On the heels of my “what’s wrong with newspapers” post, starting September 1st, both the Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I will raise their price to 75 cents from 50 cents for the daily (non-Sunday) paper.

From Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality :

During the past few years, newspaper owners demanded and were getting at 20–40 percent profit, among the highest for any industry–and that includes Big Oil.

Go to any journalism conference, and you’ll see a lot of hand-wringing. Reporters and editors are whining about how bad it is. They rightly blame owners and publishers. But, they also blame readers for accepting abbreviated news drops from TV and myriad cable networks. They whine about the Blogosphere and Internet domination. They complain about the short attention span of their readers. It’s this and it’s that. And so, with the help of $500 an hour consultants who eruditely harrumph their grandeur of divine guesses, they make cosmetic changes.

The system is broken, and it’s the owners’ fault.

According to the Wall St. Journal , "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld," a stodgy oldster who appears mainly in reruns of a TV show that began 19 years ago and ended 10 years ago.

He will be paid $10 million as part of a $300 million ad campaign that promotes Windows Vista.  Story also reported in the Seattle P-I .

An update on my post about Ed McMahon’s house going into foreclosure .  Donald Trump has come to McMahon’s rescue as reported by traditional news media here , here and here plus in this unsympathetic post that is more in tune with my thoughts on the issue.

Articles note that the 85-year old McMahon has returned to work. Not reported is whether McMahon is now a Wal-Mart style greeter at some Trump property.

I cannot find a single convincing argument that tells me that astrologers won’t do better than economists. The problem is the arrogance of these economists. They’re making people rely on theories that have not worked, do not work, and are really dangerous.

Said by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the excellent book The Black Swan in a NYT article entitled “In Volatile Times, Investors Tune in All and Any Predictions.”

Joke of the day via Naked Capitalism:

Q: What’s the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?

A: The pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW.

Exceprt from an internal email to Countrywide employees on his last day as CEO as a result of the purchase rescue of Countrywide mortgage by Bank of America, Angelo Mozilo wrote:

Beginning in 1968, David Loeb and I labored seven days a week for several years attempting to have our voice heard and our mission to open up homeownership opportunities to as many families as possible to gain traction.

Boo hoo. I worked so hard. See ya suckers for all the big bucks I’ll pocket. BTW, David Loeb was co-founder of Countrywide and died July 2003. The press release is no longer available on Countrywide’s corporate site but is here via Google cache.

LA Times reports that

Rising gas prices may be the latest ailment afflicting the housing market, as figures released Monday showed Southern California home prices plunging 27% in May from a year ago and falling even more precipitously in distant suburbs.

People are willing to spend all that time stuck in traffic, but an extra $100 a week in gas money does them in. You would think the extra time would matter, but I guess people do not value their own time.

Then again they would probably just use the extra time to watch more lame TV so maybe their time really is not worth that much.

Or, is it that some people have never been out of SoCal and don’t know that absurd commutes aren’t necessary?

Call The big Wall Street firm "Goldman Sacks " rather than "Goldman Sachs ."

Despite beating its peers in performance, profits are down at Goldman and layoffs are underway. Many of those who lose their jobs will be junior bankers, called analysts, who typically serve a two year term before going on to business school or moving on to other jobs.

Goldman is letting many of its first year analysts go but they aren’t describing this as getting fired. So first year analysts who are being fired after just one year are told that the have been placed into the accelerated one-year analyst program," according to people familiar with the matter. It’s like skipping a grade! Well, except that you get expelled from school after you get accelerated!

Read the full story here and a follow-up story here.

The title, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus , intrigued me, but the first paragraph of an essay by Clay Shirkey had me hooked and the essay just gets better:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

Every year

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.