Jun
20
2007

URLs du Jour

2007-06-20

  • Eddy Elfenbein is succinct and damning in his recollection of a four-year-ago-today NYT column by Paul Krugman, simply by quoting him:

    The big rise in the stock market is definitely telling us something. Bulls think it says the economy is about to take off. But I think it's a sign that America is still blowing bubbles — that a three-year bear market and the biggest corporate scandals in history haven't cured investors of irrational exuberance yet. … In short, the current surge in stocks looks like another bubble, one that will eventually burst.

    Mr. Elfenbein appends a graph of the S&P 500 index since that fateful day. I liked that idea so much, I popped over to bigcharts.com and composed one that compares the index with performance of a specific stock over that time period:

    [Big Chart]

    Worth a thousand or so words; that's yer Pun Salad value-added. (Original link via Instapundit.)

  • There's an interview with Hero Genius (and Red Sox employee) Bill James at Opinion Journal. It's entertaining, but those looking for rare nuggets of baseball wisdom have to realize that the Sox are paying for exclusive access to any such nuggets that James may or may not have dug up. So:

    He also refuses to take credit for the Red Sox rise. "Nothing I do leads directly to consequence, and if it did I wouldn't tell you," Mr. James says.

    Heh! Still worth a look if you're a baseball fan. And, by the way, the Red Sox Magic Number is 85 as I type.

  • The American Medical Association recently weighed in on "gaming addiction" as a malady both (a) potentially serious (for the addicts) and (b) possibly profitable (for the medical profession). Lore Sjöberg helps identify a few more computer-related disorders. For example, there's—oh oh—"Narcissistic Blog Disorder":

    This disorder is characterized by the creation of a blog in which the individual consistently denigrates not only the opinions of others, but the very fact that others have opinions, saying things like "nobody cares what some overpaid starlet has to say about global warming" and "nobody cares what some crusty career politician thinks is wrong with society today." Simultaneously, the individual assumes that people do care about what he or she has to say, in spite of the individual's only political or activist experience being watching the movie Dave twice.

    Hey, I can't help it, I'm sick!

  • Arnold Zwicky examines the linguistic history of not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground. <shot expense="cheap">Paul Krugman take note!</shot>


Last Modified 2012-10-19 1:06 PM EDT