Finch

What About Friendster?

2006-10-16T23:21:13-04:00

I'll admit it up front, I absolutely abhor MySpace. Sure I have a page, but I never use it and every time I go in to that little world I end up with a headache. Friendster, on the other hand, I like and I have always liked it. Call me a crazy, but I sort of like having the people I meet filtered by an association with my friends or college or something. Let me tell you, I don't get random emails from kids via Friendster. So, in light of the personal preference and with all the Google/YouTube madness I was wondering what the heck happened to Friendster.

Gotta love the New York Times:

JONATHAN ABRAMS was in a spot. He could take the safe bet and accept the $30 million that Google was offering him for Friendster, the social networking Web start-up he began only a year earlier, in 2002. Saying yes to Google would provide a quick and stunning payout for relatively little work and instantly place the Friendster Web site in front of hundreds of millions of users across the globe.

Go for it, he did. Mr. Abrams spurned Google’s advances and charted his own course. In retrospect, he should have taken the $30 million. If Google had paid him in stock, Mr. Abrams would easily be worth $1 billion today, according to one person close to Google. And with Google’s ample resources, Friendster might have solidified its position as the pioneering front-runner in social networking. Instead, Mr. Abrams has the distinction of founding a company that is shorthand for potential unmet.

Technorati Tags: Friendster, Google, Friendster

More Evidence Lieberman is a Traitor

2006-10-16T13:43:03-04:00

Joe Lieberman is not a man who can be trusted. When he says that he will caucus with the Democrats should he win next month. I just don't believe him. He is probably so pissed that he lost the nomination and that many upstanding Democrats actually stand with the winner of the Democratic nomination that he will be motivated by revenge.

AP:

Lieberman told The Hartford Courant on Friday that his decision on whether to vote for Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell or Democratic New Haven Mayor John DeStefano will remain private.

...Lieberman also declined to comment Friday on whether he thinks the nation would be better off with the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives. "I haven't thought about that enough to give an answer," Lieberman told The Courant.

Lieberman has said he would remain a member of the Senate's Democratic caucus if he wins Nov. 7. He has also said that Senate Democratic leaders have told him he would retain his 18 years of seniority.

Ugh! I can not stomach this guy. You know all the Republicans will have to do is honor his seniority and he will caucus with them just to piss off all the people who hate him. Nothing would make me happier than to see Holy Joe go down in a blaze of glory.

Reactions from Warner Drop Out

2006-10-14T16:45:15-04:00

The reaction to Mark Warner dropping out of the 2008 presidential race has been pretty consistent.  Most people think that Hillary Clinton benefits from anyone dropping out.  Everyone also seems to think that Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) also benefit.  Personally, I like Evan Bayh a great deal, but I don't think he is presidential material.  He is just too boring.  McCain and/or Gulliani would eat him alive.  John Edwards has never really appealed to me either.  I really like and respect his focus on poverty in America, but I'm not sure that is enough to appeal to a majority of American voters.  He also suffers from the fact that he is so youthful looking, lacks foreign policy experience and has buckled to the pressures from the left of our great party and flipped on his Iraq vote.  I'm not a fan of the damn war, but if you can't stick up to the left-wing crazies then you don't really have a chance.

Adam Nagourney (NYT):

Mr. Warner, who five years ago became the first Democrat elected governor of Virginia since 1989, had drawn broad interest among party leaders assessing the potential 2008 field, both as a centrist elected in a Southern state and as a wealthy entrepreneur able to finance his own campaign.

...Mr. Bayh canceled a day of fund-raising in California so he could make telephone calls to try to corral some of Mr. Warner’s supporters and contributors, the senator’s aides said.

Blooberg News:

Mark Warner may be the first, yet probably not the last, of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who succumb to what might be called the Hillary Effect.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has carved out such formidable advantages in fundraising, organization and ideological positioning, they said, that lesser-known candidates such as Warner will find it hard to compete.

Clinton, 58, leads all likely Democratic rivals in early polls. She has amassed $22 million for her 2006 Senate re- election campaign and will be able to use any leftover money in 2008. And by adopting issue stands that are a fusion of what political professionals characterize as centrist and liberal positions, she has left little room for a rival to differentiate himself.

When Was Your First Time?

2006-10-14T16:44:03-04:00

Technorati Tags: First Time, Felicity Huffman, Vote

Harold Leads Corker

2006-10-13T12:56:59-04:00

I happened to catch the firs Ford/Corker Senate debate last weekend. Corker was totally unappealing. I can't see how anyone, even Southerns, would like that guy. This has always been an uphill battle for Democrats, but things are looking up:

PoliticalWire:

In Tennessee's U.S. Senate race, a new Rasmussen Reports poll shows Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) now leads Bob Corker (R) by just two points, 48% to 46%.

Key finding: "A good sign for the Democrat, who has been credited with running a very effective campaign, is that his supporters tend to be "for Ford" (72%) rather than 'against Corker' (23%). By contrast, just 54% of Corker supporters say they're "for Corker," and 41% say they're 'against Ford.'"

Bleezer

2006-10-12T11:32:17-04:00

Testing a posting using a new off-line editor called Bleezer. So, what is going on in the world today? I just read that Mark Warner has dropped out of the 2008 presidential race on the Democratic side. I must admit that is a pleasant surprise. I thought for sure he would give Hillary a run for her money, but alas she still dominates.

Here goes nothing.

Technorati: Bleezer

Oy Vey!: North Korea

2006-10-11T10:43:24-04:00

What an unmitigated mess we have with North Korea. While it would be nice to cast aside politics in moments like this we have to remember that everything is political when dealing with Republicans.

First up, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):

“I would remind Senator Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration’s policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure." - NYT 10/11/06

Didn't you just know it was going to be Clinton's fault? I really don't know what it is with these people, but everything is Clinton's fault with them. Even their very own Mark Foley scandal is somehow Clinton's fault in their twisted little pea brains.

The Republican logic via nimrod Condelezza Rice (how embarrassing is she?):

There is no doubt that the North Koreans used the cover of the framework agreement to pursue a different path to a nuclear weapon through highly enriched uranium. - NYDailyNews

(The one thing that I love about this quote, however, is how McCain, the presumed front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, directly references Sen. Hillary Clinton (R-NY), the presumed front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. The 2008 general election is on!)

Normally I would be a little worried about a national security concern emerging so close to an election. The American people have typically run straight to the Republicans when threatened while the frickin Democrats typically sit back and let that happen. Ugh! But, along the way the Democrats got smart. We have been saying for some time now that while our are bogged down in the Iraq mess (thanks to Republican incompetence) N. Korea and Iran are being ignored.

Democrats like Ms. McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor who is in a tight Senate race with the incumbent Republican, Jim Talent, have spent months saying Mr. Bush paid too much attention to Iraq, while ignoring threats like North Korea. Now, Democrats are now busy saying “I told you so” to voters.

But Republicans like Mike McGavick, the Senate candidate in Washington State, are offering up an “I told you so” of their own, by spotlighting Democratic opposition to a missile defense system that is strongly backed by Mr. Bush.

Give me a frackin' break with this missile defense shield crap. First of all, the shit doesn't work. Second of all, how the frick is a shield going to prevent N. Korea from selling their nuclear technology to say....Al Qaeda? What are the Republicans gonna say when some white guy with a briefcase sized nuke walks across the border via Canada? I swear these people are idiots. But, again, logic isn't the game here. The American people doesn't respond to logic, we respond to politics. This time around the ~~Clintons~~ Democrats are fighting back:

Hillary:

Now is not the time to play politics of the most dangerous kind with our policy on North KoreaNow is not the time to play politics of the most dangerous kind with our policy on North Korea. History is clear that nothing the Bush administration has done has stopped the North Koreans from openly testing a nuclear weapon and presenting a new danger to the region of the world.

But, William Perry provides the real substantive response in today's Washington Post. I Will not quote from it here because this post is already way too long and it is a must read. The primary gist of it is that the Clinton approach was not perfect (which approach is?), but it at least drastically slowed the North down. While Bush's approach of chest thumping followed by.....NOTHING has gotten us to where we are today. What, exactly, was the consequence on the North for kicking out inspectors and reopening the spent fuel? Nada. What was the consequence of testing the long range missiles a few months back? Nada. What will be the consequence of their nuclear test? The Bush folks are all talk and the N. Koreans know it. The Iranians know it.

Do the American people now know it too? That is the question.

Nobel Prizes: Americans 6 for 6

2006-10-09T10:03:30-04:00

Just when you think George W. Bush has shamed America in to a dark hole, light emerges:

Associated Press:

American Edmund S. Phelps won the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for explaining the relationship between inflation and unemployment work that has had a profound impact on macroeconomic policy.

The 73-year-old Columbia University professor challenged prevailing views in the 1960s by developing a new economic model that has helped corporate and government leaders balance inflation and unemployment in decision-making.

Phelps is the sixth American to win a Nobel this year, meaning that every prize except for the literature and peace awards, which are yet to be announced, have gone to Americans.

Bravo! Congratulations. I find this especially enjoyable because I majored in economics in college, macro-economics was of particular interest to me and you can see the influence this man has had in shaping the economies of the world every single day. He is truly a genius with a real, significant impact on everyday working people. And I say this despite the fact that he went to Amherst College. ugh.

More after the jump...

"It's beginning to sink in that I have won this wonderful award," Phelps said from New York in a live telephone conference with reporters in the Swedish capital. "I understood that it could happen, but I had no idea when it would happen or if it would happen.

"I tried to put the people back into our economic model and in particular to take into account their expectations about what other economic actors are doing at the same time and in the future," he said.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Phelps' work, done in the late 1960s, had "deepened our understanding of the relation between short-run and long-run effects of economic policy."

Phelps challenged the prevailing view in the 1960s that there was a stable, negative relationship between inflation and unemployment, illustrated by the so-called Phillips curve.

"He recognized that inflation does not only depend on unemployment, but also on the expectations of firms and employees about price and wage increases," the academy said.

Phelps put together a new model to describe the relationship between inflation and unemployment, known as the expectations-augmented Phillips curve.

"That idea has been accepted all over the world," prize committee member Bertil Holmlund said. "It has been a resounding success story."

Phelps also showed that there is a precise "equilibrium unemployment rate" at which firms raise workers' wages at the same rate as average wages are expected to rise in the economy overall. Those findings have influenced central banks in their interest-rate decisions, the academy said.

"Phelps' work has fundamentally altered our views on how the macroeconomy operates," the citation said, adding his work proved fruitful in understanding the causes of the increases in both inflation and unemployment in the 1970s.

In its citation announcing the award, the academy said that Phelps had advanced the understanding of the trade-offs between full employment, stable pricing and rapid growth, all of which are the central goals of any sound economic policy.

"But policy always faces difficult goal conflicts. How should inflation and unemployment be balanced against each other?" the academy asked in the citation. "What trade off should be made between the consumption of current and future generations?"

Phelps' work advanced the understanding of those trade-offs.

"He has emphasized that not only the issue of savings and capital formation but also the balance between inflation and unemployment are fundamentally issues about the distribution of welfare over time," the academy said. "Phelps' analyses have had a profound impact on economic theory as well as on macroeconomic policy."

Phelps also pioneered the analysis of the importance of human capital, or workers themselves, for the diffusion of new technology and growth in the business and corporate world, the academy said in its citation.

Phelps was born in Chicago and earned his bachelor's degree at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., in 1955 and his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1959.

He has been the McVickar professor of political economy at Columbia since 1982. Earlier positions were at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Previous winners of the economics prize, given out since 1969, ranged from how the control of information affects markets to welfare economics used to explain the economic mechanisms that underlie famine and poverty.

Last year's winners were Robert J. Aumann, a citizen of Israel and the United States, and American Thomas C. Schelling, for their work in game-theory analysis.

The economics prize, worth $1.4 million, is the only one of the awards not established in the will left by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel 111 years ago.

The medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace prizes were first awarded in 1901, while the economics prize was set up separately by the Swedish central bank in 1968.

The economics prize is the fourth of six to be announced. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature will be announced Thursday, followed by the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on Friday.

Last week, the Nobel medicine prize went to Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for discovering a powerful way to turn off the effect of specific genes. John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of how the universe was created.

American Roger D. Kornberg won the prize in chemistry for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins, a process that could provide insight into defeating cancer and advancing stem cell research.

The Nobel prizes are presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of their founder. The peace prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, and the other Nobel prizes are presented in Stockholm.

Brothers & Sisters

2006-10-08T23:38:18-04:00

I don't know what people want from ABC's new drama, Brothers & Sisters, but I frickin love it. Along with Ugly Betty it is one of only two new shows that I actually plan to watch. I've watched all three episodes thus far (right after Desperate Housewives) and it gets better each week. Sally Field and Patricia Wettig are both simply amazing. The tension between them and complicated dance they pursue in the third episode was a joy to watch and the climaxing scene was worth the anticipation. You knew that train wreck was quickly approaching and you are glued to the screen. That is what we want from a good, honest family drama. I hope the numbers are there because I want this show to stick around.

Technorati Tags: ABC, Brothers & Sisters, Brothers & Sisters, Sally Field, puppy

Da Bears!!

2006-10-08T21:45:20-04:00

Chicago Bears

You can take the man out of Chicago, but you can't take Da Bears out of the man! I love my Bears and they are on fire. 5-0-0 for the season. They just whooped the Bills' asses 40-7. And, get this, can you believe we have an offense?!?

Calling the Chicago Bears an offensive juggernaut might seem to defy logic, tradition and the lineage of gritty defenders from Butkus to Singletary to Urlacher.

Believe it.

Getting a huge boost from their trademark defense, the Bears scored the first five times they had the ball Sunday and ruined the homecoming of former coach Dick Jauron with a 40-7 drubbing of Jauron's Buffalo Bills to go 5-0 for the first time in 20 years.

Rex Grossman threw two touchdown passes, Cedric Benson scored his first two NFL touchdowns and the Bears capitalized on five Buffalo turnovers as they piled up their biggest points total since 1993.

Suddenly, the team that always counted on its defense to make up for an anemic offense in recent seasons is averaging 31 points a game, outscoring even the high-flying Indianapolis Colts through five games.

See. There is a God.

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