Maybe!

Yet there are at least a few signs that U.S. officialdom is rethinking coins. “What’s a Penny (or a Nickel) Really Worth?” was the title of a 2007 paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Since medieval times, the traditional fix when minting costs surpassed the face value of the coinage was to “debase the threatened coin, that is, make it of a cheaper material.” Noting that this isn’t possible under current law, the author’s advice to Congress is to either give the Treasury the green light to find some cheaper substance for future pennies, or “discontinue the one-cent denomination and rebase pennies to be worth five cents.”

Discontinue. That is unusually decisive, if not subversive, language for a Fed official. Why? Because eliminating the penny is an admission of inflation. “You just don’t do that,” a seasoned financial journalist once told me, as if I’d just suggested toppling the government. “What does a formal acknowledgement of the worthlessness of 1¢ say about the worth of $1?” In other words, it doesn’t help the economy to remind people that prices are continually rising, while the purchasing power of their money is continually falling, even though both are true. Acknowledging inflation makes people doubt, and as any priest, rabbi, imam, or shaman will tell you, doubt and faith don’t go well together. Even though research suggests that killing the penny would benefit the economy, how can we be sure? All of a sudden, the seemingly small idea of ending pennies isn’t merely about inconvenient objects or the various uses for zinc. It’s about the whole damn economy.

Tagged: economics money the awl

Excellent article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker on what sort of environment really fosters innovation. Worth reading at the very least to learn about M.I.T.’s Building 20.

Tagged: innovation learning new yorker teamwork

Paul Ford knocks this out of the park.

Tagged: funny love nailed it relationships

I posted the other day about the damning evidence about concussions in football. This follow-up tries to piece together what would happen if the outrage over the injuries forced the NFL to shut down.

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn't worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it's mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

(Via Kottke)

Tagged: football grantland

Alternate title for this article: “430 people determine whether or not Community gets cancelled.”

NBC, with it's low traditional ratings but relatively high activity on Hulu, should be pushing hard to change this system.

Tagged: community television warming glow

Somebody call a waaahmbulance! Wall Street got slightly less insane bonuses this year and they’re all crying about it in this New York cover story by Gabriel Sherman.

This is a thoroughly stupid article that has already been picked apart by people that are smarter than me. First by Chris Lehman at The Awl, and today by Matt Taibbi on Rolling Stone’s blog:

Since 2008, the rest of America has suffered a severe economic correction. Ordinary people everywhere long ago had to learn to cope with the equivalent of a lower bonus season. When the crash hit, regular people could not make up the difference through bailouts or zero-interest loans from the Fed or leveraged-up synthetic derivative schemes. They just had to deal with the fact that the economy sucked – and they adjusted.

This ought to have been true also on Wall Street, but in a curious development that is somehow not addressed in Sherman's piece, the denizens of the financial services industry managed to maintain their extravagant lifestyle standards in the middle of a historic global economic crash that, incidentally, they themselves caused.

[snip]

Look, the financial services industry should be boring. It should be quaint. Let’s take the municipal debt business. For ages, it was a simple, dull, low-margin sort of industry, in which banks arranged municipal bond issues and made small but dependable profits as cities and towns financed improvements and construction projects.

That system worked seamlessly for decades, until people like Sherman’s interview subjects suddenly decided to make the business exciting.

Of course, I still sock away money for retirement every month, so I guess my bitching about Wall Street’s bitching sounds an awful lot like this:

Tagged: business matt taibbi the awl wall street

There is so, so much weirdness in this Slate article about the – uh – yeah, you explain it Terry Turnipseed:

Believe it or not, there is a growing trend in this country of adopting one’s adult lover or spouse

This article has everything: rich people spats, incest (maybe!), a little bit of IBM history, the phrase “daugher/girlfriend”, and the revelation that Florida does not have a law against something that appears to be incest.

Tagged: i have a "family" tag but no just no ohio or florida slate weirding life

A few months ago I posted a link that looked at how much the cost of a television had fallen over time. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty dramatic.

So this throwaway fact in the middle of a New Yorker article about Research In Motion caught my eye (emphasis mine):

Historically, new technologies have been very expensive—when phone service was introduced in New York, it cost the equivalent of two thousand dollars a month…

Or, more than Mitt Romney’s monthly tax bill! Zing!

Tagged: economics new yorker phones technology

I don‘t want to be a total sad sack before the Super Bowl, but this article from Jonah Lehrer on concussions in high school football is pretty devastating.

In the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury, the brain remains extremely fragile. Because neurons are still starved for energy, even a minor "secondary impact" can unleash a devastating molecular cascade. All of a sudden, brain cells that seemed to be regaining their balance begin committing suicide. The end result is a massive loss of neurons. Nobody knows why this loss happens. But the loss is permanent.

And these thoughts from a top coach:

Rollinson then leans forward in his chair, as if he's about to tell me a secret. "Look, most of my players aren't going to play ball for a living," he says. "I know they don't want to hear that, but it's the truth. So there's really no reason they should risk messing up their brain."

Maybe I’ll just watch the Puppy Bowl this year. Team Augusta!

Tagged: football sad

Here’s an excellent history of Pitchfork that explores their influence and success. The grade seems fair.

Although I can’t help but think that The Onion already kinda nailed everything that's wrong with Pitchfork.

Tagged: criticism music onion

Incredible essay from Brian Lam at The Wirecutter, sparked by a study about how technology might not be making us happier.

Happiness is the most important metric in personal technology. If it improves lives, it is important. I've always suspected that sitting around on the internet was a sort of rot, but I had no proof until I read this piece on the Stanford study. I just don't know why this research isn't getting as much attention from reporters as new iPads, CEO changes, earnings reports, acquisitions, and other bullshit that only affects the greedy. People think I'm crazy for complaining about tech news and how stupid and boring the mass media internet has become, but I think they're wrong.

Tagged: culture happiness technology wirecutter

A couple of articles that are worth some time and some thought that both dig deeper into the facts of some big cases.

First, Ian Parker in The New Yorker explores the facts around the Tyler Clementi suicide at Rutgers. Not unexpectedly, the full story here is a good deal more complicated than what you’ve probably heard already. As Choire Sicha at The Awl notes, “It's hard to come away from today's Tyler Clementi story in the New Yorker and think that his webcam-spying roommate should go to jail for ten or more years. But mostly it will make you want to permanently delete all your IM archives. You really, really do not want the dumb, sarcastic garbage you say to your friends showing up in court.”

And speaking of things that you say online, dig into this article in Esquire about the “Waffle House terrorists”, terrorists who might be more accurately described in a Leslie Knope-penned headline as “a handful of probably harmless retirees living out sad fantasies online that got riled up and snared by a snitch trying to dodge incest charges and an overeager FBI”. This is worth reading for the pictures and captions alone.

Tagged: esquire homeland security new yorker sad suicide

I’m in the middle of applying for a software patent. While researching other software patents – a task that is equal parts thrilling and thoroughly boring – I think it’s hard to avoid concluding that software patents are a bit of a mess: there are so many, and a good deal appear to be so obvious that you wonder why there were granted.

While digging around, I found two articles that shed some light on how we got here. First, Nilay Patel’s excellent article on patents from The Verge. Here he talks about the public exchange that forms the basis of patents and explores why software patents are particularly troublesome. In short: no one really knows what they’re doing here.

Second, Paul Graham has an essay on software patents and the role they play for software companies both large and small.

Tagged: history intellectual property software

Colbert’s antics with his Super PAC might be the most important political nonsense happening right now. And I’m saying that as someone that watched at least a few of the GOP debates. There’s been a flood of articles. Here are some of the best.

There was this genius episode from December where he explained in an editorial how he very nearly bought the naming rights to the South Carolina primary.

If nothing else good comes from this, we have at least narrowed down the exact value of sanctity — somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000.

Then there’s this excellent profile in the New York Times:

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”

And now there’s a presidential run, a move that required Colbert to hand the reigns of his Super PAC to Jon Stewart. Their glee in poking fun at the insane situation is infectious. This NPR story covers what they’ve been up to.

In that Times profile, I think Jon Stewart really nails why he can get away with all of this:

“I’m not at all surprised that the show is good — he’s amazing at it. He’s able to weave a character in a way that’s never been done on television before — rendering this fictional character in 3-D, live, in such a way that he’s still able to retain his humanity.” The extra dimension, he explained, is the other Colbert, the real one. “The third dimension is him. That’s the thing we started to see here. He is so interesting, smart and decent. He’s a good person, and that allows his character to be criminally, negligently ignorant.”

Truth. If it wasn’t obvious that Colbert was a good-humored, joy-filled nerd at heart, he’d be – well, like Bill O’Reilly.

But mostly he just seems thrilled that he gets to do this. Witness this cute duet from last night’s show with James Taylor. At the end, Colbert nearly falls off his seat to reach over and thank Taylor. You can’t fake that.

Tagged: new york times npr politics stephen colbert television