Peter Krupa

Old Republicans never die, and unfortunately, neither do they fade away. From the New York Times:

Shortly after his visit to Akron, Mr. Gingrich spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He waded to the lectern across the ballroom floor to the throbbing beat of “Eye of the Tiger,” with lights flashing and thousands of well-wishers shrieking his name. No one else made such a rock-star entrance.

Investigative journalism has never been a money-maker for newspapers. It’s good for democracy, it makes newspapers into power brokers, and it occasionally sets the national conversation, but let’s be honest, front-page stories about Tiger Woods’ hook-ups sell way more papers than 6,000-word droners about health-care lobbyists.

Newspapers were able to produce expensive, time-consuming investigative journalism because they had display and classified advertising monopolies in their markets. Now that they no longer have those monopolies and the extra cash that comes with them, subsidies for non-productive content (investigative journalism included) have been cut. As a consequence, journalists are out of work, Democracy is weaker, blah, blah blah, etc.

Or is it?

The uncommented truth of this situation is that having a lock on an advertising market gives one a huge chunk of extra change to play with. Where is that chunk now?

With Google, of course. Google controls something like three-quarters of the U.S. online advertising market. That’s about as good as any single big-city newspaper ever got. Better, because it’s for the whole country.

Of course, Google isn’t spending its extra folding money on investigative journalism, like newspapers did. Instead, it’s spending it on tech innovation, generally by ordering its employees to spend 20% of their work hours tinkering, more specifically by providing the public with awesome free products like Google Docs, YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Blogger, Google Books, Google Translator, you get the idea.

You could argue, therefore, that the economic rent that comes from dominating an ad market is still being used to promote democracy, by making it extremely cheap for millions of individuals to get online and share information themselves.

This is great. Yay democracy. But it’s also putting a lot of people out of work. And I’m too old to go back and learn Python.

From Reason Online:

To say that decriminalizing drug use “poses a threat to the coherence and effectiveness of the international drug control system” is like saying that a malfunctioning Teleprompter poses a threat to the coherence and effectiveness of the Swedish Chef.

From the LA Times: Hawaii reports no apparent tsunami damage.

As opposed to the unapparent, not-immediately-noticeable variety of tsunami damage. Over at Lat/Am Daily I’ve posted a little roundup of good, relevant Chile earthquake stories, if anyone’s interested.

Dear Scientifically-Challenged Journalists Of The World:

Please stop writing that fuel cell devices are an energy source. They are not. They do not generate energy. They need input from a conventional energy source to operate, be it natural gas, electricity produced by coal-fueled power plants, or magical pixie gas from your backyard compost pile. They may be damned efficient, and that’s great, but they’re basically fancy rechargeable batteries.

Thank you.

UPDATE: “Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking.”

It’s not like I needed anything else to further dash my hopes about the future, but this Atlantic article added some pretty significant fuel to the house fire. Basically, we’re screwed for a generation, although I’m lucky enough to be less screwed than recent graduates, Rust Belt families, and minorities.

Still, I get the additional fun of belonging to a profession that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. If I were to return to the States to look for a job, I’d be competing with hundreds of thousands of laid off journalists with similar or greater experience than I have. I’d probably be reduced to taking an unpaid internship that only hints coyly at the possibility of full-time employment, all the while ruthlessly exploiting the vulnerable.

Meanwhile, I’d feed my family with food stamps.

As those are pretty much my options, I’m throwing a Hail Mary and starting a news Web site. Lat/Am Daily covers what happens in Latin America, with lots of links and a wee bit of commentary. It’s silly to think I can cover an entire continent, I know, but hopefully I’ll be able to whittle the site down to a poignant nub that gets some traffic.

There is almost no chance I will ever be able to make a living off of this, but it’s more fun than not making a living for somebody else. In the meantime, maybe I’ll pick up some useful skills.

Oh, and I’m looking for interns. No pay, but it’ll look great on your résumé.

In no particular order:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Amelie
3. High Fidelity
4. Bubba Ho-tep
5. The Apartment
6. The Man Who Wasn’t There
7. The Royal Tenenbaums

“We Are the World” remake: Helping Haiti? Absolutely. I bet a lot of Haitians breathed a sigh of relief on February 2 and said to themselves, “Boy, I feel a lot less hungry and a lot more housed now that a bunch of famous musicians got together and sang for 14 hours. All I need now is my very own pony!”

Or here’s an idea! Rather than waiting for a few dollars to trickle down thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity, why don’t all you bumble-fuck celebrities just sell a couple of your houses and donate the goddamn cash to the Red Cross?

And finally, Jeff Bridges? Really? Like, the Jeff Bridges who’s up for an Oscar this year for his role as a musician, but has never, like, you know, done anything else musical in his life? You people are shameless.