This blog is about the Recession.
What I'm Reading:
Andrew Sullivan
Megan McArdle
Mutate!
The Technium
Tomorrow Museum
Warren Ellis
We Make Money Not Art
whYgenY
..I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there. At some point, industries enter a death spiral: too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers. That drives more customers away. Rinse and repeat….
Megan McArdle, “The Media Death Spiral”
…This one is for @jayrosen_nyu.
Source: The Atlantic
…So what are we to do now, after the crash? It’s not like anything is radically different. Radical change is, I think, impossible in modern America. For better or worse, we’ve achieved a state where, barring absolute cataclysm, we won’t be making any fundamental changes. At least, not ones that will last for very long.
So what do we do now, in the closest thing to a post-consumer society we’re ever likely to see?
Source: synapticstimuli.com
Post reblogged from Matt Payton's Tumble-o-rama with 8 notes
Quotation Of The Day
“And now there are five — five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called ‘talent,’ and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn’t know then that they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Now they do. And like a giant, gawking adolescent who’s just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can’t say no, the biggies will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks.”
[emphasis mine]
Source: mattpayton
The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead…The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse.
Source: arvidas
Variations on a Theme: After the Crash
“Theoretical and material concerns are much closer to one another than one may assume. It might be true that Thales, the first philosopher, fell into a well while gazing at the stars. But there is another famous anecdote about Thales, according to which he bought all the olive presses in Miletus ahead of a bountiful harvest, thus making a huge profit as a result of his monopoly. This successful business venture is far from being at odds with Thales’s lofty metaphysical work. In fact, both seem to be grounded on the very same activity, which we call “speculation.”…Their practice is based not on an empty prediction of the future, but on the present investment of their money or their mind in a commodity or an idea, with the hope that one day the value of their economical, social, symbolic, or cultural capital…”
— Notes for the Coming Community
…AND…
“One of the best ways you can prepare for the future is to train yourself to become an entrepreneur — essentially a person that makes their own economic opportunities. It’s going to become a major differentiator between those that succeed and those that fail in a harsh global system (this expertise has been deprecated by a system that prides itself on manufacturing salaried consumption bots). So, as your salary melts away, your pension evaporates, or your job gets outsourced — here’s a quick guide on how to bootstrap the process…
— Global Guerrillas
- Deconstruct any business you see. Estimate revenues. Evaluate competition and competitive advantage and marketing. Etc. Find out how they make money and how much.
- Get experience in an industry or area that you love (so much so that it doesn’t seem like work). Find out everything on how money flows in that industry/area. Who makes the most and why?
- Look for gaps, errors, and failures. Anything that can be improved in that target industry area. Evaluate the opportunity to fill that gap (less upfront cost the better)…
Source: ekstasis
Why Do Financial Crises Happen in the Fall?
Perhaps the rhythm of the school year, so ingrained in the American family’s calendar, means that problems that appear earlier in the year are allowed to fester during summer vacation and then finally explode right when workers return from the Poconos. Or perhaps the approaching Christmas-bonus season gets businesses and people looking more closely at their balance sheets.
Or perhaps it’s just randomness creating the illusion of a pattern. These are, after all, relatively few data points.
Are there alternative explanations?
— Catherine Rampell (via Tomorrow Museum)
…From the comments, suggestions include: (1) a lack of U.V. light, (2.) the zodiac…etc.
I’m willing to get behind the idea, proposed above, that it’s somehow tied to the concept of the summer vacation. For 22 years of my life, the time from approximately late May to early September held a sort of mystical feeling. I’ve always associated sumemr with a surreal feeling, with the idea of “not feeling like myself.” Perhaps I’ll escape this for a little while; but, should I ever have children, I’m sure to be plunged right back into (something like) that strange schedule from my own childhood. The patterns we lay down in out youth are powerful and influence our thinking about a variety of factors. Finance professionals are just as susceptible as the rest of us to falling back into old habits. It’s just…the consequences are just a bit different.
Source: The New York Times
IHS forecasts that a third of the nation’s metropolitan areas will have jobless rates in double digits in the fourth quarter of next year, and that 16 metro areas will have jobless rates exceeding 15%. The pain figures to be worst in California, which will have nine metro areas with jobless rates exceeding 15%. Michigan will have three, and Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Indiana one each…Things figure to be better by time President Barack Obama runs for re-election, but far from perfect: “By the end of 2012, the jobless rate will still be above historic norms, but it will finally slip below 8% in more than half of metro areas,” IHS says.
Source: The Atlantic
Photo reblogged from Ekstasis with 52 notes
Peter Bialobrzeski, ‘Transition #20’ 2005 (via Art Blart)
See also: Thomas Kneubühler, ’Electric Mountains, electric#6’
Also also: Larry Landolfi, ‘The Milky Road’
Also again: Edward Steichen, Flatiron Building, 1904
It’s not that we’ve stopped building; it’s just that with vast tracts of empty McMansions in the southwest and cities like Detroit crumbling into dust, with dormant cranes and windowless facades surrounding us, it seems as if we have. Those cranes were absolutely ubiquitous for years, filling in the skyline. Some of the projects are built but unoccupied, some are unfinished. The days when something like Dubai seemed anything less than psychotic are over. What happens now?
Source: claytoncubitt
Audio post reblogged from contra natura. with 64 notes - Played 275 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Richard Hell - ‘Blank Generation’
“…what motivated the “blank generation” more than anything else was the desire to make something new, and the most significant difference between punk in America and punk in England was the starting point. The British impulse, epitomized by the Sex Pistols, was to destroy, and indeed punk became notorious in America largely because of the Sex Pistols’ antics. The American impulse, on the contrary, was to assume simply that the slate was clean: a tabula rasa. There was less fury - at least until hardcore - in part because America had already destroyed itself. Nixon had resigned, the war in Vietnam was over, major cities had pockets of ruin and were on the verge of bankruptcy. There was nothing to destroy because there was nothing to destroy.”
(Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk)
yessssssssssssssssssssss
This set the wheels spinning. This post, if you get right down to it, is the reason I started this blog. Abstract and tangential though it may be, this post got me thinking about America and it’s economy in a way I simply hadn’t before.
We’ve broken everything we can break.
There is a very limited extent to which American society can change these days. Barring absolute cataclysm, we’re stuck with most of our basic institutions. Capitalism isn;t going anywhere, nor is our consumerism. This, right now, is the closest thing to a post-consumer society we’re likely to see. This is the most radical change we can hope for. Thus, I started thinking…Where do we go from here?
I don’t have an answer yet, not even a sketch of one, but this blog will be a chronicle of my thinking, a process of thought.
What comes next?
Source: hardcorefornerds
