Duncan Riley, former TechCrunch blogger, claimed last week to have insider info from a tipster who had seen new Apple price sheets. Laptops started at $800 instead of $1,099, said the tipster. Analysts - if you believe them - think a sub-$1,000 MacBook would be a big change for Apple.

Riley's rumor bubbled up from his own site to VentureBeat to the New York Times' new online Technology page, where news from VentureBeat and other tech sites is merged onscreen with the Times' original reporting. Some readers who didn't bother to unpack their trust issues took the headline (note the grammar error: "a $800 MacBook") as Times-grade truth. I don't blame them. The NYT accurately broke the story on Apple's $499 Mac a day before Steve Jobs unveiled it.

The only thing I remember from newswriting class is that journalists are telling stories, even when they think they're reporting the truth. Riley told a good story, peppered with enough details to make it plausible. Web surfers crazy for stock market guidance swallowed the tale without stopping to chew. Now that we all know there's no $800 laptop, journalists will pat themselves on the back about some important lesson they've learned. I'll do it myself, right after I stop by Daring Fireball to watch Duncan Riley's ritual spanking.

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Of course, in the US there are also much wider social, educational, religious and economic differences between people, and issues range all over the map. Which then means that it's hard to bring up any nuances in politics, since either people won't care about them (not relevant for that group), or they simply won't understand them (what does "foreign policy" matter to somebody who has likely never been outside the US unless you count things like day-trips to Tijuana?).

So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?

Ugly, is what you get.

(Photo by tobo)

I really don't think that the flaws in management you see are the fault of Zuck's youth; the flaws you see are the result of his character. The reason you don't see these flaws in equally-prominent fortysomething executives is that all the ones who have characters like that have failed so badly for so long they're off the radar.

The world is topsey turvey when Michael Moore, Ron Paul, and the majority of Republicans in congress agree on anything (that we should not do a bail-out).

So the question is, what exactly are the rest of you smoking?

In any event, as Ron Paul said after the vote, nothing prevents the Federal Reserve from just pumping as much money as they want into the banking system (diluting the value of the dollar). This is mostly a bit of Pelosi left-coast showmanship.

California: Please send some intelligent people to Congress for a change. We've seen the current crop for what they are.

Where to even begin. First off, the concept of frequency "hopping" is total flawed. When the CDPD protocol tried to ride the airwaves in the analog cellular days by hopping it turned out that LOTS OF PEOPLE LIKE CELLPHONES, and so there were insufficient "blank spaces" to hop from and to. So that brilliant, frequency hopping technology ended up taking a dedicated cellular frequency to run. The same problem is going to plague Larry's smoke-and-mirrors technology.

He is trying to get something for free here, use of EXTREMELY VALUABLE frequencies, by claiming that he will hop out of the way of the current users of these frequencies. Then when they test his product in a stadium full of current frequency users, he can't hop out of their way. Then he goes crying to the government that the test was not fair. Boo hoo, I'm rich and I want to get something for free, boo hoo.

His product, at scale, will directly interfere with the current users of those frequencies. There is no way around it. When you are at 100% capacity where do you hop to? The hopping promise is the kind of BS that hardware vendors have to push in order to get their product out into the market, and the FCC knows it is a false promise. When all those new products are jamming the airwaves and an existing user turns on his device what do you think is going to happen?

Just pray your kid's vitals are not being remotely monitored at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital with the old tech when a few hundred feet away on Sand Hill Road some VC turns on his Android phone to show his secretary. But then again, maybe the nurses will notice your kid's blue complexion in time. So sure Larry, go ahead and roll out that product that can't even pass a controlled test. Why not?

So how is the inflight porn surfing?

Lovely, here comes the new Google service "AdSense-in-Games®"

The efficiency of communication is deeply correlated to the time it takes for data to be accessed and transmitted. Text based data will always be faster to access and transmit than video based data (not just talking the web here), and therefore will be more efficient. Text is already highly accessible and ubiquitous, and anyone who thinks video is going to replace text is not only an asshole, but probably retarded.

Chad Hurley is a douche bag who got lucky and got rich. The company he built hemorrhages money and has done nothing but create an outlet for outcasts and undesirables to communicate their nonsense in a space insulated from society. YouTube is nothing more than an expensive mental institution.

This is almost as ridiculous as when Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as an OS. Fucking lucky idiots.

In a previous post I said I would shut-up... But I just can't help myself: Probably because I know more about financial implications than the average Silicon Valley individual:

@sample032: It is a well-known "fact" that all banks (including investment banks) fail on a Friday: Probably because everyone is out glow-stickin' it up or something during the weekend.

@deathbychichi: AIG wants government assistance because they don't want private companies to take-over aspects of their business and create spin-offs. Or it's like a methadone-addict asking for help as long as the help provides perpetual heroin. In other words: AIG insured junk-debt; and now they're looking for a cash-based way-out of their debt: Enter the Federal Reserve. Seeing that the Fed is willing to now buy stock as collateral from various companies, as well as sub-prime MBOs; I guess that... well, I really have know idea....

Things are fucked.

Anyway, for an investment for Monday, September 15, 2008:

If you (the active investor) think that financials will go down in price; then buy the ticker SKF: SKF is a double-inverse of the financial sector.

On the other hand, if you aren't totally sure about the Financial Sector losing value: Then for every one share of SKF that you buy purchase four-to-six shares of XLF; that should create a nice hedge.

Lastly, if you honestly think that the injection of liquidity from the Fed, plus the creation of a liquid-pool of capital from the major Wall Street players ($70 billion) will off-set any decline in prices of the Financial sector, then you would be best- off buying XLF out-right.