV for a performance on “Letterman” last night took guts. I mean even Brian Williams—America’s news anchor, the media patriarch of the same network that hosted her SNL performance—tore it to shreds in an email to Gawker’s Nick Denton.
And the consensus seems to be that she pulled it off.
Whereas the entirety of the internet seemed to delight in piling on the derision after SNL, BuzzFeed is describing last night’s performance as “pitch-perfect” and Stereogum notes an improvement over the SNL gig.
It’s almost as if Lana Del Rey has crammed the entire narrative of meteoric rise to fame, crash and comeback into the span of a month.
Although the stinging reviews of her once hotly-anticipated debut “Born to Die” are still fresh, even the album’s perception has time to morph in its reception. For our part, we’re sticking with our analogy—Del Rey’s pop is like eating Chipotle: we’re not too good for either of them.
Check out Del Rey’s performance on Letterman last night, and the controversial SNL performance below.
Web wrap: must-reads from the internets
February 2nd, 2012 by Alex Moore
BuzzFeed was able to round up 14 perfectly nice quotes from Lana Del Rey reviews.
Will Egypt’s soccer riot throw a curve ball in its revolution?
5 perfectly logical reasons that mindboggling, irrational teenagers act the way they do.
Donald Glover made a “Save Community” PSA.
President Obama’s approval rating declined in 47 states.
Things Jonathan Franzen hates: almost everything.
Facebook experienced a 15-minute outage—and the internet survived.
Behold: the best rejection letter ever.
Occupy Super Bowl being planned to protest Indiana anti-union law
February 2nd, 2012 by Alex Moore
The last time Occupy got a major injection of support from unions was October 5th. Backed by the AFL-CIO and other major unions, Occupy transformed from a relatively modest encampment in Zuccotti Park to a massive march with tens of thousands of union members and supporters literally occupying the streets of lower Manhattan.
Even though Occupy has now largely fizzled out, it may get one more injection of union support to help revive the meme. And not just any union: the football players’ union.
As Think Progress pointed out yesterday, just four days before Indiana plays host to Sunday’s Super Bowl, governor Mitch Daniels (R) signed anti-union “right-to-work” legislation into effect.
Indiana union branches are none too pleased. Before the law passed yesterday, the unions announced plans for an Occupy Super Bowl initiative were it to pass, taking advantage of the attention being turned toward Indiana this weekend to make their opposition heard. What’s more, they’re backed by the NFL Players Association.
From Think Progress:
According to a UNITE release, DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, will participate in the protest. Smith has issued a statement and written an editorial against the right-to-work law, and several NFL players, including Indiana native and Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, have also spoken out.
“I can promise you that the players of the National Football League and their union will be up front about what we think about this and why,” Smith added in an interview with The Nation in January. Smith is a double threat: he’s also a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive board.
As we saw in October, unions have serious organizing power. If the NFL Players Association can unite with the AFL-CIO in opposition to the anti-union bill, they could potentially draw a lot more attention to the issue. Governor Daniels has warned that any Occupy activities that disrupt the bread-and-circus routine of the Super Bowl would be a “black eye” eye on the state.
I guess the injury in this case, whether the law or the protest, depends on your point of view.
Of course, one thing that could keep Occupy Super Bowl from getting the same kind of attention as the Occupy march of early October is the absence of an actual Occupy faction nearby, although apparently local Occupy branches have vowed to make their way to the Super Bowl, including members of Occupy Purdue. (You know, of Purdue University.)
Hey, it might not be Occupy Wall Street, but at least this still shows the Occupy meme is still alive and well as a touchstone.
Facebook’s first investor invests $1 million in Ron Paul
February 2nd, 2012 by Alex Moore
You know who Peter Thiel is. He’s the guy in “The Social Network” who cuts Facebook their first real, bona fide investor check for $500,000. Thiel became Facebook’s first investor in 2004, famously handing over the check with the admonition, “Just don’t fuck it up.”
Before investing in Facebook Theil had co-founded PayPal, which he took public in 2002 and which Ebay acquired a year later for $1.5 billion. Thiel’s stake in PayPal at the time of the acquisition was apparently worth $55 million.
So he had a few bucks to spare when he decided to place a bet on the fresh-faced, 20-year-old Zuckerberg. And man, did that bet pay off. Though Thiel’s initial investment has been diluted from 10% ownership down to 3%, if Facebook’s upcoming IPO is as big as Wall Street is predicting, the check he cut on that fateful day in 2004 should blossom as a windfall somewhere between $2.5 and $3 billion.
This fall the New Yorker published the kind of epic 10,000-word profile on Thiel that only the New Yorker can. It revealed a deeply complex character of an interesting political persuasion: Thiel is a faithful Christian and a libertarian-leaning gay conservative from California.
Where does such a person go for a political candidate? Ron Paul, naturally.
Politico reports that Endorse Liberty, a Ron Paul Super PAC created on December 20, raised $1 million in December with $900,000 coming from Peter Thiel. “However, in a press release on Tuesday, the [Super PAC] founders disclosed that they have increased their fundraising to date to $3.9 million,” with most of the additional funding coming from other technology entrepreneurs.
Given the fervent youth following that has sprouted up around Ron Paul over the last year, it seems highly appropriate that Facebook’s first investor would choose to invest in Paul. Sure, with nearly a billion users worldwide the idea of a “Facebook generation” is fast becoming watered down. But to the extent Facebook still represents a base of young interconnected people hell-bent on chattering non-stop, a daunting amount of its political chatter tends to be about Ron Paul.
So what does it mean that a serial entrepreneur with a penchant for picking winners is investing on Ron Paul?
After PayPal’s acquisition by Ebay, Thiel founded a hedge fund, Clarium Capital. As anyone who has read the New Yorker profile knows, Thiel has made plenty of losing bets in addition to the winners. Clarium had an incredible run in the bubble years and terrible bust after 2008.
But like most of Ron Paul’s supporters, the likelihood of his actually winning is probably beside the point here. The Ron Paul mania seems to be about pushing a worldview agenda as much as actually electing a candidate. By all counts the real world doesn’t seem posed for a Ron Paul victory. But who knows—Thiel and his Silicon Valley buddies have changed the world before—maybe they can do it again in the political arena.
Web wrap: must-reads from the internets
February 1st, 2012 by Alex Moore
It happened: Facebook’s IPO filing is here.
Rick Santorum gets the Bad Lip Reading treatment.
So there’s a Super Bowl coming up. What happens to the losing team’s championship shirts? They end up in the third world.
Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned with the very poor” line in itself would make him unelectable in an ideal world.
Check out some tricks for getting your very own TV show, from Louis CK and Lorne Michaels.
Goldman Sachs fires its spokesman.
Gay Republican files discrimination charge.
Liquor sales are on the rise.
Bill O’Reilly fails at middle-school math while trying to make Amsterdam look like a haven for heathens.
Occupy Detroit saved someone’s house from getting foreclosed upon.
Instagram founder replaces Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber in Best Buy’s Super Bowl ad
February 1st, 2012 by Alex Moore
The prince of darkness is getting booted from Best Buy’s Super Bowl ad in favor of the new king of digital photos.
Last year Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber starred in Best Buy’s ad for the Super Bowl. This year promised more of the same. Sex sells first, but celebrity sells second. If you’re selling a vast array of electronics from iPads to washing machines, celebrity is probably your best bet.
At least it was until Steve Jobs died.
Amid all the fanfare of Jobs’ death in October, Bloomberg reports that Best Buy marketing head Drew Panayiotou had a revelation: technology inventors are our new rock stars.
John Lennon and Bob Dylan used to be the revolutionaries who changed the world by zigging while everyone else zagged. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are those guys today. Now the most influential rock star in the world is just another musician, or just another celebrity.
The world’s biggest rock stars are currently geeks, which would appear to be an advantage for Best Buy, home of the Geek Squad.
Bloomberg reports that Best Buy cancelled its plans for another typical celebrity-laden Super Bowl commercial shortly after Jobs died, and instead pivoted to a spot featuring a new crop of influential geeks. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom appears in the ad, as does Philippe Kahn, who developed one of the first camera phones.
Before deciding to go with the tech inventors for this year’s ad, it sounds like Best Buy was considering an ambitious celebrity ad: “We looked at everyone from George Clooney to Stephen Colbert,” Panayiotou told Bloomberg.
In the end, they apparently decided that tech upstarts would tell a more exciting story. “Big brands like to hire celebrities. We believe the inventors are more than enough. I give those 125 million viewers a lot of credit. I think they’ll appreciate the story.”
So is it Best Buy that’s trying to ‘think different’ now?
Occupy Wall Street evolves into a think tank being documented by NYU
February 1st, 2012 by Alex Moore
A month after Occupy Wall Street descended on Zuccotti Park to become one of the more potent political and cultural conversations of the year, the worry set in that its whole point was blowing off course. What had been a brilliant approach to dialogue about deep, systemic economic unfairness quickly mutated into a cat and mouse mele with cops, its focus on park occupation rights and free speech.
The problem persisted as the movement spread across the country to encampments in Oakland, DC, Los Angeles and more. The movement had an optics problem. Instead of effectively addressing the economic issues we confront, it ran the risk of appearing as general unrest springing from some vague frustration buried well below the surface of the news coverage.
What to do? As Occupy was cresting nationally, Death and Taxes’ DJ Pangburn got out ahead of the problem by calling for a reinvention of the movement. As occupations at Zuccotti Park and elsewhere were cleared, we saw an attempt at reinvention at Occupy Congress, but it didn’t really stick.
Today, the NY Times reports that a think tank known as The People’s Think Tank which began assembling in the early days at Zuccotti Park, is emerging from Occupy as a still-vital hub of intellectual activity as the physical occupations fizzle out.
“I support Oakland and people taking to the streets, but I’d take an intellectual gathering any day,” said Tim Weldon, a founder of the People’s Think Tank. “I’m not here to shout at police.”
In mid January the New York City General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street announced it would temporarily close its offices, and “decided to freeze its budget in order to regroup and think how best to rebound in the spring.”
The People’s Think Tank is continuing to meet, however, the minutes of its meetings being recorded and archived for posterity by NYU’s Taminent Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. NYU director Michael Nash said, “I think OWS is the most exciting thing that’s happened in radical politics since maybe the 1960s.”
It’s possible that Occupy Wall Street may finally reemerge this spring in a vital new form that’s once again affecting real change in the cultural conversation as we head into the 2012 election. Hopefully this time it’ll be in a form that cops can’t pepper spray.
How much will the Winklevii make in Facebook’s IPO?
January 31st, 2012 by Alex Moore
Facebook’s upcoming IPO is the moment a couple of young, enterprising entrepreneurs have been waiting for. And no, I don’t mean the company’s founders. By the looks of it, Mark Zuckerberg, who has been known to lead a spartan lifestyle, living in a rented house with no TV until about a year ago despite being one of the nation’s richest people, cares less about the personal riches to come out of Facebook’s success than another interested party, the Winklevoss twins.
Zuckerberg’s former Harvard classmates became a famous part of the Facebook narrative by continuously suing the company in one fashion or another since 2004, claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea from their Harvard project Connect U.
Despite relentlessly shaking the money tree for the better part of a decade, a judge ruled in June of last year that the 2008 settlement the Winklevii won would be final. Since 2008, the twins had been back on the litigation path, claiming their settlement should have been higher, and that they were deceived about the value of the company in 2008.
The settlement they received back then was for $20 million in cash, plus $45 million in stock. After they tried to sue their lawyers for not getting them a higher settlement, a judge finally ruled against the twins and ordered them to pay the $13 million in legal fees it owed the firm.
That left the Winklevii with $7 million in cash—$3.5 each. Not a bad payday for most of us, but for a couple of guys who grew up in Greenwich, CT and Southampton, NY, it probably felt like just another drop in the bucket.
The only real hope for the twins was one day being able to cash out that $45 million in stock.
Back in 2008, after the twins learned that the company was worth a whopping $1 billion, they felt they’d been low balled—steamrolled by Zuckerberg once again. Their $45 million in stock was a pittance. But with Facebook’s IPO, expected to hit the market as soon as next week at a mind-bending $100 billion, the Winklevoss twins’ stock should theoretically be worth $450 million.
$225 million a piece? Even for a couple of Greenwich guys, that’s an insane windfall. That’s family dynasty money.
It’s been a long time coming, but the Winklevii’s tenacious application of torture by litigation is finally paying off. Their days of appearing in Pistachios commercials are probably over. Probably.
Web wrap: must-reads from the internets
January 30th, 2012 by Alex Moore
Snoop Dogg endorsed Ron Paul.
Arlington National Cemetery’s most recent tombstones are increasingly featuring Wicca’s five-pointed star.
President Obama is planning an assault on rising the rising costs of college tuition.
How Apple’s famous ’1984′ ad was almost cancelled.
Upon arriving LA, a UK couple was interrogated for hours in separate cells and immediately shipped back to merry ol England. TSA was being very un-Dude, about this, man.
What does a 6-hour Djokovic-Nadal final at the Australian Open say about men’s tennis? It says that these dudes are fucking ripped.
Lana Del Rey’s album released amid a massive backlash.
Holy shit, the Spice Girls are reuniting.
Florida highway pile-up is straight out of an action movie.
Obama to ‘hang out’ on Google+ today
January 30th, 2012 by Alex Moore
Google+ becomes the latest social media outlet to get the presidential seal of approval today as Obama will host a “hang out.” We reported at the time when the White House opened a Google+ page for Obama and noted that, like everyone else, it didn’t seem like the Administration really knew what the hell to do with Google+.
It seems they’ve now started to figure it out. In today’s hang out (a multilateral video chat) users will watch the president answer questions to user-created videos submitted via YouTube. Politico notes the White House expects questions from about 225,000 users.
The Administration has shown a voracious appetite for social media, checking in on Foursquare, uploading pictures on Instagram, and now diving into Google+—a medium the Facebook generation is still tentatively feeling out. Obama has become the social media president almost the same way George W. Bush became the brush-burning president—every week he’s into something new.
While Google+ has nowhere near the number of monthly users as Facebook or Twitter or the kind of 24-hour presence in users’ lives, It was just reported that Google+ has reached 100 million total users 7 months after launching, and the site now gets 20 million monthly uniques, about half Twitter’s monthly traffic.
Part of this growth may have come from Google’s somewhat controversial decision to start factoring personalized items from Google+ into its search results. Just this month the FTC actually opened an investigation as to whether this is an anti-trust violation. Since Google’s search is so dominant, it may constitute a monopoly and therefore an unfair advantage to use it to develop Google+ and compete with Facebook.
Although if the Administration is worried that Google might be in anti-trust violation in developing Google+, they’re not letting it stop them from granting a presidential endorsement with today’s hang out. It always makes news when Obama joins a new social network or uses one to engage with audiences in a first-ever capacity. When Obama hosted the first ever Twitter town hall with the company’s Jack Dorsey co-hosting, it inevitably bestowed a new level of credibility on the company. The same will probably happen with today’s hang out—the president hanging out on social media channels is still enough of a novelty that it’s kind of inevitable.
Assuming Obama wins re-election this November, by this Christmas I fully expect to see the First Family on Pinterest, with their wish lists, vacation ideas and interior decorating plans for the White House posted for everyone to check out. Hell, now that Pinterest is the biggest driver to retail sales on the web, presidential endorsements there may actually help juice the economy.
