Brian Gongol
Jay Leno moves out, and Jimmy Fallon gets ready to move in
Leno may have been hard-working and successful in attracting (and keeping) an audience, but he never really used his five hours a week in the world spotlight to do much of anything to elevate the human condition. He had a tremendous soapbox on which to stand, and never really said anything really sincere or deeply thoughtful. It doesn't have to be a Charlie Rose kind of show every night, but you don't have to look any farther than Craig Ferguson to see occasional examples of moments that are both entertaining and thoughtful. Instead, Leno's usual routine was bland and lowest-common-denominator, based largely upon pointing and laughing at someone else for being stupid (see "Jaywalking").
GDP is just one among many useful measurements
It's roughly like the measurement of airspeed in an airplane: Absolutely essential, but not the only thing that matters. So, those who would jettison GDP as a measurement of well-being are just being blinded by some ulterior distaste for economic growth (or an unhealthy obsession with equalizing outcomes), but anyone who cartoonishly ignores every other measure for sake of GDP alone is also missing the point. It's an imperfect measurement, but it's also one of the most important, by far.
Former "McGruff the Crime Dog" actor is going to prison for 16 years
Railcar graffiti: If it isn't yours, don't paint it
But at a cost of $1,000 to repaint a car, owners sometimes don't want to bother. One could wonder whether there's a way to channel the work of the frustrated artists who are just looking for a canvas (as opposed to the gang members and criminally-oriented taggers).
Burlington Northern will spend $5 billion on capital improvements in 2014
A huge amount of America's infrastructure is actually privately-funded and privately-maintained. But if one railroad can spend $5 billion in a year, are we doing enough to keep up with our public-sector infrastructre spending -- or are we just deferring much-needed maintenance and hoping it fails after we're gone?
Mexico is about to become the #2 exporter of cars to the US
It's overtaking Japan and could soon beat out Canada, too
Atlanta's snow catastrophe: It was forecast...but the people who should've listened didn't
Robber picks the wrong Casey's store
An Iowa DCI agent was in the parking lot
The US power grid needs better cybersecurity
One-paragraph review of "Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger"
How Facebook is putting people inside dangerous echo chambers
Everything's a trade-off
For the cost of the Sochi Olympic Games, Russia could have just bought every team in the NFL and the NHL
The risks to radio as it ignores personality development
A $15 million mansion at Okoboji
Comcast announces plans to buy Time Warner for $45 billion
That's a premium of 50% over the intrinsic value of Time Warner, but the compulsion to get bigger can compel a lot of bizarre decisions. If Comcast were actually seeking to spend $45 billion in optimal ways, buying Time Warner for such a premium price would not be the way. As usual, there's talk of savings from synergies, but here's how to tell something about this is a raw deal: it's an all-stock deal. Those only make sense when the acquiring company thinks its own stock is wildly over-priced by the market and the target company is unreasonably cheap. That can hardly be the analysis here -- in fact, while Time Warner is overpriced, Comcast is quite fairly priced. That's like going into a store and not only paying full retail price, but paying a premium on top of the retail price, and doing it on a credit card that doesn't even offer rewards points. (And, again, someone used the word "synergies" in the press release. That's usually a huge red flag.)
Slowing down high-frequency traders by delaying press releases
It might be a sensible first step
Natural-gas production is through the roof, but storage and distribution are choke points
Betty White is everywhere
(Video) Including in-flight safety briefings
Does your candy match your politics?
Interpreting stock charts the wrong way
Someone pointed out to CNBC that a chart of the stock market in 1929 looks a lot like the chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 2012 until today. There are so many things wrong with this interpretation: First, there will be uncanny similarities and eerie patterns in stock charts all the time -- because they are fractal in nature. They can be self-similar at wide ranges of scale (that is, a minute-by-minute chart, stripped of the time scale, can look a lot like a month-to-month chart with the same number of data points). The prices mean nothing in isolation -- prices matter only in relation to fundamental matters of value (and, by the way, the DJIA of 2014 has virtually nothing in common with that of 1929 other than its name and the highly arbitrary way in which it is calculated). And, above all else, it is not really the "price" of the market in aggregate that counts, but rather the individual prices of many different companies, each in relation to its intrinsic value. People who look to charts like some magical set of tea leaves are only asking to be buffaloed by self-proclaimed wizards who know nothing but their own chart alchemy. The truth of the matter is that there are many over-priced companies in the US stock market right now, at a ratio of perhaps 2:1 over the number of under-priced or fairly-priced securities. But that's something far different from a market on the brink of a crash.
Iowa suffered a big drop in farm income from 2012 to 2013
The importance of manufacturing to Africa's future
The danger of out-of-touch business executives
Wearable computing: Still finding its way in the world
Lots of users lose interest and stop using them after just a matter of months
Time for "Le Selfie"
Nobody seems impressed by the decorum of the French press corps along for the ride to Washington this week
There has to be a better strategy than praying we don't get obliterated by space rocks
Any strategy to protect our fragile existence on this planet has to include a plan to prevent a catastrophe caused by the arrival of a large asteroid. That plan would have to include surveillance (knowing where the threats are and when we might face them), prevention (some approach for deflecting, destroying, or otherwise reducing the impact thereof), and mitigation (figuring out what our greatest vulnerabilities are and how to buttress them). And whatever goes for space rocks goes double for threats like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes -- things that are also bound to happen that we (unfortunately) still don't understand well.
Security breach at Kickstarter
Another case that should remind people of the importance of having different passwords across different websites
The cultural importance of the Midwest
How Presidents judge other Presidents
Gnarles Barkley recorded "Crazy" in one take