Job Interviews I and II

From DOGHOUSEDIARIES

Job Interview I

Job Interview II

US Housing: Over 30% Down Since 2006 High

From The Economist's Daily Chart blog

Segregation: Still an American Reality.

"Decades after the end of Jim Crow, and three years after the election of America's first black president, the United States remains a profoundly segregated country."

from Salon.com

The 10 most segregated urban areas in America

Are we surprised?

To Kill a Haji - Afghan War Murders

"How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon"

From Rolling Stone

see The Kill Team

Candelaria: Bar Souterraines

"Posé sagement dans une rue tranquille, on lui donnerait le bon Dieu sans confession à ce resto de tacos. Pourtant, il a quelque chose de louche : où vont tous ces gens qui se faufilent derrière le zinc ? Ils disparaissent derrière un mur. Une porte, en fait. "

From My Little Paris

Bar Underground


Candelaria
52 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e, Métro filles du Calvaire 
Ouvert du mardi au dimanche de 12h à 23h
Le bar à cocktails ouvre à 18h, cocktails à 12?
Tél : 01 42 74 41 28

Air New Zealand Safety Video

Looking good!

Suckers and Punches

"Absurdly fetishized women in teeny little skirts, gloriously repetitious fight sequences loaded with plot coupons, pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge. Then he yanks it all back and stabs us through the eyeball."

Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir's review of the Zack Snyder film

Sucker Punch     

The New Capitalism: Rent it!

Image by sylvain kalache via Flickr



Navneet Alang, a technology-culture in Toronto, Canada has wrttin in Techi that essentially the web is turning us into a bunch of renters rather than owners.

"...the central premise that you exchange money for goods might be giving way in which you either charge for access, or charge for the things surrounding the content – the old merchandise, live shows argument rather than the album."

See

How the Web Might Redefine Capitalism

One Night in Paris mais dans le ventre

"S'infiltrer en pleine nuit dans le ventre du plus grand marché du monde, ça n'est pas donné à tout le monde. Rungis vous ouvre pourtant ses portes, le 1er avril prochain."

"Le 1er avril, de 3h à 9h30. Rendez-vous à 2h30 place Denfert-Rochereau. Alfred s'occupe de vous emmener à Rungis... et fournit le café. "

From Merci Alfred

Taylor - Magnum Photos

Joining the club, as they say. Or perhaps the horde...

From Slate.com with a selection of photos from Magnum

Taylor Photos

Newspapers: Graphs of Past and Future Collapses.

SAI Business Insider has published two graphs about a week apart:

• One called "Why The Newspaper Industry Collapsed"
• And the other called "The New York Times' Delusional Digital Pricing Scheme

It's interesting to compare the two. 

 

Wonder what similar charts will look like in a year's time?

Table Football at Euro 48,500 a Pop

"Built by a Dutch design firm that's worked with Samsung and Nokia, 11’s an absurdly luxe foosball table that wowed crowds as a prototype back in ‘08 with its high-tech components and aesthetic qualities evoking the “beauty and grandeur of today’s modern stadiums”, thanks largely to costing just as much."

Via Thrillist 


11 | The Beautiful Game - The world’s most epic foosball table

11thegame Company Web site

US Air Marshals - Don't Try It

"...a passenger on a Delta flight allegedly started telling people that he was an air marshal. Sometimes, you might be able to get away with this—air marshals aren't on every flight. But Wednesday was not this impostor's lucky day. There was a real air marshal on Delta Flight 1922, and when the real air marshal got wind of the fake one's claims, he detained the man in question."

From The Economist's blog Gulliver

Don't pretend to be an air marshal

Love the photo!

AT&T, T-Mobile and Wireless Spectrum

"ATT has several good reasons to spend $39 billion to acquire T-Mobile. But the most important reason that AT&T needs more wireless spectrum -- the airwaves used to operate mobile services -- and T-Mobile has it."

From SAI Business Insider

CHART OF THE DAY: The Real Reason AT&T Is Buying T-Mobile

Another African Nightmare - La Côte d’Ivoire - The Ivory Coast

The Economist's Baobab Blog has been running a series of articles on the situation in Abidjan which has naturally been pushed to the back of the news by events further in North Africa and the Japanese earthquake disaster.

The blog has run a series of now 4 blog posts which are perhaps best summed up by this image from the first entry, a picture of absolute rage and desperation.

An unfortunate but too typical African sentiment.

The Baobab blog posts can be found below in date (not blog order) earliest first:

• Arriving in Abidjan
• Grinding to a halt
• Paradise lost
• The final push

A Google Social Network - So What.

Image by niallkennedy via Flickr"Google will launch a social network, possibly called Google Circles, at its Google I/O conference in May, according to technology blog The Next Web."

So says The UK's Daily Telegraph blog that generated a random headline on my RSS feed

Google 'to launch social network in May

And an equally random thought crossed my mind on idally reading the feed post:

"Why?" and then a few seconds later "Why bother?"

I mean, they've managed to f'up all their earlier 'social' stuff experiments.

Seriously Google guys, give it a break and get back to search...and fix up those results, will you! I mean, really. Anyone would think that since the so-called big make over the other week we were all getting back great results now.

Like hell!

Fix it Google guys.

It still sucks of pseudo 'real' search results that we all know are spam.

The Sendai Earthquake - The Catfish Jumped

"Beneath the Japanese archipelago lies a mythical catfish, brutish and capricious. For most of the time, its head is pinned down by a granite keystone, held in place by the Shinto god of the earth. But occasionally, the god drops his guard. Then the fish thrashes, convulsing the earth."

From The Economist blog Asian View

See When the earth wobbled

The New Zealand Economy: Into the Hole

Image via Wikipedia"The earthquake that struck Christchurch two weeks ago was not only a national catastrophe for New Zealand. It is also becoming clear how devastating it is to the Kiwi economy."

"Across the industrialised world, there is one country that shows a debt profile similar to the so-called PIGS countries, and that is New Zealand. Over the past decade, New Zealand’s total overseas debt has risen steeply. In December 2000, it stood at 109 per cent of GDP. Ten years later total debt had reached 132 per cent, while NZ net debt stood at 85 per cent of GDP."

I would concur with the writer of this article in that all bets are off as to a possible New Zealand recovery this year. The issue of debt and indebtedness covered here is serious in itself but what is perhaps more worrying is the comment

"For the PIGS, at least, there was a safety net provided, thanks to European guarantees underwritten mainly by German taxpayers. Should New Zealand’s troubles get worse, who will Kiwis turn to?"

They could turn to the Aussie's but it would come with a very high price:  loss of their independence.

From the Australian Business Spectator

See New Zealand is in a dangerous debt spiral (free sign up required to read).

Paris Bar # One - Château en Ville

"Grandes pièces, fauteuils en cuir... le lieu respire. "Et puis le vin, ça a toujours renforcé la convivialité", souffle le patron. D'autant qu'il s'agit du seul bar de la capitale où vous pourrez boire un cru de légende au verre. Du genre Margaux Château du Tertre 1993. Une expérience saisissante, de celles qui vous marquent le palais pour quelques jours. Et cette fois en plus, vous pourrez en parler avec votre voisin de comptoir."

From Merci Alfred

Voir


Le bar le plus convivial de Paris


ÔChateau,
 68 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 75001 Paris 
www.o-chateau.fr 
Tel : 01 44 73 97 80 

Zimbabwe: Bob and South Africa - Nothing Has Changed.

Image via Wikipedia"South Africa, which is supposed to be "facilitating" a solution in Zimbabwe to the three-year-old power struggle between Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party and Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), seems to have adopted the 87-year-old dictator's view on the perniciousness of the West's targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe."

Not sure why anyone things anything will ever change in Zimbabwe as long as Robert Mugabe is alive. Maybe we should start a new movement:

The WBD - The "When Bob is Dead" movement!

See Pesky sanctions

From The Economist blog Boabab

The Future of Publishing

Referring back to my previous post

Online Digital Music - Pandora's Box

Now why can't the music industry do the same thing?

See from SAI Business Insider

"he gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month."

Full article This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

Online Digital Music - Pandora' Box

Image via CrunchBase"Pandora, the popular Internet radio service, filed for an initial public offering in February that would raise $100 million. Spotify, a highly lauded European service, is reportedly raising $100 million from private equity firms to help it come to the United States."


The New York Times notes that


"Since it emerged in the 1990s, digital music has been hugely popular with fans, but for online music companies and their investors it has almost never been profitable."


See


Investors Are Drawn Anew to Digital Music