AZspot: If Yahoo buys Tumblr...
There are bulls and bears. Turns out the bulls are about to pump a billion bucks into this.
Put me in the bear camp. The dirty non secret of the Internet is that the likes of Tumblr slapped together by high school dropouts is low barrier to entry. Anyone can duplicate Tumblr.
And they do! Except it has a brand, and a user base that can’t be replicated. That is, until critical mass moves people off - like with Digg to Reddit or MySpace to Facebook or Flickr to Instagram or Blogspot to Tumblr and blah, blah, blah.
All Mayer wants with this place: cachet, and the dim prospect of retaining it for a while. It’s supposed to be a halo brand for all of Yahoo’s other services. Because quite frankly Yahoo’s biggest problem is that no one cares about it.
Being bought by Yahoo! kills the Tumblr brand by association. They are bad stewards staffed by lazy bureaucrats and their poisonously unambitious corporate culture will sideline Karp within months. Not that he was a good leader, but he was a signal of what Tumblr was. It will be clear what it has become: passe.
The platform will stagnate because adopter types like me will be onto the next gold rush, as of this post. Arguably, that peak of the s curve already came. But this just makes it official.
I think there’s truth in that. David Karp is actually an immensely genuine person. You or I might roll our eyes at the feel-good optimism of it all. But … he’s completely serious about it. But whomever Yahoo makes Tumblr overlord is more likely to be a business guy who maybe gets brands but probably can’t fake Karp’s earnestness.
As for me? Whatever. I write long, boring text posts. I have options. I don’t even like Tumblr’s brand that much.
(Source: squashed)
soon
YOLO!
If Microsoft tries to acquire them it’d be Mumblr.
If Facebook tries to acquire them it’d be Fumblr.
If TheCallus wins powerball and acquires them, it will be Cumblr.
I’m rooting for the dark horse, the Drudge Report, to create Dumblr.
“ What do Adolf Hitler, Menachem Begin, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama have in common? They have all been accused of terror attacks on their own countries. ”
Why Were We Bombed again? (via azspot)
I understand that many of the things you post are presented with out comment and that (in the case of your blog) it does not imply endorsement or even agreement. But I’m still a bit surprised by this one. The whole false flag schtick seems to be so outrageous and offensive that it does not usefully contribute to the discourse.
(via azspot)
Well played Jeremy
So there was this really cool moment at the end of that interview where the rescuer says something like, “A pretty little white girl running into a black man’s arms? I knew something was wrong.”
And it was half a joke but also half a hyper-sophisticated comment on how out of the ordinary it is to see somebody run past the casual racism we tend to accept.
But also I’m reminded about Kai from Dogtown and I wonder whether the the hero-who-talks-differently at least helps us break down some stereotypes.
(Source: lmaocharlesramsey)
Congrats on fucking yourself out of any chance at a new job in the industry, idiot. Cute trick, though.
I don’t really get the rage at Karp et al. over the sucrose sacking.
If you have an awesome hair stylist you’re really happy with but then decide that the budget just doesn’t support $50 hair cuts every month or so, it’s entirely reasonable to cut that out of the budget. And maybe you feel bad about it and recommend the stylist to somebody who can afford the $50 hair cut. And if you’re a bit sensitive about not being able to afford $50 hair cuts, maybe you say that your stylist accomplished what you wanted to accomplish so you’re winding the project down.
It still kind of sucks. But if you’re firing somebody for reasons that have nothing to do with job performance, why pretend it’s their fault?
Down Payment Rules Are at Heart of Mortgage Debate - NYTimes.com
Here’s the issue, and it’s obvious: poor people can’t afford a down payment. If we price the risk of default, they also can’t afford the payments on a house at an appropriate interest rate. This has led to an outcry from advocates for federally-backed mortgages with very low down payments.
Let them have their way. Everything should be fine, until house prices fall. And that never happens!
I think it’s reasonable to ask which characteristics of risky loans increase the default risk.
We tend to commit the common fallacy of evaluating risk at two poles - when the loan is issued and when the loan is in distress. This is a very, very common problem.
Risk is something we have to continually measure, especially because it is responsive to structural market concerns. This is the entire argument behind a securities market for mortgage loans: to provide some form of early warning when we need to start anticipating rising or falling default risk.
That’s why it’s such horrible news that the government is now issuing / backing / etc. 9/10 loans and intervening with such consistency in the housing market. Now the only warning for a collapse in housing is the relative mental health of Congress. By now I sound like an angry uncle. Moving on!
Balloon payments, exploding ARMs, and so create risks for obvious reasons. The critical inquiry regarding down payment is whether there’s a certain percent down where risk tips. (Though I would expect this to vary from market to market.)
That’s why the market was / is flawed. We have an overemphasis on risk at time of origination. Continuous monitoring of risk at the borrower / systemic level is far less reliable. A lot happens over 30 years.
That’s why high down payments matter - I think we should bag all the statistical fakery and focus things that we know will decrease VaR. There is no statutory “tipping point” - it moves with the structure of the market. Lowering VaR is the only way to respond to the fact that we can’t price that risk very accurately given the many public policy / timeframe barriers to doing so.
The most reliable plug in the VaR chug? Down payment size. Fewer, smaller loans are less dangerous. Period. Rent, motherfuckers.
I would think that 5-10% should be enough to demonstrate some ability to save money over a period of time without requiring a decade of savings to get into a house.
Completely disagree. Markets are not measurements of the ethics or “goodness” of borrowers. They measure risk, and 5% down means that a 5% decline in housing leads to a very, very high % default rate. We need to have down payment rates that are substantially higher than current state.
If you start dropping much below 5% down, except in very expensive markets, I start getting a bit worried.
Bad news: the FHA can get you down to 3.5%, with a huge credit to closing costs. Worse news: all the banks know there is dead fish in the water and still don’t lend because the “market risk” portion of the VaR model is F(how do we feel today, Chairman?). Worst news: don’t worry, the government is here to help.
We really might be on the same side here. The plain vanilla mortgage is essentially a measurement of what constitutes a federal guideline for responsible lending. There is no guarantee like there would be with an FHA loan. The low downpayment reflects maximum flexibility to the lender. The question isn’t about guaranteed loans—it’s just about whether Uncle Sam needs to penalize the bank that writes a loan on a 5% down payment. Or even a 15% downpayment.
Obviously this is going to affect industry standards so nothing is clean cut.
Down Payment Rules Are at Heart of Mortgage Debate - NYTimes.com
Here’s the issue, and it’s obvious: poor people can’t afford a down payment. If we price the risk of default, they also can’t afford the payments on a house at an appropriate interest rate. This has led to an outcry from advocates for federally-backed mortgages with very low down payments.
Let them have their way. Everything should be fine, until house prices fall. And that never happens!
I think it’s reasonable to ask which characteristics of risky loans increase the default risk. Balloon payments, exploding ARMs, and so create risks for obvious reasons. The critical inquiry regarding down payment is whether there’s a certain percent down where risk tips. (Though I would expect this to vary from market to market.)
I would think that 5-10% should be enough to demonstrate some ability to save money over a period of time without requiring a decade of savings to get into a house.
If you start dropping much below 5% down, except in very expensive markets, I start getting a bit worried.
“ This is far more than a semantic question. Whether something is or is not “terrorism” has very substantial political implications, and very significant legal consequences as well. The word “terrorism” is, at this point, one of the most potent in our political lexicon: it single-handedly ends debates, ratchets up fear levels, and justifies almost anything the government wants to do in its name. It’s hard not to suspect that the only thing distinguishing the Boston attack from Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook and Columbine (to say nothing of the US “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad and the mass killings in Fallujah) is that the accused Boston attackers are Muslim and the other perpetrators are not. As usual, what terrorism really means in American discourse - its operational meaning - is: violence by Muslims against Americans and their allies. ”
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
I was going to post this exact quote. So spot-on.
(via hipsterlibertarian)
I’m bothered by Glenn Greenwald’s willingness to distort facts in order to suit his ideological ends. The terrorism label was being used in connection with this attack long before the religion and national origin of the attackers was known. I know that. You know that. Glenn Greenwald must know that.
(via hipsterlibertarian)
ThanksToYou: robot-heart-politics: annasaur: why has no one questioned the fact...
why has no one questioned the fact that Dzhokhar’s book-bag was WHITE and the bomb exploded in a BLACK bag?! um what?
Because there were 2 bombs and 2 bombers and the other one was carrying a black bag. We’ve never seen the second backpack.
So…
Maybe because it got blown to shit? Seems plausible.
If thats the case shouldn’t the black book bag have been blown to pieces too? They are covering something up…
And when you really think about it, how do we know either the white book bag or black book bag are real? Because what is “reality” anyway? I mean, when you think about it, aren’t we all just subatomic particles flying around in a vast nothingness? And do we even know that? I’m just saying that there’s a lot of room for interpretation about all of this. And when you think, epistimologically, how can we be certain that there’s such a place as “Boston”? I mean, I’ve been there—but that could have just been a dream. Or maybe it floated off. The cartographers could be in on it too.
