Sunday, January 25, 2009

A Few Things We've Missed

Inauguration week is over, time for me to get back on the horse. Shorters, more or less.

Annals of awful advertising:

Old man yells at clouds.

How else do you shorterize this? Megan is yelling at ad copy for being unrealistic. Next she'll be claiming pornmakers use photoshop to make herpes sores go away.

Atlantic Business!:

What an amazing idea. In the midst of the biggest collection of financial crises since the you know what, how about trying to partially repurpose The Atlantic into a business trade rag based on the amazing talents and track record of one Megan McArdle?
The Atlantic is going out of business. I don't mean this snarkily, I mean if they think this is a good idea that will succeed in any way the people running it are so far removed from reality that collapse is the only possibility. I suppose David Bradley can keep it going so long as he stays solvent, but he'll be the only one reading it.

Question of the day:

Why am I the only one so politically tone deaf as to oppose helping people but favor more free money for banks?

John Thain ousted at Merrill Lynch:

I've actually developed quite a bit of sympathy for Mr. Thain. After all, he didn't create the mess at Merrill Lynch...
Heh, indeed.

Why is government IT so awful, Part III:

Because of regulations, duh. It might even be worth clicking over to this one, Megan doesn't realize how revealing she's being in it.

Huh?:

Nevermind the content of the post, if you hover over the url you'll noticed this is the fifth time Megan has used "Huh" (with or without the ?) as the title of a post. It's almost as if a pattern is emerging.

Politics hour:
As an aside, I have, in fact, been pretty impressed with Boehner so far.
Huh huh, she typed out "Boehner", huh huh.

Don't just stand there, do something!:
Stimulus is supposed to be, as Conor noted below, a short term and temporary strategy. But while it can ease the pain of a slowdown (at least in theory), as Tyler Cowen has been pointing out, the actual empirical evidence that massive government spending can shock an economy the size of ours into a permanently higher level of output is . . . well, it's sort of hard to find a wittily apt description of something that doesn't really exist.
There's a lot of solid Keynesian theory that says it will be so. But not that long ago we had a lot of pretty good theories from very smart economists about how this sort of financial crisis couldn't really happen again in the first place.
Once again, the failures of Friedmanites, Hayekians, and other free marketeers conclusively demonstrates the inadequacies of Keynesian theory.
Also, the fact that I haven't had a period in well over a month means Megan is pregnant.

3 comments:

spencer said...

if you hover over the url you'll noticed this is the fifth time Megan has used "Huh" (with or without the ?) as the title of a post.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it means it's the fifth time she's done so *this month.*

Susan of Texas said...

She's not even trying to write better posts now that she has a new venue.

Excellent!

Anonymous said...

Remember, government is incapable of doing anything right, including taking out the trash, so of course government IT is going to suck.

I work in government, and given what I've seen I think if she meant to say that "government IT sucks because it was mandated by the Bush Administration to be driven by profit-hungry contractors" she'd be closer to correct but would explode her own argument.