TJ Sondermann › Likes

You need to be either crazy or have a strong backbone, character and conviction to swim against the tide - interesting to see how Schiff opposed "popular" belief in the financial industry in such a vocal manner. Fav quote "... stay away from the financials, they're toxic ..." - Mustafa K. Isik

It's more then that - you need a perfect sense of timing. In let's say 2003 or 2004, it would have been absolutely right in theory, but deadly in practice. As John Maynard Keynes put it -- "the fundamentals can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." - ǝuǝƃnǝ

It's amazing to see such luminaries as Arthur Laffer and Ben Stein being so wrong, yet it's not hard to see how Schiff was right: Without inflation, house values can only get so high before the avg. monthly payment exceeds the avg. monthly wage, and at that point people will have no choice but to default. From there, it's easy to predict that home equity will collapse, and so on. - Gabe

Surely recession will last "years" = depression? - Brian Sullivan

I kept saying the market going to tank since 200. I sold all my stocks at that time. My broker called me crazy. I should have shorted. I also think it will take years for the market to correct itself. There might be trading opportunities but I would not be investing unless Dow hits 6,000 And if we have banks defualting, 4,000 But I am not Peter, just a Troll. LMAO - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

In my other life! ;-) - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

As long as we don't consume so much crap, don't spend the money that we don't have via credit, and start saving real amounts of money, and start producing things of value, then the economy will start to come back. - joe is...

Whiplash... the quick interest rate hikes and uncontrolled gas prices are what jerked us into the ditch. The question is whether a new vehicle will be in order if we crash in early 2009. :) It could be one sad holiday season for retailers... and China. - Gus

jokrausdu is probably right, but it was saving too much that got us into this mess. Instead of spending all their money, the Chinese and Indians were saving it. Since interest rates were so low, they turned to mortgages as a safe, high-yield investment. Once all the safe mortgages ran out, they went to unsafe ones, causing all the trouble. - Gabe

Gabe, you should read http://friendfeed.com/e... - Private Sanjeev

Laffer is putz - and the first clip is proof. - MikeAmundsen

I'd really like to see an interview with Laffer today where he's shown that clip and asked to justify his prickish behavior in the face of being 100% wrong. - Kevin Fox

guess i need to start keeping an eye on peter schiff! - MikeAmundsen

@Kevin Bloomberg Radio had a nice interview with Laffer recently. I think EconTalk has one as well. - Kevin D. White

Sanjeev: it sounds like either way it's China's fault. :) - Gabe

Seeing this guy's latest YouTube vids, he's now predicting food lines and martial law. I think part of his predictive accuracy has to do with a truly pessimistic perspective. Is there anyone in this new media climate who can provide counter-intuitive insight without a radical extremism? - Christopher Galtenberg

Ok, well, I'll just be quiet until everything happens. - Christopher Galtenberg

Now that is funny... +100 Chris - Brian Roy

Awesome! I felt kinda left out not being asked to China, too. We'll unwind in Shanghai. - Chris Baskind

How about a failed insurance firm? The kind of bailout money you could get from that would be HUGE~ - Helen Sventitsky

I've got not one, but 4 dotcom failures i could unload on you! - Jason Shultz from twhirl

Oh, wait, you're buying failed dotcoms? I've got two I can sell you, plus at least one other that I don't actually own. I can sell you something I don't own, right? - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Just put a big bow on them, Jason. They can go alongside mine. GREAT NEWS: Looks like I now own Iceland. It's a start. - Chris Baskind

You don't actually own them? Perfect! I'll borrow cash to buy in. - Chris Baskind from IM

the paper is presented as a Scribd doc -- shows how clueless they are in using the Web -- the people writing this paper are clearly not of the generation they speak about - Allan Benamer from twhirl

Is it on Scribd? I downloaded the PDF... And I think the observations on the data are solid and insightful. They're old skool researchers but the analysis is light. I believe they're trying to spur discussion instead of drawing absolute conclusions - Daniel Bachhuber

@abenamer Sorry to miss meeting you in person at NetSquared. We are not so fond of Scribd either -- but in foundation land you have to do whitepapers sometimes. But how would you take findings like these to the web? - Eric Johnson

HTML with CSS is all that's necessary -- it's really hard to resyndicate if it's in that Scribed format -- I love pushing that kind of stuff out to my readers but I think thick document types don't really make sense in the heavily text-driven social media world - Allan Benamer

BTW, I made that same comment about a UN Foundation piece on wireless tech -- it was a PDF in their case. I just want people to think about repost opps when other people retweet or repost on their blogs... - Allan Benamer

@abenamer I agree with you re general yuckiness of pdf. But my question is a bit bigger than pdf vs html, though. How might we do some of what @danielbachhuber is suggesting -- spur discussion in ways that might help us all apply this stuff? Blogosphere is one way... - Eric Johnson

ceding control to your users is priority #1 -- keeping content in a fixed and static way is proof Case Foundation hasn't learned this yet. Sometimes, your own general principles can be exposed by existing practice. I recommend incorporating more and more UI widgets into your site that will allow for more interactivity not less. - Allan Benamer

@abenamer I think putting a report, as a finished product and not a blog post, in HTML is a barrier to entry. It's way easy to print as PDF, and not so easy to print a report as a website. I would bet they have a PDF instead of a custom-styled website just because it's that much easier to do. - Daniel Bachhuber

See that's the problem. A "report" is basically a conversation that has ended. It's really tough to comment on something like that because most people will be intimidated by the finished nature of the text. There's a kind of architecture that's evinced by a report that makes it feel more like a cathedral instead of a bazaar. And bazaars are where conversations are at... - Allan Benamer

The New Media Consortium released a "report" but they did it wiki style to encourage the conversation ..http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki... - Beth Kanter

@kanter Thanks for that link! @abenamer CF's piece of the conversation is for the moment here: http://blog.socialcitizens.org/archive... . Comments are open there, and of course everywhere. - Eric Johnson

I have to say that I think there's some benefit to the traditional report -- a snapshot that captures a moment of research -- so the document may be sealed but the conversation and the next version can be in the works. What do others think? Do reports have value as snapshots within a larger conversation? - Marnie Webb

I was going to share the report on my blog and found that the "embed code" was disabled because the report is private. Regardless of the format of the information, there was apparently a choice not to have the report easily shared. I agree with Allan that using widgets on the site should encourage interactivity, not less. This also appears to be inconsistent with the message being communicated inside the paper. - Roger Carr

@rogercarr do you think the inability to share was intentional or just a technical glitch? - Beth Kanter

Downloaded the PDF. Will read it later. If it was web-i-fied I'd be interacting with it already. - Ruby Sinreich

Reports are fine but they feel awfully outmoded in a social media context. Think of a "report" as a closed-source program and threaded comments as open-source. Reports are naturally closed-architecture as I'm hinting at when I mention the Cathedral and the Bazaar. As a result, it should be no surprise that there are more comments on this thread about the report than on the blog itself as we're dealing with open ended issues here. - Allan Benamer

I agree, Allan, that there's a lot from the open nature of comments and that there's a missed opportunity to get people to share the reports. I guess I just don't think it's either/or. It can be both/and. - Marnie Webb

@rogercarr It's a tech glitch, not secrecy. Embed code did work, but it looks like Scribd now has a bug. It does work from the paper's home on Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc... (use the icon above the paper). Ah, tech! - Eric Johnson

And I should say that I'm the guy at the Case Foundation who thought Scribd was a good compromise between the "paper" we started with -- designed pdf -- and the sharing needs that Allan is so right about. Budget and deadlines came into our decision, of course. For us the paper is background -- more for the foundation/funder/corporate audience. The puzzle is how to build on that background -- conversationally and otherwise -- to help us all to better practice. - Eric Johnson

Marnie, of course it's both/and but looking at the current data (3 posts on the blog versus dozens here on FriendFeed) it seems to me the report format isn't a winner. Eric, what if you posted the report in chunks on the blog? Sometimes, serialization and hopefully, resulting syndication can help commenters find spaces in the text to comment. I think a social news release to relevant bloggers might also be in order. - Allan Benamer