"Since 2002, Leavitt Brothers has been a leading research company which has offered stock picks and market analysis to hedge funds and self-directed traders. " ... NEVER HEARD OF 'EM

"good local coverage isn’t enough, because ordinary citizens don’t pay for news. What we paid for, when we used to buy the paper, was a bundle of news and sports and coupons and job listings, printed together and delivered to our doorstep." ... "A newspaper used to be both a profitable business and a public service, but this was just an accident of the competitive (or rather uncompetitive) media landscape. His commonsense approach to saving papers won’t work, because there is no longer any commonsense business model for a former monopoly that is still seeing its revenues erode faster than its costs." ... WONDER IF BUFFETT READS SHIRKY? (he reads everything) ... LOOK, BUFFETT IS NO FOOL, HE'S AS HARD-HEADED AS THEY COME AND UNDERSTANDS *ALL* ASPECTS OF THE BIZ, IT WAS A SMART BUY NO DOUBT

"cheap plans disproportionately attract a special category of users: dummies."

"Like many Rust Belt cities, it is a captive of its rich manufacturing past, when well-paying jobs were plentiful and landing one without a college degree was easy." ... GLOBALIZATION WIPED OUT AMERICA'S WORKING MIDDLE CLASS

"I have come here to study temporarily, not to seek political asylum." ... THIS GUY IS STILL DELUSIONAL

MUST HAVE GOOD HEALTH INSURANCE, SOUNDS EXPENSIVE

"I’d come out with new versions that I thought dramatically improved the product, only to find my forums filled with complaints from power users who wanted the return of some obscure option, or were upset that I wasn't adding the geeky features they wanted.

Sales went up, but positive feedback went down. I had built FeedDemon with the wrong customer in mind, and I paid for it by spending a ton of time defending each release. ... if you're building a mainstream consumer product, then from day one you need to tell yourself, “screw the power users.”" ... WISE

INTERESTING GUY FOR SURE ... I'D BE TWICE AS INTERESTING WITH HALF HIS MONEY

THEY CAN'T HEAR US YET

"That floating "hopefully" had been around for more than 30 years in respectable venues when a clutch of usage critics, including Theodore Bernstein and E.B. White, came down on it hard in the 1960s. Writers who had been using it up to then said their mea culpas and pledged to forswear it. Its detractors were operatic in their vilifications. The poet Phyllis McGinley called it an abomination and said its adherents should be lynched; and the historian T. Harry Williams went so far as to pronounce it "the most horrible usage of our times" — a singular distinction in the age that gave us expressions like "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing," not to mention "I'm Ken and I'll be your waitperson for tonight.""

"The Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi has slammed rumors claiming that she had sex with Bo Xilai, the deposed former party secretary of Chongqing, and made 700 million yuan (US$110 million) from sleeping with other Chinese officials. Zhang has said she will seek legal action over the claims, reports our sister newspaper China Times." ... BLATANT SMEAR CAMPAIGN (she doesn't need the money)

"Re-posting the editorial yesterday, major web portals, including QQ.com, rewrote the headline of the Global Times as: “China Must Permit Some Corruption, the Public Should Understand“." ... HA! THAT'S A VERY LOOSE TRANSLATION

FEATURED TUMBLR LIST ... DISCOVERY STINKS

YES AND THEY USE A LOT OF KITTEN AVATARS

"I) Why don’t you try being Type A for awhile. Worry about the things she is worried about. Plan the things she is overplanning. Take some of the Type A burden off of her so she realizes it’s not all up to her." ... GREAT ANSWER (james often gives great answers, too bad no one is listening)

@EPICUREANDEAL, YOU BAD MAN, VELLY VELLY BAD MAN

"This was the very point of my post. People's morality is defined not around what is right and just but what they need to do to make a buck. We are human. Even TED.

Investment bankers learn to rip of clients. That is what they need to do to get by.

And the Epicurean Dealmaker - and everyone else in the industry - has accepted that as the new fair and just." ... HEMPTON IS THE ULTIMATE ARBITER OF WHAT IS RIGHT AND JUST I SUPPOSE

BILL PORTER'S BAIDU BAIKE PAGE

"A pig farmer in Suining county, Jiangsu province, has built a house for his two little pigs—not of straw, sticks, or bricks, but of actual concrete. The hut he erected for his little porkers set a certain Mr. Chen back RMB 8000, and neighbors joke that Chen’s pigs are leading a “modestly prosperous existence”—a “小康生活” (xiaokang shenghuo) in the Chinese phrase. Others are more indignant, but for all their huffing and puffing the piggy house remains standing." ... I'VE YET TO MEET BETTY TIAN, BUT I ALREADY HAVE A WEB-BASED CRUSH ON HER (despite the occasional missing comma)

"social media marketing"

" In 1972, he dropped out of the program to move to Taiwan and live in a Buddhist monastery. He stayed in Taiwan twenty years, making the translation of Chinese poetry into English his spiritual practice—for him, sitting down in front of the classics and figuring out what a writer from a thousand years ago was trying to say is a meditative experience. " ... I HAVE SEVERAL OF HIS BOOKS, NONE OF WHICH I'VE READ (OF COURSE)

GALBRAITH MENTIONS THIS SITE, "the one that really defined the exact format was Jean Aw and Daniel Frysinger’s NotCot. For the layout of each item on NotCot, the site used the metaphor of a Polaroid photo with a note written in the space below the image." ... ANOTHER SORT OF PREDECESSOR TO PINTEREST

"At the same time, Joshua Schachter’s beautifully minimalist social bookmarking system, Delicious, had grown rapidly. The simplicity of sharing bookmark links puts Delicious right up there in the key steps towards the development of social platforms. Sharing bookmarks is similar to news aggregation, only the items are manually picked, or curated.

Text bookmarks are like headlines that link to a full item. For the design sites that I wanted to manually pick from, it seemed like a thumbnail image on one of the pictures on a page showing, say, a table could act like an image headline — a small thing that links to a bigger one. By parsing out all of the images on a page and resizing them, when a button was clicked in the browser, I could make every image become its own form submit button. Thus, by making the process of choosing an image headline one click and by combining this with the same process as Delicious, users could create visual bookmarks." ... SMART

"I get too much credit for RSS and for Yelp, but the one thing that I can unashamedly claim to have invented is visual bookmarking, and more specifically the “choose images to thumbnail via a bookmarklet” method that Pinterest is based on. It’s not much of an “invention” per se. It’s a moronically simple thing, but it’s the right moronically simple thing. And given that more than one billion dollars rests on the idea, maybe it’s worth looking back at its history." ... " Pinterest is a success because it is qualitatively different and properly timed. It had proper resources to make it work well and scale at a time when the market was ready for it. The lesson to be learned here is that first to market is not as important as sometimes claimed. Most successful Internet platforms are second or third generation versions of an earlier idea." ... YEP, THIS IS THE KEY INSIGHT

"Have as much contact as possible with older people. Personally, I met people at Podcamps. My friend Greg, at the age of 13, met his first future employer sitting next to him on a plane. The reason this is so valuable is because people your age don’t usually have the decision-making ability to help you very much. Also they know almost everything you will learn later, so ask them." ... PRETTY GOOD POST, BUT THIS POINT ASSUMES THE OLDER PERSON A) UNDERSTANDS THE WORLD B) IS WILLING TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT C) WON'T ACTIVELY SABOTAGE THE ASKER AND D) THE ASKER IS WILLING TO ACCEPT WHAT THE OLDER PERSON TELLS THEM (ALL HUGE ASSUMPTIONS)

"If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice." ... DON'T LIKE THE WRITING STYLE, BUT THEY HAVE THE RIGHT IDEA

"Glass-Steagall did one basic thing. It forced banks to get rid of their investment banking arms. Dodd-Frank, by contrast, accepts the complexity of modern banking — and then adds to that complexity with its thousands of pages of regulations." ... WELL THERE'S YER PROBLEM ... "“It appears the trades themselves were so complex that the risks were not well understood,” she said. “The bank management didn’t understand them. The regulators weren’t aware of them. And the bank’s risk management system didn’t pick them up.”" ... NAH, I THINK THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING, THEY JUST GOT TOO LARGE AND THEN GOT GUNNED

PAGINATED ... ""The decision to copy a given business generally takes three hours to a couple of days; actually building the first version of the new company's website takes four to six weeks. "The speed at which you can make decisions here is amazing," says Brigitte Wittekind, a former McKinsey consultant who was recruited last year to create a clone of Birchbox, the New York start-up that offers samples of cosmetics to subscribers for $10 a month. Wittekind's company, Glossybox, spent its first year opening websites in 20 countries. It has 400 employees and 200,000 paid subscribers—twice as many as its American counterpart—and just launched in the United States, one of the few instances in which a Rocket clone will go head to head with the company on which it is modeled.""

WHY DO THEY ALWAYS PUT CRAP MUSIC ON TOP OF THESE? I ASSUME THE CRASH AT 1:30 WAS FATAL, IF YOU DON'T WANT TO WATCH SOMEONE DIE, DON'T WATCH THIS ... ALL OF THESE GUYS HAVE A DEATH WISH, CLEARLY

"Introducing bitmarks

So, what are bitmarks? It’s a better name for bookmarks. Bitmarks are the interesting links you collect across the web — a hard to find recipe, an article, an awesomely hysterical video. It’s anything that you find and want to save and maybe even want to easily share. You can organize them into bundles based on a theme or share them with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, and email. You decide whether each bitmark gets published to your public profile or saved privately, so that only you can see it." ... BITEMARKS?

"Niajo in Nali Patio is starting a new Business Lunch: three courses for RMB 98, which includes drinks, wine and coffee. The menu will rotate weekly, but this week's includes a cold creamy lentil soup and grilled sea bass, among other options. They're also doing a Special Rice Menu. RMB 148 per person for chef's salad, paella of the day, dessert and a glass of wine. These deals are available Monday-Friday, Noon-2.30pm." ... THERE MUST BE SIX SPANISH RESTOS IN NALI... HOME PLATE COMING TO SHUANGJING, HMMM?

"It is impossible to eradicate corruption in any country. The question is how to control it and bring it to a level that the public can tolerate." ... CHINESE CAN TOLERATE AN INFINITE LEVEL OF CORRUPTION ASSUMING THEIR *PERSONAL* FORTUNES ARE IMPROVING AS WELL ... "Corruption is also a result of our current level of development." ... DRAGGING OUT THE OLD 'STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT'

SHEESH ... IRVIN GOLDMAN

"According to the regulations, users logging more than 5 posts of “sensitive information” would be prevented from posting for 48 hours and have the relevant content deleted. Further, those users posting “sensitive content” with “malicious intent” would be prevented from posting for more than 48 hours and face the possibility of having their account terminated." ... WEIBO TOO BIG NOW TO KILL BUT THEY CAN CERTAINLY NEUTER IT

Last sold: Nov 1992 for $134,000 ... NOW ASKING 325K

"That farewell scene in Don’s office was beautifully played by Jon Hamm and Elizabeth Moss, Don’s cocky negotiating slowly sliding from his face as the realisation dawns that’s he’s losing her, her lip wobbling as he refuses to shake her hand, but instead kisses it, holding on to her as long as he can. It was as tender and difficult a parting as you’d expect, and a damn good exit for Miss Olson." ... YEP, GREAT SCENE, VERY POWERFUL STUFF ... REVEALED IN COMMENTARY THAT DON KISSING HER HAND NOT IN THE SCRIPT

I DID NOTICE THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD GRAPHIC

"China always has a very strict and unreasonable censorship policy on import films, especially when it is related to the image of the nation. According to the mindset of communist, the Chinese people should be always looking good, there are no Chinese villain. A Chinese alien is certainly unacceptable here. As for the neuralyze scene, it is very obvious that the authorities are over sensitive on wiping out memories of the Chinese, which is a hinting on internet censorship to maintain social stability." ... CHINGLISH

$1495/yr ... I GET THIS ALREADY

"I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town." ... I'M NOT SURE HE'S RIGHT ABOUT THIS ... "Technological change has caused us to lose primacy in various key areas, including national news, national sports, stock quotations and employment opportunities. So be it. Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance." ... ARE THERE ANY? .... "In a very general way, strong interest in community affairs varies inversely with population size and directly with the number of years a community’s population has been in residence. Therefore, we will focus on small and mid-sized papers in long-established communities." ... AH, THERE'S THE KEY

"Max Capacity

25 Dragons at time of purchase
50 Dragons after first upgrade (for 50)
100 Dragons after second upgrade (for 100)" ... SO IT COSTS 150 GEMS TO STORE 100 DRAGONS, OK (that second upgrade is a rip)

NICE IDEA BUT SHOULD HAVE USED CABBAGE INSTEAD OF PORK

"only half of Tumblr’s 6.25 million users are in the U.S. Those users are now posting some 4.5 million posts a day — that’s up from 650,000 new posts a day a year ago."

OLD NEWS, OFFICIALS ABOVE A CERTAIN LEVEL (I FORGET WHAT IT IS) ARE VERY STRICTLY MONITORED, ALL INT'L TRAVEL MUST BE CLEARED *LONG* IN ADVANCE

SERIAL KILLERS, RAPISTS, CLEAVAGE, HUMAN KIDNEY TRAFFICKING, TEACHERS ELOPING WITH PREGNANT STUDENTS, SEX TRADE, SINKING BOATS, ETC.

"fell from a window of a dorm room"

Last sold: Aug 2001 for $113,000 NOW ASKING 263K, ZEST 177

DON'T CHIPS FROM ALL MANUFACTURERS HAVE BACKDOORS?

" We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure. "

Posted on November 01, 1992 .... PLUS CA CHANGE?

""We were expendable! It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.""

"If there is one thing that unites interesting people it is that they don’t keep a tally of the number of books they’ve read in order to brag about it." ... ALSO SIGNALS THE BOOTLICKERS TO KICK UP THINGS THEY THINK HE WANTS TO HEAR ... "good leaders are bores" ... WELL, THEY'RE WORKAHOLICS OBSESSED WITH THEIR BIZ ... "What boring does mean is narrow. Boring people are very interested in one or two things and not remotely interested in anything else." ... CORRECT ... "Bill Gates is said to be a crashing bore who has no small talk and a stunted sense of humour." ... OF COURSE

"So what can people do who have had the severe misfortune to have been born interesting? They can try publishing of course, if there are any jobs left. Or they can teach, or write, or direct films, or become poets and philosophers. Better still, they can marry a successful bore to bankroll their unremunerative activities, or if all else fails, they can curl up in a corner and read far too many books ever to count." ... BETTER PIECE FROM LUCY THIS WEEK

LOOKS PROMISING

"Everyone wants a piece of the China market"

"Chinese companies in general suffer from what I call the “contempt for the intangible.” " ... THAT'S ONE WAY OF PUTTING IT

"It’s really quick and easy to update your Tumblr, which is another great thing about the site. In a few clicks you can add a Text post, a Photo, a Quote, Link, Chat, Audio file or Video. At first I found it frustrating that Tumblr kept all of these types of media separate. However, I’m starting to think of Tumblr as less of a blogging platform (in the WordPress/Blogger sense) and more of a place to tumble together and share media."

That's where Tumblr comes in.

It's what Goldilocks would call, "just right." It's not a full-blown blog and it's not a one-sentence message service. It is, as Steve Rubel noted last week, a "hybrid," a platform that is "...a social network for both original and curated content... longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature."

"The kitchen with Corian, Viking range, bookcase, and cabinets galore lends glamour to every gathering. Own this apartment and be the envy of all who enter and those who can only wish." ... 225K, SOMEONE THREW SOME MONEY DOWN A RATHOLE

"This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it." .. FOR A REASON

By some strange alchemy, I really have bonded with this stranger. I haven’t ex­changed more than a couple of sentences with him, but I find I like him, and – this is even more mysterious – totally trust him.
“There’s a real bond,” he agrees. “We wouldn’t get it if we’d just had a meal. We’ve been on a journey together.”

"it raises some deep questions about the nature of consultancy.
The first is about the hubris in thinking that letting a few top consultants loose in rural India is going to make any difference to anything – apart from their life expectancy ... consultants, like buffaloes, aren’t very good at listening and seeing ... they feed on whatever they can get their teeth into, sometimes doing considerable damage."

"No region — from OPEC to Non-OPEC, from Africa to Russia — has the single-handed ability to lower the price of oil now, because none can bring on new supply quickly enough for a long-enough sustained period of time."

160 PEOPLE WANTED BY CHINA ON INTERPOL'S LIST

MADE OFF WITH 50MM SUPPOSEDLY

"On a trip that Mr. Waters said took him eight days and about 15 hitchhiked rides to get him from one end of the country to the other, he has accumulated numerous anecdotes for a book he has tentatively titled “Carsick” and which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux." .... COLLECTING BOOK FODDER ... "an avuncular ambassador of sleaze culture" ... AN INTERESTING GUY FOR SURE, THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS MADE ME PHYSICALLY ILL IN A MOVIE THEATER

SKYNET... LOOK, FACEBOOK SET UP BEAUTIFULLY AS A SHORT BOTH ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY (esp), AND THEN AS A LONG TO 33 ... ALL THIS ALGO TRADING DOESN'T CHANGE THE BASIC PATTERNS THAT YOU CAN ALWAYS EXPLOIT

"Kaczynski’s occupation is listed as “prisoner” in the directory. Under awards, he wrote: “Eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1998.”" ... TEDDY STILL HAS A SENSE OF HUMOR, THE OLD LOON

AND NOT A MINUTE TOO SOON

"Zhang Yongming should have been the police’s first suspect: In 1978, he was sentenced to life in prison for murder, after dismembering a victim. He was released in 1997 and lived within a two kilometer radius of all the victims."

VALEDICTORIAN ... " she negotiated the terms of their getting back together, including the possibility of marriage ... The couple agreed that they would not live together, but that Mr. Zuckerberg would spend at least 100 minutes of private time with Ms. Chan a week, as well as take her on at least one date" ... SICKO TERM SHEET

""They have determined that she has not done anything wrong and have released her, yet they are preventing her from leaving even after holding her for 79 days," said Jason Tan.

Reports say Ms Wu is also not allowed to speak to journalists, and was freed only after paying $7,000 bail." ... SO-CALLED BAIL? SOUNDS MORE LIKE A NEGOTIATED FEE TO ME (very common)