Astrogirl

…but this is the funniest thing I’ve seen this week:

This publication obtained audiotapes of two meetings conducted by recently departed ad sales EVP Lisa Brown. In them, she repeatedly launches into obscenity-laced tirades, personally insults senior executives in her group, and at one point, pounds her shoe on the table, Khrushchev-style, when a creative director [...]

On Tuesday, Don Henley, yes that Don Henley, wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post called Killing the Music. While he’s certainly right that the music business is in trouble, I don’t think he truly understands why. I suppose he could be forgiven for getting it wrong. The music business certainly gets [...]

As you may or may not know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics do not count certain unemployed persons in the splashy, front-page unemployment number. These people are described as follows: “In some month, about n persons were marginally attached to the labor force…These individuals wanted and were available to work and had looked [...]

Bush’s decision to open the Tongass National Forest (in Alaska) to logging has officially bitten him in the ass. From USA Today:

The tree-huggers fume that government subsidies to the timber industry cost taxpayers hundreds of millions, and the nearly 5,000 miles of existing logging roads are enough. But a powerful rumble of discontent is [...]

The Atkins diet is under fire from all sides this week, it seems. Mayor Bloomberg chose to question the honesty of the some his own state’s M.E.s by suggesting that Dr. Atkins actually died from his diet instead of a blow to the head from falling on an icy sidewalk. Veronica Atkins is [...]

Recently, I was able to purchase from the Apple iTunes store an old favorite of mine, Alice Cooper’s _Elected_. After listening to that repeatedly, I started to think about a mix tape of rock and roll songs I could find that are about politics, but not about Viet Nam or the USSR or any [...]

The new Medicare legislation actually provides a giant subsidy to Corporate America: “Some companies with many retired workers are expected to post big earnings gains for 2003 or 2004, thanks to accounting guidelines for subsidies under the federal prescription-drug program.” That gets right down to it. Of course there’s more:

…if an employer [...]

In this Barron’s article, Hugh Hendry briefly explains what happens when you print too much currency. He uses the classic example — John Law’s French fiat currency disaster.

He pulls no punches:

The response to the crash since March 2000 has been to create even more money. Just as it was 300 years ago. We’ve created [...]

From Steve Roach’s column today:

The Europeans and Japanese believe they have suffered enough and are pointing the finger at others — mainly China — to pick up the slack. US politicians are also sympathetic to this line of reasoning. Consequently, the role that China plays in venting global imbalances is also likely to be [...]

I can’t really figure out how the .3% lost from the Producer Price Index in November is supposed to be a good thing[1]. This number came out before the negative Consumer Confidence data which was credited with taking the market lower. In any case, they still don’t say much about what falling producer [...]