New blogs. Really, this time.

Yeah, I can't believe it either. The day has finally arrived. We're moving on up to Wordpress.

For occasional posts about specific securities, with a focus on the tiny, obscure stocks I've blogged about here, see Shadow Stocks. No rush to look there right now though, as I've been too busy for the last several hours trying to figure out Wordpress to think much about any specific securities.

For pretty much everything else, see Steam Catapult. See you over there.

Templates for the new blogs

Yes, there will be new blogs. The job is now in the hands of my crackerjack project manager Matt from Simande, who sent this list of 100 free WordPress themes to look at (he'll add logos and graphics the logo designer created). I have a theme in mind from this list, but I thought I'd see if anyone else had any favorites from the list.

Happiness and social media success

Happy New Year, everyone. Since he-who-shall-remain-nameless still hasn't finished setting up the new Wordpress blogs (partly because, apparently, he is unfamiliar with Disqus, which Cheryl was able to set up on her own blog in a few minutes), I'll keep posting here for a little while longer. One of the nice things about Disqus, incidentally, is that it makes it easy to follow your favorite commenters as well as bloggers. For example, you can follow my comments on Disqus-powered blogs by clicking here: http://disqus.com/daveinhackensack/. The last few comments that come up at that link (in reverse chronological order) I made a little while ago in the comment thread of this post by Fred Wilson¹, The Happiness Project - A New Year's Resolution.

You can click on that link to Fred's blog post for the whole exchange, but I'll summarize and excerpt it here, as it relates to a topic I've blogged about before (e.g., here). After recommending Gretchen Rubin's book "The Happiness Project", Fred wrote about her use of social media to promote it,

I'd like to end with a few words on Gretchen's adoption of blogging and social media during her happiness project. In the second month of her twelve month program, she decides to start a blog. It becomes the Happiness Project blog. She figures out how to set up a TypePad account, she decides to blog six days a week religiously, and she starts using Facebook and Twitter. That's how I met Gretchen. Her husband, who is featured prominently in the book and who I've known for a dedade, emailed me last summer and said "my wife Gretchen is getting totally into this social media stuff and I wonder if you might give her some advice". We met for lunch and I gave her a bunch of advice, but was impressed at how much she had already figured out on her own.

[...]

So let's all buy her book , get a bit happier, and show that social media can put an author at the top of Amazon's bestseller list.

In response, I wrote (in part),

Social media success in this case would have something to do with having the access and support of prominent bloggers such as you and your wife. This reminds me of a discussion I had with Andy Swan in a comment thread on this blog a month ago, in your post about "The Fall and Rise of Media". Back then I noted,

There are still velvet ropes; it's just that top tier bloggers (including multimedia stars such as Breitbart or Godin) have their own velvet ropes now. The average person starting a blog today doesn't have much more voice than he did when his broadcasting options were limited to writing letters to the editor of newspapers, calling into talk radio, or going on public access TV.

Gretchen Rubin got past the velvet ropes of your blog (and signed on the Gotham Gal [Fred's wife, who blogs under that pseudonym] as a legitimate affiliate) in part apparently because you've known* her husband for ten years. Not exactly social media success ex nihilo.

*Edited as per Fred's correction.

Fred retorted that he wasn't exactly friends with Mr. Rubin; he had just known him for ten years. And that Gretchen Rubin's social media success would have happened without his help. Perhaps so, but then Cheryl shared some background with me on who Gretchen Rubin was. As I noted in Fred's comment thread,

BTW, Hackensack Gal informs me Gretchen Rubin appears on Slate (owned by social media start-up The Washington Post Co.), is a former prominent attorney (including a stint as Supreme Court clerk for Justice O'Connor), and daughter-in-law of former Goldman Sachs chief, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and former Citigroup consigliere Robert Rubin. Again, there's nothing wrong with any of that, but it supports my initial impression that this wasn't an example of social media success ex nihilo

¹Fred's not just a user of Disqus but an investor in it, via his Union Square Ventures.

Thanks for reading

And thanks especially to those of you who left intelligent comments here.

I'd been planning to shut this blog down when I started the new ones (which my crack design agency still hasn't finished yet), and link to the new blogs here, but now I think maybe it's better just to start fresh. I got that idea over the weekend, based on the reaction to a subsequently deleted post. I knew blogging was mostly pointless going into it, but that was just another reminder of that.

I'll still be blogging, for a while at least, at the new blogs, as I have a new subscription-based site to promote. Perhaps I'll see a few of you there. Goodbye and best of luck in the new year to the to the rest of you.

Scratch that. Change of plans. I'll post links to the new blogs here. Still waiting on the set-up of them.

Update on new sites

The two new blogs that will replace this one should be up next week. The plan is to post new investment-related content on one, and everything else on the other. Initially, I was just going to keep everything on one blog, but I got a package deal on the logos, and I think there may be a way to monetize an investment-themed blog down the road. I have a thought on how to do that, but more on that later.

There will be a couple of technical differences on the two new blogs. Both will use Disqus for comments. When I first came across Disqus on Fred Wilson's blog, I didn't get the point of it, but now I think it adds value. For those unfamiliar with Disqus, it allows you to embed a reply to a particular comment; it sends you an automated e-mail when someone responds to one of your comments; and it allows commenters to rate each others' comments. The first of those features makes longer comment threads easier to follow; the second keeps older comment threads alive longer (because commenters know someone will be made aware of their comments) and obviates the need for comment moderation on older posts; and the third of those features will give me a metric by which I can encourage readers to leave more intelligent comments. I'm planning on offering a prize to the commenter who earns the most points commenting on the new blogs at the end of the first month. More on that next week.

The other technical difference will be that the new blogs will be on WordPress. I don't know if that will make a difference to you as readers, but it will mean some new things for me to learn, I suppose. The main reason for the move to WordPress is that there is a greater choice of templates there, and the one my designer picked to semi-customize wasn't available on Blogger.

Finally, the second subscription-based site is currently in development and should launch... maybe by the end of the year, if all goes well. We'll see. More on that later too.

Template Concept for New Blog

This template combines elements of the logo with another image and a semi-custom Wordpress theme. Feel free to share your feedback in the comments.

Logotherapy II

My design agency's takes on my initial chicken scratch concept are below. Feel free to offer your opinions in the comment thread.

Looking for Co-Authors for a New Blog about Small Stocks

Something I've realized: posts such as the previous one ("A Conversation with USEG Management") are valuable, because they offer original reporting/commentary on a stock that's not widely followed, but they won't have much of a place on the entrepreneurship/business-oriented blog I'm starting. Post such as that have also been fairly sporadic on this blog, partly because I don't have time to follow more than a few companies that closely. So here's what I have in mind: a team-written blog focused on stocks that aren't widely followed. I just bought a nice domain name for this new blog -- one that's relatively short, easy to spell, and lends itself well visually to a logo.

Guidelines for the stocks:

- Under $100 million market cap; preferably, under $50 million.

- Little or no analyst coverage.

- Must have potential multi-bagger upside, in the author's opinion.

Guidelines for the authors:

- Write about 1 to 3 stocks, no more. If you find a 4th stock you like better than the first three, kick one of the first three off of the list.

- Do original reporting. Call the company's management occasionally and post notes on your conversations. Call elsewhere. Be a sleuth. Don't regurgitate aphorisms from Warren Buffett. Save that for other sites.

- Post as often as you have something new or useful to write about your companies, but no more. Don't just post for the sake of posting.

- Engage with your commenters and seek out the answers to their questions.

- Don't run and hide if your stock tanks. If you're still a believer, explain why; if not, explain why.

If you're interested in contributing to this new blog, send me an e-mail with "Obscure Stocks" in the subject line. Thanks.

USEG News

Shares of U.S. Energy Corp. (NASDAQ: USEG) rose about 32% today on about 13x average volume on the news that the company had entered into a drilling participation agreement with Brigham Exploration (NASDAQ: BEXP) in the Bakken oil field. From the release:

"We are delighted to be teaming up with one of the best and most technologically advanced operators in the Bakken oil field," stated Mark Larsen, President of U.S. Energy. "Brigham has proven itself to be one of the premier companies in the Williston Basin through the advancement of their multi-stage frac completions and their consistent improvement of production rates. We look forward to a long term relationship with Brigham and developing low cost reserves well into the future," he added.

"Our patient search for a sound investment in oil and gas has now come to light with today's announcement," stated Keith Larsen, CEO of U.S. Energy Corp. "At a time when natural gas appears to be poised for an extended period of low prices our main focus has been to expand our oil production and reserves. This agreement does just that by providing us with the potential to rapidly expand our oil production and increase our reserves by participating with an experienced operator that has a track record of lowering its finding and development costs. Furthermore, I am confident that our drilling schedule for the balance of 2009 will allow us to reach our corporate production goal of 7,000 MCFED or approximately 1,200 BOED by year end," he added.

This is a pretty large commitment by USEG -- according to the press release, USEG's "expenditures are anticipated to approximate $17.6 million for the first six initial well program." That's a little less than half of USEG's remaining cash and Treasuries, going by the company's most recent balance sheet. Judging by the relative performance of USEG and BEXP today though, without drilling down further, I'd assume this deal is on pretty favorable terms to USEG. Which would make sense, since it appears that BEXP had a more acute need for the cash than USEG had for the participation deal. I'd venture that some BEXP shareholders bought into USEG today.

I got a voice mail about this today from Reggie Larsen at USEG, but we didn't get a chacne to speak. If he and I connect tomorrow, I'll update this post accordingly. Investor relations via social media: just like in those trendy marketing books.

Sorry for the Paucity of Recent Posts

I've been busy with other things. If anyone has requests for post topics, feel free to make them in the comment thread below and I'll try to take a stab at them as time permits.

Thanks.

Possible Names for New Blog

I've mentioned this in a couple of the comment threads, but I'm going to be moving to a new blog soon. The new blog will probably be on Wordpress with a professionally designed logo and a customized theme, and the content will have a somewhat tighter focus on business and entrepreneurship. Here are three domain names I've purchased and am considering for the new blog:

- HackensackVentures.com

- LaunchingInnovation.com

- SteamCatapult.com

The first name has the tie-in with the name of this blog, of course, and continues the semi-ironic attempt at treating Hackensack as a brand. I say semi-ironic, because Hackensack, for those who are familiar with the place, does connote a certain grittiness and lack of concern about image; to the extent that you can spin that in a substance-over-style direction, that's a positive. It's also an ironic take off on the name of prestigious venture capital firms such as Union Square Ventures¹.

The second name is more straight forward, and describes what I plan to focus on: launching innovative business ideas of my own, and helping others launch theirs.

The last one is a play on the second one: a steam catapult is what launches aircraft off of carrier decks. As the unshaven fellow in the video on the homepage of this naming company, A Hundred Monkeys² says, a name ought to have some "mystery". Steam Catapult would have the most "mystery" of these three names. One downside though is that the Navy is apparently moving toward electromagnetic catapults, so when that transition happens, steam catapults might connote retro, which could clash with the innovation theme -- or not, perhaps, since steam catapults will still have been innovative in their time.

I thought I'd take an informal poll of my small handful of occasional commenters and see what you guys thought. Fire away.

The photo above, of a F-14 about to get launched by a steam catapult from the deck of the USS JOHN C. STENNIS, comes from Wikipedia Commons.

¹When you are attempting to attract wealthy investors, you generally use a name that connotes wealth or sophistication, or a combination of both. Hackensack, of course, connotes neither. I knew a Manhattan-based financial planner who came up with the name for her practice by combining the name of a prestigious prep school and adding the word "hill" to it, because rich people often live on hills, or in towns with "hills" in the name.

²I read about this company a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, no? This, as with most public relations and traditional marketing businesses, seems to be made possible by OPM. I can't imagine a scrappy entrepreneur starting off with his own savings of those or his friends and family writing a big check to someone to name his business. But if a business is venture-funded, that's a different story.

I have been too harsh

I have been too harsh in a few recent posts. Specifically:

- "How to Promote an Online Business": I was a little too sharp with this PR man. He did raise some good questions in our phone conversation last week, and although the services he subsequently offered me weren't what I was looking for, our conversation did spur me to do some more research on topics he brought up. Also, I should remember that most business services vendors are geared toward big corporate clients instead of entrepreneurs, and for good reason. Entrepreneurs tend to be more results-oriented and tight-fisted, and less likely to be in business a few months from now. All good reasons to focus on selling to big corporate clients instead. Sorry, M.

- "Get Mad You Sons of Bitches" and "A Critique of Pointless Blogging". In both cases, I could have shared my criticisms and suggestions via e-mail first, or, just kept them to myself, I guess. There's an old saying about the folly of offering advice: wise men don't need it and fools won't head it. That saying is probably right about the folly of giving advice, but perhaps not precise enough in the reasons why offering advice is often folly. Neither of the subjects of those two posts were fools: Stearns has an MBA from a top-20 school (Georgetown) and Persky has a degree from MIT. Being intelligent, though, doesn't necessarily make you receptive to advice or criticism. You have to be ready to hear it. This I know from experience. I've had friends who meant well give me good advice in the past, and watch me ignore it because I simply wasn't ready to hear it. So it shouldn't be a surprise to me that Persky deleted my comments on his blog, and continues to paste in filler text without offering any of his own insight or other commentary, or links to the original sources.

Being unemployed and looking for work, as Persky and Stearns are, is, in a sense, a form of purgatory. A quote from a film comes to mind here [consider this a half-assed spoiler alert: the film, Jacob's Ladder, is nearly 20 years old, but if you haven't seen it by now stop reading here]. Before I get to that quote, take a minute and three quarters to watch the original trailer for the movie, to set the table for it:



OK, now here's the quote, from a character named Louis (played by Danny Aiello) who is the protagonist's (played by Tim Robbins) chiropractor/friend/guardian angel:

Louis: Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.

Similarly, in a non-eschatological sense, sometimes the trappings and pretensions of your old life need to burn away before you can move on.

Apathy Check

I started writing a post yesterday about Bobby Jindal, his recent op/ed on health care policy in the WSJ, and the folly of conservatives calling grants "refundable tax credits". Is anyone interested in reading that post? I'm on the fence about it myself, and I was the one writing it. You decide. If this post gets no comments, I'll take that as a "no".

A Critique of Pointless Blogging

This blog is, I realize, a glass house in some respects¹, but I'm going to ignore the old admonition in this post and throw a couple of polished stones from my blog's proverbial front porch. Today's target is the Oracle of NY, one of the blogs written by Joshua Persky, the subject of a recent post ("Infinite Corridor") and a man who was kind enough to correspond with me last week. After our correspondence, I checked out Persky's last few blog posts. I have critical comments about two of them, one of which I already noted on Persky's site, but I'll reproduce it here.

The first of the two posts I'll mention is this one, "President Obama on the American Graduation Initiative", which consists simply of three paragraphs excerpted from a recent speech by the President, without any context or commentary by Persky. This was the comment I left on Persky's site:

What is the "American Graduation Initiative"? You haven't explained what it is here, it's not mentioned in the three paragraphs you excerpted, and you didn't provide a link to the full text of Obama's speech. You also haven't provided your opinion of the American Graduation Initiative (whatever it is) here. What was the point of this post?

I hate to be critical, but through your moxie and hard work, you've gotten a lot of national attention, and I don't think posts like this one are anyway to retain that attention. This one seems like you just wanted to post something for the sake of posting something.

The second post is this one, "Valuation Services and Consulting", and here's the text of it:

Steps for producing a valuation for a bank loan to a private company:

1. Gather and review financial and legal documentation.


2. Note key loan parameters such as: interest rate, maturity date, type of loan (bullet or amortizing), first or second lien, financial covenants, up-front and other fees, pre-payment penalty.


3. Note key financial performance parameters: EBITDA, income, margins, cash flow, balance sheet (historic, current and projected).


4. Analyze key financial ratios: leverage, interest coverage, loan to value.


5. Perform DCF analysis.


6. Compare company to similar publicly traded companies.


7. Compare loan to publicly traded similar debt instruments.


8. If the company is distressed, determine the value of its assets.


9. If the company is in bankruptcy, determine the probability and timing of recoveries.

For competitively priced hedge fund portfolio valuations, business development corporation and private equity valuation services and consulting, please contact:

Joshua Persky
tel: 917 650 8700
email: joshua.persky@sloan.mit.edu

Here's my thought on that post: Wouldn't any potential customer of Persky's valuation services already know about these steps? If so, how does enumerating this list in a blog post demonstrate one's talent for valuation? A better tack might be to offer as an example a case study where you can demonstrate your mastery of some tricky aspect of valuation. Persky could use a historical case where he has access to all the necessary data, or he could speculate a little and attempt a valuation (or comment on the reported valuation) of a well-known, privately held company. A way to get some attention as a valuation expert while demonstrating that you are familiar with current technology might be to attempt a valuation for a business such as Twitter.

Another thought: is it best to lead with price by offering "competitively priced" valuations? First, it's probably implicit that your valuations will be "competitively priced", given your current situation and the state of the labor market, and second, is price the most important factor to a hedge fund or other firm seeking a valuation? If it is, they can probably find an even cheaper valuation by outsourcing the job to India, but my guess is that they have more pressing concerns than price, such as, for example, accuracy, and protection from liability. This sounds like a difficult market to compete in as a sole proprietor. I wish I had some positive suggestion to offer here, but I always try to picture myself on the other side of the deal: if you were running a hedge fund and you were concerned about litigation from your investors, wouldn't you feel more comfortable having your valuations done by an established accounting firm?

Perhaps Persky would be better off taking his talents in a different direction. Presumably, if he is talented in valuing private businesses, he'd have some talent for investing in them as well. There are always business owners looking to sell their privately-owned businesses, and affluent individuals and companies looking to buy them. Persky might, for example, offer service where he'd help affluent individuals diversify their assets by buying privately-held firms. He might also scout out businesses currently for sale, do his own valuations on them, and then offer to help sell those businesses. Last year I approached a business broker about a situation and he was happy to offer me remuneration contingent on finding a buyer for his client. I imagine most business brokers would be amenable to this.



¹Namely (for starters), in its lack of focus, its name, its use of a generic blogger template. I plan to address some of this in the near future.

The Arc of a Typical Blog

From a post by John Scalzi last month (Hat Tip: commenter "Nate" on Megan McCardle's Atlantic blog):

The vast majority of blogs, in fact, have nothing but the following three posts:

Post One: “Here’s my blog! This is where I’m going to share all my thoughts about life, the universe and everything! It’s going to be great and I can’t wait to tell you all what I’m thinking about everything!”

Post Two: “Hey, sorry I haven’t updated in a while — life’s been crazy. But I’ll be back soon.”

Post Three: “Here’s a picture of my cat.”

And then it’s done.

Nothing wrong with this — writing on a regular basis is work, even when you’re ostensibly doing it for fun, and it shouldn’t be a surprise not a lot of people really want to work that hard. Also and perhaps more to the point, I suspect many people who start blogging realize fairly quickly that they either don’t like sharing all their thoughts to the world, or that their thoughts, while interesting to them, appear fairly banal once they’re typed out, and it’s better just not to post them for the sake of posting them. And there’s nothing wrong with this either, and indeed the blogger is to be congratulated of the bit of personal insight. Most blogs are abandoned because they should be.

The Economics of Blogging

A Wall Street Journal column last week by the Democratic Political consultant Mark Penn, "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire", alleged that 452,000 Americans made their living by blogging. One professional blogger, Megan McCardle, explained on her Atlantic blog why this estimate was "addled" ("Blogging for Big Bucks"):

The estimates of professional bloggers seem wildly inflated--if you help update the company blog once a week as part of your marketing internship, you are not a paid professional blogger. And the numbers they themselves link to tell a much different tale from the article: most blogs bring in pitiful amounts of money for their owners.

This seems to follow the model of Mark Penn's book: find some bizarre number and mindlessly extrapolate it to an absurd conclusion. Yet I still don't understand why common sense did not keep him from publishing this article. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that almost all of us know many more computer programmers than professional bloggers--this is true of me even though I am a professional blogger, as are half my friends. Or he might have called some professional bloggers, who would have (sorrowfully) told him that no one is making $75K a year off of 100,000 pageviews a month, that being about how much traffic I pulled when I was starting up in 2002. Or, hell, he might have noticed that in the very BLS survey so nicely transformed into a table for his article, there is not entry for "blogger"--but that if you add up every writer, reporter, editor, PR person, technical writer, or "media and communications worker, other", there are only 499,890. Since Penn says that there are 452,000 paid bloggers, this implies that 9 out of every 10 communications workers are professional bloggers.

There may be one guy with some incredible niche--or moronic employer--making a ton of money with a modestely well-trafficked blog. But the plural of "anecdote" is not data.

Believe me, I'd love to think that blogging is a surefire path to riches and job security--but I'm afraid all most people get out of their blogs is the satisfaction of a job well done.

Coincidentally, a few days after reading Megan's post, I discovered the newest blog by Daniel Wahl, The Nearby Pen ("helps you live a happier and more productive life by sharing good art, reviewing good books, and explaining good thoughts") which included a post ("AdSense Pennies Make Dollars") that unintentionally supported Megan's point about the paucity of bloggers who make significant money from their blogs. In his post, Daniel mentioned the revenues he had generated from his three blogs over the last few months:

Not only will I not be making loads of money with Adsense, but at this stage of the game I should not expect to.

So why use Adsense? Quite simply, because--as the title suggests--pennies make dollars. Or to put it differently, a little bit of money adds up, even if little by little. And who knows, perhaps those pennies will grow faster with traffic at each site. In my view, it pays (at least a little) to learn more about how advertising on one's blog works while the blog is growing. I also think it is interesting. Here's the data for my first three months:

January...........4,291 page impressions...........$1.97 earned
February..........4,242 page impressions..........$3.62 earned
March.............4,411 page impressions..........$11.15 earned

This is no knock on Daniel -- I'm sure if I were using Google AdSense my ad revenues would be as low or lower (which is one reason why I never signed up for them) -- but it underlines Megan's point about why Mark Penn's estimates seem dubious. As for Daniel's point that pennies make dollars: sure, but time equals money, and, for most of us, there are much more remunerative uses of our time than blogging. So why do it? I mentioned one reason in my first post: to attract a few commenters I could get feedback from and bounce ideas off of. Another reason is the same reason most callers call talk radio stations, or letter writers write letters to the editor of newspapers: to express opinions. I have gotten a couple of ideas from writing this blog (or, more accurately, from observing the responses to a handful of posts), and one or two of those ideas could lead to a business opportunity down the road, so, in that sense, this blogging might end up being profitable as a form of brainstorming, but that remains to be seen.

Economics as Politics by Other Means

Although Greg Mankiw didn't mention it specifically in the post I linked to previously ("News Flash: Economists Agree"), I wonder if part of what prompted him to write it was the row set off by Clive Crook's Financial Times column last week, ("Politics is damaging the credibility of economics"). In that column Crook wrote,

Economics outside the academy has become the continuation of politics by other means. If you wish to know what Mr [Paul] Krugman thinks on any policy question, do not read his scholarly writings; see which policies are advocated by the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Mr Krugman agrees with liberal Democrats about most things, and for the rest gives as much cover as the discipline of economics can provide - which, given its scientific limitations, is plenty. He does this even on matters where, if his scholarly work is any guide, the economics is firmly against his allies. Liberal Democrats are protectionists. Mr Krugman is not, but politics comes first.

The syndrome affects economists on the right as much as on the left. Just as there is a consensus among economists that protectionism should be opposed, most economists believe that a powerful fiscal stimulus is both possible and desirable in present circumstances, and that the best stimulus would include big increases in public spending. Yet recently, Robert Barro, a scholar with conservative sympathies, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that this view was an appeal to "magic".

The problem is not that Mr Krugman questions the consensus on trade (if indeed he does), or that Mr Barro questions the consensus on fiscal policy (as he certainly does). It is that both set the consensus aside so carelessly. In doing so, these stars of the profession destroy the credibility of their own discipline. Mr Krugman gives liberals the economics they want. Mr Barro gives conservatives the same service. They narrow or deny the common ground. Why does this matter? Because the views of readers inclined to one side or the other are further polarised; and in the middle, those of no decided allegiance conclude that economics is bunk.

Crook threw in a (mostly accurate) criticism of the blogosphere as well:

The web, for all its blessings, is an aggravating factor. Many of the most successful economics blogs promote communication within political groupings, not across them. On the web you best build an audience by organising a claque and stroking its prejudices. Extend elaborate courtesy to people you agree with and boorish contempt to those who do not get it. Celebrate exasperation and incivility as marks of intellectual authenticity - an attitude easier to tolerate in teenagers under hormonal stress than in professors at world-class universities.

For Krugman's and Barro's respective responses to that column, see Crook's Atlantic blog post, "The Dismal Science, Revisited".

Daniel Wahl's New Investing Blog

Hat tip to reader J.K. for directing my attention to Daniel Wahl's new investing blog, Systemically Important. Don't expect a discussion of specific stocks there though. As Daniel mentioned to me in a comment on his other blog,

If I start blogging again on stocks I own, I'll probably not mention names--focusing only on method alone. It's not something that's done by 5000 other bloggers or even 1 and it actually zeroes in on the thing that matters most long-term.

Instead, expect witty commentary on financial news of the day, as well as a guide to some of Daniel's favorite business blogs. Here's a taste, an excerpt from a recent post, "Mated: Financial Blogs":

What would happen if the Hubble Telescope, noted for its ability to see far beyond what any normal person can, mated with the lyrical talent of Bob Dylan? A blog written by Macro Man of course.

If sliced bread, the daily item so important even Jesus begged his Father for it, mated with the greatest economic and business thinkers of our day, what would be the result? Abnormal Returns.

What would happen if Mae West, a pop icon of old famous for her wit, mated with Bruce Lee, the bad-ass martial arts master famous for his awesomeness? Too easy, I know. A site called Dealbreaker.

New Blog Feature: Reactions

If you don't feel like leaving a comment, you can provide feedback on a post with simple click, thanks to Blogger's new "reactions" feature. Just click "good", "meh", or "bad". We'll take your feedback into consideration, and do our best to make sure you get your money's worth on future posts.