I think there is more than just one single option. In my opinion, bankers and the banking industry are free to choose how banks ought to be regulated.

I guess this is supposed to be Professor Krugman’s so called “learned” response to my so-called “learned” stimulus.

So since the answer must be found elsewhere than to question “free market” capitalism, the solution is to ram employment down your throat and to call that something like a defense of freedom!

LMFAO — it doesn’t get any better than this, does it?

Neither do the disabled, whose inability to work is unfortunate, but not driven by economic issues.

I’m afraid that this man simply does not discriminate between work and employment… — FAIL!

1. Increase spending: reduce unemployment, raise growth, output, pollution global warming and ecological doom;

2. Do nothing: live with low demand, high unemployment, surplus hours spent without increasing output, less pollution, less global warming, possibility of a sustainable future.

Which would you choose? Would you prefer spending, high employment, burning up fossil fuels, increasing short-term wealth or would you rather live in a lower output, more sustainable world?

Press coverage of Argentina is another one of those examples of how conventional wisdom can apparently make it impossible to get basic facts right. We keep getting stories about Ireland’s recovery when there is, in fact, no recovery — but there should be, darn it, because they’ve done the “right” thing, so that’s what we’ll report.

And conversely, articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone — they’re irresponsible, they’re renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly.

I wish to focus on one point, though, and single it out as what I see as the primary “fly in the ointment”. Professor Krugman writes:

as Bernanke pointed out in a recent speech, employment looks bad across the board: “The fact that labor demand appears weak in most industries and locations is suggestive of a general shortfall of aggregate demand rather than a worsening mismatch of skills and jobs.” As a result, he declared, the data “do not support the view that structural factors are a major cause of the increase in unemployment during the most recent recession.”

This is simply wrong — and even Professor Krugman has pointed out how it might be wrong. Why he seems to be pretending to be oblivious to this fallacy, well I have no idea what his motivations are.

Technological shifts can change the entire global economy — for example:

• fire;

• the wheel;

• the printing press;

• power generation using fossil fuels;

• electricity;

• radio;

• the Internet;

and many other technological shifts have changed the entire global economy. Granted: globalization has steadily increased over time — and many of these technological shifts have also been quite influential in increasing globalization.

Indeed, perhaps the Internet has been one of the most powerful of these technological shifts with respect to the globalization of work. Today, employment has become an outdated business model. In my opinion, civilizations that are unable to adapt to a world without employment contracts will be increasingly left behind. It is no longer necessary for one person to “employ” another person in order to get jobs done. On the contrary, for civilizations to have thriving and successful economies, it is becoming increasingly important for people to be able to “freely” self-organize, to network and collaborate.

In my opinion, when Professor Krugman declares that unemployment is a problem, he is indeed living in the past, and therefore he is simply barking up the wrong tree.

This isn’t a case where a few lesser outlets omitted a minor point about a headline. It’s a case where a story that was interesting enough to earn a full Techmeme pile-on was lacking in coverage that would be necessary for understanding the story at even the most superficial level. As you might expect, a few of the larger outlets have big enough audiences that their commenter communities were able to add the missing salient facts to the story, but on both The Verge and Business Insider, the comments which mentioned Friend Connect were buried in their respective threads and, as of a month later, not highlighted in the original posts.

The tangent I followed led me to think more about the difference between “natural language” and “intellectual property” … and especially in the context of our current millenium.

See: Do You Remember “User-Generated Content”? To Solve Search Queries, You Must Pay Attention to Users — Who Is the User + What Language Does the User Use?

I guess a word search on “depression” for a psychology magazine would finger me as a possible author — if the searcher were a bot, not a human being.

Professor Krugman may be interested to note, however, that even though the same word is often used differently in different jargons, there probably remains some kind of nebulous similarity in meaning.

Aside from that, I find Professor Krugman’s remark that he will only accept such search results “once they get more of the kinks worked out” (my emphasis) … well, I find it condescending — as if algorithmic search results are perhaps good enough for idiots, but do not pass muster with the professor.