This is an appropriate final post. For this, for me.

July 1 is my catalyst. Goodbye all!

Wow, missed this story and its Catfishy elements. First of all, rooting for Katie Bakes career and should read her more. Second, so crazy how the internet has so quickly become that virtual world for all of us who can’t handle IRL.

I have never considered this my story; it has always been my secret. I told no one while it was happening, and for years afterward I never said a word. Why would I? Even the happiest-ending anecdotes about my Internet past had long been social suicide. (Friends seeing theBusinessWeek article for the first time tended towards the same reaction: “Oh my god, look at you!” they’d say. “You were such a little loser!”) The thought of divulging all the darker details made me nauseous. It was a lonely silence. I had always gone online as a respite from life’s dull and daily troubles, but as with any shameful vice — addiction, debt — the solution turned into its own problem somewhere along the way.

If there was anyone who might relate to this, I realized, it was probably the group of mostly bloggers crowded into a small bar on the Lower East Side last June for a reading series whose vague mandate was “stories about the Internet.” So I stood up, drunk and terrified, on my 27th birthday, and explained everything that happened from beginning to end.

My hunch that I might find a sympathetic crowd here turned out to be true. Afterward, people came up to me to recall their own oddball histories, with GeoCities, or wArEz, or — of course — AOL. Others seemed glad to know they weren’t the only creeps who had sent letters and packages to Internet friends, or even gone so far as to meet them offline. One or two just wanted to reminisce about eWorld, and the thrill of its little red mail truck. And it turned out I wasn’t the only one to have played fast and loose with my identity: a few people cataloged some former online untruths of their own.

Isn’t that the ultimate blessing of the Internet? Sure, it lets you lie and deceive. But it also lets you confess, and draw a small community to your confession, and find, eventually, a clean, well-lighted place for your real self.

WTF didn’t we just raise taxes on the country two months ago?

Ah yes only the regressive taxes work :).

We’ll see on this. I need a hashtag for Who Run the World. Girls. 

But it’s an interesting time and place in American business, given the sources of Ms. Sandberg’s wealth and her present ability to compensate not only herself but large armies of extremely highly educated subordinates in a paper worth more/less (no judgments here) than greenbacks. With that kind of power, why wouldn’t these companies be able to accommodate in ways impossible globally?

But anyway, its such a niche dream regardless, she’s basically speaking to this tiny sliver of ivy league girls out there. Everyone knows they should be CEOs, we get it. 

When her book is published March 11, accompanied by a carefully orchestrated media campaign, she hopes to create her own version of the consciousness-raising groups of yore: “Lean In Circles,” as she calls them, in which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success. (First assignment: a video on how to command more authority at work by changing how they speak and even sit.) 

“I always thought I would run a social movement,” Sandberg, 43, said in an interview for “Makers,” a new documentary on feminist history. 

 

With less than three weeks until launch - which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home - organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up. 

Even her advisers acknowledge the awkwardness of a woman with double Harvard degrees, dual stock option riches (from Facebook and Google, where she also worked), a 9,000-square-foot house and a small army of household help urging less fortunate women to look inward and work harder. 

Big Brother gon’ be everywhere, disguised as “data for you.” This is the camera in your car, the new IntelTV has a camera in your set top box and now we gotcha.

Most variants of this model rely on a simple device in the car that beams data back to the insurance company. (Other schemes, like one operated by Aviva, a British insurer, rely on smartphone apps downloaded by customers.) In America, the focus is on how much time a car spends on the road, or “pay-as-you-drive”. Europe, where Britain and Italy lead the field, has typically emphasised driver ability (“pay-how-you-drive”), tallying how often brakes are slammed or corners taken on two wheels. Some devices include location-tracking options that can figure out if, say, a car is doing 80mph in a 50mph zone.

Let’s just get right down to it: white people are corny and corny USED to be the last thing that was acceptable in rap. “Thrift Shop” is a funny song—I had no idea its gotten to #1—but it’s ridiculously corny and only deserves to be listened to once.

I loved Harlem Shake before this meme nonsense but everyone turning into a “I can’t dance” EDM rave is just sad. 

Let white people have their popular, corny music, just like they have Taylor Swift. It’s just a subgenre of rap…the real danger is rap allowing people to appropriate their craft and then hide away from the umbrella of rap “I’m indie” instead of coming out and saying it.

Depending on your lens, this reflects a tremendous cultural victory for hip-hop or the moment when hip-hop, as a construct, begins to lose meaning. What it really portends is hip-hop’s centerless future, in which its elements and references will be widely up for grabs — even more so than they are now — and used in unanticipated ways, inevitably weakening the center, and maybe undoing it altogether.

Hated the end but this was another sad indictment of the pathetic millenial man. It’s nice to be the present-day antagonist: everything wrong with modern society, I represent.

Pretty..

Very astute. In my eyes deficit reduction has reached fetish levels in Washington because it gives everyone  an opportunity to shake down every single  one of the “special interests” they rely on to keep them in office. With a random sequester, everybody’s got a reason to lobby and the longer I can make it a football kicking around the more I can extract. 

The secret to the special treatment that deficit reduction enjoys in Washington, I think, is that it’s a rare policy area that lends itself to pox-on-both-their-houses politics. “It’s such fun for me to irritate the AARP and Grover Norquist in equal measure,” Simpson told Allen. “It makes your life worthwhile.” It also makes deficit reduction a safe topic for otherwise strenuously nonpartisan figures to issue strong opinions on. After all, they can’t be accused of being partisan, as both parties are standing in the way!

This elite consensus is the context for Simpson’s schtick. Much of the Washington establishment — insofar as such a thing exists — really does want a big deficit deal and really is furious at the Republicans and the Democrats and everyone else they perceive as standing in the way. And so they cheer Simpson calling out the frauds and the fools obstructing his self-evidently noble mission. And Simpson is all too happy to indulge them.

Simpson’s phrasing is typically extreme, but this kind of thinking is a constant hum beneath the deficit debate. There’s a widely acknowledged nobility and morality to proposing painful plans that would require lots of sacrifice — though the worst of that sacrifice rarely falls on the kind of people putting together these plans. Oppose them and you are, if not literally betraying your country, putting something — perhaps partisanship, or special interests — before it.

Also no one reporting on this will feel an ounce of these cuts.

Feel like I’ve seen this chart a million times. Still induces an audible gasp.

nbaoffseason:

gotemcoach:

THE OSCAR ROBERTSONS: The award for biggest disappointment goes to…L.A. Misérables 

They all hate each other.  Life sucks.  When does this end?

[poster reference]

Steve Nash & Anne Hathaway share the same barber. How perfect is that?

Too big to trial…

The settlements present a significant shift. Authorities have long avoided guilty pleas over fears they will destroy the banks and imperil the broader economy. By going after a subsidiary, prosecutors shield the parent company from losing its license, but still send a warning to the financial industry.

For one, banking regulators are likely to sound alarms about the economy. HSBCavoided charges in a money laundering case last year after concerns arose that an indictment could put the bank out of business. In the first interest rate-rigging case, prosecutors briefly considered criminal charges against an arm of Barclays, but they hesitated given the bank’s cooperation and its importance to the financial system, two people close to the case said.

Could this make me more excited for the future? Been salivating for so long.

So true. The girl starts it and you have to match her emotion.

Have I mentioned that I love Jen Doll?

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer, notes that elongations, like emoticons and initialisms (OMG! LOL!), tend to flourish in those venues most starved for nuance. “When you’re dealing with IM, texting, and Twitter, those discursive functions that add to the simple message are really crucial,” he said. These tactics suggest that the process linguists call “accommodation”—the way speaking styles converge when humans talk to one another, facilitating both conversation and a sense of common identity—is not limited to spoken communication. “We’re navigating different registers all the time, finding out what’s appropriate,” Zimmer said. But “when those registers don’t match our expectations”—when our best friend begins a text with “Dear Jennifer,” or someone responds Hello to our Hiiiiiii—“that’s when we wonder if things are running afoul.”

Why isn’t this front page news?

Details on the carbon tax are scant, but previous reports indicated that it would come into force by 2015 and might start at 10 yuan ($1.60) per tonne of carbon, rising to 50 yuan ($8) per tonne by 2020. Notably, the tax would be collected by local tax authorities, and not municipal environmental protection bureaus.