Friday, July 09, 2004
Roundup from the road
I'm out of town this week, so there'll be only light posting, but here are a few random items:
A former student has an op-ed in the NYT today, which reports on some correlations between platform content (think number of pages, mentions of candidate's and opponent's names) and election outcomes. I'm a bit leery of this (there aren't many observations, and this sort of analysis is easy to push into data mining and curve fitting). But worth noting.
Ken Lay has a defense only a mother could love. And he's got history of hiring and promoting corporate criminals that is hard to ignore. Either this guy was criminally negligent, or criminally fraudulent. The latter seems far more likely. Remember, Enron wasn't a good company with a few bad seeds ruining it with hidden schemes. The whole enterprise was a fraud, based on an impossible business model and financed by sham deals and phantom partners. When it actually did make money, it was by subverting the markets it was supposed to be creating, and ripping off the weak and vulnerable. So little of Enron was on the up-and-up that Lay would have to be hermetically sealed in his office not to notice it.
Finally, this is nifty, in a high-tech retro kind of way.
A former student has an op-ed in the NYT today, which reports on some correlations between platform content (think number of pages, mentions of candidate's and opponent's names) and election outcomes. I'm a bit leery of this (there aren't many observations, and this sort of analysis is easy to push into data mining and curve fitting). But worth noting.
Ken Lay has a defense only a mother could love. And he's got history of hiring and promoting corporate criminals that is hard to ignore. Either this guy was criminally negligent, or criminally fraudulent. The latter seems far more likely. Remember, Enron wasn't a good company with a few bad seeds ruining it with hidden schemes. The whole enterprise was a fraud, based on an impossible business model and financed by sham deals and phantom partners. When it actually did make money, it was by subverting the markets it was supposed to be creating, and ripping off the weak and vulnerable. So little of Enron was on the up-and-up that Lay would have to be hermetically sealed in his office not to notice it.
Finally, this is nifty, in a high-tech retro kind of way.
