Paul Graham:

It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost.

From the archive:

If at first you don't succeed, at least learn from your mistakes.

The Other Half of "Artists Ship"

48 percent of dot-com companies founded since 1996 were still around in late 2004.

Mr. McFaul checks in with his psychic when he is stumped for answers about where his business, and his competition, might be headed.

“This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.

I have wondered about this for years, and still do not quite have an answer.

What is it, exactly, that drives us to seek these things again and again?

Mr. Bruckermann's cut was more than $150 million. He left the company to grow oranges on his Spanish estate.

Today:

The Bush administration is examining a range of options for providing emergency financial help to spur a merger between General Motors and Chrysler, according to government officials.

Over the past year:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Last campaign season:

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap.

Earlier this month:

GM said in a statement Friday that bankruptcy protection was "not an option."

Last week:

One of the biggest boosters of the American auto industry said Tuesday that he was bailing out of his large stake in the Ford Motor Company — a stinging no-confidence vote that raised the anxiety level in this city over the deepening troubles of the Big Three car companies.

White House Explores Aid for Auto Deal

From January:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Today:

One of the biggest boosters of the American auto industry said Tuesday that he was bailing out of his large stake in the Ford Motor Company — a stinging no-confidence vote that raised the anxiety level in this city over the deepening troubles of the Big Three car companies.

By starting to sell off his $1 billion bet on Ford, an investment that is now worth less than $300 million, the financier Kirk Kerkorian joined the growing ranks of investors who have soured on Detroit’s prospects because of plummeting sales and mounting losses.

From somewhere I can't re-find at the moment:

We used to be a car company that also sold financing. Now we're a bank that sells cars.

And also, the ever-relevant Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

Kerkorian Sells Part of Ford Stake

"Drink Milk and Roll Out!"

She already knows she is overweight. There is no need for you to remind her.

This virus never leaves the body.

She acknowledged that issue would probably lead to a hornets' nest of problems.

There are two typical responses to this information.

One is that famous, barking laugh that punctuates even seemingly mundane sentences. The other is his paean to the wisdom of long-term thinking.

Governments should stop playing doctor.

It is still a sin for a Catholic to consult a witch or a necromancer.

Mr. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, called the accusations “extremely disturbing.”

The gist is that no one is innocent and that the ends justify the means.

And these cases are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg.

To some, bulletproof fashion is the logical next step.

From the heady days of a bygone era ... a glimpse of the future present.

Problem is, anyone with a camera and a cable network can broadcast a public funeral - and an 82 percent market share divided between four networks and several news channels isn't enough to attract a Bud Bowl. The answer is the F! channel, which will offer definitive coverage of famous deaths - all day and all night. Sure, reruns will attract only the faithful (or the downright weird), but when the world mourns, F! becomes must-see TV in a way NBC execs can only dream of. In much the same way that MTV branched out from videos into other aspects of the music scene, F! will offer original programming as well. F! Unplugged will feature the exploits of Dr. Kevorkian, and Mourning Becomes Eclectic will give viewers a glimpse of "alternative" burials around the globe.

Since most of F!'s programming will consist of filmed public events, costs will be low. The most significant start-up expense will be a publicity campaign aimed at convincing local cable companies to carry F!, though this outlay may be mitigated by a possible partnership with G-SPAN. The steady stream of celebrity death should ensure plenty of free promotion - elaborate outside advertising isn't necessary when the passing of even culturally marginal figures receives extensive what-does-it-all-mean metareporting in the nation's newsweeklies. Rather, the channel will produce effective but inexpensive posters that feature catchy slogans like "Imagine living in a non-funeral country," "Tragedy from 9 to 5, eulogies from 8 to 11," and "You could have talked to your wife any time."

The Pitch | Suck: Daily

Here's the Economist, this week:

A brave man would see catharsis in all this misery; a wise man would not be so hasty.

Susan Jacoby, in her latest book, The Age of American Unreason, wrote:

The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. This illusion of course is not confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture (unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for technological answers to nontechnological questions ...

This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.

Here's the Economist, again, from back in January:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

One from Adbusters:

We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Finally, from Gertrude Himmelfarb:

To Carlyle, these legislative reforms were evidence of the incorrigibly utilitarian character of the age, mechanical attempts to cope with spiritual problems. In fact, they were brought about by the combined efforts of Evangelicals and utilitarians -- and Evangelicals perhaps more than utilitarians. The philosophy of the two could not have been more discordant. Where Evangelicalism derived its ethical and social imperatives from religion and morality (a religiously suffused morality), utilitarianism was a purely secular and pragmatic philosophy; the calculus of pleasure and pain that determined the individual's self-interest was presumed also to determine the public interest, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Yet this odd couple, Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, so far from operating at cross purposes, managed to cooperate in pursuit of the same social ends.

What next for financial capitalism?

The SEC issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks on Friday, a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares.

"The commission is committed to using every weapon in its arsenal to combat market manipulation that threatens investors and capital markets," said the S.E.C.’s chairman, Christopher Cox.

Those damned bears ...

Like sea lions snacking on Columbia River salmon, it's not the entire bear species causing problems. Bark-peeling is a learned behavior.

"One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it. There are bears that peel and bears that don't peel. We target peeling bears."

Fortunately we've solved that little problem ...

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work; it's just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: (pause) Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

SEC Temporarily Blocks Short Sales of Financial Stocks

As Decius writes today of "the excesses of recent years", and points out that the Fed has suspended the rules prohibiting banks from using deposits to fund their investment banking subsidiaries, I think of three things:

The mindset of corporate America:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The mindset of the American public:

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitization, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

The mindset of the market:

"Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy!"

What would Peter Drucker do?

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."