Peter Krupa

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.

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.

From Oliver’s birth2

Oliver Simon Krupa Flores, born February 9, 2010.

With now only 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats may not be able to pass health care reform. Tonight’s Senate vote in Massachusetts is a ridiculous coda to an absurdly difficult battle, and frankly, I don’t think we learned anything.

Americans still haven’t fully grasped the fact that their health care system is an international punchline. A majority of them cling to worn-out Reagan-era orthodoxy about tax cuts and Big Government. Meantime, the last decade – arguably the climax of that orthodoxy – saw negative private sector job growth and no increase in middle class wages.

Nobody seems to get it. You can present as many facts as you want. It doesn’t matter. The talking heads and their mouth-breathing minions continue to shout the same talking points, like the more you repeat something – anything – the truer it gets.

This vote was sad for me personally because it means I might not ever be able to afford living in the United States again. Since I do mainly freelance and contract work, I have to pay for my own health care. This is doable when one is young and single, but not so much when one is married with a kid.

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but I’m not feeling it right now.

Dear Anyone Who Wants to Write or Speak in English:

“Beg the question” does not – not - mean “raise the question.” It does not mean that. I’m not going to tell you want it means. If you want to know what it means, google it. Until you know what it means, don’t use it. All I’ll tell you for sure is that it does not – not – mean “raise the question.” It doesn’t ever mean that. Ever. So stop using it as if it does. OK? Just stop. Thank you.

I looked into going back to school recently. I might still do it some day. In some ways it’s hard to see a financial benefit. Cost = ($30,000 annual tuition x 2) + ($40,000 in annual salary foregone x 2) = way more than the benefit I’d gain from Master’s-level government employment (Oh, didn’t you hear? Private sector job growth during the last decade was negative).

Still, I wonder if the current wailing and gnashing of teeth over the expense of undergraduate and graduate education fails to account for details. Take college. The average debt from a four-year degree is now $23,200. That’s either a little or a lot. It’s a little if you studied engineering at MIT. It’s a lot if you majored in Christian Studies at Hillsdale College.

Same with, for example, law school. People gasp about $140,000 debt incurred in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League. However, that cost is neither surprising nor excessive considering it gives one access to six-figure Biglaw salaries. If one doesn’t mind settling for a normal (probably government?) salary, it’s not too difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to get good LSAT scores, get scholarships to a decent law school, graduate with debt that’s not overwhelming, and go on to have a nice local career.

The problem is that Americans are making the same mistake with education as they recently made with real estate. We justify massive borrowing by blindly assuming that the investment will always maintain its value and pay a return. While this was perhaps true for education during the last several decades, it no longer is. Students must now make good choices to get good value.

There’s a really interesting book excerpt in the New York Times Magazine on the globalization of western-style mental illness. Most fascinating is the observation that mental illness is not constant across time and space. Different cultures have different kinds of mental illness, as do different periods of history.

If there is a manifestation of insanity peculiar to the west in the 20th-21st century, I wonder if it might be the phenomenon of public, apparently random shootings. Wikipedia has a list of all known school shootings around the world. Most took place in the west and appear to have started in the 1960s. Likewise, workplace shootings started in the 1980s in the west, which is how the expression “going postal” entered the vernacular.

I think authorities usually write these incidents off as “copycat” shootings – people imitating each other. But that just begs the question: How large a role does imitation plays in the manifestation of mental illness?

And why do the mental illnesses of so many westerners get expressed through random violence?

A writer at BoingBoing decided to lob a grenade into the blogosphere by asking, “Is parenthood a lifestyle choice?” You have to live in a peculiar kind of bubble to even consider asking that question. It appears to assume that non-parenthood is more prevalent than parenthood, giving the latter that status of a steampunk obsession, vegetarianism, or a commitment to Linux.

It’s an especially weird question coming from a Web site that is predominantly secular humanist. Evolution-believing, science-loving, socialist-leaning secular humanists, of all people, should know that in this confusing, godless, short existence, pretty much the only thing a species shoots for is reproduction. That’s what “survival of the fittest” is all about: adapting and surviving so you can pass on your DNA, not so you can have Sunday morning brunch with your friends for the rest of your life.

That said, I would never say anyone has an obligation to have kids. I’m not the Catholic Church. I would simply reverse the question posed. “Is childlessness a lifestyle choice?” Yes. And it’s a fine lifestyle choice. But consider this if you’re an artist or filmmaker or a writer or someone who wants to help humanity while remaining barren: You are missing out on an essential, crucial part of what it means to be human.

This has huge implications for how you experience art, civic participation, and social interaction. There is a whole range of emotions and responsibilities that you will never experience, I don’t care how many dogs you have. So get out there and procreate. It’ll be fun.

I was recently laid low by a fit of nostalgia upon reading an old blog post by Jared Cook about Hillsdale’s “disgruntled sons of the moral majority,” a group of which I am apparently part. I realized that I miss being around people who care about ideas, appreciate a well-turned phrase, and talk about books the way others discuss college basketball.

The great thing was it never really mattered if we agreed. It was the sparing that counted, the sword-crossing. I consider myself fortunate to have been invited to spar with people who, to this day, are the most intelligent I’ve ever met. We had a fine time.

Sadly, as I clicked through Jared’s various links to Hillsdale blogs, almost all of them have fallen silent, with Daniel Silliman’s being the notable exception.

Whither the disgruntled sons? Bob? Sam? Prizio? Anybody out there? The fit of nostalgia continues.

I signed up for Facebook today. I did, I really tried, and I got past the part where they ask you what schools you went to, what year you graduated high school, what year you graduated college, then I clicked OK on a couple other things, and… holy shit.

Those two made a baby? And that douche-bag joined the Marines? And that passive-aggressive weirdo now thinks he’s Michael Jackson? And what’s with all the Hillsdale people who became fucking priests?

And after my brain sucked up all this juicy gossip, it descended into my stomach and congealed into a cold lump. Because I knew the only way I could get more of this gossip was to reciprocate – to volunteer information on My Life Since Graduation, what I look like, what I do, who I married, where I live.

And it hit me that really, that’s what Facebook is about – gossip.  “Social networking” is just this decade’s version of sour-faced Mrs. Fergueson and her telescope, and the really scary thing is not that people like to gossip and spy on each other, but that they like it enough that if it comes down to a “show me yours, I’ll show you mine” kind of a situation, most people do so.

My foray into Facebook lasted three minutes. Truth be told, I don’t really want to see most of you people again, unless we’re drinking.

Anyway, the Facebook server says my account is still there… should I ever wish to reactivate it.