Havent you heard? I'm the king of NY! (news thread)

[Good Intentions]

This would be the small amount of attention being given the WC which made the headline stories a week ago, when London was burning, be about the price of All Black replica jerseys?

[RavingLunatic]

well, sure, i'd prefer if the NZ media paid more attention to stuff that actually matters, and our identity as a country was not so attached to sport

To put things in perspective, at least your identity as a country is not attached to war and military occupation.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

This would be the small amount of attention being given the WC which made the headline stories a week ago, when London was burning, be about the price of All Black replica jerseys?

i mean, i don't know what papers you read, and maybe the jersey was on the front page once (when an effigy of adidas was set fire to outside their building - big deal for NZ), but london was the headline on stuff.co.nz almost every day for weeks.

[Good Intentions]

My eyes sometimes pass over the New Zealand Herald, and then immediately do a roll.

[Antero]

Tripoli is in the hands of the rebels.

[kyle]

Relevant to the thread title:

http://jezebel.com/5839835/omfg-heres-your-first-look-at-newsies-on-broadway

"Bill Pullman's role has been axed for a lady journalist named Katherine Plumber, who will write the story about the newspaper boy strike and play a love interest to Jack." Ugh... fucking everything having to fuck everything up. Still excited as hell.

And then something I've been waiting for:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037211/Sarah-Palin-took-cocaine-affairs-Glen-Rice-husbands-business-partner.html

ohhhhhh man.

[Anne the Man]

I'm trying to put together links/a story about Occupy Wall Street and I come across this damn thing.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1183550850001/excessive-force-used-at-wall-street-protest

What happened two seconds before [woman gets dragged along ground like a sack of potatoes by police]? Did she reach for that officer's gun? Did she spit in that lieutenant's face? Then I would argue that their actions were totally appropriate.

Earlier they went on about how the girls sprayed with mace and screaming were probably playing it up for the cameras. I know saying fuck you Fox is old but FUCK YOU FOX arghhhhargh

By the way, if any of you know around how many people are currently occupying please let me know. Have any of you been down there?

[Trousers and Pat]

topical wonder showzen

[Thermofusion]

I loved that show

[hannah]

topical wonder showzen

 

[Good Intentions]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

<takes breath>

grrrmphwHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Al-Qaida calls on Ahmadinejad to end 9/11 conspiracy theories

[elpollodiablo]

I'm curious what the general take here is on this story that davy posted to FB this afternoon.

Much of the writing about the new economy of the 21st century, and the Internet in particular, has had a tone somewhere between cheerleading and utopian. One of the Net’s consummate optimists is Chris Anderson, whose book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More,” championed the Internet’s “unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and contents of all sort, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground.” With our cell phones, MP3s and TiVos, we’re not stuck watching “Gilligan’s Island” over and over again, he writes. Now we can groove to manga and “connect” through multiplayer video games.

Of course, it’s not all about the Internet: David Brooks’ influential “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” traced a multi-ethnic, meritocratic elite and a fantasia of latte shops, retro-hip consumers and artisanal cheese stores. The cheese stores are, in some cases, still there, but much of what Brooks predicted has fallen through. He wrote — in 2000 — that we were living “just after an age of transition,” with the culture wars dead, a “peaceful middle ground” politically and a nation improved by the efforts of a class that had reconciled the bourgeois ethos with bohemianism.

This was easier to understand when things seemed to be humming along. But even after the 2008 crash — with unemployment at 12 percent and above in California, which, thanks to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is also the state most driven by the creative class — blind optimism continues.

In 2009, Anderson came out with the intelligently argued “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which suggested that new revenue streams and the low cost of computer bits meant that both businesses and consumers would benefit as the Internet drove down prices. It’s nice to contemplate, but the human cost of “Free” becomes clear every day a publisher lays off staff or a record store closes.

Richard Florida helped set much of the agenda with his 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argued that this class would make cities rich in “technology, talent and tolerance” and jolt them back to life. His latest book, “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,” wrestles with the difficulty of the last few years. But it continues to put faith in knowledge workers and the places they settle to bounce back stronger than ever.

The new economy “is good for whoever owns the computer server,” says Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer and author of “You Are Not a Gadget,” which debunks a lot of Internet hype. “So there’s a new class of elites close to the master server. Sometimes they’re social network sites, other times they’re hedge funds, or insurance companies –other times they’re a store like the Apple Store.”

Andrew Keen is another Silicon Valley insider who’s seen the dangers of the Net. “Certainly it’s made a small group of technologists very wealthy,” he says. “Especially people who’ve learned how to manipulate data. Google, YouTube, a few of the bloggers connected to big brands. And the social media aristocracy –LinkedIn, Facebook.”

Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” looks at the way the supposedly democratizing force of the Net and its unpaid enthusiasts has put actual professionals out of work. It’s not just the Web, he says, or its open-content phase, but a larger cultural and economic shift. “We live in an age where more and more people think they have a book in them,” he says. “Or a film in them, or a song in them. But it’s harder and harder to make a living at these things.”

And when Google is used as an excuse to fire the librarian, or “free” access to information causes circulation to drop and newspapers to lay off staff, the culture pays a very real price.

[davy]

Not to change the subject, but hey, Amanda Knox won her appeal:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44752948/ns/world_news-europe/

[Good Intentions]

Miles, I have to agree with what you said on FB: that article is a bit of nonsense. As is usual, the thing it trumpets as a uniquely new terror, amateur distribution networks being favoured over established ones, has been with us a very long time - amateur journals have been omnipresent for every type of human endeavour for at least 120 years. For instance, right now I'm reading some Lovecraft (strengthening my geek pedigree), and almost every single thing he wrote was first published and distributed by amateurs in a publication network which stretched country wide and first lifted him to prominence. As for record stores and the like, I suspect that they are suffering more from pressures from larger actors in the market than anything else. I don't see any libraries closing, and if they are it's from government funding trouble than anything else. Where funding isn't under terminal threat, the library systems I'm familiar with are expanding quite a bit, in order to offer exactly that curatorship role which davy mentions. And funding is in trouble for entirely unrelated reasons.

[Good Intentions]

Oh yeah, and as Miles said on Facebook, it's not true that less people are being paid for creative work, or that less work is being done, or that it is of a lower quality.

[elpollodiablo]

Miles, I have to agree with what you said on FB: that article is a bit of nonsense. As is usual, the thing it trumpets as a uniquely new terror, amateur distribution networks being favoured over established ones, has been with us a very long time - amateur journals have been omnipresent for every type of human endeavour for at least 120 years. For instance, right now I'm reading some Lovecraft (strengthening my geek pedigree), and almost every single thing he wrote was first published and distributed by amateurs in a publication network which stretched country wide and first lifted him to prominence. As for record stores and the like, I suspect that they are suffering more from pressures from larger actors in the market than anything else. I don't see any libraries closing, and if they are it's from government funding trouble than anything else. Where funding isn't under terminal threat, the library systems I'm familiar with are expanding quite a bit, in order to offer exactly that curatorship role which davy mentions. And funding is in trouble for entirely unrelated reasons.

Agreed on pretty much all counts; I'd add that lumping Borders cashiers and record store clerks in with a category of labor that includes professional book editors, journalists, and "non-tenured novelists" is absolutely hilarious, even if those categories very, *very* rarely overlapped historically. Just because Quentin Tarantino worked at a video store does not mean that job doesn't belong to the same category as a job at  McDonald's. The market certainly never valued the labor of these workers as "curators" in the way the article would have you believe, even if a certain segment of the community did. I wouldn't argue that people in those jobs didn't perform a valuable service for a certain particular segment of consumer--I understand the nostalgic attachment people have for a consumer relationship that enabled them to discover some things that had meaningful effect on their lives, but *nothing* about that relationship is essential to the experience of culture.

[RavingLunatic]

I wouldn't argue that people in those jobs didn't perform a valuable service for a certain particular segment of consumer--

Specifically, the segment interested in signing up for a Borders Rewards card--you get valuable coupons through your e-mail and you earn points towards Borders Bucks would you like buy a book to donate to our book drive for kids in hospitals how about a gift card would you like some Lindor balls to go with you purchase three for only a dollar?

[Trousers and Pat]

another march is about to start in nyc
what's going to happen this time ?

did you guys catch this part ?
(JP Morgan Chase donates 4.5 million us dollars to NYPD)

[Greg Nog]

I was just at the march, and some guy in front of me asked a cop, "What are you gonna do with the 4.6 million?"  The cop shrugged and said, "You got me, it ain't in my pocket."

[Ah_Pook]

steve jobs died i guess

[Chet]

Can't wait for the jokes.

[elpollodiablo]

Only 56. Jesus. I didn't realize he was so young.

[peacocks]

I'm just glad facebook is nice enough to compile all the posts about him and just say in one little blurb "Bla Blabla and 97 other of your friends posted about Steve Jobs."

will his coffin or urn be shiny white with curved edges and impossible to break into? Or will he kick it 2000 and have it be kind of see through in bright blue? That's what I'd do anyway.

[Ignatius]

Whoa, some folks on FB really really have a high opinion of this guy.

[peacocks]

yeah one girl said "Poop, another tragic death" :/