Category: Housekeeping

A Bit About Me

By James Kwak

As loyal readers know, I spent the summer working and mainly not-blogging. I’m back in school now, but this semester will be busier than previous ones. I’m taking two clinics, and I have to make up for phoning it in last fall when I was writing 13 Bankers. (Simon and I wrote it in four months while I was in school and he was teaching three classes.) Also, I only have one more year of school left in my life, I’m paying more than $45,000 for it, and I’d like to take it seriously.

So the blog is going to be a somewhat lower priority in the past.* I’m hoping to post a few times a week this semester, if I have enough original ideas. I hope you will keep reading; I assume most people get the blog via email or an RSS reader, so frequency shouldn’t be an issue for you.

It’s possible that after school I will go back to more serious blogging; I do think it’s a valuable and potentially powerful medium, and certainly a lot more gratifying than writing academic papers.

Thanks again for reading.

* In my defense, most of the high-volume economics bloggers are either tenured professors (Cowen, Thoma, DeLong, Krugman) or people whose job is to blog (Salmon, Klein). (Yves Smith is an exception; how she finds the time I don’t know.)

Summer “Vacation”

By James Kwak

Tomorrow I am beginning my summer internship (for those who don’t know, I’m a law student between my second and third years). I’m going to be working in death penalty defense.

Sometimes people ask me how I find the time to write this blog. The answer is that being a student at the Yale Law School takes a good deal less time than a real job. (You can, of course, make yourself very busy with clinics, journals, and other activities, but you don’t have to.) But this summer will be like a real job, and I intend to spend the time that I’m not working with my family, which means that I will be cutting way, way back on blogging this summer. I’m guessing that I’ll write about two posts per week, but I would not be too surprised if I don’t even manage that, and there’s a small chance I won’t have time for anything at all.

I expect that I’ll get back to something close to my usual frequency in late August or early September.

Thank you for taking the time to read the blog.

Mysterious Facebook Problems

By James Kwak

Sometime this morning all of the links from our Facebook page back to the blog stopped working. According to Facebook, “Facebook users” had identified the page as being “abusive.” I didn’t find out until this evening, when a reader emailed me. (I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook.) When the problem started, it also applied to all of the older links from Facebook to the blog. The problem did not seem to affect links from the Facebook page to 13bankers.com.

Then, in the last half our, the problem went away, and now all the links work.

I have no idea what happened. For background, this is what usually happens. New posts on this blog go into the RSS feed. That feed gets polled periodically by Twitterfeed, which takes the title of the post and the URL (compressed using bit.ly*), appends “#fb”, and creates a new tweet from our Twitter account. (The 13bankers.com feed gets treated the exact same way.) Then the Selective Tweets application for Facebook monitors our Twitter feed; whenever it sees a tweet that ends with “#fb”, it posts it to the Baseline Scenario fan page in Facebook.**

The fact that the links to 13bankers.com continued to work seems to absolve Twitterfeed, bit.ly, and Selective Tweets. However, I have enough software experience to know that things are not necessarily that simple.

So the possibilities seem to be:

  1. Facebook doesn’t like bit.ly — doubtful.
  2. Facebook doesn’t like anything being promoted by Selective Tweets, as suggested by one commenter — quite possible. This could be a flaky problem, meaning it comes and goes.  (It does seem like the problem appeared briefly on April 23 as well.)
  3. Facebook has some kind of algorithm that says, “if the same site gets posted too many times using something that looks like an automatic process, it’s probably spam.” But this seems doubtful, since we are far from the biggest blog that auto-posts to Facebook.
  4. A bunch of pro-Wall Street activists (are there such people? aren’t they called “lobbyists”?) figured out how to report to Facebook that baselinescenario.com is really a religious cult indoctrination site, and therefore someone at Facebook (or some program) shut off access to the site.

If anyone knows, or has better theories, please comment. If it happens again, someone please email us at baselinescenario at gmail dot com.

(Incidentally, ours is not the first blog this has happened to. This happened to Cake Wrecks, a blog that highlights really, really bad cakes.)

* Actually, I told Twitterfeed to use Snip instead of bit.ly, but for some reason it’s using bit.ly. But it’s been using bit.ly since long before this problem started.

** I don’t use the main Twitter app for Facebook because, at the time I was setting this up, it didn’t allow you to post your tweets onto a fan page, only onto your personal Facebook page.

Download the Blog – New and Improved!

By James Kwak

I finally came up with a better way to create a downloadable blog archive (always available via the “Download the Blog in PDF” link under Navigation in the right-hand sidebar). Now the archive is up to date (through April 2010) and you can download it in PDF, Kindle, or EPUB format. And it has clickable bookmarks for each individual post.

Thanks go to Joss Winn, Martin Hawksey, Feedbooks, and Yahoo! Pipes. See the archive page itself for a technical description.

Away Message

By James Kwak

I’ll be traveling and probably not blogging (hopefully not using a computer at all) until next weekend (March 27 or 28). Simon will be around, though. Bye.

13 Bankers

The day that President Obama came out in favor of size and scope limits for banks seems like a good day to tell you about our new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown–in which we argue for hard size limits on banks, among other things. While we end up talking about the financial crisis, the way the government responded to it, and the too big to fail issue, it’s really a book about power–the economic and political power of the banking industry both recently and throughout American history, the problems it creates, and what we can do about it.

The book will be out on April 6 (or maybe a week earlier), but you can already pre-order it wherever books are pre-ordered. In the meantime, to learn more, we have a new book web site with its own blog (for book-related news and thoughts).

Now, back to proof-reading . . .

By James Kwak

Baseline Scenario Catches Up to Last Year’s Technology

I finally bothered to figure out how to push new posts (well, links to new posts) into the status messages of our Facebook page. This means that if you are or become a fan of that page, links to new posts will magically appear on your Facebook home page (which they keep redesigning–does anyone besides me find it annoying when Web 2.0 companies keep changing their user interfaces around and forcing you to figure out how they work every couple months?).

I’m doing it this way: Blog -> RSS -> Twitterfeed -> Twitter -> Selective Tweets Facebook application -> Facebook page. So if you follow the Twitter feed you won’t miss anything that’s on Facebook.

Alternatively, if you use Facebook and want to stay within Facebook, you can go to our Facebook page and click on the RSS/Blog tab to read full posts.

As for me, I stopped using Facebook many months ago.

By James Kwak

Feed Problems?

I’ve gotten a few messages that our feed is not working properly. And, it occurs to me that I haven’t been getting email updates for the past couple of days.

The default feed produced by WordPress (https://baselinescenario.com/feed/) is working fine, and I can read the blog fine in Google Reader. But the Feedburner version (http://feeds.feedburner.com/BaselineScenario), which generates the emails, is stuck at January 8. I’ll look into it, but if you have any diagnostic details or suggestions let me know below.

(I suspect it is related to my having changed the number of items that go into the feed from 15 to 200; I was trying to figure out a better way to convert the blog to PDF, and that was one of the steps. I reset it this morning, so that may fix it.)

Update: Forcing Feedburner to ping the default feed worked; the Feedburner feed is up to date now. I’ll watch it to see if it picks up the next post or not.

Update 2: It did. I’m guessing that email subscribers will get an email tonight. (Of course, most of you aren’t here to read this.)

By James Kwak

Kindle Comments?

As a few of you have figured out, you can read our blog on the Kindle. I know a few of you know this because I have received a very small amount of money from Amazon – a good deal less than the annual expenses of maintaining this blog, and those expenses are probably only in two figures anyway.

Simon pointed out that not being able to read comments on the Kindle is a problem. The reason for this is that WordPress.com separates posts and comments into two separate feeds. So I was just over at the Kindle Publishing site, about to publish the comments feed as a separate Kindle blog, when I realized I had no idea what the copyright status of comments is. In particular, if I do publish the comments feed on Kindle, I will make (a paltry amount of) money from other people’s work.

Now, I am guessing I am probably on firm legal ground doing that, since there are lots of blogs that make money (though few that make a lot of money), and they are all to some degree making money off of their comments. I think I’m on firm ethical ground as well, since the amount of money is so small that there is just no way to distribute it to the commenters that would not cost more to implement than the revenue I would receive. But I wanted to know: (a) if anyone knows of a good discussion of this topic (I can’t be the first person to think of it) and (b) if any of our regular commenters cares one way or the other.

Thanks.

By James Kwak

At the Beach

I will be at the beach with my family for a week. I’m not certain about this, but there is a strong possibility that I will not be using a computer, let alone checking email or blogging. (Computers are useful when traveling, especially since I don’t have an iPhone or a Blackberry, but if you have one then there is the temptation to check your email, and then you are on a slippery slope to hell.)

Luckily for you, Mike Konczal, aka Mike Rorty, of Rortybomb and The Atlantic, has agreed to be my stand-in for the week and will be guest-blogging here. Mike is a bona fide financial engineer with the good sense to live in the San Francisco area, and is a natural with economics, finance, public policy, and the English language.

Enjoy.

(Simon will probably still be blogging, although he will also be on vacation; in fact, he has been on vacation for the past week.)

By James Kwak

The Spam Filter

The spam filter seems to be catching a few more legitimate comments than usual recently. I just rescued about nine comments (out of over one hundred messages flagged as spam) from the last several days. Some of those comments were from some of our most regular commenters. I know that if you put in a lot of links your comment is more likely to be flagged. Besides that I don’t really know what it is looking for.

If your comment does not appear, feel free to email me to look into it. I do get a lot of email, but if you are a regular commenter I will try to look into it as soon as I can.

By James Kwak

The Economics of RSS

I rarely write about blogging itself – I take it for granted – but Felix Salmon, one of the real proponents of the medium, has a new post on RSS feeds and why they matter. First you should read his original post,* which argues that information providers (such as blogs) should provide full RSS feeds (including the full content of the article), like we do here, rather than truncated feeds (showing just the first few lines), which most but not all ad-supported web sites do. His argument is that the success of a blog depends on getting other bloggers and journalists to link to it, and those bloggers and journalists are far more likely to read your blog if you publish a full RSS feed. I believe his argument, but as he says in the new post, it would be nice to see some empirical research to know if we are wrong.

Like Felix, I read blogs through my RSS reader – Google Reader – and I basically never click through to read the full post if all I get is a truncated feed. So if a blog doesn’t publish a full feed, I am only likely to read a post if it is recommended or excerpted in a blog that does, such as Calculated Risk, Economist’s View, Marginal Revolution, etc. (I do scan a few online newspapers the old-fashioned way – on their web sites.)

Of course, I’m just one blogger, and if the really big guys like Paul Krugman and Andrew Sullivan are happy with truncated feeds, then Felix and I could be wrong. If anyone knows of any empirical research out there, please let us know.

* Yes, that post is by Felix, not by Ryan Avent, who replaced him at Portfolio earlier this year. In an impressive display of technical incompetence, Portfolio has not figured out how to show that some posts have one author and other posts have another offer. I know that they are going through hard times, but this can’t be that difficult.

By James Kwak

We’re on Kindle

At the request of a few readers, we’re now publishing the blog to Kindle. I have a suspicion that block quotes in some posts may not work properly. (I used to use a simple indent for block quotes; now I use the <blockquote> tag to try to solve this problem.)

I have never seen or touched a Kindle, so I have no way of testing it. Please let me know if you try this out and if you have any problems.

By James Kwak

Comment Etiquette

I am surprised and a little impressed, but not happy, about the lengths some people will go to to promote their views in our comments. I’ve noticed two disturbing bits of behavior recently. One is “replying” to the first comment on a long comment stream in order to boost your own comment up to the top of the page, when you are not responding to that first comment substantively. The second is posting comments under multiple identities in order to agree with yourself or, worse, to insult or attack other commenters. On one recent post, one person posted eight comments under five different names, only two of which were substantive.

There are various measures I could take to try to solve this problem, but all of them will create overhead for the community as a whole. So please stop.