"The UK economy, which had previously looked more vulnerable to the global recession than any other G7 country, is now likely to suffer less than the rest of Europe, as a result of unprecedented policy stimulus from the lowest interest rates in history, a super-competitive currency and a big reduction in tax. Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition in Britain has been confused, discredited and splintered by the financial crisis as badly as John McCain's campaign." Pow! - Lloyd Shepherd
"The preview for the upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed movie looks pretty good, but the shot of the speedometer early on seems to imply that we’re still not on the metric system in the 23rd century, long after the USA has been subsumed into the United Earth government and then the Federation. My understanding is that Abrams doesn’t really care for Trek fans, and no doubt remarks like this won’t change his opinion of us for the better. But still!" - Lloyd Shepherd
"But the bedrock strength of Tindle Newspapers is the opposite of lunches with the London mighty: all 225 titles are sacredly local. Editors print lists of funeral mourners and flower show winners in a way that once gave the weekly Somerset Guardian Standard 125% penetration in Frome. That's a quarter of the town buying more than one copy a week. Tindle's favourite story is how he gave the Tenby Observer a second chance in 1978, when it was so bankrupt that he had to use a call box to phone the receiver because the lines were cut. "They'd tried to save it by expanding and turning into the West Wales Observer. That was exactly the wrong thing to do. I asked the staff if they could get the paper out that week, they said 'yes' and I said: 'I'm in then, but throw out anything that isn't Tenby. We're not interested in Carmarthen and Haverfordwest.'"" - Lloyd Shepherd
"But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done. " via Russell Davies - Lloyd Shepherd
"The priorities of our Boomer led society are clearly born out in the above figures. We spend more eating out than we give to charity. We spend as much on big screen TVs and stereos as we do on education. This may explain why 37 million (12.5%) of all Americans live in poverty and our high school students trail the students of 25 other countries (including Latvia) in science and math knowledge. Our school system processes many more clueless morons who don’t know the candidates for President, versus intelligent, thoughtful, hard working, driven young people. The $160 billion spent on gambling is indicative of the get rich quick without hard work attitude of the Boomer generation. Even worse, households with income under $13,000 spend, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all their income. Our government feeds this addiction by siphoning off billions in taxes from these gambling revenues to redistribute as they see fit." - Lloyd Shepherd
"Media regulator Ofcom has received a petition with around 50,000 signatures from fans of evicted X Factor contestant Laura White complaining about the hit ITV1 show's phone voting set up." 50,000. Jesus H Fucking Christ. - Lloyd Shepherd
"Emotional problems like depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, seen through this lens, appear on Mom’s side of the teeter-totter, with schizophrenia, while Asperger’s syndrome and other social deficits are on Dad’s". - Lloyd Shepherd
More optimistically, the Net Geners are much more positive than their predecessors about their family. Half of those interviewed regard at least one parent as their “hero”. Mr Tapscott believes the internet is producing an improved, more collaborative version of family life, which he calls the “open family”. Parents increasingly recognise that their youngsters have digital expertise they lack but want to tap, and also that their best defence against their children falling foul of the dark side of the internet, such as online sexual predators, is to win their children’s trust through honest conversation. Ironically, Mr Tapscott’s recommended “platform” for this essential social networking could hardly be more old tech: the family dinner table. - Lloyd Shepherd
Mr Yang told the conference audience that he wants Yahoo! to become a “platform company”, suggesting that outside developers should build applications to make Yahoo!’s services more useful. But Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce.com and all other self-respecting technology firms nowadays want to become platforms, too. Why should Yahoo!, which has been less innovative, be the one to succeed? This argument is the one that pains Mr Yang the most. There is a “perception that we’re following,” he admitted, but “we do believe we’re innovating.” The audience of web entrepreneurs, many of them once inspired by Mr Yang’s example, let the matter drop. It is a bit sad to tell this old web hero to go. He must decide to do so himself. - Lloyd Shepherd
“Look,” Rosenbaum concludes, “there’s nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing.” Gosh, thanks, Ron. But if you question my authority to discuss the future of journalism, I wonder who made you the DMV of the discussion. - Lloyd Shepherd
"Internet advertising is by no means immune. Advocates of the internet claim that the sector is both more mature than it was during the last downturn; and it's more "measurable" than other media. They hope to avoid a repeat of the 27% decline in 2000-2002. Good luck with that. The sector's maturity also means that its underlying growth is more sluggish than it was in the late 1990s. In 2001, internet advertising swung to a 13% decline from 78% growth the previous year; this time the sector starts from a growth rate of 27%; I would hate to see what a swing as violent as the dotcom burst would look like. As for the measurability of internet media: sure, marketers and their agencies can track engagement and clicks in great detail online; but it's still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer's sales." - Lloyd Shepherd
"He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn’t actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer’s investment bankers stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: “I’m a junior analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I’d worked on a deal for the Money Store.” He was promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. “What I didn’t tell him was that my job had been to proofread the documents and that I hadn’t understood a word of the fucking things.”" - Lloyd Shepherd
"The broadcast era is coming to an end. The network era is well under way. Only openness can keep the BBC relevant through the transition." Bowbrick's state of the openness nation on the BBC Blog. - Lloyd Shepherd
"None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment." - Lloyd Shepherd
"Look, there's nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing. He's said some savvy, if unoriginal, things about journalism (advocating looking at the article as an ongoing process, not a product, for instance). He's among the most rational of the new thinkers. But it's the callous contempt for working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession for a brief shining moment—well, longer than that—before it became a platform for "reverse engineering." - Lloyd Shepherd
"It’s now known as the Buncefield Depot explosion, and little has been done to remedy the situation for the people affected by this massive incident. Ian lost everything, his beautiful home, all of his belongings, and years later he suffers from symptoms caused by the blast. Frankly, he’s lucky to be alive– and he knows it, but deserves closure and help from the companies that caused it." - Lloyd Shepherd
"Pete Clifton, head of editorial development for multimedia journalism at the BBC, speaks to Jemima Kiss about metadata and sharing the organisation's technology" - Lloyd Shepherd
“I work at the BBC. I’m far from racist and that uneducated woman has no right to call me one.” She says of her daughter: “I don’t want her to turn up with a guy with a turban on. It’s going to freak her out. She’s not used to Asians.” - Lloyd Shepherd
“Yes we can” had never been much more than a motivational vitamin, too close for comfort to Bob the Builder’s “Yes he can!” But by attaching the phrase to the past tense, to achieved history, Obama stripped it of its bright futurity and invested it with a measure of uncertainty, as if intoning both “Yes we did” and an implied “Yes we may.” - Lloyd Shepherd
"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases. This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went." - Lloyd Shepherd
"5) Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn't afford that many crowd scenes. The original plan was to set the final episode six months in the future, by which time the zombies were badly decayed and could only shuffle (although "freshies" would still run), but budget and time constraints ruled this out. Which would you rather see - running zombies or absolutely no zombies at all?" - Lloyd Shepherd
"I know that bbc.co.uk is the third biggest web property in the country, yet every time I go there I feel completely alone. Instinctively, I know there are other people on the site so the idea is connecting audiences with programming and with each other, embracing that big theme of social media." - Lloyd Shepherd
