Fortune Favors The Bold

where did it all go wrong?

“The silver lining, at least, is that this gorgeous creature didn’t have to live in Chicago any more.”

All of our rights 

are going away.

BTW I enjoy how Pinterest is even more thought-numbing than Tumblr is. The core Tumblr software allows you to reblog anything, but the context is that you are blogging it and YOU probably should have an opinion about it that is definite and nuanced. Tumblr allows you to share and have no opinion at all, of course, and the way the community is run suggests that it’s better for everyone if you just share without commenting, but you are given (mostly) every chance along the way to not only share thoughts but to also have those thoughts stand on nearly equal ground with the original media. It seems Pinterest, on the other hand, is purely a mechanism for viral sharing. If I had something that I wanted to share with the world, but I wished to add a thought or reaction to it that I wanted to have equal visibility with the source link in my own post… Pinterest seems like a poor place to do that.

It’s a great place to establish a list of things seen around the web with the implicit endorsement of, “I liked this!” As a matter of fact, it’s better than Tumblr for that.

But if that’s how you mainly communicate with the outside world, you really don’t have much to say. All of these social “likes” and link shares from people who lack overwhelming popular authority have the same value/power as a phone call vote into “American Idol”. PRO TIP: don’t put it on your resume.

Favorite fact of the day: A “Fab-Ab February” graphic is going viral right about now… it was originally posted to Tumblr, but if you Google it, all the search results on the first page are talking about how people found it on Pinterest.

HOW’S DAT WIRED COVER LOOKIN FOR YA BOY, EH?

Cuozzo in the New York Post writes this characteristically grumpy dispatch about a logistical issue at the new WTC site that has been already solved to the satisfaction of all involved parties. Quelle horreur! He demands an explanation.

Well, read a magazine sometime, moron. The engineering of the entire site is incredibly detailed… it’s a complex complex!

The problem is that neither the transportation hub nor the performing arts center are going to be finished on time - both of which have been wracked by financing issues and cost overruns. That fact is no secret at all. Because of those buildings’ eventual engineering/construction requirements, the tunnel to the primary 1 WTC loading docks (which threads through both foundations) will not be ready before the 1 WTC building itself is complete and ready to open. 

But they solved the problem with a temporary dock- at a cost of tens of millions, says an extremely authoritative… anonymous source. 

That ONE TOWER is expected to cost $3.8 billion to build. In order for this to increase the project’s budget by 2 percent, it would have to cost $80 million. The entire site should end up costing between $12-$16 billion to finish, which would make anything that costs $20-$30 million a rounding error. 

That’s pretty much what I can’t stand about newspapers. They are almost always penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to talking about projects and infrastructure, repeating whatever nasty shit that anonymous politicians and government staff use to snipe at one another. And we’re supposed to buy into that. Meanwhile, they’re all too stupid to effectively figure out what’s going on in the financial world at any given moment, where people are REALLY putting the hurt on us. They cover the $1 million story and fuck up the $1 trillion story. They are the shittiest auditors. People with math skills that bad should be put in a group home.