As the week comes to a close, we begin prepping you for the weekend with our expertly curated morning train reads:
• Zweig: Don’t Overpay for Technology Again (MoneyBeat) see also Turning the Nasdaq crash and recovery into a POV rollercoaster ride (WSJ)
• Michael Lewis: Crash Boys (BV)
• Facebook and the Feed (stratechery) see also Facebook changes its News Feed algorithm, control over publishers (Fortune)
• Economists have discovered how bad the economy really is (WonkBlog) but see also Let The Economists Obsess Over Rising Rates (Irrelevant Investor)
• An Ex-Cop Keeps The Country’s Best Data Set On Police Misconduct (FiveThirtyEight)
Of course there are job openings out there! We’re in a new economic expansion don’t ya know; e.g., major retail chains teach successful sales skills and have exciting opportunities for, um …peristalsis.
The Asshole Factory
My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store. …
What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life. …
Only a monstrous asshole of the highest order could assemble such a demonically vampiric bullshit machine to prey on…everyone. Customers, managers, workers alike. Such a carefully sophisticated engine of human misery; of finessed cruelty; all to rake in a few extra pennies an hour, at the expense of dignity, intelligence, creativity, commitment, fairness, craft, service, sovereignty…sanity.
The store is an Asshole Factory.
America tells Comcast to pound sand.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/24/us-comcast-timewarnercable-idUSKBN0NE2D220150424
Hysterical listening to the right wing lament.
How do these media mergers make the world better? When Rupert Murdoch turned the WSJ into the journalist equivalent of radio’s full-program service (a term only a GOP legislation-namer could love) how did that “improve?”
These clowns need to spend money on my internet. which has been down twice for multiple hours in the last month.
SPEND MONEY FIXING MY INTERNET COMCAST!
10-tonne fatberg removed from west London sewer (the guardian http://bit.ly/1GqJMar) Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet (nytimes http://nyti.ms/1DYqZ2u)
China Says Please Stop Hiring Funeral Strippers (wsj http://on.wsj.com/1aYeZUq) The Name of a Pie Led to the Most Fractious Debate in Google History (wsj http://on.wsj.com/1IQxpSB ) ain’t easy as pie
Fraud City: Teachers go to jail, bankers go to ? (the daily show http://on.cc.com/1OOzQH7 ) the APS scandal, no child left behind were already in The Wire
bankers get bigger bonuses?
An Android is urinating on the Apple logo in Google Maps
http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/24/google-maps-android-apple-piss/
This was done using Google’s Map Maker…
http://www.google.co.uk/mapmaker
…not by a Google employee. But a citizen.
Imagine having a picture of Merkel Peeing on Putin in Russia. That would happen in Russia, or Apple’s walled garden and you get how propagandized the fashion obsessed are who are happy to pay triple for the identical functionality of Apple over Google.
Google took it down immediately. In Russia the doer would be killed by Chechens
A breakdown of the $229 billion gun violence tab that American taxpayers are paying every year
Natasha Bertrand
Apr. 24, 2015
American taxpayers pay roughly $12.8 million every day to cover the costs of gun-related deaths and injuries— and that is a conservative estimate, according to a new report released by Mother Jones on the cost of gun violence in America.
The true cost, however, is not fully known, partly because of the vast sum that’s been spent by the NRA and other gun rights activists to shut down research related to firearms, and partly because of the sheer number of expenses incurred when someone is shot.
What is known is that taxpayers cover roughly 87% of these costs, which include, but are not limited to:
…
http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-violence-costs-america-more-than-229-billion-every-year-2015-4
Opinion
The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much
By PAUL F. CAMPOS
April 4, 2015
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
…
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html
not so sure thats true that state support for higher education is higher than it was before. at least not here in Texas, where education has gotten a short shift. as far as spending goes. seems that also true in LA where LSU is getting ready to for academic bankruptcy http://www.inquisitr.com/2038068/lsu-files-for-bankruptcy/
along with other state schools there.
course when state funding was made up by charging students more, it had the effect of forcing schools, to appeal more to them, which of course costs more to do that before. cause i remember when i was in college (the 70s), college facilities were a lot more institutional than today (the only seeming exception was for sports).]
course there was that Alabama school that dropped football all together.
Regarding college tuition increasing so much:
because it’s other people’s money. Not unlike why medicine costs so much.
Doctors get paid way more than people can afford because patients borrow money from the government (obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid) causing increased national debt.
College professors and administrators want more money than students can pay so students borrow money from the government (student loans) causing increased national debt.
It is not a market-based system. In both cases cited above, there is a loss of future productivity when borrowers are saddled with debt. Oh wait, they are never going to pay it back anyway.
The government may not get it all back, but seniors owing money have already found their tax refunds, paychecks, and SS payments being docked for what they owe. It doesn’t go away.
Hilarious how Obama slams Tom Brady with Deflate Gate joke when he no shows for political reasons.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/patriots–white-house-visit-has-obama-s-deflate-gate-joke–no-tom-brady-203513444.html
Brady boy, when the president calls you come.
I don’t know Tom’s politics and don’t really care. Seems to me he exercised his freedom of choice/will. Good for him.
Overly emotional , eh mate
Free markets. Liberal trade policies. That’s what Barrack Obama stands for.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/24/obama-tears-into-elizabet_n_7137854.html
the down side to the oil and gas boom? less food as that takes over farmland?
http://www.ibtimes.com/oil-gas-drilling-consuming-millions-acres-us-farmland-study-1895698