Newmark's Door

Interesting list: "The greatest [sports] beatdowns in history". Secretariat was amazing, wasn't he?

VC Paul Graham's speech is titled, "How Not to Die". I thought, "Cool." But it's about businesses, not people. Still very interesting.

At long last: New York does a chewing gum taste test.

How vulnerable various Big Apple neighborhoods are to the popping of the real estate bubble. Supposedly "Hipster Brooklyn", Bed-Stuy, and "Emerging Queens" are the most vulnerable.

An inspirational piece, particularly appropriate for younger folk: "But They Did Not Give Up". It doesn't even mention the travails and eventual triumph of Milton Hershey.

But . . . it's worth remembering that, at least every once in a while, you should give up. As Kenny Rogers sings, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em".

NBC's Today show nominates the best five sandwiches in America.

My opinion: the authors of a massive--42 pages--lead article in one of the economics profession's top two journals--Journal of Political Economy--whose findings have been cited in the "New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, USA Today, Financial Times, Rolling Stone, ABC NIghtline, ABC World News Tonight, CNBC, BBC News, MTV, NPR, and Bloomberg Radio" have an extraordinary amount of responsibility. They should accept the burden of addressing careful, thoughtful criticism. They should, after a reasonable amount of time, freely share their data with other researchers so that their results can be studied, tested, and if need be, questioned.

Unfortunately, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, authors of "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis", don't seem to agree. Stan Liebowitz has sharply but carefully and thoughtfully attacked parts of the paper. So far he has had almost no response. And he would like to further examine the paper's main empirical results, but he has not been able, so far, to obtain the data.

Until important emprical results in economics are, as a matter of routine, carefully scrutizined and until they are provably replicable, economics will never get the respect that physics and biology and chemistry get. And that's a shame. 

Nicely done: "7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People".

It can be difficult--even if you're an expert economist--trying to figure out what the Federal Reserve folks are saying. If you're an amateur, it is, of course, even more difficult. CurrencyTrading.Net is trying to help with their guide, "When the Fed says X, they really mean Y (A Handy Translation Book)". (Thanks to reader Rich McIver for the link.)

Supposedly, Americans just don't understand good chocolate.