What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it
Tag: humor
By James Kwak
I’ve recently been making you suffer through my struggles with the telecom industry. To show that I appreciate your patience, I wanted to recommend to you a brilliant cartoon on telecom tech support, from the inimitable XKCD. I would reproduce it here, but that seems like it would violate fair use, so you’ll have to go over there.
Don’t forget to check out the mouseover (place your pointer over the cartoon and wait for a few seconds).
By James Kwak
The Center for Responsible Lending has a great comic strip titled “If Anti-CFPA Folks Ran Toyota Today?” with classic lines like “Fixing these cars will raise the price of cars in the future, and hurt deserving drivers.” I’m pretty sure it was directly inspired by one of my favorite posts, “If Wall Street Ran the Airlines . . .,” but that’s perfectly fine by me. We have to keep saying the same things over and over because they’re true.
Who needs blogs? Just listen to Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin).
To Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer), in Season 3, Episode 4:
“Next stop homeownership. [Pause] I’m just kidding. The middle class is dying. You’ll be renting forever.”
To Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), in Season 3, Episode 8:
“What do we elites do when we screw up? We pretend it never happened and give ourselves a giant bonus.”
(Yes, I am way, way, behind. My wife and I only watch TV shows on DVD or streaming [Netflix or Hulu], we watch very little TV at that, and for all of 2009 we were watching Battlestar Galactica [still two episodes left].)
By James Kwak
New York Times headline: “U.S. Limits Tarmac Waits for Passengers to 3 Hours.” Just imagine …
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Representatives of industry associations reacted negatively to the government action, warning that over-regulation would stifle innovation and harm the competitiveness of U.S. firms. “Requiring each plane to stock up on 0.5-ounce bags of pretzels and peanuts will only hurt passengers,” said Sam Tapscott of the Airline Roundtable. “Airlines will have no choice but to pass the higher costs on to consumers, who will see the price of excessive government intervention in every ticket they buy.”
More worryingly, some industry analysts warned of dire consequences for the U.S. economy. “Forcing airplanes to return to the terminal after three hours will reduce the efficiency of the entire air travel system,” said David Dell’amore, professor of flight operations at Harvard University. “Modern flight management algorithms minimize aggregate wait times and ensure the perfect balance of customer comfort and economic value-added.”
Hat tips to Uncle Billy and Felix Salmon:
“A FORMER INVESTMENT BANKER ANALYST FALLS BACK ON PLAN B.
“1. Explain why you want to attend law school.
“I want to attend law school because I want to make a difference in the world. My desire to attend law school has nothing to do with the fact that I was recently fired from my job as an analyst at an investment bank, where I worked in the mergers and acquisitions group. Since January, I’ve worked on approximately one merger, zero acquisitions, have played Spider Solitaire 434 times and updated my Facebook status, on average, five times a day. …”
(Unfortunately, I suspect it’s about nine months too late — I imagine most analysts at Goldman and Morgan Stanley are quite happy there these days, thank you.)
By James Kwak
What to do when you don’t have $233.95 to pay your bill. From Geekologie.
… that the US dollar will remain stronger than …
The Baseline Scenario 