There’s a provocative column by Joe Nocera in today’s NYTimes about LinkedIn’s IPO last week. Nocera thinks that the investment banks Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch — which LinkedIn hired to take it public — essentially stole hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn’s treasury.
Here’s how it works. [Read more…]
Excellent analysis — by the NYTimes Timothy Egan– of the damage Rush Limbaugh is doing to the Republican Party. (Kudos, too, to the home page editors at the Times for putting a link to it at the top of the page for so long today.)
Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet, to be nearly as unpopular as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who damned America in the way that Limbaugh has now damned the nation’s newly elected leader. But Republicans just can’t quit him. So even poor Michael Steele, the nominal head of the Republican Party who dared to criticize him, had to grovel and crawl back to the feet of Limbaugh.
Where Democrats have gotten smarter is in their ability to push the whacko fringe off-stage when they start getting too much attention. That’s going to be a problem with Limbaugh, whose livelihood and lifeblood is tied into getting as big an audience is possible. Rev. Wright will be able to feed his family if he doesn’t have a mass audience; not so Limbaugh. That will make Rush exceptionally difficult to shut up, even if he were willing to in the name of party unity. Which he isn’t.
Which is a pity. What this country needs is principled dialog and problem-solving, not demagoguery. The more Limbaugh drives the Republican agenda and dialog, the less likely bipartisanship becomes, which weakens the nation at a time when it requires the best effort from all available smart people.
by Dan
From the Middle Eastern Times:
I was blown up last Tuesday. Luckily I can write about it. Many others who’ve shared the experience can’t. They’re dead, or their bodies and brains are so messed up by shrapnel or concussion they can’t remember the details.
It takes a special kind of person to be a war correspondent. I know three: Jon Landay of McClatchy, Marie Colvin of The Times of London, and Robert W. Worth of the NYTimes. I’m glad I know them — and proud to have worked with the first two early in my career — but I’m even gladder I’m not one of them.
But if you’re going to cover the war in Iraq, and Lord knows we need good coverage, this is a hell of a way to do it.
by Dan
Good to know that a little water hasn’t dampened New Orleans’s taste for bizarre politics. First comes my friend Jason Perlow running into Mayor Ray Nagin waiting tables. (Check out the rest of his excellent food blog, too.
Then comes Kimberly Williamson Butler, the clerk of the criminal court and a N.O. resident since just 1999, who announced her candidacy on the steps of the courthouse after surrendering for ignoring a string of court orders. Oh, yes — it appears that her campaign Web site has a pic of the candidate superimposed not on an actual New Orleans scene, but on Disneyland’s New Orleans Square.
It would be all the more entertaining if the election weren’t so critical for the city’s future.
by Dan
NYTimes piece this morning (by Michael Cooper) about how New York State spends millions of dollars on pork-barrel spending but doesn’t actually itemize it anywhere. (Free subscription required.) Turns out that the state budget includes one line — $200 million for "Community Projects Fund-007" — that the governor and legislative leaders can disburse without fear of discovery or veto.
Whether or not this leads to abuse, I suppose, depends on your definition of "abuse." But the feeling seems pretty universal that it’s a pretty sketchy practice:
"It’s bad government, because the grants are not based on any known criteria," said Edmund J. McMahon, the executive director of the Empire Center. "There are no performance guidelines, there is no application process, and at the end, we don’t even know if the money was spent on what it was supposed to be spent."
<snip>
Mr. McMahon noted that while members of Congress are debating whether their process for funneling money to pet projects, known as earmarking, is open enough, the federal government at least requires disclosure of each project in Congressional reports that accompany legislation. In Albany, by contrast, the member items are kept secret. The Empire Center’s lists, released by the state, do not say exactly what the money is for or even which official requested it.
A couple of groups have managed to tease out where the money — borrowed money, by the way — has gone.
by Dan
Confusing correlation for causality, the record industry has long blamed file sharing networks like Napster and Kazaa for a drop in music sales. At last, an independent study says that whatever has caused the woes of the music business — like, for instance, that lots of contemporary music sucks, or that bands can’t build a following when they’re not allowed to release new music for years at a time — the problem isn’t file sharing.
Lot of good that does Napster, of course.
The study shows that people who download music for free were probably not going to be buying it anyway. Why? Most of them can’t afford it, not at $18 a CD.
“Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,” write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill….
“Say I offer you a free flight to Florida,” [Oberholzer-Gee] asks. “How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free.” If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but “it doesn’t mean that these people would buy CD’s at $18,” he said.
Two questions for further study:
by Dan
Many of you know that I watched the second plane hit the South Tower. I wrote this piece for the following day’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which ran it with minor changes. There’s a word or two I’d change, but I’m letting it stand as an example of deadline writing.
by Dan
Dave Winer, whose weblog software I use and who knows a thing or two about online community, is less impressed with Tom Friedman’s column of this past weekend than I am. He says:
Now with all due respect, they shouldn’t believe everything they read in the NY Times either.
Well, that’s certainly true enough. The thing is, Dave, what the Net helps do is put random content on the same footing as The Times. This is what terrifies Big Media, which has invested bazillions of dollars into establishing a trust equation with readers. Here’s what I wrote about that, nearly six years ago to the day (what — you thought this was a new issue?), in NetGuide:
The camcorder approach to information has its place, and is where a lot of the excitement about the net comes from. Always be asking yourself about what you’re reading and why it was put out there. And remember that good information always has a price.
What Friedman, Winer, and I are talking about is a subtle and complex issue. This is my full column, from the August 1996 issue of NetGuide, and I’ve seen no reason in the intervening years to change my mind.