Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 41 Editor's Choice: 10
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Build it up!
[Read the article: How do you know when your intuition is speaking to you?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you have never followed your intuition, it may be weak. Mine was. I never listened, so if it ever spoke up, it was in the tiniest of whispers.
Go practice. Go to a restaurant, flip through the menu, and pick the right thing from it. Don't reason it out, don't analyze the options, don't worry out what you had before. Read through it and imagine the options. At some point you will feel a little tug. Order that.
Then as you wait, ponder that feeling a bit. Where in your body it seems to come from. How it feels: heavy or light, warm or cool, swelling or shrinking. And how the things you didn't pick felt just a shade different.
As you learn to listen to your intuition, you will also be improving it. Think of it like your own personal bloodhound. Not only do you have to learn how to read its signals, but it has to learn how to follow the right scents. It will only learn to pick up the good trails it you let it sometimes go down the wrong ones.
Start now. It will take time, but waiting won't make it take less time. Dive in! Find your heart and follow it.
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I confess
[Read the article: Things I learned today about democracy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I confess that sometimes I think you go to far, Glenn, at least rhetorically. However, this article is 100% brilliantly spot on. There's no point to the mere holding of power by people who won't do anything good with it. The Republicans didn't get where they are by refusing to take stands on things that they believe in, and I don't understand why Democrats haven't learned that yet.
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Twenty-four
[Read the article: In defense of casual sex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some commenters feel that at 24, Tracy should be having less sex, or more sex, or at least doing it differently somehow. Some apparently can't believe that people at 24 should be allowed to have opinions. And it looks like quite a number are envious that she's had a reasonably good time bumping uglies and isn't haunted or scarred by it. Kinda sad, really.
Me, I'm envious about something different. I wish at 24 I'd had the ability to write this clearly about myself and my life. Lord knows where I'd be today! So bravo, Tracy, and godspeed.
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In addition to Hulu
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In addition to Hulu is Sidereel.com, which has links to shows wherever they end up on the net. It has all three of these shows, plus news and discussion around them.
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Must we conflate enterprise with corruption?
[Read the article: How conservative greed and corruption destroyed American politics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a small business owner, I think markets are pretty amazing things when properly applied, and I resent the suggestion here that business and corruption are virtually the same thing.
Yes, free-market fundamentalists claim, falsely, that a fourth-grade notion of a market is great for anything and everything. Yes, crony capitalism is built on old-boy networks and a culture of corruption, and is inimical to democracy. But dismissing markets and business based on that is like using the failures of the statist Soviet Union to prove that government is bad.
The problem here is the greedy, arrogant, and foolish people who, contemptuous of the public good, use whatever ideology they can to amass money and power.
If we focus on the ideology they espouse this time, then we will have discarded useful tools from the worlds of economics and commerce. Worse, we will be unprepared when similar people line their pockets and satisfy their egos under the guise of public service. We must treat the problem, not the current symptoms.
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Short selling? Feh.
[Read the article: McCain to SEC chair Cox: "Off with your head!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I haven't seen any data that shows short selling is a big issue here. And there's every indication that people have been deeply mispricing assets for a long time. As with housing, when prices go up crazily and then back down some, the going down is not a problem, it's a consequence. In this case, a consequence of excessive borrowing and lax regulation.
If people really think that the dropping stocks are worth a lot more than current market price, then they should go out and buy some. But I'd suspect the people griping don't really think that; they're just unhappy and want to argue until reality ends up different.
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A trillion dollars?
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You say the taxpayers ate a "trillion-dollar bill for cleaning up the fiasco". The GAO's July 1996 report places taxpayer costs at $124.6 billion. Joe, do you have a source for your number?
If not, being off by a factor of 8 regrettably undermines the authority of any notions you have about the financial markets.
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Catch 22? Not so bad.
[Read the article: First reactions to the Paulson plan: Boo!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]At least in theory, if the choice comes down to bankruptcy or throwing some executives overboard, then it would be my hope that board members would find themselves some new CEOs.
A quick refresher: Public companies are owned by investors. Investors appoint board members. Board members hire executives. Although there's definitely been some problems with board members being too cozy with execs, deciding to sink the company rather than claw back ill-gotten gains seems like the kind of think that would trigger shareholder lawsuits against board members pronto.
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Just a different kind of craven
[Read the article: The simultaneous rejection of the bailout and a corrupt ruling class]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I honestly don't think this is much of an improvement. They're still craven power-seekers; it's just that this comes around the election, when they're briefly forced to cultivate us.
What they're still failing to do is lead.
Long ago I worked for derivatives traders, so I have at least a basic understanding of what's going on, and what is keeping Bernanke and Paulson awake at night. The recent string of failures of major companies and banks backs their view: this is a serious financial crisis, one that could deeply worsen the current recession.
But Congress either doesn't understand the risk or -- more likely -- is too interested in keeping their jobs to do their jobs properly. Going from pandering to donors to pandering to constituents isn't an improvement. It's more of the same.