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#1 mat

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Posted 21 March 2009 - 08:16 PM

Wow - having watched a huge response in 'liberal' media blogs over the last day.5 since PK's article was posted, I never thought the Tyee would pick it up, and eloquently, briefly and with impact, express the angst over this US multi-trillion dollar bailout plan.

A lonely nation turns its eyes to Paul Krugman
By Crawford Kilian March 21, 2009 08:40 pm
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In what may have been the worst weekend for the US economy since the fall of 1929, the US blogosphere exploded about Barack Obama's "Katrina moment."

In his Saturday New York Times column, Nobel Prizewinning economist Paul Krugman reported on the leaked Geithner plan for the American banks, and declared: "The zombie ideas have won...What an awful mess."

Other respected economics blogs like naked capitalism agreed: "One would have to be a criminal to participate in this."

A top economics blog, Calculated Risk, ran a YouTube clip of a song from last fall: "Hey Paul Krugman," asking him to do more to save the country.

Ex-Republican blogger John Cole summed it up:

The Illness - reckless and irresponsible betting led to huge losses

The Diagnosis - Insufficient gambling.

The Cure - a Trillion dollar stack of chips provided by the house.

The Prognosis - We are so screwed.

Another New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, quoted a letter to the editor: "President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived."

Canadians will have to wait to see if they're in the path of the storm, and what the Harper government will do about it.

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.


A brief note on this. Paul Krugman was a bear on the US economy for the past 3 years, but generally blasted Nouriel Roubini, as being way off base. Roubini, who I feel is now going a bit overboard in self-advertising, was, and still is, absolutely correct. PK has offered a number of small, slow and intermediate (within articles), notes to NB - an inkling of apology. PK and NB are now totally in editorial agreement - so watch what they say, take it in.

The fact that Paul Krugman is now coming out openly, even more pessimistic than Nouriel Roubini, and editorially blast the Obama administration on economic policy (when he has been a big fan for over a year) is telling.

Canada, watch out.

#2 mat

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Posted 29 March 2009 - 12:47 PM

New York Times has launched an online Global edition http://global.nytimes.com/

#3 AnonAnnie2

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Posted 29 March 2009 - 03:50 PM

yum yum yummy!!! Thanks for the link!

#4 mat

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Posted 21 April 2009 - 10:22 PM

This is lovely...

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 21, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO

Alfred Hitchcock would have loved the Twitter headquarters here. Birds gathering everywhere, painted on the wall in flocks, perched on the coffee table, stitched on pillows and framed on the wall with a thought bubble asking employees to please tidy up after themselves.

In a droll nod to shifting technology, there’s a British red telephone booth in the loftlike office that you are welcome to use but you’ll have to bring in your cellphone.

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)

I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.

ME: You say the brevity of Twitter enhances creativity. So I wonder if you can keep your answers to 140 characters, like Twitter users must. Twitter seems like telegrams without the news. We now know that on the president’s trip to Trinidad, ABC News’s Jake Tapper’s shower was spewing brown water. Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?

BIZ: The one I’m thinking right now.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.

ME: I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

EVAN: I have private pain every day.

ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?

ME: Do you ever think “I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?”

BIZ: If I said I was eating a hamburger, Evan would be surprised because I’m a vegan.

ME: What do you think about the backlash to Twitter on the blogs? Isn’t that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?

BIZ: If people are passionate about your product, whether it’s because they’re hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios. People can use it to help each other during fuel shortages or revolts or earthquakes or wildfires. That’s the exciting part of it.

ME: Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?

BIZ: With Twitter, it’s as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.

(They’re spilling past 140 characters now, but it must feel good to climb out of their Twitter bird cage. Evan has to leave. Biz and I continue.)

ME: Don’t you get worried about being swallowed up by Google?

BIZ: They don’t swallow you up. They call you up.

ME: Why did you call the company Twitter instead of Clutter?

BIZ: We had a lot of words like “Jitter” and things that reflected a hyper-nervousness. Somebody threw “Twitter” in the hat. I thought “Oh, that’s the short trivial bursts of information that birds do.”

ME: Oprah unleashed mayhem in the Twittersphere last week when, in her first tweet, she greeted “Twitters” instead of “Twitterers.”

BIZ: I’m still kinda old-school. We’re twittering, and we’re all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don’t love is twits.

ME: Would Shakespeare have tweeted?

BIZ: Brevity’s the soul of wit, right?

ME: Was there anything in your childhood that led you to want to destroy civilization as we know it?

BIZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?

ME: What’s your favorite book?

BIZ: I loved Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid.

ME: But you’ve helped destroy mystery.

BIZ: When you put more information out there, sometimes you can just put a little bit of it out, which just makes the mystery even broader.

ME: When newsprint blows away, I want a second career as a Twitter ghostwriter. Which celebrity on Twitter most needs my help?

BIZ: Definitely not Shaq. Britney, maybe.

ME: Gavin Newsom announced his candidacy for governor today on Twitter and elsewhere. Does that make you the new Larry King?

BIZ: Did he? I didn’t know.

ME: Have you thought about using even fewer than 140 characters?

BIZ: I’ve seen people twitter in haiku only. Twit-u. James Buck, the student who was thrown into an Egyptian prison, just wrote “Arrested.”

ME: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?

BIZ: Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message “Help.”



#5 G-Man

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Posted 22 April 2009 - 08:32 AM

Cute.

#6 Mike K.

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 10:42 AM

New York Times reporter John Broder wrote a scathing review of Tesla Motor Co's all-electric vehicle in a recent edition of the paper. He claimed the charge did not last as long as advertised, the vehicle performed poorly in colder weather, and wasn't anywhere near up to snuff relative to marketing campaigns and other reviews.

...except his review wasn't entirely honest. It turns out Tesla packages a tracking system on every vehicle it supplies to the media and was able to tap into the vehicles actual usage reports. So Tesla came out swinging and announced Broder's review was nothing more than bull crap.

This, of course, turned into a battle royale where Broder & Co. challenged Tesla's reporting system, even suggesting it was baseless. This only encouraged Tesla to push the issue further. Eventually CNN attempted to duplicate the same review conditions Broder described and they found the vehicle operated as specified.

But the plot thickened even further. As news spread about the false review it was revealed that Broder is not even an auto industry reporter but a specialist an oil industry specialist. Oops.

So there we have it, a perfect example of a reporter going down in flames for (allegedly) blindly towing the line of the oil industry, penning a false review and eventually getting exactly what he deserved. The New York Times' image has also been tainted with a lot of people wondering if this is a typical day in the life of that paper or a messy one-off.

That aside I actually saw several Tesla vehicles cruising along LA's freeways last week. They're beautiful cars and within a decade should become affordable for the masses.

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#7 jonny

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 12:57 PM

^ The weakest links right now with electric vehicles are the cost and charging. Until they can get the cost down to $20-30k and get the charging up to a super high standard (i.e. fully charging a car within 10 minutes), forget about it.

I think it's possible that manufacturers can get these two variables under control, but IMO they are big hurdles at the moment. The price variance between a Tesla (I believe the lowest cost model is around $50k) and a comparable gasoline powered vehicle is significant and can buy a lot of fuel.

The relatively long charging times required for these Tesla's means that a lot more planning has to go into a person's daily routine, and road trips require more planning and then waiting to charge the batteries back up at charging stations. At the moment, you couldn't drive a Tesla from Victoria to Kelowna, for instance. Right now this makes EVs impractical for most people.

They do seem like cool vehicles, although I would miss clutching and shifting.

#8 G-Man

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 01:48 PM

I think it depends on what you are using it for. The Model S has a range of 480 kms on a charge and if you get a supercharger installed in your garage the charge time is about an hour. A regular charger will charge overnight. How often r people going more than 480kms?

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#9 jonny

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 02:12 PM

I think it depends on what you are using it for. The Model S has a range of 480 kms on a charge and if you get a supercharger installed in your garage the charge time is about an hour. A regular charger will charge overnight. How often r people going more than 480kms?


I think most people use cars as multi-purpose vehicles, and not just for one purpose. Commuting, day trips, longer road trips, running errands, etc., are some of the various ways people use vehicles.

First off, 480 kms is what Tesla claims will be the fuel economy. I have yet to get as good of fuel economy as the manufacturers claim of any of the cars I have owned. They must test fuel economy with the vehicle traveling down hill and with the wind.

Using driving to Kelowna as an example, you could not drive to Kelowna on one charge (5ish hour drive from Vancouver). That, to me, would be a pain. I drove 1,200 kms last weekend (2 tanks of gas in my car), which would have been much more inconvenient to accomplish with an EV. The charging time would severely hamper my decision to purchase that particular vehicle, but as infrastructure and charging times improve, this will improve.

Another thing to consider is cold weather. Rarely due many places in North America have the kind of warm temperatures that are optimal conditions for EVs.

At this point, the Tesla is an expensive toy. A cool toy, but still a toy. We'll see where the technology goes.

As for the NYT journo...what a goof. Journalistic integrity at its finest...

#10 Mike K.

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 02:14 PM

Tesla's are luxury vehicles and the price isn't as high if you take that into account. As the technology matures they'll come down in price, though.

But even if the price remains out of reach of an average buyer, they'll still push enough tin to those who can afford the brand.

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#11 aastra

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 02:15 PM

The New York Times' image has also been tainted...

It makes me think of a barge full of rotting trash getting tainted when somebody adds an empty soda can onto the top of the pile.

#12 Holden West

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 02:22 PM

It's impossible to criticize any shortcomings in the Times' article without admitting the crazy accusations of the Tesla CEO. It's an admitted fact that the Times writer was given contradictory and wrong advice prior to and during the test drive as well.

The Times ombudsperson comments:

http://publiceditor....-in-tesla-test/

And here's the reporters point-by-point rebuttal of the Tesla criticism:

http://wheels.blogs....what-it-doesnt/

Tesla personnel told me over the phone that they were able to monitor the state of the battery. It was they who cleared me to leave Norwich after an hour of charging. I spoke at some length with Mr. Straubel and Ms. Ra six days after the trip, and asked for the data they had collected from my drive, to compare against my notes and recollections. Mr. Straubel said they were able to monitor “certain things” remotely and that the company could store and retrieve “typical diagnostic information on the powertrain.”

Mr. Straubel said Tesla did not store data on exact locations where their cars were driven because of privacy concerns, although Tesla seemed to know that I had driven six-tenths of a mile “in a tiny 100-space parking lot.” While Mr. Musk has accused me of doing this to drain the battery, I was in fact driving around the Milford service plaza on Interstate 95, in the dark, trying to find the unlighted and poorly marked Tesla Supercharger. He did not share that data, which Tesla has now posted online, with me at the time.


I appreciate the irony of high-mindedly using exaggeration and unfounded rumours to counter an organization you think uses exaggeration and unfounded rumours.
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#13 VicHockeyFan

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Posted 19 February 2013 - 04:39 PM


They do seem like cool vehicles, although I would miss clutching and shifting.


I'd only miss that because I know it gives me power, how and when I want it. Electric cars have scary torque, I think you'd like it.
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