Now I Understand….
Posted on July 19th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
A couple weeks back I raised an eyebrow about Henry Blodget’s suggestion on his website, Business Insider, that Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg should be the next Treasury secretary. Given her lack of relevant experience, it seemed an absurd suggestion.
Now I know why Blodget really made it: Sandberg is the lead speaker at a Business Insider conference. Tickets are a mere $1300 a pop.
So Blodget was either thanking her for agreeing to attend his conference, trying to persuade her to attend his conference, or trying to boost sales for the conference by putting the rumor out there she might be the next Treasury secretary.
If something doesn’t make sense on the face of it, there’s usually a reason…
4 Responses
7/19/2011 5:08 pm
Marc Hauser resigns: http://www.boston.com/Boston/whitecoatnotes/2011/07/embattled-harvard-psychology-professor-resigns/Yb6hnLhdPuBkPf4f0rTXpO/index.html
7/19/2011 7:10 pm
Curious also what people think of this story: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/
The Harvard connection is somewhat tangential (this guy was apparently a fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at the time of his alleged offense), but it’s predictably getting a lot of media attention.
7/20/2011 3:29 pm
Impressive call, RB.
7/20/2011 4:23 pm
My $.02 on the Aaron Swartz situation. He seems pretty inept as a libertarian political activist: None of the people he wants to win over is going to think that breaking into a wiring closet is kinda like sitting in at a lunch counter, in spite of the fact that both were illegal acts done by idealistic people who probably expected to be punished for doing them.
What I don’t get is how this turned into a federal case. Yes, it looks like it could be a violation of federal law, but the government’s statement notwithstanding, not all forms of “stealing” are the same. These laws were sold to Congress as tools to go after people taking down the international banking networks, not downloading scholarly articles. How did the prosecutor decide it was worth spending the government’s time to twist the law around this situation? I haven’t seen any indication that either JSTOR or MIT wanted Swartz put down for 35 years. There is something either fishy or scary about this (as well as saddening). I wonder which of the private enemies Swartz has acquired over the year have influence with the DoJ.