Tag: nyt

McDonald’s Oatmeal

You knew it had to be bad, but this bad? Bittman on McOats:

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

[…]

Incredibly, the McDonald’s [oatmeal] contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

Read the whole thing; Bittman really hits it out of the park on the perception of simplicity, speed, and “cheap” calories. I particularly enjoy knowing that cream “contains seven ingredients, [only] two of them actual dairy.”

McDonald’s Oatmeal

Amazon Women of the Modo

Holy Lord is Alex Pareene’s Salon piece required reading:

Was President Obama “henpecked” into waging war on Libya by his “Amazon warrior” female advisors? Only if you’re shocked by the thought of women in positions of power actually asserting their power. It also helps if you consider skepticism of military engagement to be inherently “feminine” and think that getting convinced of something by a woman is in and of itself emasculating. And if you’re Maureen Dowd you repeat all that stupid, backward cant, because you’re the hard-charging award-winning New York Times columnist with the most retrograde conception of gender relations this side of Hays Code-era Hollywood.

Dowd’s first paragraph is simply a list of clichéd terms for war-making women. In the rest of the column she purports to be simply compelled by the media attention paid to the role of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton in planning the Libyan campaign, but she is actually just reveling in the opportunity to call a Democratic male politician an effete weakling surrounded, as always, by ball-breaking bitches […]. There is little daylight between her “position” on the matter and Rush Limbaugh’s, except that Rush is at least honest enough not to cloak his chauvinism in the trappings of irony.

All I have to say to that is: more please.

Amazon Women of the Modo

…the underlying problem is that anyone with actual expertise and any kind of public profile — in short, anyone who is actually qualified to hold [a position requiring Senate confirmation] — is bound to have said something, somewhere that can be taken out of context to make him or her sound like Pol Pot. [Donald] Berwick has spoken in favor of evaluating medical effectiveness and has had kind words for the British National Health Service, so he wants to kill grandma and Sovietize America.

So what lies down this road? A world in which key positions can only be filled by complete hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience but unquestioned loyalty.

In short, we’re on our way to running America the way the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq.

Paul Krugman
I’d only quibble with: on our way.
Source: The New York Times

If you want to pay the New York Times to read the news using both their iPhone and iPad apps, in theory, you should be their ideal customer — you’re willing to pay, and you’re looking forward, technology-wise. But you’ll save money by getting several pounds of paper that you don’t want delivered to your doorstep every week.

John Gruber, crystallizing the fundamental problem with the New York Times’ paywall scheme. Or, as Jay Rosen might put it: the print guys won.
The paywall was supposed to be all about beginning a gradual transition away from the strictures of the printed Times (and everything that implies for the costs of operating under that overall business model). Instead, it seems to be a continuation of that model at any cost, well after said model has proven to be unworkable. Pining for yesterday won’t bring it back any sooner.

Dear New York Times, (Four things)

Your paywall is going up on March 28th. Fair enough. I see non-print-subscribers will need to pay somewhere between $15 and $35 per month to access more than a few articles.
We can agree not to bicker over the inherent stupidity of having tiers like “web” vs. “tablet.” That sort of foolishness is left as an exercise for you, the apparent fool. But I will say: charge for the app but then make it the best way anyone can imagine for accessing the single-priced, dumb pipes version of your content.
That said, what I don’t see is that I, the potential online subscriber, will be getting much of anything in return for my hard earned dollars (other than baseline access, of course).

So here’s a short list of what I, the paying subscriber, expect from you:
1) Access to all articles as a single page by default. If I am mentally unstable enough to request articles be broken into several pages by default, then so be it; however, it is therefore sadly unlikely I am able to hold a job and pay for a subscription. But if you’re going to persist in this multipage CPM crap, then I, the subscriber, should get to choose whether or not I have to take part in it now that I’m paying for the privilege.

2) No content-obstructive ads, ever. I realize ads are a fact of life for you, me, and us, and I respect that they have to be there (just like they are in the physical paper, whether or not I subscribe to it). However, the physical paper does not suddenly and irrevocably wrap my head with a mandatory, inescapable, full page ad that then lingers for some length of time each time I pass one while reading the physical Times. Neither should the electronic version of that article. You are a content company, start respecting both your content and the prospective buyer of said content.

3) Mobile ads should furthermore be minimizeable. Pixels are precious on an iPhone or other small screened devices. If you are going to tier out “mobile” versions for special and exrtra cost over “web” versions, then you have to let me minimize the ad. I have seen your ad. Now let me drop it down or scroll it up so I can have a few more lines of text per page. In fact, since you love tiers so much, mobile is the one space where I should be able to purchase an entirely ad-free version for some additional fee. Those pixels are worth that much to me. At least give me the option to pay for them.

4) Finally: a subscriber should have access to full text RSS feeds of everything you publish.

That this is very little to ask is self-evident. That none of it will be granted is similarly self-evident. That none of these key, user favoring absences will be cited when the paywall fails to attract much in the way of a revenue stream is probably also all-too-self-evident. So it goes.

There are three things you need to know about the current budget debate. First, it’s essentially fraudulent. Second, most people posing as deficit hawks are faking it. Third, while President Obama hasn’t fully avoided the fraudulence, he’s less bad than his opponents — and he deserves much more credit for fiscal responsibility than he’s getting.

Paul Krugman, reminding us how to start a column. Later, he offers a solution in seven words: “health care, health care, health care, revenue.”
Yep.

President Trump

For weeks, Mr. Trump has been engaged in not-so-quiet discussions about making a potential White House bid, but he has taken few visible steps, beyond television interviews, to test his support and demonstrate his seriousness. By accepting an invitation to appear at [CPAC], Mr. Trump is once again fueling speculation about his political future — and generating maximum exposure in the process.

Help us Flying Spaghetti Monster, HELP US!

President Trump

Ryan warns that if we don’t deal with our fiscal problems, we’ll have to raise taxes and cut benefits for seniors. So what can we do to reduce the deficit? Well, government spending is dominated by the big 5: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest payments; you can’t make a significant dent in the deficit without either raising taxes or cutting those big 5. Defense is untouchable, says the GOP; so that leaves the entitlement programs. And 2.7 of the three entitlement programs are benefits to seniors (70 percent of Medicaid spending goes on seniors).

So let’s see: to avoid cuts in benefits to seniors, we must … cut benefits to seniors.

I’m reasonably sure that Ryan hasn’t thought any of this through.

Paul Krugman hedging like Lehman on that “reasonably.”

Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.

Bob Herbert, saying what so many others seemingly find so very hard to face or admit. This is who we are, and it’s critical that we face it.
Yapping about Social Security and the necessity of cuts to same is just that: yapping. The money is in Medicare (as in: controlling the costs of) and the Bush tax cuts (as in: all of them, even those marginally aimed at the middle class). Solve those two and get employment rolling and everything else that today seems utterly intractable will simply melt away. Even better: the Bush tax cuts will solve themselves if we can just muster the will to let them.

Climate of Hate; Just the Beginning

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

–Paul Krugman, who reports in his blog that he hated writing this piece. It is, however, absolutely essential reading.

Climate of Hate; Just the Beginning