Reading through back issues of the magazine, which was published in Europe with distribution help from The Wall Street Journal Europe, one does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point in its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home." If you didn't understand why someone would want to greet their guests in such a way -- and as a nation we certainly didn't -- then you didn't understand what it meant to be a trader. But Trader Monthly did, and it limned the trader so that all might behold his glory. A trader was a sort of embodiment of the primal drama of capitalism; not just an überconsumer, but a bullying, self-maximizing, wealth-extracting he-man, a lout in full.
Reading through back issues of the magazine, which was published in Europe with distribution help from The Wall Street Journal Europe, one does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point in its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home."
If you didn't understand why someone would want to greet their guests in such a way -- and as a nation we certainly didn't -- then you didn't understand what it meant to be a trader.
But Trader Monthly did, and it limned the trader so that all might behold his glory. A trader was a sort of embodiment of the primal drama of capitalism; not just an überconsumer, but a bullying, self-maximizing, wealth-extracting he-man, a lout in full.
Good riddance.
Lott said in a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Chicago that Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, defamed him when he wrote that other scholars had been unable to replicate Lott’s research linking lower crime rates with the right to carry guns. The passage amounts to an allegation that Lott falsified his results, according to the lawsuit. The allegation "damages Lott’s reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students and members of the general public who read ‘Freakonomics,’ " Lott said in the lawsuit.
Lott said in a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Chicago that Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, defamed him when he wrote that other scholars had been unable to replicate Lott’s research linking lower crime rates with the right to carry guns. The passage amounts to an allegation that Lott falsified his results, according to the lawsuit.
The allegation "damages Lott’s reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students and members of the general public who read ‘Freakonomics,’ " Lott said in the lawsuit.
Well, he lost at trial, so he appealed. And the appeals court has shot him down (PDF):
To the extent that Lott is complaining about an attack on his ideas, and not his character, he is barking up the wrong tree. The remedy for this kind of academic dispute is the publication of a rebuttal, not an award of damages.
In the larger sense, or at least in the political sense, [new technological] developments clearly change the nature of the scholarly procedures, but just as clearly they do not alter the demands for quality control of research. To be sure, the sophistication of the new technology provides unheard-of checks upon fraudulent reportings and preliminary findings published in multiple sources that simply have not been available in the past [...] Whatever its stage of evolution, technology neither automatically opens nor closes possibilities. It does provide for new options and hence new dangers and opportunities. The new technology contains the potential for including ever larger numbers of people in the mainstream of democratic participation. These remain political no less than technical challenges. Hopes for future developments in the area of the new technology require a sense of user needs even more than manufacturer capabilities. We are simply once more recreating a postindustrial environment in which life and death issues are replicated on a canvas, this time called information rather than environment.
In the larger sense, or at least in the political sense, [new technological] developments clearly change the nature of the scholarly procedures, but just as clearly they do not alter the demands for quality control of research. To be sure, the sophistication of the new technology provides unheard-of checks upon fraudulent reportings and preliminary findings published in multiple sources that simply have not been available in the past [...]
Whatever its stage of evolution, technology neither automatically opens nor closes possibilities. It does provide for new options and hence new dangers and opportunities. The new technology contains the potential for including ever larger numbers of people in the mainstream of democratic participation. These remain political no less than technical challenges. Hopes for future developments in the area of the new technology require a sense of user needs even more than manufacturer capabilities. We are simply once more recreating a postindustrial environment in which life and death issues are replicated on a canvas, this time called information rather than environment.
That was written in 1983.
To suggest that Obama or Geithner are tools of Wall Street and are looking out for something other than the country's best interest is freaking asinine. Maybe their ideas are wrong -- but their hearts are in the right place .
Aravosis responds:
Well, I'm not sure it's his heart that some are worried about. Chris often points to the fact that Geithner was at the Fed while Wall Street was getting away with financial murder. Geithner may simply be the wrong-headed, but good-hearted, man for the job.
Yeah, the criticisms I see of Geithner are mostly that he's part of the problem, and thus he can't be part of the solution. I'm less concerned about someone's heart than I am about their ideas. Would you feel better about the Iraq War if someone conclusively proved that Bush launched the war out of genuinely good-hearted intentions? I wouldn't.