Althouse

"A burbled value of $100 billion would price [Facebook] at an earnings multiple of 100 to one."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:58:00 +0000

"Fast-growing Apple is currently valued at 13 to one. Google is valued at 20 to one. Facebook isn't LinkedIn or eToys or even Google."

Like a bank, it must care about its dignity and an image for stability because of its intimate relationship of trust with its 845 million members, who know their unparalleled cache of personal information is about to turn Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into a billionaire 24 times over.

So far, Mr. Zuckerberg and colleagues have been more cautious in exploiting customer data than they get credit for. But let us be frank: There is no way the company can grow into such a gargantuan market value by adding even hundreds of millions of new members if it continues to extract only $1 in profit per year per user.

ADDED: In evaluating the worth of Facebook, can we take their judgment in interior design into account?

That is Facebook's own photo, so they are not ashamed to go out into the world looking like that. Disturbing! Those paper lanterns projecting out into the doorway or stuck back behind a trashcan and a rolling chair. The diagonal stripes on the carpet and continuing — miniaturized and de-diagonalized — on one wall. The horrid clock as the only thing hanging on the wall. I couldn't work in an environment like that, and yet the 2 individuals sitting on that crappy brown sectional couch are both billionaires. And they are billionaires in the business of creating something that will occupy the visual field of hundreds of millions of human beings. Something is terribly wrong!

The NYT "pounced on a murky tale about a star athlete" instead of "the erosion of due process at Yale and throughout American higher education."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:52:00 +0000

Writes Peter Berkowitz in the Wall Street Journal:

The [sexual assault] complaint lodged against [quarterback Patrick] Witt was part of a new system for dealing with sexual-assault accusations at Yale. The school put the system in place at least partly in response to an investigation by the Department of Education stemming from allegations in early 2011 that Yale maintains a campus atmosphere hostile to women. Under the new system, the Times reported, Mr. Witt's accuser chose to file an informal complaint, which does not involve a full investigation or a finding of guilt or innocence....

"My entire taxable income, plus some, went to the payment of taxes."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:55:00 +0000

"This does not include real estate taxes, sales taxes and other taxes I paid for 2010."

Oh? We should care? He's 1%. He should pay. Jesus wants him to pay.

Anyway, the key word is "taxable." Throw all the deductions back in and he's only paying 20%. Obviously, then, he should be paying even more. Jesus wants him to pay more.

"For me as a Christian, it... coincides with Jesus's teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required," Obama said, quoting the Gospel of Luke.

"If they began this project where they want it to go — between San Francisco and Los Angeles..."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:31:00 +0000

"... they would run into so much opposition from the environmentalists, and from local politicians influenced by the environmentalists, that the delays could take the high-speed rail advocates beyond the time limit for using the federal subsidy money. But the green fanatics have not yet taken over politically out in the San Joaquin Valley."

Writes Thomas Sowell about the high-speed rail line between Fresno and Bakersfield, California.

In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.

Scott Walker supporters advocate writing in Scott Walker's name in the primary that will determine who will be his recall opponent.

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:48:00 +0000

A devious notion!

It started as a conversation on Facebook, but less than a week ago [it became] the page Operation: Write in Scott Walker in Democrat Primary...

And it's got 834 "likes" as I write this.

Wisconsin's system of open primaries means voters do not have to share a political party's affiliation to vote in its primary. So, there's nothing to stop Republicans from voting in a Democratic recall primary — and from writing in Walker's name.

If this effort were successful, it's unclear what the effect would be on the general recall election. The Government Accounability Board was contacted Friday, but didn't immediately provide an answer....

When asked about his initial impression of the write-in campaign, Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Graeme Zielinksi said it was, “Surprise, then laughter.” Zielinski said the effort has no chance of succeeding.

“Republicans seem frightened by democracy and the will of the people and, given what Scott Walker has done to ruin Wisconsin, they should be,” Zielinski said.

Ha ha. I'm laughing too!

ADDED: I'm working on a parody "I'm My Own Recall Opponent," to the tune of "I'm My Own Grandpa." ("I'm My Own Grandpa" lyrics here.)

AND: I like the diagrammed version:

(The voice there is Ray Stevens. The first version, above, was Grandpa Jones. The second one... ?)

"Avoid the gruesome pitfalls of overdressing or underdressing."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:48:00 +0000

"Simply dress like you are going someplace better later."

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor tells a joke about Romney and Mormons and polygamy and Gingrich.

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:13:00 +0000

"One is a practicing polygamist, and he's not even the Mormon."

That sounds like a joke that's just out there waiting for everyone to discover it. I find it hard to believe that she's the first person to say it... and also that she did say it.

"The NFL Has an 'L' of a Problem."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:53:00 +0000

In 2016, it will be Super Bowl L... unless they give up the Roman numerals thing.

The Roman numerals got hard to read quite a while ago, but getting to the simple "L" for 50 is going to look weirder than any of the elaborate configurations of letters we've had to puzzle over — or ignore — in recent years.

"What Time Does the Superbowl Start?"

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:06:00 +0000

= the best-ever string of words for pulling internet traffic.

Part of the strategy is the missing space. It should be: Superb Owl.

AND: Speaking of the Super Bowl, here's Madonna:

Who doesn't want to walk along the helmeted heads of football players as if they were a cobblestone street? And... where can I get wall-sconces like that (see 2:25)?

"When Iyal is distressed, Chancer is distressed. Unlike Iyal, Chancer knows what to do about it."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:56:00 +0000

"Iyal rages by crossing his arms, sitting down hard on the floor and screaming and kicking. Chancer unknots the crossed arms by inserting his wide muzzle through the locked arms from below, opening them up and nuzzling toward Iyal’s face, licking and slobbering, until the boy’s screams turn to tears of remorse or to laughter.... Chancer doesn’t know that Iyal is cognitively impaired. What he knows is that Iyal is his boy."

A dog and his boy.

Shouldn't Democrats have had a viable candidate lined up before they went to all the trouble to get a million signatures on those Recall Walker petitions?

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:27:00 +0000

This list of 11 potential candidates is horrifying — or hilarious, depending on how much you like Governor Scott Walker. I mean, Citizen Dave has the 11 in order, and #1 is Herb Kohl! Herb Kohl is a 76-year-old man who's retiring from the U.S. Senate after a quarter century (and very little to show for it). According to Dave, the great thing about Kohl is that he's very rich, so he can use his own money. Note the implied concession: People aren't going to want to make contributions to the other candidates. But, look, there are no donation limits in the recall election. If Kohl wants to dump his money into the election, he can hand it to whomever he wants.Maybe one of the other 10 characters on Dave's list. Maybe #6, Kathleen Falk, who is, you know, the only person on the list who's actually announced her/his candidacy.

ADDED: Here's the Government Accountability Boards memo about contributions for recall expenses. The exemption applies to money used "for the purpose of payment of legal fees and other expenses incurred in connection with the circulation, offer to file or filing, or with the response to the circulation, offer to file or filing, of a petition to recall an officer prior to the time a recall primary or election is ordered, or after that time if incurred in contesting or defending the order."

"Even if he has the proportions of a porn star..."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:05:00 +0000

"... no intellectual woman with an ounce of self-respect would flop around in the mud with an imbecile like Meade."

The people over in the Isthmus forum are trying to understand Meade.

ADDED: That's from page 5 of a thread that begins with the question why the forum — called "Daily Page" forum or "TDPF" — doesn't seem to have any participants who are "non-white." By page 3, there's some bizarre race-baiting about intelligence, in which — you figure out why — it is demanded that Meade admit he is less intelligent than Barack Obama.

ALSO: If you really want to go deeply into the background here, the subject of the thread "TDPF: whites only" is a play on an earlier thread "South Carolina GOP: whites only," which began "South Carolina's population is nearly 30% black. Yet in yesterday's voting, blacks made up approximately 1% of the electorate. It's remarkable how little discussion there is about this...." In that conversation, Meade tells the good liberals of the forum that they are displaying "covert racism," and much defensive posturing ensues.

At the No Photograph Café...

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:52:00 +0000

This is an open thread with no photograph. I'm sorry. You should see what it's like here in Wisconsin. There's nothing to photograph. We're stuck in this slough of not-winter in mid-winter. Please! Chat with me. Dissipate the bleakness!

"Xylophone-powered pop is still a rarity and this Como track is almost entirely lost to history, even though it is a great hellzapoppin romp through falling in love."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:03:00 +0000

"Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)" is #99 on the countdown of 100 greatest songs that reached #2 — but not #1! — on the Billboard list over the years going back to 1955. This is List-a-Beefy's new project. (Click on my List-a-Beefy tag to see past posts linking to the previous Top 100, which was limited to recordings that reached #1.)

"Hot Diggity" was #2 for 5 weeks in April and May of 1956. Rightfully blocking its ascent was "Heartbreak Hotel" (my favorite Elvis Presley record). I say that now. But at the time, when I was 5 years old, I adored Perry Como (and I didn't quite get Elvis Presley). I watched his television show, and I loved his very calm, gentle way of singing and speaking. This is how it looked in 1956. (Yikes! Be careful watching that. It's really wholesome.)

What proportion of libertarians...

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:42:00 +0000

... are just liberals who want their marijuana?

"Donald Trump to endorse Mitt Romney for president today in Las Vegas, sources with knowledge of endorsement tell CNN."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:37:00 +0000

Email just received.

Trump's a businessman. He can see who the winner is, and he's backing the winner. Rumors were that he was going to endorse Gingrich, as if Trump is all about conservatism (and Newt constitutes the conservative). Not so!

"In truth, the art project is akin to a massive resource extraction project, and under federal law should be treated as one..."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:42:00 +0000

So reads the complaint in a lawsuit brought by a group of University of Denver law students against federal land managers who approved Christo's draping fabric over 6 miles of the Arkansas River.

[I]n classifying an art project as a “recreation activity,” the suit says, the federal analysts framed their assessment in ways that excused the impact of the thousands of bore-holes, rock-bolts and anchors that will have a cumulative effect, the suit says, not unlike industrial mining.

This is a new twist on the old "what is art?" question. These law students are arguing about the art/mining distinction.

Let me add: I love Christo. I used to hate him.

"12 More Law Schools Sued Over Reporting of Law Grad Employment and Salary Stats."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:01:00 +0000

ABA Journal reports:

Plaintiffs contend that they were misled by the statistics into taking on a heavy debt burden in pursuit of employment as attorneys that was much harder to find than the job stats provided by the law schools suggested. They also allege that salary figures may have been compiled from a small sample of law grads with fatter-than-average paychecks.

"That the man who wrote the song 'Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud' and who recorded the soundtrack to the Black Power movement..."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:52:00 +0000

"... could scarcely comprehend that a black man like Cornelius both owned and helmed this kind of enterprise without white patronage is a testament to the magnitude and the improbability of Cornelius' achievements."

From a column at NPR.org titled "Why Don Cornelius Matters."

(Unfortunately, Don Cornelius committed suicide.)

Under the "Adopt a Vortex" program, Mini Cooper paid to have a cold front named "Cooper."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:46:00 +0000

But now the cold front has caused many cases of hypothermia and frostbite and at least 100 deaths.

"She said her cat died after getting entangled in piles of Etsy fabrics..."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:25:00 +0000

"... boxes of paperwork, trash and other possessions, while a dog died allegedly after swallowing a pile of Love’s pills."

Graffiti artist makes $200 million.

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:21:00 +0000

David Choe painted some walls at Facebook's offices in 2005 and — given a choice to be paid in dollars or company shares — took the shares.

The walls look pretty awful, by the way, but presumably they inspired the people in that place at that time, and how can you not feel good that Choe made the right choice?

The Government Accountability Board puts scanned recall petitions on line — even though the ACLU raised concerns about privacy.

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:52:00 +0000

The petitions show over a million names and addresses of (purported) Wisconsin citizens who (presumably) want a recall election to remove Governor Scott Walker.

I'm saying "purported" because I don't know the extent to which there are fake names or names of non-Wisconsinites in there. And I'm saying "presumably" because I don't know whether people signed their names as a result of what they truly want and whether they all understood what they were signing.

Anyway, the ACLU concern seems to be about stalkers. Some people have good reason not to want their name connected to an address in such a visible manner. In fact, I assume that there are some people who signed the petition who would not have signed if they had been warned that this would happen.

Right now, it's very hard to look up names, because the GAB website only has scanned petition PDFs up. You can't do a search for names.

Walker supporters have until Feb. 26 to challenge signatures. The Republican Party has more than 2,000 volunteers lined up to review signatures. It takes 540,208 to force a recall.

Obviously, these people could type all the names and addresses and post them on line. That would make it very easy to look up names, and I've said before that I want that so people (like me) can make sure our names were not appropriated by others and so we can look for duplicate names and suspiciously overused addresses. But since the total number of signatures submitted is so much larger than the number required, it's much less important to work at weeding out all the bad names. Not that there shouldn't be any checking. There should a process of sampling petitions to get a sense of the degree of accuracy, and if the incidence of bad signatures does not exceed, say, 5%, then we could feel confident that there are enough signatures (since nearly 50% of the signatures would need to be bad to avoid the recall election).

On the other hand, as a political matter, in fighting the recall, Walker supporters have an interest in portraying the recall effort as spurious, so if they can point to petition fraud, even if it is insufficient to avoid the election, it may help Walker win.

2 Instapundit posts show some sharp, clear things that Romney can't say... but I like picturing Romney saying.

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:19:00 +0000

1. Here, Instapundit deals with Romney's supposedly unfortunate remark that he's "not concerned about the very poor":

Frankly, I think he’s got a point. People whose livelihood comes from the government — whether the very poor, or the government employees — are doing fine. It’s people who depend on the actual economy who are hurting.

2. This one links to something I said to Andrew Sullivan who'd taken shot at Romney/Mormons. Instapundit then prints email from Will Collier that says:

Disclaimer: I’ve got no particular use for Romney or anybody else still running this year. That said, whenever a yahoo like Sullivan pulls the “fake friendly” Mormon card over the next year, the response ought to be this speech from the end of the (in)famous South Park “All About Mormons” episode…

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

"Why are we laughing?"/"I'm not sure."

noreply blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:01:00 +0000

That's the last line of this montage of moments from David Letterman's 30-years of TV. That's at Gawker, and I'm seeing it this morning, so I missed the tip that there was a 30-years celebration on the show last night. I didn't record it, and I don't keep a DVR subscription to the show, a show that I watched all the time 10 years ago. Or was it 15 years ago?

What do you want to see in 2016?
	Super Bowl L
	Super Bowl 50

pollcode.com free polls

I'm talking about Americans who call themselves "libertarian" or who say they like Ron Paul and so forth...
	More than 50%.
	Maybe 20-50%.
	5-20%.
	Less than 5%.

pollcode.com free polls