A few random thoughts while perusing through the blogosphere on a quiet Sunday afternoon… (why are there no ballgames on TV today?)
1) A nice photo blog which I thought Jim Johnson might like.
2) Hey, these business cards are really kewl… (via Marginal Revolution).
3) Speaking of Tyler Cowen, he writes from Japan:
The quality of Japanese service, by the way, is miles ahead of anywhere else (though stores don’t like to take returns) and those subjective pleasures of the shopping experience don’t get picked up by the numbers either. I can’t imagine how a Japanese would feel moving to Germany or Austria.
Whenever I visit Korea, the thing I notice right away is that service is far, far better – almost from the moment I step onto the plane. But equally, customers, citizens, passersby are far ruder to each other. In other words, they push and shove one another, cut in front of lines, squabble incessantly etc until they reach the store clerk who is not only polite and friendly, but who will go ten extra miles to get you what you want. In America, strangers are far more civil to each other – they open doors for one another, they wait their turn, they say “please” and “thank you” – until they get to the store clerk who proceeds to treat them like shit. Government offices are, however, all the same – lousy.
4) Why are academics unhappy? I think this guy has it about right. Academics peddle in status, not money. This is a recipe for unhappiness. This also makes them, in the eyes of non-academics, a) weird; b) elitist.
5) The hackery of that wretched phony Bill Kristol. Dan Drezner makes the following point, which I think is a good one:
One particularly interesting point in response to my paper is that while my paper focused on bloggers as public intellectuals, it might be the case that bloggers serve an even greater good by engaging in quality control of other public intellectuals.
One line that the talking heads on TV make incessantly is that bloggers, unlike “real journalists,” cannot be trusted because they don’t have editors – i.e. don’t have to meet the same high standards of fact-checking and good practice. They make this argument because they can’t appeal to expertise – it’s sort of hard for them to say that Krugman or Delong don’t know anything about economics, or that Drezner doesn’t understand politics, or that Cole is clueless about the Middle East. I would suspect that even pompous fools like George Will would know better than to make that argument. So they talk about the vetting process. But it seems to me that popular blogs – I’m not talking about small blogs like this one that no-one ever reads – do have an editorial process i.e. commenters. At least for factual errors, if Atrios or Kevin Drum makes a mistake, they’ll be corrected pretty damn quickly. This would also argue that bloggers who don’t allow comments (cough, Andrew Sullivan, cough), should be trusted less.
Tags: Potpourri
