Tarp, teabaggers, bailouts and rising unemployment. In the current economic maelstrom, some see the US on track toward a much more highly managed and regulated economy. Is it possible that "the refusal of powerful institutions to admit losses – aided and abetted by a government in thrall to the “money-changers” – may make it impossible to escape from the crisis" ? As President Obama has said, the ship of state is an ocean liner, not a speedboat. It can't be turned that quickly. But in the current uncertainty, where Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recommends nationalization of banks and be donw with it, and banks deemd too large to fail are given "stress tests" for future solvency but the results withheld-- who can know for sure.
In this Financial TImes article, Martin Wolf looks at the influence of the financial oligarchy on the poliitcal sphere, and asks, are we just like Russia? While the answer is somewhat reassuring, there are other troubling issues, largely the self-denial by of the reality of the poor economic condition of many banks by their CEOs and leadership, that must be resolved before real improvement may be possible. Read more here:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/09f8c996-2930-11de-bc5e-00144feabdc0.html
Ideas in Art, culture, technology, politics and life-- In Brooklyn or Beacon NY -- and Beyond (anyway, somewhere beginning with a "B")
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Twitter: The Greying of Social Networking
Is it our fading attention spans, incurable despite massive doses of ginko biloba and fish oil ? Or growing up in NYC with 1010 WINS newsbites, 45 rpm singles, and NY1 minutes..
Anyway, at the risk of alienating today's tech-immersed jugen, check this out: Yesterday's Times of London online notes that "midlife chatterers show they prefer to keep it short and tweet. Twitter appears to be the embodiment of youth culture with tech-savvy and fast-thumbed teens firing off short updates filled with abbreviations about their lives. But it turns out that the keenest users are the greying brigades of the middle-aged.
More mature users, led by famous tweeters such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Sarah Brown, are the driving force behind the popularity of the site. New research shows that 45 54-year-olds are 36 per cent more likely than the average to visit the site, with figures from comScore, the internet market researchers, showing that the majority of the 10 million Twitter users worldwide are aged 35 or older.
Twitter is a social networking and “microblogging” site, where users post short updates — “tweets” — of up to 140 characters via the website or a mobile phone. More than 3.5 million people signed up in the first two months of this year.
Full news item here:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6083154.ece
Anyway, at the risk of alienating today's tech-immersed jugen, check this out: Yesterday's Times of London online notes that "midlife chatterers show they prefer to keep it short and tweet. Twitter appears to be the embodiment of youth culture with tech-savvy and fast-thumbed teens firing off short updates filled with abbreviations about their lives. But it turns out that the keenest users are the greying brigades of the middle-aged.
More mature users, led by famous tweeters such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Sarah Brown, are the driving force behind the popularity of the site. New research shows that 45 54-year-olds are 36 per cent more likely than the average to visit the site, with figures from comScore, the internet market researchers, showing that the majority of the 10 million Twitter users worldwide are aged 35 or older.
Twitter is a social networking and “microblogging” site, where users post short updates — “tweets” — of up to 140 characters via the website or a mobile phone. More than 3.5 million people signed up in the first two months of this year.
Full news item here:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6083154.ece