Goolsbee was on ABC’s “This Week” and pantomimed the European finance ministers who perpetually talk about taking action, but never do.
The central example of inaction mentioned was that Greece has yet to lay off a single government employee. This example was put forth by conservative George Will (studied economics at Oxford), yet was refuted by none. I found this striking. Not even progressive (Russian history and literature major) Chrystia Freeland qualified his statement.
Am I the only one surprised that no one on an ABC political panel stepped up to refute the notion that Greece primarily has a spending problem. Isn’t the real issue that the tax rates aren’t progressive enough? Surely Chrystia is aware that there are Greeks who own yachts(?)
The skit Goolsbee refers to is below — both as video and text.
Right! This calls for immediate discussion!
REG: Right. Now, uh, item four: attainment of world supremacy within the next five years. Uh, Francis, you’ve been doing some work on this.
FRANCIS: Yeah. Thank you, Reg. Well, quite frankly, siblings, I think five years is optimistic, unless we can smash the Roman empire within the next twelve months.
REG: Twelve months?
FRANCIS: Yeah, twelve months. And, let’s face it. As empires go, this is the big one, so we’ve got to get up off our arses and stop just talking about it!
COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!
LORETTA: I agree. It’s action that counts, not words, and we need action now.
COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!
REG: You’re right. We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It’s not going to shift one Roman soldier!
FRANCIS: So, let’s just stop gabbing on about it. It’s completely pointless and it’s getting us nowhere!
COMMANDOS: Right!
LORETTA: I agree. This is a complete waste of time. [bam]
JUDITH: They’ve arrested Brian!
REG: What?
COMMANDOS: What?
JUDITH: They’ve dragged him off! They’re going to crucify him!
REG: Right! This calls for immediate discussion!
COMMANDO #1: Yeah.
JUDITH: What?!
COMMANDO #2: Immediate.
COMMANDO #1: Right.
LORETTA: New motion?
REG: Completely new motion, eh, that, ah– that there be, ah, immediate action–
FRANCIS: Ah, once the vote has been taken.
REG: Well, obviously once the vote’s been taken. You can’t act another resolution till you’ve voted on it…
JUDITH: Reg, for God’s sake, let’s go now!
REG: Yeah. Yeah.
JUDITH: Please!
REG: Right. Right.
FRANCIS: Fine.
REG: In the– in the light of fresh information from, ahh, sibling Judith–
LORETTA: Ah, not so fast, Reg.
JUDITH: Reg, for God’s sake, it’s perfectly simple. All you’ve got to do is to go out of that door now, and try to stop the Romans’ nailing him up! It’s happening, Reg! Something’s actually happening, Reg! Can’t you understand?! Ohhh! [slam]
REG: Hm. Hm.
FRANCIS: Oh, dear.
REG: Hello. Another little ego trip for the feminists.
LORETTA: What?
FRANCIS: [whistling]
REG: Oh, sorry, Loretta. Ahh, oh, read that back, would you?
Don’t let the healthy gluten and dairy free menu distract you. The food is amazing and the wine list is progressing nicely (disclaimer — I am advising them on their wine choices and pushing Novelty Hill hard.) They also have a nice deck on those sunny days (cloudy days too thanks to the awnings…) It’s been added to my list of regular haunts. From the site:
Lunch is getting exciting. It features a millet grain gluten-free sandwich bread developed especially for Graces 5. With all the nice weather this week, you can dine inside or on our newly remodelled patio and snuggle near a firepit in the late evening.
Located in downtown Redmond, Graces 5 offers delicious local cuisine in a tranquil atmosphere. We use local sustainable ingredients wherever possible. All of our dishes are gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free and low sugar but you’ll never know it because the food tastes awesome! Our seasonal menu features a wide variety of options for carnivores, vegans, and vegetarians. Our menu is a perfect fit for those of you on the paleo diet. Come by the newest restaurant in redmond today!
I have a bunch of Twitter search/monitoring tools I really like. Topsy, Cloud.li, etc. (used to love Backtweets, but alas — they have been gobbled up by Twitter…)
The latest one I’ve been spending a lot of time with is Followerwonk. It’s a very powerful tool for searching Twitter profiles, and my favorite feature is that it has the ability to export found sets as CSV files for import into excel or other databases. Sadly, no API as of yet.
Advanced search lets you search specifically by name, and so far I have yet to find another service that is better at tracking down specific people.
We are doing an event at the Napa Film Festival in November, and as you can see below, I can easily find people who like both film and wine. Great for highly targeted engagement. I will for sure cover it in more detail at our CES seminar.
What’s NOT trending? Non-Apple tablets. A little time spent with Google Insights for Search indicates that the collapse of the HP Touchpad platform may be a bellwether of things to come from other major consumer electronics vendors.
After hearing that HP threw in the towel and has departed the tablet space, I fired up my browser and took a look at searcher interest in all the iPad wannabes.
The bottom line? In terms of search volume, it turns out the HP Touchpad was pretty darn popular. Only the Playbook and the Xoom were searched more often, and not significantly so. The Nook Color and the Dell Streak weren’t even half as popular as the Touchpad.
Search volume for the past 30 days:
Looking at searches for most of the other tablets on the market, the Touchpad dominates. The Asus Slate didn’t get one tenth the interest that the Touchpad did.
Putting it all into perspective, let’s see how the Touchpad did against the iPad. In a word, ouch. Imagine what the Asus people are thinking tonight.
Now one might argue that many of these tablets are based on the Android platform, so perhaps considering Android in the aggregate might prove to be more promising. Are people searching for Android tablets? Not really:
Who would have guessed? Solyndra, the green energy company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, is sadly no more. Even more tragic is that $500,000,000.00 taxpayer dollars were wasted in anticipation of results that could only be described as miraculous:
Chris Gronet, the founder and chairman of Solyndra, said the guaranteed funding “will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates.” He added, “This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”
Cheap power? New jobs? Solve global warming? He forgot to add “will cure cancer.”
Sound vaguely familiar? It might if you ever read Gulliver’s travels. George Will referenced the relevant passage back in 2009.
Gulliver’s travels took him to the Academy of Lagado, where “professors contrive new rules and methods” for everything: “One man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last forever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundredfold more than they do at present.” There was, however, the “inconvenience” that “none of these projects” had yet come to fruition and “the whole country lies miserably waste.” But “instead of being discouraged,” people were “fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes,” which included “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”
(emphasis mine)
Gronet was not alone in breathless praise for the venture. President Obama called it “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.”
Ah, the dangers of utopianism. And people wonder why trust in government is at a record low.
Who were the early skeptics? National Review’s Greg Pollowitz for one. He rang alarm bells as early as March 2009.
It should be noted that this “investment” has been under investigation since May. This from ABC:
The Obama administration bypassed procedural steps meant to protect taxpayers as it hurried to approve an energy loan guarantee to a politically-connected California solar power startup, ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News have learned.
On a related note, there are now 6,928,000,000,000 cubic meters of commercially recoverable natural gas reserves in the U.S. 100 years worth at least. If you want to see true example of “American ingenuity”, check out the Texans at Mitchell Energy who invented Fracking.
Apparently you sell a lot more Touchpads at $99 than at $499. Gee, I guess individual downward-sloping demand curves aggregate into a similarly sloping curve after all. So weird. Someone notify Steve Keen.
One major reason IMHO that many Americans get all tingly over the Gipper is not generally discussed. Those on the left certainly won’t bring it up.
It has nothing to do with the skyrocketing employment or the plummeting inflation numbers he presided over. It has to do with our survival. Youngsters (and old pacifists) don’t remember the “Doomsday Clock”, but most who were raised during the Cold War sure do. It became a staple of the nightly newscasts.
“The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global disaster. As of January 14, 2010, the Doomsday Clock now stands at six minutes to midnight. Since its creation, the time on the clock has changed 19 times.”
Notice how (like with the employment numbers in that era) we see a singularly steep and positive spike during the Reagan/Bush run.
One of the single biggest jumps (unsurprisingly) came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. Hey I seem to remember someone in 1987 specifically calling for the wall to be torn down! Who was that again…?
Oh — and most importantly it must be stressed that the enhanced feeling of safety from nuclear attack was evenly distributed across the populace. Whew.
Who would have guessed? Solyndra, the green energy company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, is sadly no more. Even more tragic is that $500,000,000.00 taxpayer dollars were wasted in anticipation of results that could only be described as 