RIP Toxie

Comics at a Comic Con?

Valerie D'Orazio thinks about the place of comic book retailers at the big comic conventions:

I don't really see girls who like "Twilight" as the reason the convention is being "stolen" away. Really, the bigger issue is this: media conglomerates have taken comic book culture and "Andy Warholized" it, presenting us with mass-market, mass-produced, highly vetted versions of that culture's icons. But not only that, the conglomerates have appropriated the comic book/"fan" community's mechanism of promotion & dissemination of information: the convention. So that's the Icons and the Mechanism being appropriated.

Some of What's in the Stimulus

See if there's anything in there for you.

More Financial Storm Watching

This is a pretty important little graph:


And here's a link to a bigger version.

It's basically a measure of investors willingness to take on a minimal amount of risk. You can see that it peaks in early October.

It's noteworthy because it's back under 100 points, indicating that investors are willing to invest in things slightly more risky than treasury bills. That is a good indication that the financial crisis, at least, is subsided and we are now left with just a really bad recession.

The treasury department got dragged into doing the right kind of rescue late, and there are plenty of things to be annoyed with in the TARP, but it would appear to have gotten the job done. Now, in dealing with the effects outside of finance, we have to hope that Congress can act quickly to pull off some sort of fiscal stimulus (lending cheap money to the states should be priority A1).

Slogan for 2009: "We Could Do Worse But We'd Really Have to Try!"

Presidential Economics

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- George Bush

(via Boing Boing)

$73

David Leonhardt gives some perspective about some numbers thrown around in the auto company bailout debate.

Fox Schadenfreude

This video should be played over and over to Ben Stein and the rest of Fox's clueless economic cheerleaders, Clockwork Orange style.

401(K)erblooey!

Are you a rich asshole?

If you are, you can rent a home in DC during inauguration week for outrageous amounts of teh moneys. Have a place in DC? Stay on someone's couch and rent that shit out to Rich People, for enough $ to pay your rent for several months! Makes me wish I had a place in DC, although then I would probably have to deal with a dead hooker in the closet when I got home....

FLOW CHART!

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
(That's their title.)

Summers and Geithner

A lot of people voted for Obama, based on the economy. Here's a little information about two prospective Treasury Secretaries.

Lolfedchairs

From this Economist's View post.

Line Graph for Otis

By request, I have created a visualization where you can see countries overcoming one another in projected GDP:
Control-click to select and unselect countries for bar graph display.

A Visualization by Johnny Logic

Whipped this up with some data from Wikipedia, which in turn came from the IMF.

Department of Duh: Focus on Money Makes People Assholes

A study in Science makes the case that just getting people to focus on money makes them less cooperative and more individualistic. As Bob Sutton of Work Matters summarizes:

Compared to control subjects, those primed to focus on money:

1. Were less likely to ask others for help
2. Less likely to give others help
3. Preferred to work alone
4. Preferred to play alone
5. Put more physical distance between themselves as a new acquaintance

I wonder if this sets money-centric people to fail in collective action type problems: A situation in which everyone (in a given group) has a choice between two alternatives and where, if everyone involved chooses the alternative act that is Individualistically Rational (IR), the outcome will be worse for everyone involved, in their own estimation, than it would be if they were all to choose the other alternative (i.e., than it would be if they were all to choose the alternative that is not IR). This is a real problem libertarian friends of mine have never seemed capable of absorbing. Hmmm.

U.S. Spending Visualization