A numbers genius—not Nate Silver!—has pored over the 171,000-plus recorded updates of the Drudge Report since 2002 and put it all into chart form. Most stunning-yet-not-surprising statistic: two-year-old Politico ranks 16th among sites linked to by Drudge.
Just like my high school history teacher told us, skipping college and getting a damn job instead is the smartest economic thing you could possibly do. Someone has proven it, using mathematics!
This is the year of new ideas for saving newspapers! Unfortunately, the main solutions seem to be plagued the one thing that led most people into journalism in the first place: lack of math skills.
The world belongs to Nate Silver! Briefly. Silver, the number-crunching baseball stat geek who decided to become a political poll-cruncher in his spare time and only turned out to be the most freakishly accurate election predictor ever, is now the toast of the media, Obamaphiles, and stat nerds alike. The Times has even weighed in now, several months behind the curve! Now is your chance to capitalize, Nate; screw this up and you'll soon return to the depths of nerd-only notoriety. After the jump, our professional advice to Nate about building his entire future in five easy steps—five being a number that statistics show gets a lot of page views!: 1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap. 2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too! 3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card. 4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich. 5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope. [Pic via Newsweek]
Rember how Obama's election was the greatest thing to happen to the newspaper industry in a decade? People lined up across New York City to buy copies of the New York Times proclaiming his victory! And the smart ones put those copies right on Ebay. This chart shows the average of the five highest prices paid on Ebay each day for that November 5 issue of the NYT. One early seller fetched $400; today you can have your pick for less than $30. Oh, the metaphor.
A Wisconsin couple bought four lottery tickets-all with the same numbers, for the same drawing-and won. AP headline: "Wisconsin couple each hit lottery - twice." Same story on WNBC.com, headline: "Has Couple Found Formula To Win Lottery?" Same story on Drudge, headline: "Couple Finds Formula To Win Lottery; Rakes In $700K This Week!" This is why America is losing.
Email: it's no longer cool! Was it ever? Apparently it was, so I hope you didn't miss your opportunity to use your inbox as a "gauge of Digital Age machismo." Because now email, like The Blob, has turned into a monster that threatens to swallow us all in its pulsating, gelatinous walls. The problem has spread from nerds to regular people, and America is now paying attention. The LA Times even quotes one nerd proclaiming "EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL." Dang! "All your time are belong to email," I imagine internet scientists saying. And they're more right than you know!: Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:
"You can almost count the calories on your fingers and toes," claims an ad for Miller Genuine Draft Light. Quite an ambitious statement! Or you could call it "totally false." But it all depends on how freakishly high your total number of fingers and toes is—perhaps some severely mutated babies born in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster could indeed make the claim true. MGD's full ad, with its boldly stated mathematical impossibility, is below.
The Times' "Editorial Notebook" section is the box on its Op-Ed page that invariably contains a pointless, grating rumination about life on the farm in Connecticut or something equally inapplicable to NYC life, written by someone who should be unemployed but is, instead, rich and a member of the Times editorial board. Today the section offers the opinions of a Harvard man. Kudos to the Times for luring an Ivy Leaguer into the dirty, ink-stained corridors of journalism! So what important topic is Philip M. Boffey, '58, so eager to explain to the nation? Harvard, of course!
Did you hear the exciting news from the Congressional Budget Office? As the Times puts it: "The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans." The poorest 20% of Americans, by the way, bring home $383.4 billion in total. (That would be like 4 grand a year each on average, using the fuzziest of math.) Which means the richest 1% got themselves an income rise of around $80,000 a person. So now the riches are as rich as they've been since... 1929! Ha! This time around, though, the rich have arranged this by taking jobs themselves that could go to the less rich, even though they are incapable of updating their personal blogs.
