Personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi theorizes that there were a whole lot of things the Presidential candidates didn’t (and couldn’t) say about your money during the debate last night. For example:
Not all homeowners deserve to stay in their houses. Renting is a perfectly reasonable alternative, but the idea of Americans “losing their houses” is politically untenable. Why? Because America perpetuates a mistaken culture of homeownership. Owning your own home is the kind of BS sacred cow that got us into this mess: Our parents tell us to buy a house. Our friends are impressed if we own a house in our twenties. The government literally encourages us to own a house by offering tax deductions. Homeownership is the American Dream! The truth is, if you’re making the largest purchase of your life, you need more than a slogan — you need to take the responsibility to do some research.
Hit the link to see the rest of Sethi’s list of political suicides Obama and McCain didn’t commit last night.
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Tags: all-homeowners, american, because-america, houses, largest, life, Lifehacker, money, obama, offering-tax, personal finance, politics, presidential, ramit-sethi, responsibility
At a conference for magazine publishers, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg all but admitted her company still has no idea how it’s going to make money, besides letting Microsoft broker ads for it. “We need to find a new model and new metrics,” she told attendees at the American Magazine Conference. It’s a classic move from the White House veteran’s political background: If you’re not winning by existing rules, move the goalposts. (Photo by Doug Goodman/AdAge)
Filed under: Cellphones
Screen grabs chronicles the uses (and misuses) of real-world gadgets in today’s movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dt com.
The crew on
Without a Trace may not have all the high-tech investigative toys found on channel-mate
CSI, but one of the guest characters in last night’s episode apparently has an
in at AT&T, getting himself a Blackberry Bold (complete with evidence) ahead of its American release — which may or may not be
this month.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
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Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for Children and Families apparently didn’t get the memo that Google is your new god. The CCF is a California organization dedicated to, among other things, making sure only biblically-appropriate marriages involving one weewee and one hooha are allowed in the state by endorsing Proposition 8, which “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” Thomasson told OneNewsNow, the propaganda arm of the American Family Association, that since Google has come out against the same-sex marriage ban, he won’t be using the search engine. And Thomasson had some harsh words for Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The Google cofounders, according to Thomasson, “replaced all notions of God’s truth by worshiping money as god.” Also, the company makes fun of Easter and prefer “pagan-type holidays.” Of course, no one seems to have told the CCF’s Webmaster — the screenshot from CCF’s page on current issues surrounding marriage in California asks users to search Google News for the latest updates on heathen abominations.
(Photo by AP/Steve Yeater, via Mangoes)
Marc Andreessen has been invited to join the board at eBay. The online auction company has been struggling of late, never mind CEO John Donahoe’s assertion that what’s bad for the American economy is good for eBay. Andreessen, probably smelling the stink blowing in from the rising tide, stockpiled enough venture capital to last Ning through a “nuclear winter.” Proving his acumen at swindling investors if nothing else — and he does know how to keep employees overworked between stints at eager, young startups like Netscape and Ning and layoff-happy AOL. [San Jose Mercury News]
If your iPhone 3G’s American AC adapter doesn’t have a green dot on it, Apple wants you to swap it for a new one. The recalled adapter’s plugs have been reported to break off in wall sockets — not just an annoyance, but an electrical shock and fire hazard.
The above pic is a splash screen you can see when visiting Canadian electronics and appliance retailer Easyhome, notifying visitors of a four-day sale. Depicted on the Sony TV in front of the American flag is a politician flashing pearly whites and a double-thumbed “This guy!” Beneath him is the none-too-veiled message “Even BS looks good on a 52-inch HD LCD TV.” Maybe so, Canada, but some think it’s even better with the volume all the way down. [Easyhome - Thanks Chris!]
I like to think I’m resistant to neophilia, the fetishistic embrace of new technology endemic to Silicon Valley. And yet I felt a rush when I logged on to Gogo’s inflight Wi-Fi service on the American Airlines flight I’m currently taking from San Francisco to New York. The airliner’s cabin has long been the last online frontier, a disturbing pocket of disconnectivity. My colleague Jackson West urged me to test the service, to review it for my readers. But I find myself more preoccupied with human needs than speeds and feeds. More than anyone, I worry about the likes of Mary Meeker.
I can hear the 20somethings in the audience scratching their heads: “Who’s Mary Meeker?” Back in the ’90s, investment banks’ Internet analysts were superstars, viewed as oracles and rainmakers. In 1999, Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s lead Internet analyst, got a profile in the New Yorker. The text is not online, but I distinctly remember how it chronicled Meeker’s nonstop activity. The only time she was still was when she boarded an airplane, closed her eyes, and slept through the flight. Could she have stayed awake, had she known she could achieve download speeds of 989 kilobits per second, with a latency of 108 milliseconds, for the low, low price of $12.95 a flight?
Inflight connections, currently on a handful of flights, will rapidly go from novelty to necessity. Bosses will expect workers to log on nonstop; why shouldn’t they? Even on leisure trips, compulsive connectors will go online out of sheer habit. I recently remarked to a friend, “Planes are for sleeping.” That’s before I got onto Gogo. Alas, poor Mary; even soaring above the clouds, there will be no rest for the weary.
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