blog.pmarca.com

The New York Times covers blogging

Actual New York Times headline for Sunday, April 6, 2008:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Reworded for brevity:

Blogging Causes Death

Future New York Times headline submissions from yours truly:

Blogging Causes Herpes

Bloggers Shorter than Normal People

Want To Contract Malaria? Try Blogging

Bloggers Have Bad Breath

Leprosy and Blogging May Be Connected

Hitler Probably Blogged

Now Bloggers Aren't Even Wearing Pajamas

Blogging Fad Almost Over

And of course, the inevitable, perennial favorite:

Child Abuser/Serial Killer/Campus Shooter Had a Blog

p.s. The Judy Miller memorial New York Times blogging story headline:

The Bloggers Have WMD

Cramer: an apology

I need to apologize -- not to Jim Cramer, but to my readers, for not being sufficiently hard on Cramer the other day.

I had missed this essential and hilarious fact:

[Three days before Bear Stearns went kablooey, and the same day he hollered about how "fine" Bear Stearns was on his quasi-TV show], on TheStreet.com, Jim Cramer listed Bear Stearns common stock as a "buy" at $62...

[After Bear blew up] TheStreet.com quickly removed Cramer's March 11 "buy" recommendation from its page devoted to Bear Stearns.

Jim Cramer: no matter how bad you think he is, he's worse than you think.

[Source: Bloomberg.]

Department of Remarkably Good Ideas, nuclear weapons edition

This just in:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has formally ordered the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to conduct an inventory of all U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon-related materials to make sure all items are accounted for...

The order comes in the wake of the discovery last week that four nuclear warhead fuses were accidentally shipped to Taiwan in 2006...

The inventory review, which will involve thousands of items, is due to Gates in 60 days. Pentagon officials said the request was ordered, in part, because this latest incident comes after the August 2007 accidental flight of six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 bomber across the country.

The CNN headline is to the point and priceless:

Pentagon Ordered To Locate All U.S. Nukes

I've been trying to think of an idea that would be even better than this one.

And I have failed.

This is, officially, the best good idea of all time.

Sleep well!

[Link: CNN.]
[Hat tip: Rick Segal.]

Jim Cramer is still putting random words in random order

Last week I showed you a widely-distributed video of CNBC stunt-host Jim Cramer loudly gesticulating to his Mad Money fan base that Bear Stearns was "fine" and that "Bear Stearns is not in trouble".

The day was March 11, Bear stock was trading at $62, and Bear immediately blew up.

Several members of the Cramer fan base promptly emailed me and said, no no no, Cramer explained that he was just saying that you shouldn't move your money out of your Bear Stearns brokerage account. Which is a little odd, given that Bear was primarily a hedge fund prime broker and not a consumer broker, and Cramer's show is aimed at regular folks, a.k.a. consumers. However, it is possible that his defenders could have a point.

Except they don't.

On the very same day, March 11, Cramer also recorded a different video (not embeddable, so just follow that link) on TheStreet.com in which he explains in detail how Bear the company is "totally solvent; there's not an issue; Bear is not in trouble, I want to make that point vociferously".

Oh well.

I will give Cramer's fans credit for one thing -- he is highly entertaining. Although frankly I'm still not sure how he's ever going to top confessing publicly to securities violations last year. One can but hope.

Why am I being mean to Cramer? Two reasons.

First, his whole approach is fundamentally fraudulent. You can't sit at home, watch a TV show, actively trade stocks like Cramer says, and make money. At best you're going to badly lag the indices, and in the process unduly enrich your brokerage firm, the tax collectors, and -- yes -- CNBC and Jim Cramer. Cramer's show is just another stupid tax, like a state lottery, or cigarettes.

Second, he says he likes it (fast-forward to about 3:15 and watch to the end).

As a side note, I may not be able to embed TheStreet.com videos, but I sure can embed Jon Stewart's take on Cramer's Bear Stearns call -- just fast-forward to 4:40 or so:

[Link: Jon Stewart on Cramer.]

Paging George Orwell, Joppatowne Maryland edition

Bear in mind that this is a public American high school...

In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.

The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the "new reality," though they hasten to add that the school isn't focused just on terrorism. [Of course not -- they also cover surveillance.]

School administrators... refused to be interviewed for this story. But it's no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.

Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language." [Perhaps Busuu, or Njerep, or Zaparo? Nah, I'm guessing mostly Arabic.]

...[I]t's not clear how many Joppatowne grads will be on track to join the upper echelons of the intelligence community and how many will wind up as airport screeners. "We do want to encourage higher education," Volrath says. "We also want to be realistic. Some of these defense contractors will have huge security needs, and the jobs won't require four years of college."

From Mother Jones, courtesy of Marginal Revolution.

Department of astonishing chutzpah, Richard Brodhead edition

In the wake of the now-debunked rape case against three lacrosse players, Duke University will establish a center devoted to justice and training lawyers to fight wrongful convictions, president Richard Brodhead said Wednesday.

Duke will invest $1.25 million over the next five years for the project at the law school, which will also expand its Wrongful Convictions Clinic and Innocence Project. The clinic and the Innocence Project investigate claims of innocence by the state's convicted felons and raise awareness of problems in the criminal justice system.

Via the Associated Press.

Despite the case being such a travesty from the start -- the prosecutor, Michael Nifong, was ultimately disbarred and ejected from office -- Brodhead has become famous for stating the need for the accused students to be, quote, "proved innocent" by the criminal justice system, turning the whole American concept of "innocent until proven guilty" on its head.

Presents! Presents, falling from the sky!

The class-action legal juggernaut that was the law firm [and organized criminal conspiracy] now known as Milberg Weiss suffered more body blows yesterday as its co-founder, Melvyn I. Weiss, was indicted...

[P]rosecutors in Los Angeles charged Mr. Weiss, one of the architects of class-action securities lawsuits, with conspiracy, racketeering, obstruction of justice and making false statements to a grand jury... could face a sentence of as much as 40 years...

The indictment also broadened existing charges against Milberg Weiss, the firm Mr. Weiss co-founded in 1972, contending that the firm received some $250 million in legal fees over the last 25 years from class-action cases in which it paid kickbacks [bribes] to individuals who had served as named, or lead, plaintiffs...

“The indictment outlines a decades-long kickback scheme that was deliberately concealed from courts that were overseeing significant class-action cases,” said George S. Cardona, the United States attorney in Los Angeles, in announcing the charges against Mr. Weiss...

The charges against Mr. Weiss contend that he knew about and participated in the plaintiff kickback scheme since its inception in the late 1970s, and that he continued to participate in it in even after federal prosecutors began their investigation.

But there's more!

In a related development, Steven Schulman, a former named partner at Milberg Weiss, agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge in connection with the plaintiff kickback scheme.

Mr. Schulman, who will cooperate with prosecutors, also agreed to disgorge $1.85 million in profits, pay a $250,000 fine and accept a prison sentence that is likely to be 27 to 33 months, according to court papers.

All the gory details about this organized criminal conspiracy were outlined in detail in a sworn statement from their partner and now convicted felon David Bershad from earlier this year. Fun reading!

News clippings from the New York Times.

Go boomers!

For Americans ages 35 to 54:

• 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975...
• 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today’s middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19...
• More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses... [representing] a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975... [and this doesn't even include OJ!]
• 630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977...
• 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined...
• 370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers...
• More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago...

What experts label "adolescent risk taking" is really baby boomer risk taking. It's true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

From Mike Males writing in the New York Times.

p.s. Think anyone's ever going to notice that these people are the children of the quote-unquote Greatest Generation? Paging Tom Brokaw...

Look up "hugely satisfying" in the dictionary...

...and you'll find this:

Bill Lerach, the renowned [well, that's one word for it] class-action attorney who won billions of dollars in securities fraud settlements, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal conspiracy. He will pay $8 million and spend one or two years in prison for scheming to pay illegal kickbacks to the lead plaintiffs in some of his lawsuits.

From the Financial Times.

Lerach and his equally appalling -- and increasingly equally indicted -- colleagues at a quote-unquote law firm called Milberg Weiss terrorized the high-tech industry for over a decade, filing baseless lawsuit after baseless lawsuit against many public company executives for theoretical crimes for which the only evidence was a falling stock price, putatively on behalf of individual shareholders -- who, it turns out, were frequently being illegally bribed by, you guessed it, Lerach and Milberg Weiss.

Lerach's malfeasance helped create the current climate of fear and paranoia in the public equity markets that have made it so dauting for new companies to become public, which in turn raises the cost of capital for growth companies, and in turn drags on the growth of the American economy and therefore on your pocketbook.

However, I must confess that my true satisfaction about this miscreant going to meet his new friends in the federal pokey is caused by Milberg Weiss's 2001 lawsuit against me and my former company, Loudcloud, in which Lerach alleged -- I am not making this up -- that we defrauded investors because the founders and board members of the company bought shares in the IPO. Yes, that's right -- since they couldn't sue us for insider selling, their normal MO, they sued us for insider buying.

Bye, Bill!

Great moments in jurisprudence, Clark County edition

Today, via the New York Times:

O.J. Simpson Released on Bail

A judge set O.J. Simpson’s bail at $125,000 today after he was charged with armed robbery... and kidnapping. The former football star... posted less than $19,000...

1994:

Funny, this is the same way the media companies reacted to Tivo...

As a successful venture capitalist, Howard Hartenbaum had grown accustomed to some measure of deference from the entrepreneurs who pitched him. So when one particularly brash CEO called him a "nut case" and then said that a meeting with him "made me want to vomit," Hartenbaum was livid.

Hartenbaum, a partner at Draper Richards in San Francisco... stumbled upon those comments, posted by an anonymous entrepreneur, on a website called TheFunded.com. Incensed, Hartenbaum fired off a series of e-mails, threatening litigation and demanding to know who ran the site. He also expressed interest in investing.

From Inc. Magazine.

Clearly they should get divorced and then immediately remarry

A married couple who didn't realise they were chatting each other up on the Internet are divorcing.

Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles...

The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said.

Adnan, 32, said: "I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years".

From The Daily Telegraph.

Oh, MITI, how I've missed you...

But I'm still waiting for that Fifth Generation artificially intelligent mainframe...

Tokyo, alarmed by the global dominance of Google and other foreign Internet services, is spearheading a project to try to seize the lead in new search technologies...

“The question is how Japanese companies like Sharp and Matsushita can be encouraged to provide [Internet] services. They clearly have the know-how to build things,” says Toshihide Yahiro, director of the information service industry division at [MITI]... [Yes, time to build some things!]

Tokyo hopes to use Japan’s strength in developing devices, such as mobile phones and car navigation systems, to create proprietary search and information retrieval functions. But some question [cough] whether a state-led project is capable of [overtaking] Google.

The Japanese project is comprised of 10 partnerships, each tasked with a specific next-generation search function. For example, the government has matched NTT Data with Toyota InfoTechnology Center and Toyota Mapmaster to create an interactive, personalised car navigation system. Other partnerships involve NEC, Hitachi and Sony Computer Science Laboratories. [MITI] has allocated Y14bn-Y15bn... to the project.

“Seventy per cent of car navigation systems are made in Japan. There is scope for more personalization,” says Mr Yahiro. “There is a need for car navigation systems that are capable of searching for which bathrooms are equipped with baby-changing stations and other necessities.” [Not to mention those fancy electronic toilets that will perfume your rear!]

Some blame Japan’s copyright laws for holding back the development of web services. Services such as Google hold copies of other companies’ web pages on their servers. Because Japanese law forbids the duplication of copyrighted works without the rights holders’ permission, Yahoo Japan, Google Japan and other search engines offered in Japan operate from US-based servers. [Yes, well, that could be an issue.]

We'll be checking in on MITI's newest project regularly.

From the Financial Times.

Headline of the day

No Proof Astronauts Were Drunk

From the Washington Post.

Now, I'm not in favor of piracy, but...

...this is definitely cruel and unusual punishment:

A man convicted of illegally downloading an episode of Star Wars has been told that he can no longer use his computer with an Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Scott McCausland pleaded guilty last year to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement' by downloading Star Wars: Episode III illegally.

He served five months in prison and is now on probation, but has been told that he cannot use his Linux computer.

"I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence," he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog.

"However, the [monitoring] software doesn't support GNU/Linux. So he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.

"Which basically means Microsoft and monitoring software or no computer. I use Ubuntu 7.04 now, and they are trying to force me to switch."

From VNU, via Valleywag.

I really don't see the problem

From Saul Hansell at the New York Times:

[A] new Internet search engine, Accoona... powered by innovative artificial intelligence technology [sic]...

[F]ounded by Marc Armand Rousso...

[R]egistered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell its stock to the public... [M]anaged by a little-known underwriter... [U]nderwriter, pulled out of the offering... "After completing our due diligence review, we have chosen to disassociate ourselves with the company."...

[Rousso] pleaded guilty to stock fraud charges in the United States in 1998 and was convicted of stock fraud in France in 1999... [S]ettled several suits brought by investors who claimed stock losses...

[V]ery little of Accoona’s $149 million in revenue last year came from its search engine...

[N]early all its revenue was from several online electronics dealers it also owns... [G]enerated numerous consumer complaints about aggressively selling accessories, spotty product availability and poor customer service...

[Search engine] attracted only 106,000 visitors from the United States in July, according to comScore...

[S]earch results... filled with links to second-tier sites and those of promoters trying to manipulate search engines with various tricks.

[R]ousso... paid more than $3 million during the last three years as a consultant to Accoona... [O]wns 14 percent of the company’s stock.

[A]lessandra Coderoni, whom Mr. Rousso married in August 2006, was paid $1.4 million to serve as Accoona’s chief operating officer in the 15 months before the marriage...

[Rousso] took control of several companies, promoted them to the public, and liquidated their holdings at a profit through a series of brokerage accounts in various names...

[E]ffort... to launder money stemming from [his] schemes...

[A]rrested, and he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money-laundering charges... [S]entenced to probation, a $200,000 fine and forfeiture of $4 million in assets... [B]anned from working in the securities industry...

[A]lso convicted of securities fraud in France, related to selling American stocks to European investors at inflated prices... [F]ined 120,000 euros.

[A]lso caught up in the investigation over illegal campaign contributions to the 1996 Senate campaign of Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey because he had raised money with a partner who later pleaded guilty in that case...

Accoona bought three companies based in Brooklyn that operate discount electronics retailers, including ButterflyPhoto.com, NYLiving.com, BestBuyPlasma.com, Digitaletailer.com, Lcdtvs.com and BuyersEdge.com...

ButterflyPhoto, the largest of these sites, has an unsatisfactory rating from the New York Better Business Bureau...

[O]ne of a group of online dealers that lure customers with low prices and then use aggressive tactics to get them to spend more money. "You will see prices online at $100 below cost... [T]hen they will call you to say that with this particular product, you need to buy this expensive battery to go with it.”

[C]ompany [says it] is “committed to providing the highest level of service and observing the highest ethical standards.”

Good idea of the day

Toys ‘R’ Us Stops Selling Lead-Tainted Bibs

From the New York Times.

That's exactly what happens whenever I wear a traditional Mayan dress!

Hotel mistakes Nobel laureate for bag lady...

She was wearing a Mayan dress, the traditional attire of indigenous people in central America, and the hotel's response was also traditional: throw her out.

Staff at Cancun's five-star Hotel Coral Beach appear to have assumed this was another street vendor or beggar, so without asking questions they ordered her to leave. Except the woman was Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel peace prizewinner, Unesco goodwill ambassador, Guatemalan presidential candidate and figurehead for indigenous rights.

From the Guardian.

That's the same reason they never give me one

Norman Mailer... ruminated on his failure to win the Nobel Prize.

It wasn't politics that soured his chances, he declared; it was stabbing his second wife with a pen knife in 1960.

From the Washington Post, via Marginal Revolution.

Now I have to find something different to watch each night at bedtime...

Reuters:

Recordings that claim to stimulate baby brain development may actually slow vocabulary development in infants if they are overused, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

For every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants aged 8 to 16 months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than babies who did not watch them, Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington and colleagues found. ...

"The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos, and there is some suggestion of harm," Zimmerman said in a statement.

"The bottom line is the more a child watches baby DVDs and videos, the bigger the effect. The amount of viewing does matter."

Zimmerman and colleagues conducted random telephone interviews with more than 1,000 families in Minnesota and Washington with babies and asked detailed questions about television and video viewing.

Parents of the 8- to 16-month-olds were asked how many words like "choo-choo," "mommy" and "nose" their child understood. ...

"The results surprised us, but they make sense. There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert," said Andrew Meltzoff, a psychologist who worked on the study.

"If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV, instead of with people speaking in 'parentese'-- that melodic speech we use with little ones -- the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience," Meltzoff added.

"Parents and caretakers are the baby's first and best teachers. They instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition. Watching attention-getting DVDs and TV may not be an even swap for warm social human interaction at this age. Old kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people."

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute who worked on the study, said parents frequently asked him about the value of such videos.

"The evidence is mounting that they are of no value and may in fact be harmful," Christakis said.