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How The Austerity Class Rules Washington | The Nation

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Climate Skeptics Take Another Hit | Mother Jones

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Apple's "Fall From Grace"

parislemon:

This is, quite simply, one of the worst pieces I’ve ever read on Apple. 

Zach Epstein starts off trashing Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement as perhaps “the beginning of the end” — and does so citing a bunch of analysts.

Analysts.

As anyone who watches Apple closely knows, analysts are absolutely fucktarded when it comes to Apple. If you bet directly against what they’ve said about the company over the years, you’d be a very rich person. They’re always wrong. And it’s clear that the vast majority of them do not understand the company. 

Of course, posts citing analysts about Apple are nothing new. Some writers keep going back to the well despite getting diarrhea of the mind over and over again from what they drink there. It’s fascinating to watch.

But what makes this post particularly bad is the way Epstein pussyfoots around the position he sets out to take. The entire end of his post is basically “don’t get me wrong, I think the iPhone 4S is great but…”

So he loves the device, but analysts don’t, therefore it’s the end of Apple? Right.

He also cites the seemingly tepid reaction from the crowd during the event itself. I’ve been to pretty much every single Apple event over the past five years. This is the reaction about half of the time.

Rumors leading up to these event often set the stage for things that simply aren’t coming. This leads some to be disappointed — a natural reaction. It’s only when Apple is able to truly surprise people — like with the iPhone — that everyone is wowed. Even the initial iPad announcement was dubbed “underwhelming”. 

If you judge Apple’s products by the reaction of analysts and the press, you’re an idiot. Pure and simple. Apple doesn’t make products for analysts and the press. They make products for everyone. 

American McCarver: There's Always Hope

Nice article from Jason Snell at the new sport blog American McCarver about Sunday’s USA-Brazil World Cup soccer match.

americanmccarver:

It’s easy to joke that the only thing Americans care less about than soccer (translation for our non-U.S. readers: “the sport called ‘football’ that’s being ruined by Sepp Blatter, rather than the one being ruined by Roger Goodell”) is soccer when it’s played by women. Then again, the…

The Understatement: Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (aka The New York Times Is Delusional)

understatementblog:

Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:

Full sized chart

As Frédéric Filloux and others…