Category: Business
Dear Resentful Intellectual, Some time ago a few of you complained about the filthy lucre that “Chet” was raking in. “Chet” is supposed to be the prototypical Wall Street guy — tall, handsome, personable, eerily well-adjusted, everything but clever. Of course what you really want to know is not why Chet makes so much money, [...]
An old joke has a grocer trying to explain business ethics to his son. “Suppose a lady comes into the store,” he says, “buys two dollars worth of merchandise, pays with a fifty, and leaves, forgetting to take her change. Here’s where business ethics comes in: do you, or do you not, tell your partner?” [...]
My father asked me write about dollar-cost averaging, which is strange, since his own financial career is epitomized by refusing to buy an apartment in New York in the wake of Manhattan’s last great real estate crash in 1973, shrewdly choosing instead to commute two hours a day to his job in the city. Or [...]
To understand the absurd seriousness with which Americans treat higher education, look at their cars. Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers, which trails a Wesleyan admissions officer and six supplicants for places in the class of 2004, documents this magic moment: A week before his decision was due, he mailed off a $250 deposit and his official [...]
5 CommentsThis place has gone to seed, in large part, because I’ve been doing some actual work, trying to get a software release out — late, inadequate, but out — and as a consequence have followed Floyd McWilliams’s and Evan Kirchhoff’s theorizing about the future of software with more than academic interest. Evan starts here, Floyd [...]
13 Comments(I had a pleasant holiday from you, dear readers, and, I trust, you from me as well. Now let’s get down to it boppers.) Toxicologists say that the dose is the poison, and Americans could save themselves millions of dollars if they only understood what that means. Everything on earth, from arsenic to mother’s milk, [...]
7 CommentsMDMA, better-known as Ecstasy, has been shown to cause Parkinson’s Disease in monkeys if the monkeys had actually been getting MDMA. As it happens they were getting methamphetamine instead. Derek Lowe, himself a pharmaceutical chemist, eviscerates the authors politely, as a professional courtesy: I’m sure that some people are going to point the finger at [...]
5 CommentsYou might be a junk scientist if: You prophesy disaster in some remote future. It is safest to choose a date in the long run, when we’re all dead, but even the less judicious have little to worry about: by the time D-Day rolls around people will have forgotten what you said. If someone does [...]
11 CommentsI hate to disagree with the estimable Craig Henry over at Lead and Gold, and still more with Tom Wolfe, but Craig, in the process of taking pie-eyed Internet triumphalism to task, quotes Wolfe as follows: I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the [...]
Old joke. Q: How can you spot an intellectual? A: He’s the guy in the corner worrying about “the problem of the intellectuals.” The problem of blogging, then. The principal lesson of blogs is that the market price for reasonably well-considered rumination is zero, and the competition for readers at that price is fierce. This [...]
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