$6800 audio cables at amazon.. Don't miss the product reviews.

What Good is Wall Street? (NewYorker)

Other regulators have gone further. Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. In a recent article titled “What Do Banks Do?,” which appeared in a collection of essays devoted to the future of finance, Turner pointed out that although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth—payments that economists refer to as rents. “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value,” Turner wrote. “Financial innovation . . . may in some ways and under some circumstances foster economic value creation, but that needs to be illustrated at the level of specific effects: it cannot be asserted a priori.”
Turner’s viewpoint caused consternation in the City of London, the world’s largest financial market. A clear implication of his argument is that many people in the City and on Wall Street are the financial equivalent of slumlords or toll collectors in pin-striped suits. If they retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
Krugman, NYTimes, "There Will Be Blood"

Toilet paper roll art

"the" project

An interesting NYTimes interview with Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch (nytimes)
Most monopolists create a golden age that lasts a decade or more,  and then slowly they became more interested in being in power. AT&T became dangerous when they began to suppress technologies that might threaten their rule.

"Linotype: The Film" Teaser from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.
Linotype film teaser

Sons of Pong (boingboing)

Bill Moyers at the BU Howard Zinn Memorial lecture on how corruption has moved from a side-dish in policy to the main course.

from How Twitter Made Handwriting Cool. (telegraph uk)
A few years ago, a number of pencil bloggers announced that the discontinued Eberhard-Faber Blackwing 602 was, not to put too fine a point on it, the greatest pencil ever. A sleek black object with an oversized ferrule (eraser holder) and the charismatic epithet, ‘half the pressure, twice the speed’ embossed on its shaft, it was declared ‘the world’s best pencil’ by American author Joseph Finder. 

Pencil bloggers.  I'm beginning to think that this old blog isn't specific enough for these modern fetishist times.

Pontiac, as of yesterday, is no more.