Brian Gongol
Should Sunday morning talk shows fact-check themselves?
A review of Iowa's weather in December 2009
A huge temperature plunge and some remarkably heavy snowfall
The extraordinary rise of the text message
Americans were sending 50 billion text messages a month in 2007, and 110 billion a month in 2008. By mid-June of 2009, the figure was up to 135 billion per month. That figure was just 12 million a month in June 2000. Clearly, we have found something exciting about the lowly text message, which is barely different at all from the telegrams of the 1800s.
Internet refuseniks: Not as special as they think themselves
50% of American adults used the Internet in 2000. Now 80% do. And anyone who deliberately avoids the use of the Internet in 2010 looks cranky, just like someone who might have avoiding the use of a telephone or a television in 1962.
You know who wins in a bankruptcy? The attorneys.
There are real costs to bankruptcies
Turning Alanis Morissette's song into something really "Ironic"
(Video)
New air-travel security rules: Just a bunch of show
Bruce Schneier again calls it "security theater", and he's right. What good is a rule about staying seated for the last hour of a flight when we don't even bother to screen airport employees. The TSA ran a tiny pilot program to screen airport workers in 2008. Since then, what? And while thousands of airport workers will continue to have unscreened access to luggage, planes, and travelers, the government wants to introduce more full-body scans. How about spending that money on more Air Marshals instead? Human intelligence and direct human intervention are the only things that stopped the shoe bomber and the latest terrorist attempt. We ought to emphasize the use of things that work instead of putting on a show for the illusion of security.
China forecasts 8% economic growth in 2010
That's a very quick rate of expansion -- imagine if everyone were 8% better at their jobs on December 31st than they had been on the preceding January 1st. Economic growth is hugely important, even if that's not so widely understood. And, fortunately for 1.3 billion people, economic growth often leads to political freedom as well. They're not perfectly correlated; India has long had more political freedom than China with less economic growth, but that may very well be attributable to the work of politicians who valued "self-sufficiency" in the Indian economy more than growth.
Why people will sign up for a credit card with a 79.9% interest rate
If people who can't get credit otherwise can manage to keep a zero balance on the card, it could be the only way they can get a card
Does Interpol now have free reign to police in the United States?
A brand-new Executive Order seems to say "yes, it does"
Why listen to a financial reporter when you can actually follow the advice of the wealthy?
A BBC financial reporter, looking back on the last decade -- one in which the stock markets were big fat losers -- says that "in these kind of conditions, the old tenets of 'buy and hold' and 'invest for the long term' seem hard to justify." Wrong interpretation. Instead of taking the advice of someone who talks about other people's money, one should instead take the advice of someone who has built an enormous fortune over many decades: Warren Buffett, who says America's economy is going to grow over the long haul, and who notes that "Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time." People are free to follow the advice of whomever they wish, but it certainly doesn't seem worthwhile to follow the advice of a reporter when it runs directly contrary to the advice of the kind of magnate upon whom the reporter reports.
The MacGyver Kitten
(Video) Brilliant? Not really. But a sufficiently clever 80s flashback to be good for a laugh.
Radio on-demand: Why should investors sell their winners?
Radio on-demand: What did you get for Christmas?
Chloride "is pervasive in Iowa groundwater"
It's time we stopped pretending like "psychics" should ever be quoted
Someone claiming to have "psychic" visions in Canada says she sees a "dark aura" around President Obama, and then proceeds to suggest she thinks an attempt will be made on his life. There should be no mistake made about this: Nobody has psychic visions of the future. There are people who can be very adept at forecasting trends and events that are likely to occur, but they are known as futurists. Ian Pearson, for instance, has spent years making predictions based upon evidence, and he writes down his predictions and his explanations for those predictions for all the world to see. Anyone claiming to be a "psychic," by distinct contrast, is a crook seeking to exploit their fellow humans' uncertainty about the future. Nothing about being a "psychic" should exempt a person from scrutiny for making outrageous statements -- nor should it qualify them to get any more attention than some lunatic ranting at the drive-thru window of a fast-food restaurant. Anyone publishing "psychic" predictions as news ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Predictions for the future of print journalism
...from a columnist whose industry trade publication (Editor and Publisher) is being shut down. Newspapers can survive and be profitable for quite some time to come, but they can't act like it's still 1985.
White peacocks exist: Who knew?
Those predicting the end of the netbook are too early
The netbook still has a place in the consumer landscape -- and as faster chips keep reaching the market, the demand for what is, in essence, a low-end laptop surely won't go away
Really bad Russian covers of "Let it Be"
Why worry about pharmaceuticals in the water?
Excessive alarm about trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in drinking water seems misplaced when the public and the political class refuse to acknowledge all of the work that needs to be done just to maintain current levels of water treatment, much less the expensive new processes that may be required to address pharmaceuticals, too. It's like a three-pack-a-day smoker in Minneapolis worrying more about catching some exotic tropical disease than about lung cancer.
A worthwhile interview with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates
(Video) The 90-minute "town hall" with the two broadcast on CNBC was surprisingly pointless -- not by the fault of Buffett and Gates, but because it was filled with sycophantic applause and long-winded introductions by Columbia Business School students hoping for a moment in the spotlight instead of really good questions to probe two of the sharpest minds in America. Fortunately, they were smart enough to control the conversation when filmed during a walk-and-talk interview with a CNBC reporter, and that was the content worth watching.
Instead of behavioral profiling, we're getting new stupid air-travel security measures
Passengers are being told to keep nothing in their laps, to stay seated for an hour prior to arrival, and to expect no in-flight entertainment, all because of one failed attempt on a passenger jet on Christmas, conducted by a suspect whose own family warned officials to be alarmed about him. As has consistently proven to be the case, we have far more to gain from human intelligence-gathering than from idiotic blanket procedures that just make air travel miserable for everyone.
China is strategically expanding its energy supply
For all of the self-flagellation and hand-wringing that's been conducted over America's contributions to carbon-dioxide production and global warming, the environmentalist movement has utterly missed the place where realpolitik coincides with their interests: China is aggressively expanding its access to hydrocarbon fuels through every means available, financed by lots of state-controlled money. This means that two things will happen in the future: First, China's (dubious) lead as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases will increase. Second, access to those fuels will become increasingly expensive to Western nations. Thus, the quest for alternative energy sources, which the environmentalist movement wants people to adopt because they feel guilty about harming the environment, is really far more significant as a matter of national security. By shedding the guilt-trip nonsense, which often comes across as blatant anti-capitalism, the environmentalists might actually be able to wisely align their interests with unconventional allies in the business sector and among national-security hawks who don't want to see the next century turned over to Chinese hegemony. It might even lead to the adoption of proven strategies like innovation prizes, which would almost certainly get us to the "energy future" we really need faster than punitive carbon taxes or cap-and-trade ever will.
The real costs and benefits of health screenings
Unfortunately, the tone of a lot of new recommendations sounds like it's anti-testing altogether, and that's certainly not making anyone feel more comfortable with the idea of government (which is already broke, frequently incompetent, and hidebound by bureaucratic rules) taking over health-care rules for many Americans
Will the NBA add franchises in Rome, Rio, or Tel Aviv?
Over the next ten years, possibly. So says the NBA commissioner.
The last ten years as a graphical chart
How to save a water-logged piece of electronics
Put it in a bowl full of dry rice. Very sensible, and it has a lot of testimonial support.
Cedar Rapids told to scale back flood-protection plans
How the Iranian government could be setting itself up to fail
Intriguing analysis suggests that attacks by the Iranian government on religious institutions may very well incite a popular revolt that will overthrow the Supreme Leader and his cohort faster than a reformist movement ever could. If you're an American and you care about the price of oil (and thus the price of gas), or you worry about nuclear war, or you are concerned about the American troops in the Middle East, or you think about visiting Jerusalem someday, or you care about the future of a just and free world, then this situation ought to rank a little higher on your priority list than who's on the next season of "American Idol".
Twitter, viewed through rose-colored glasses
Is Twitter a "human seismograph"? Maybe. It's not bad for sampling the zeitgeist, that's for certain. But to say that "the Twitter economy is burgeoning" overstates the case considerably. Twitter serves a moderately useful function today -- but it's far from indispensable (if 18 million people use the service, that means 6,774,000,000 don't), and there's nothing about the service that is sufficiently unique as to form an economic "moat" (a competitive advantage that keeps competitors out). Twitter is plagued by outages and growing pains, and some of its conventions, like the "hashtag", are too confusing for first-time users to understand intuitively. And if something doesn't make intuitive sense without explanation, it faces an uphill battle to gain further adoption. Twitter does some good, and there's no doubt that some form of microblogging will always be around. But to think that Twitter is sufficiently important, significant, or durable as to create its own "economy" is wishful thinking of a very high order.
How much of the US economy has been "phony" for the last quarter-century?
ISU economist Dave Swenson thinks the answer is, "quite a lot of it"
The campaign to put pants on Ziggy
Stephan Pastis, of "Pearls Before Swine", conducted a cartoon "campaign" to put pants on Ziggy. He involved the artist behind "Ziggy", and got a joke about dry cleaning in the process before getting pants on the pants-less.
Portfolio rebalancing: Why bother?
Even though it's widely recommended that investors "rebalance" their portfolios each year, taking profits by selling some of the winners and pouring those funds into lagging sectors or markets in anticipation that they'll catch up thanks to the law of averages, the whole idea of rebalancing is a poor substitute for careful analysis of the full range of investment opportunities at hand. If one is investing for the long-term, then one really ought to be reluctant to sell anything from one's portfolio, even if it's performed well. Should the Yankees get rid of Mariano Rivera just because he's been pitching extremely well since 1995? That hardly makes sense. Instead, what's wise is to find the best opportunities at a given moment and stock up -- just like a smart shopper might stock up on non-perishable items like paper towels or light bulbs when a good sale rolls around.
What people in 1969 thought the Internet would someday look like
(Video) Turns out, they got the gist of it
A few suggestions for living more happily in 2010
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