I have only met Arianna Huffington once. I remember it vividly but my guess is she doesn’t remember it much at all, which says volumes about both of us. The scene was surreal. Huffington and I were in Larry Flynt’s office in Los Angeles, participating in an experimental online talk show Larry was trying to distribute over the Internet. Our topic for the moment was gun control: I was conflicted while Huffington was violently opposed to guns, citing their danger to children, which she thought should over-rule any constitutional argument. I made a point and she replied with the motherhood card, “Well you obviously have never had children.” Point and match for Huffington. Game over.
But I had children. Back then I was the father of two sons, one of whom had died in my arms only a few months before. That memory was still too vivid for me to even respond to Huffington, who took my silence as capitulation, and maybe it was. She easily threw her kids into the battle while I couldn’t do the same with mine.
Maybe she sensed my weakness.
That was long before the Huffington Post was even thought of, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read this week that AOL was buying the blog for $315 million. What AOL is buying, primarily, is Arianna Huffington in her role as media baron (baroness?) in the Fleet Street tradition, and it is a perfect fit. Huffington is at heart a female Rupert Murdoch, she just came to it too late in life. Like Murdoch she is all about taking a position and relentlessly pushing it to attract like-minded readers and advertisers. The story is everything. Well that and the money.
Did I mention that, inspired by Huffington, this blog, too, is for sale? By her metrics it’s worth $20 million, but I’d take a tenth of that.
AOL grossly over-paid for Huffington, but CEO Tim Armstrong was desperate for an editorial strategy and a team to follow it. AOL has been leaking editors and reporters lately who couldn’t really afford to go but also couldn’t make themselves stay in what had become a directionless sweatshop.
Maybe Armstrong thought he was getting a strategy and a leader with Michael Arrington and TechCrunch last fall, but that isn’t working as Arrington turned recently on Engadget, another AOL property, out of what appears to me to be pure bile over having taken the money and sold his soul.
Huffington’s soul, if she has one, is not for sale, just her snickersnee. But that doesn’t matter because she’ll be a success as editor-in-chief of AOL long enough for Armstrong to sell the whole mess to Google, where Huffington will probably flame and die. But that won’t matter, either, because then she will have been paid twice — once to come and again to go away.
What’s most telling about this deal is the quick departure of Huffington CEO Eric Hippeau, for whom I worked in the 1980s when he was publisher of InfoWorld. There’s no smarter publishing executive anywhere than Hippeau, who in this case took the money and ran, knowing the deal made no financial sense whatsoever.
Still I believe Armstrong was right to do it, because Huffington’s base instincts can only help AOL.
While my words may sound snide I actually admire Huffington (and Murdoch) for their vision, instinct, and relentless execution. She’s a wonder of energy and audacity who gets people to write for free then sells it, keeping the proceeds. I couldn’t do that.
But then I’ve obviously never had children, either.
First. Take that Robert Young!
Wrong, on both counts. I was here when there were no comments, and there wasn’t a meaningful one to make.
Second, HP is a waste of time. Huff is not a liberal; far from it.
I listen to her on the radio all the time. She has said herself that during the Bush administration she moved from being center/moderate to liberal. I tend to agree.
Jeez, someone’s jealous.
We still love Bob!
She’s a typical liberal. Annoying, neurotic and morals / values for sale.
Yuck.
You sound like the most annoying of all, a sanctimonious conservative.
Always remember, Freemon:
It was the Right Wingnuts from Reagan to BushII that gave us a Great Recession. And they ran at least 3/4 of the government for 22 of those 28 years. The reason “gummint don’t work” is that for those 22 years, the Right Wingnuts actively sabotaged Government. It was they who repealed Glass-Steagall, and let the finance corporations rape the Middle Class. Get the facts straight. And they were the ones who made it easy to ship our jobs overseas. Get that fact straight, too.
Glass-Steagall repeal. Not that it had much to do with the Great Recession, but it was signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton and voted for by many Democrat Representatives and Senators.
Oh well. Inconvenient facts to Robert Young’s Manichean world-view, which he’ll conveniently ignore.
He was stupid to sign it. He didn’t write it.
Before you go telling people to “get the facts straight” in between calling them names, you might want to get your history straight, learn some economics, and make your points coherent enough to be rebutted… or at least understood.
If you’re referring to our current depression, which has only gotten worse under Obama with full control of the legislative branch, it is worth noting that there were two factors that caused this boom/bust cycle: First was the leftist “refusing loans to people who can’t pay is racist” propaganda that paved the way for Clinton forcing banks to make loans to such people. (It later turned out that the loans were correlated with ability to pay, not race, but then, leftists don’t care about such facts.) That combined with the federal reserve keeping interest rates well below the rate of inflation, and the government operating a “print money to boost the economy” policy between 2000-2010 and you got the inevitable housing boom, and the inevitable bust, and now the utter destruction of much of our economy.
If you werent’ so focused on hating the “wingnuts” you might actually notice that I just laid blame at the feet of both clinton, and bush, and obama. I can point out errors that bush one made, as well as reagan, carter, ford, nixon– oh, nixon! He made a doozy!
But of course none of this matters because you don’t know and you don’t care, you just hate them other guys because you think socialism is gonna let you sit on your fat ass at home and collect a paycheck. (BTW, republicans are socialist too, though they pretend to be capitalists better than the democrats do. If you don’t get that, you aren’t really aware of what the terms mean.)
Really, at the end of the day, politicians are just criminals. They will get away with whatever you let them get away with, so I blame you.
Your ignorant dumb ass is so easily controlled by partisan hacks that you spend your time on the internet spewing hatred about things you do not even understand the basics of.
Here’s an education: When you control people, you limit their ability to innovate. When you tax and inflate, you do damage to the economy, destroying jobs. When you have coercive union membership, and massive regulation, you destroy jobs. When you destroy jobs, you increase poverty.
It really is that simple. So, really you should be hating yourself. You’re the root of all you see as evil.
Smart guy. In an article that mentions Huffington’s ad hominem attacks against Cringely in a debate, this guy ups the ante, claiming expert knowledge _and then_ attacking the target’s identity.
How’s that for innovation, Cringely?
” there were two factors that caused this boom/bust cycle: First was the leftist ‘refusing loans to people who can’t pay is racist’ propaganda that paved the way for Clinton forcing banks to make loans to such people.”
Wow, it’s really amazing how America’s Community Reinvestment Act caused property bubbles and bank busts in countries such as Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, and Spain, when their banks weren’t even subject to this law!
Sarcasm aside, you’ve been lied to about the CRA, by Fox News, Rush, and others who are protecting the banksters who perpetrated the fraud that crashed the world economy. Stop repeating the lie.
It wasn’t because of “affirmative action” loans forced by liberals. That is 100% right-wing BS made up after the fact, in contempt of the reality based community. It was predatory lenders making adjustable rate and interest-only loans to people who didn’t understand what they were getting into. Then it was Wall Street repackaging those loans into bonds, and those bonds getting repackaged into better-rated bonds by rating companies who lazily and foolishly trusted the guidance given to them by Wall Street, even though they should have given them lower than the lowest ratings possible. It was all the repackaging and manufacturing and multiplying of synthetic bonds out of mortgages that multiplied the original amount by some large factor. (See “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis.) Credit default swaps allowed much of this multiplication, into insane amounts.
Why was all this fakery possible? Mostly it was lack of regulation and enforcement of whatever regulations were left. (If you leave the keys in your unlocked car, you can expect it to be stolen.) Between Roosevelt and Reagan, the US financial system was relatively stable. Then deregulation came, leaving us where we are now.
It’s true that Carter and Clinton contributed some to deregulation (especially Clinton), but it was mostly Reagan and the following Republican presidential administrations that destroyed the safeguards.
An unregulated free market means survival of the most ruthless and deceptive. Your kids will be poisoned by tainted food, your land will be stolen, and nobody will be brought to justice.
The recession is the result of ‘supply-side’ saturation.
We moved to many resources from the demand side of the economy to the supply side. That made us top heavy and lead directly to the collapse in short order.
This is a long term trend that began 30 years ago with supply-side bias policies. But mostly, Bush takes the cake. Remember, once upon a time there was a surplus.
He moved 5 trillion dollars from the demand side to the supply side with his tax cuts alone. He probably moved another 5 trillion by other means as well: the war on terrorism, Medicaid part D, understaffing and lax enforcement of economic agencies like the IRS.
You can’t take $5 trillion out of the demand side of the economy and not expect consequences. He took $10.
You might point out deregulation as a problem, and it was, but deregulation is a by product of concentration of wealth. Rich people make money off of investments. When demand shrinks there’s only small returns on orthodox investments. They then start to demand deregulation to get at unorthodox means. This condition also creates investment bubbles, because the demand for decent investment opportunities is escalating, while the avialability of decent investment opportunities is declining, so that when a sector that offers decent returns opens up, say, a new technology which brings with it its own latent demand, the investors flood that sector like greedy pirannahs creating the bubble.
Bush takes responsibility for basically destroying our economy and society – we are in a slow motion avalanche that will have us looking like a third world country 30 years from now.
As for Obama, simply patched up the regime that Bush put in place. He basically saved the system from complete melt down, but has left it at depression levels, because he’s kicked the can of supply side bias policies further down the road. Until we have demand side bias policies we won’t see an end to the depression.
And you can cast blame for this on some Dems, like Clinton, but the weight falls on Republicans, they are the ones who gave us supply side bias policies 30 years ago. Those policies lead to massive concentration of wealth and power. About 700 families control $40 trillion. They own the Republican party but they have enough money that they can buy enough democrats to the effect that they always have a majority looking after their interest.
And all that culture war stuff has been used to essentially destroy our culture. Morality, Values, that’s a middle class phenominon: the rich don’t need them and the poor can’t afford them and are prone to instant gratification. By giving the rich more money we shrink the middle class, and there goes the values oriented society. By voting for Republicans, you have quite simply have had a hand in destroying our society.
If you’re not a liberal, then you are a snide, weak-kneed, amoral nothingness.
So, who do you think is handing out the liberal dimes, her advertisers? (Someone has to get the targeted ads for locale-based altercatholic homosexual partnering; anyhow, I would rather get the ones suggesting filling floodplains with oysters.)
Your counter (my counter, not having a child or her twitter on my arm just now) should theoretically be stronger for circumstances. “Obviously, you’ve never had to dispatch children with guns, because of the live mineral edges policies you advocate. I am on to your gypsanos and found them incorrigible to positive electroconvulsive therapy; yet for all the guns hired on or military aid from the governance I elect, my children were not shot by those or defectors to those. Your ad hominem was tasteless, too.” Watch her droogs try to argue out of live anything.
Adriana is doing excellent work marking criminal valuations (but with measure.) AOL have made a stellar example of themselves in that market. I hope they’re FASB/FSB certified to do it; that trick of foresight buys so much time.
“FreemonSandlewould on February 27, 2009 9:07 AM
We’re all going to be doing this after a year of Obama.”
Are we dead yet?
The definition of a conservative is the desire for ever increasing concentration of wealth and power.
Well, at least that’s what the Republican party is all about.
That culture war stuff is just a proxy for class war (the real culture wars were ended with the passage of the bill o’ rights in 1791). How else do you con people into voting against their own interest? In this case, where Americans have handed $31 trillion (yes, with a T) over to the top 2% over the last 30 years.
Anyway, by that standard, she’s very much a conservative.
An
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert X. Cringely, Cringely2tw. Cringely2tw said: Arianna Huffington, queen of all media: I have only met Arianna Huffington once. I remember it vividly but my gu… http://bit.ly/hlLDM1 […]
Your Huffington anecdote pretty much sums up what AOL is getting:
A parade led by a demagogue, whose ends justify means, who assumes silence is assent, and can dismiss your disagreement because of the noise from the band that plays behind her.
Ouroboros.
You’re right. and it is worth noting that this description aptly fits the brownshirts in pre-nazi germany. Later they started getting into street fights but first off they were just hateful propaganda and parades with loud bands.
Huffington is evil, and AOL loses credibility by buying her propaganda organ.
OMG did you just compare Huffington to a Nazi? I guess you win.
Since when did this blog become a forum for pointless trolling and flaming?
I’ve never understood her appeal, or any of the political “pundits” for that matter.
This is the worse deal since Time Warner bought AOL, if I didn’t no better I’d have thought Gerald Levin had taken over at AOL. I wonder how many of the “guest” bloggers will continue to create content for free?
Not to worry, AOL already has it’s revenue generation strategy mapped out.
You got that backwards, AOL bought Time Warner.
Mapped out? Where’s the execution? Unless Huffington will be providing it the place is doomed.
“Mapped out? Where’s the execution?”
Evidently my attempt at sarcasm has failed. I think there is zero chance that this investment pays off, thus my comparison to the Time Warner – AOL debacle.
But for what it’s worth if it were up to me I’d have given the money to you before HuffPo.
By the way, if you believe the Drudge Report (which I read with the same frequency as HuffPo– never) Arianna’s take was about $18M,
This reminds me of when Fiorina bought Compaq for HP. Just a lot of Board Office shtick to make it seem like she’s doing something.
Perhaps a better example is when GM bought EDS. It made little sense, the guy doing the buying didn’t understand the field that EDS worked in, but they got Ross Perot, whom they assumed did. Perot was nearly as ambitious as Huffington though Huffington is perhaps the ultimate gadfly. Perot came out of the GM deal a billionaire.
It’s not necessarily a bad deal for AOL. The media world is going to be biforcated between left and right. Murdock owns the right. That leaves the left. The opportunities of the lack of a Murdock on the left is probably what drove Huffington into the left. But right wing perspectives have hit a saturation point where increasing them only brings declining returns, so it’s a matter of time that the left grows in importance. Ariana got there early and staked out a position. Now she’s capitalizing on that. MS-NBC stumbled into the left wing media vacuum because of Olbermann, but it’s holding it’s nose as it collects its profits. That’s why Olbermann left.
So, prediction, media interest on the left wing side of media world is going to grow, because right wing is played. (it was too successful and has hit its limits). Some small players will swell into bigger players. Execution plays a part. That’s where MS-NBC will eventually fall – as a reluctant player in a field they don’t want to be in. Look for Gore/Olbermann to pull Current TV onto the radar screen, maybe Oprah will do the same, and we’ll always have Arianna/AOL. Since right side media is played, taking a position on the left seems rational to me. And Arianna is a dynamic element on the left, right now.
People always say how horrible the AOL-Time merger was. And for Time-Warner shareholders, sure. What people forget is how GOOD it was for the AOL shareholders. They got a huge media company into what was at the time, basically a dialup ISP just before dialup died. If that deal hadn’t gone through, AOL stock would have been worthless. Mind you, I still can’t believe Time-Warner’s shareholders actually approved that deal.
That’s akin to saying “everybody thinks the Madoff scam was bad but they forget it was great for Bernie Madoff”.
I guess Steve Case deserves an award for suckering Gerald Levin and Ted Turner (although Turner claims to have always been suspicious of the deal), but judged solely on the merits of the outcome, it was a horrible deal.
Huffington has never been anything but a whore, in every sense of the word. She does not have allegiance to anything except money, and she does not care what she has to say or do in order to get it.
She was willing to be the wife of a secreted gay Republican until he failed to win office. She bolted. What more do you need to know? Succubus.
She’s the ultimate opportunist and the ultimate gadfly.
She must know how to flatter people pretty good. If you’ve got something to offer her, she must be great. But fall from grace and she won’t even know you are there.
I think, as a media industry maven, contrast her to Oprah. I think that clarifies things greatly right there.
She reminds me a bit of Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada.”
But in that movie, Streep’s character seemed to have some principles. Not much, but some.
Where are the SouthPark kids when you need them?
Years ago a former hockey player, Jeremy Roenick, appeared as a guest panelist on Canada’s TSN. Hockey Insider Bob McEnzie, who has been a great hockey commentator since before time began, made a comment about a particular play. Roenick, looking to be the knowledgeable made a comment that started out, “How do you know what so and so is thinking you’ve never been on the ice…”. McKenzie, quietly put his papers together, tapped them on the desk and said, “If you’re gonna’ play that card every time I make a comment, we’re done here.” TSN went promptly to commercial. The program returned, and Roenick never uttered anything remotely as stupid as that again.
Perhaps Ms. Huffington needs to keep the “You’ve never had children” card safely tucked away too.
That was fun to read.
-Steve
About Arianna being a female Murdoch – the crucial difference is that Arianna understands the internet, and Murdoch doesn’t. That’s why the Huffington Post was sold for $315M and the London Times is bleeding money and readership via its paywall.
See Arianna Huffington’s plans for local citizen journalism in every city, numerous special interest sections, plenty of original video using AOL’s new studios, etc.
She sees this as a way to get round the “innovator’s dilemma” and take a new direction and to invigorate HP.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/huffington-post-aol_b_819373.html
Good luck to her, I say – the conservative and mainstream media have had things all their own way for far too long.
As I wrote, she is very likely to succeed in this new role. which she was born to play. It’s just casting. But I wouldn’t take the Innovator’s Dilemma metaphor too far, because Huffington faces at AOL the challenge of riding a small-company editorial style in a big company. Here’s the reality in media companies, THEIR dilemma: they always snap back into the same shape. Look how hard Yahoo is trying to change and can’t. Huffington has a different style and is more of an editorial leader than Carol Bartz, but AOL will snap back, too. They always do. Hopefully they’ll sell it first. As for Murdoch, he’s more savvy than you think as almos thte only guy to make a paywall work.
Bob – I disagree that the London Times paywall is working. I’ve been following the story from the beginning, and the fact that they have tried to avoid releasing figures, and when they have released any information it’s been deliberately vague and misleading, shows that there are major problems.
All indications are that it’s a failure, despite the spin that Murdoch is trying to put on it.
Maybe the Times paywall is a failure, but the Wall Street Journal’s isn’t and that paper is worth more than the Times as a result.
I understand your shock at being cast as an unparent. She should have apologized sincerely, and should still, I think.
— the conservative and mainstream media
the conservative/mainstream media
The notion that there is a predominantly liberal media is just another Goebbel’s’Big Lie from the Right Wingnuts.
LOL @RobertYoung, on multiple accounts.
Please try to convince me how CNN, NBC and NPR are conservative. Neocon, maybe, but certainly not conservative. Will the real conservatives please stand up?
On the repeal of Glass-Steagall, read your own link and check your facts. Clinton signed that piece of trash.
How about the quantitative easing that Bernanke (under republican and democrat presidents) is using to ruin our currency?!
Thank You !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m not sure what you mean by differentiating neocon from conservative, and applying the former badge to CNN, NBC, and NPR. Nor the remark about “true conservatives,” which invites comparison to “True Scotsmen.” If we’re talking “true conservatives” I’d be more inclined to go back to Barry Goldwater, in which case today’s “true conservatives” aren’t so, at all.
Back to the “conservative media”, you forgot to mention Fox when trying to debunk the phrase. From what I can see of most of today’s media, they will report exactly what the administration says, in its official role as the administration. Then it appears that they give open mic to anyone from the right who wishes to criticize. I see very little airtime from the commentators on the left, aside from MSNBC and a more balanced (?!?) treatment on Comedy Central.
He signed it, which was stupid. He didn’t write, Gramm, Leach (love that name), and Bliley did. Fact is, except under Clinton median income fell from Reagan to BushII; fine for the 1%-ers, nobody else.
I always admire any person who can take an idea and make big money out of it. (More or less honestly, I mean.) By the way, was she paid in cash or stock?
The report said almost all in cash. Smart lady.
Ariana’s job for AOL, as far as I can see, is to make AOL enticing enough for Google to purchase in three years, before it “snaps back into shape”. AOL shareholders get a payday (finally), Ariana gets richer (why not) and Google tries to figure out how to implement AOL-HuffPost into its overall strategy. Of course, by 2015, Facebook may end up buying up all concerned (bad joke).
Except there is no reason why google would need to buy it unless all the other news sites block google (which is unlikely). None of the current google management seem interested in media, and google is more interested in making youtube work as that is where the big money (now that they have soaked up all the classified money) lies.
HuffPo explains how it operates here, who it pays to write, who writes for fee and why, etc.
Probably written to allay fears of any AOL shareholders
I’ve read that 80% of AOL’s net profit is derived from customers who don’t realize they actually don’t need to pay for AOL services. Vast majority of HuffPost’s original content is written by unpaid contributors. What a country!
Hope to see a Ken Olsen tribute column here soon.
ditto.
No Bob it’s not obvious you don’t have children…
It’s just obvious you won’t Eat your young to make that point or an extra $295M for your humble $20M blog
That’s $2 million, thank you…
If you sold out I could never really trust your comments. Right now you only report to yourself, if someone else controlled the purse strings, how long would it be before they told you what to say and you told them to shove it and we would never hear from you again.
That was a joke. Nobody would buy me.
I will buy your blog for 50% of all future income that it generates.
Sounds like the Government.
Bob, How come you can’t get people to write for you for free? You have the most brilliant readership in all of the Internet (and beyond). Start with Guest Columns (with you as the Editor) and then go on from there… Where is your entrepreneurial spirit?
Guest columns are a slippery slope and more trouble than they are worth. I’m offered them every day and always turn them down simply because my readers are so savvy. If I work hard enough to turn a guest column into something I am willing to publish, I may as well write it myself… so I do. Clearly MY business doesn’t scale well.
Well that’s what I get for talking about a business I don’t know much about. Still, given your community of readers and what I consider to be a very unique column and view on the tech world, I’m always rooting for you to find some way to expand this into something for your community of hip techno readers. (From the comments, it looks like some of your other fans root for that too.) But I guess if you or I could think of something like that then one of us would do it. Maybe it’s on a white board somewhere and we just don’t know it yet.
Maybe this is a good thing. For years I have been worried about our press. Journalism isn’t what it used to be. Since we need the press to make informed decisions on our elected officials, I’ve been worried…
About this time last year I went to a town hall meeting with one of our US senators. It was interesting to hear her talk for a couple hours. Through the course of the meeting I noticed some of her positions on things was based flawed or downright incorrect information. As people would question them, she would shut them down. She refused, for example to believe cap and trade could be harmful for business. She was convinced it would create jobs.
I know some of the members of our local press. I watched them during the town hall meeting. I talked to them after the meeting. They did not know if our senator was right or wrong on any subject discussed. They didn’t care. Researching the subject, checking the facts was the furthest thing from their minds. As misguided as our senator was, our press is worse.
Arianna is a free thinker. She doesn’t recycle stories from other news outlets. While I don’t agree with her politics I respect what she does. She has a bigger stage at AOL. If she can make a difference — that may be a good thing.
I hope you are right. Certainly it will stir the pot.
As a guy who has made his living from writing for 44 years I can tell you that pot stirring is what it’s mainly about. Columnists who don’t inspire letters to the editor are quickly fired. As this blog shows, reader involvement is vital and that doesn’t happen without hard work, independent thinking, and a willingness to take strong positions.
44 years? Bob, how old are you …> 60?
Take the money, Bob. With some cash investment you could branch out; maybe even make a series of online TV intervie…
No, wait.
Bob,
Your blog, IMHO is worth more than $20mm, just because it’s interesting and useful.
Unfortunately, you’re not enough of a blowhard, so you probably won’t get even the $2mm you said you’d take.
Of course, if you were a blowhard, I wouldn’t be reading, so I guess there’s a bit of a conundrum.
Good luck.
~ Paul
Infinite loop there….
This is getting silly. Can’t we simply understand that capital M means million as in megabyte and that capital K means thousand as in kilobyte. Ater all, we’re all using computers now.
interesting – yes
useful – not seeing any use.
Bob, do you have a sense of the degree to which Sr. management at AOL is now former Google execs, and how this is relevant to assuming an inevitable sale to Google?
A few Google people have gone over but not many. It doesn’t have the lure or equity upside of a startup and as a restart is far from a sure thing.
I have two questions for readers RE: AOL
1) When is the last time you went on the AOL website ?
2) What is your impression about someone who sends you an email with an @.aol.com address ?
AOL is a dead company walking – I need to rush out and short their stock.
You are right about “dead company walking.” I read, somewhere several years ago, that the typical AOL subscriber was a 55 year old unmarried female. These gals are now in their 60’s pushing 70 with a life span of probably 85.
I can’t imagine that their are any AOL subscribers < 55 today.
Answers:
Question 1: It’s been at least 10 years, perhaps longer.
Question 2: I dunno how I’d react- I haven’t seen anybody send me anything from
that domain in almost as long! 🙂
“I actually admire Huffington (and Murdoch) for their vision, instinct, and relentless execution.”
I admire Murdoch for nothing for what he has done in the name of profit strips away the ethics we used to depend upon when reading news. Murdoch resembles Citizen Kane when Kane says, “They’ll believe what I tell them…”
He’d probably take that as a compliment. Notice I didn’t say I agreed with the guy (or Huffington) just that I admired their energy and focus. This is not wimpy dilettante journalism we’re talking about. I’d like to see more of it on all sides.
It’s not journalism at all, it’s propaganda. Goebbels would be proud of Murdoch.
“She refused, for example to believe cap and trade could be harmful for business. She was convinced it would create jobs.”
Of course Cap and Trade will create jobs, as we see an increased financial desirabilitiy for other forms of energy … non-carbon and lower carbon forms of energy … which will help us grow the new economy based on sun, wind, hydrogen, geothermal, and technologies such as the Bloom Box and room-temperature superconductors which capitalize on the need to reduce the amount of hydrocarbon consumption and emission while increasing the efficiencies of traditional fuels (coal, oil, natural gas).
As long as we artificially decrease the cost of hydrocarbon fuel mining we will be doomed to continue to consume a limited and dwindling resource — cap and trade certainly does increase the cost of hydrocarbon fuels. But that is a good thing because it will 1) discourage the use of hydrocarbion fuels, 2) encourage the development, use, and consumption of zero carbon footprint energy sources and 3) help fund the development of newer, safer, alternative fuel technologies to help decrease the cost of these energy sources.
Arrianna Huffington was correct — you’ve just not been listening to the economists, scientists, and engineers who are focused on the big picture issues. Instead you listen to the people who have the most to lose … not the rest of us who have the most to gain.
Yep, you drank the Coolaid! 🙂
++!
Smart like Sarah. Just what the planet needs.
The alternative to cap and trade is straight up EPA regulation (which they can do, since they have taken it to court and obtained a ruling that CO2 is a pollutant). The EPA will simply fine large emitters. Cap and Trade is hugely more efficient because it’s simply easier and costs less to eliminate a ton of CO2 emissions in some industries (like agriculture for example), than in others (eg. commercial air travel).
You really believe that?! Please tell us you’re kidding!
Your logic is the same as when ugly girls hang out with even uglier girls at the bar… that way they’re the cutest of their friends. And it might even work on a drunk guy… for the night. But when you return to reality, ugly is still ugly.
Making conventional fuels cost more is not the same as making alternatives cheaper. If we’re going to adopt alternatives – and if we want to see job growth come with it – we need to use our heads to make them cheaper (sooner would be preferable to later or none of this is going to matter much anyway).
Laws against doing stupid things don’t make us any smarter.
Interesting food for thought Bob, as always. Not sure why you’re so hopeful that AOL will survive and thrive. It strikes me as a dinosaur that probably needs to die in the circle of (business) life. Thanks for snickersnee as well, always love learning a new word!
I think that the only thing that this whole sale proves, and proves well, is that public companies will overpay for minimal gain when they don’t understand their business. In the end it will all be superceded by yet another new internet media model and be forgotten totally in about five years.
Supposedly Warren Buffet says he buys good people, not companies . . . is she worth $315M ? She’s worth a lot more than that, and she will be worth a lot more than that, if she can turn AOL around.
I have heard that some of the contributors to the Huffington Post were unpaid staffers. How long will they continue to contribute after H’s big payday?
Maybe she has a plan to become CEO of the new AOL/HPo.
I don’t see why you’re so optimistic about her editorial role at AOL, this deal is a disaster on all fronts. It’s almost like these executives deliberately lob bombs at their own companies with these patently idiotic deals, ie AOL buying Bebo, Sun buying MySQL, or Ebay buying Skype. You could write a book filled with all the things Arianna doesn’t know about journalism and business. Why would Google ever buy the new AOL? Goog buys tech companies, they don’t buy media companies, particularly failing ones. It is hilarious to watch incompetent firms like AOL or Sun flail into oblivion though, so I guess one must at least give them credit for keeping all of us on the outside chuckling, 🙂 while blocking out of one’s mind all the people faced with the horror of working there. 😉
btw, Bob, I commented on the Groupon post sometime back, but my comment got flagged for moderation because I had the temerity to back it up with some links. Do you ever clean that spam filter out?
Oh! My dear, fellow. Great closing line: Touché !
She already hate you for showing her wrinkles, what a snapshot !
Please keep stirring the pot.
“But then I’ve obviously never had children, either” For some the art of debate/retort is a slicing zinger of and at the moment. I appreciate the slow burn response of when the time is right.
[…] the Internet does pay off monetarily for someone besides Facebook or Google. Like Ariana Huffington and other investors in the Huffington Post, which AOL bought for $315 million cash a couple of days […]
Yes Bob, but your blog is worth reading 99% of the time. Hers isn’t. There’s only so much you can buy with a brand everyone has heard of. Huffungton is a one trick pony. You have at least three or four.
Oh X, X, X! Who has the wit and depth to blog like you.
And you don’t want to be rich do you?
PS is it Xavier ? Or just X
I don’t see how you can fault Huffington for not knowing about your kids or the tragedy surrounding them. Her use of the “children card” in the debate was vicious, but then again most talk radio debate is vicious.
“violently opposed to guns”: With all due respect, Bob, if there was ever an unfortunately ironic phrase, this is it!
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