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Incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, bad journalism (niemanlab.org)
330 points by coloneltcb on Feb 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 113 comments



Around the time the whole cookie banner thing started, Forbes had this particular one that acted like turning off nonessential cookies was this whole convoluted process that required waiting and processing something. There'd be a progress bar stating "please wait, processing your request".

Looking at the JavaScript, it was a setTimeout() for quite a long time.

I knew exactly what kind of company Forbes was after that.


Alright, but was it any better when for example NYT employed the 'click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel' model? I remember that relatively well, because 13 years ago I used to trust them and was literally shocked when I had to spend 85 minutes and ~130 EUR on a 2009 international call.


what about jimmy over there ... he did this thing last year, it was so terrible you would not believe. really puts things into perspective, makes you think.


No but that is orthogonal to the discussion.


I mean it's a company that looks up to rich people, no matter how they got there. Scamming is legitimate if it makes you rich, right?


Forbes is a company that caters to "wannabee" rich people, rather than the 'real rich'.

'Real Rich' people can usually see past scams and similar bullshit.

If they couldn't, they wouldn't remain rich for long. :)


> Forbes had this particular one that acted like turning off nonessential cookies was this whole convoluted process that required waiting and processing something. There'd be a progress bar stating "please wait, processing your request".

Weather Underground, formerly an indie weather service that IIRC goes back to a telnet interface before the web existed, does something similar. A window from trustarc.com appears showing a progress meter counting up the percentage 'processed', alongside "We are processing your request, this could take up to a few minutes to process." Haha. I flipped 2 bits.

Now owned by The Weather Company (who also owns The Weather Channel), who are owned by IBM, who proudly say it uses the IBM Cloud, which apparently needs a few minutes to process this. Shameful deception of end-users.

I had used wunderground for my entire life on the Internet until I saw that. The National Weather Service is pretty good - and no dark patterns.


Every American should thank NWS (amd their equivalent state/local meteorology offices if they exists on your area) for basically doing their job.


Always entertains me that name, given the organisation that previously used it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground


It’s my understanding that they mostly just regurgitate NWS data you already paid for and slap some ads on it.


Isn’t that what google AMP does as well when you block some of their garbage?


And now you also know what kind of company google is.


Glad I'm not the only one that has noticed this scam going on. I've seen a number of sites doing it. One site I saw this on you had to wait an entire minute. Guess it's time for a new set of laws...


It’s already illegal- this is the exact kind of nonsense Google and Facebook were fined for at the end of last year. Strangely the Irish data protection agency seems less enthusiastic.


The Irish state gets some sweet ad money from harbouring Google in the EU.

Edit: They also protect Facebook ...


Sometimes users find a loader reassuring that the operation is working. I can think of many instances where, as a web developer, I've been asked to implement a loader because an important process finishes too quickly. Now this is anecdotal and may not be why the publisher did it but it can see why it would be implemented.


That's fair, but it isn't just a few seconds to give the impression that something is working, it's multiple minutes of watching a percentage slooowly climb from 0% to 100%. It's obviously just a cheap trick to annoy people who turn off their spyware.


Aha, maybe I misunderstood the example initially. In this case it could be a rate limiting feature that would ensure your browser is not making an excessive amount of http requests. That said, some parallelization should happen so it could go faster. So it does sound like there was no attempt to make it good for users.


This process requires no requests, no processing, nothing at all. It's literally asking the user "do you want us to make extra requests and data processing, or not do anything at all?", so choosing the "no" option should result in nothing at all being done "behind the scenes".


Turning off spyware requires zero requests. You could even say it requires a negative number of requests.


Except it only happens when you don't wanna be tracked. In case you opt-in for ALL the cookies it's instantaneous...


No, sorry, opting out of cookies is an instantaneous thing that 1) warrants no waiting time, and 2) is something that can happen in the background while using the site.

There is absolutely zero reason to artifically force the user to wait 30 seconds other than to coerce them into enabling predatory advertising cookies, which Forbes did (does?) and they know it.


Did they use TrustArc? A number of companies use the fake progress bar they provide. Here's an HN thread about Starbucks doing it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092 (which links to https://twitter.com/pixelscript/status/1436664488913215490 )


The name sounds awfully familiar, yeah.


What would be the logic of doing this?


You had the option to “accept everything and continue instantly” when you were waiting.


You could enable predatory advertising cookies instantly without waiting.


It is a coercive tactic to get people to accept their tracking cookies


If anyone remembers Daniel Lyons' numerous anti-Linux articles on Forbes [0] from back when Linux was seriously threatened by the SCO lawsuit... I'm still a bit salty about that. The articles were mean-spirited, sarcastic and overblown, well written (if one ignores the numerous factual inaccuracies and ad hominem attacks), and featured attention-getting titles like "Linux's Hit Men" [1]. The sad part is they were quite believable for anyone with no knowledge of the situation. If you followed any of the relevant tech news, not so much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons

> Lyons was a senior editor at Forbes magazine, covering enterprise computing and consumer electronics. He was also the author of the Forbes cover article, "Attack of the Blogs", where he wrote that blogs "are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective," claiming that Groklaw was primarily created "to bash software maker SCO Group in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage."[11]

> Between 2003 and 2007 Lyons covered the SCO cases against IBM and against Linux. He published articles such as "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets," where he stated that "like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree. They should wake up."[12][13][14]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys.html?sh=...


Lyons is an interesting case. Good writer by most measures.

His later work on Fake Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley was hilarious.

I can't grok whether his hatred of Linux was genuine or was it simply motivated by some external motivation from SCO or related organisation.

He should have known better.


> Good writer

I would posit that when you write hit pieces (either for your own convictions or money), you are not a good writer.


You might be a good writer anyways, just one who is wrong or did not understand the situation.

If we required writers to be right all the time they'd fail at that like anyone else.


You are moving the goalposts - I did not call for this.


No, there are very good writers who write hitpieces. If you want to make moral judgements maybe they're not good people, but writing a hitpiece doesn't make you a bad writer.


You moved the goalposts again.

And it turns out we disagree :)


It is hilarious that this is still up on the Forbes website right now (my italics):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/heathermorgan/?sh=3f3120737f7d

"When she's not reverse-engineering black markets to think of better ways to combat fraud and cybercrime, she enjoys rapping and designing streetwear fashion."


In case it helps anyone else, I didn't understand this comment and I looked it up and found the person referenced is one of the couple who have just been charged with (stealing) correction, laundering ~4 Bn in bitcoin

(Edited based on information in a reply)


I’m sad they never made the Forbes richest people list. They deserve to be amongst their fellow robber barons.


They’ve been charged with conspiring to launder, not stealing, the $4B+ in bitcoin.


It's quite plausible to assume one of them or both did steal it though. It's not very likely that somebody would just give 4bn in bitcoins to a stranger to keep for a while.


Because that encrypted zip file was probably received from the hacker Ilya bought it from for a million dollars or so, when this hack was only worth $8mm.

Just one of many "probably's".


Obviously, they reverse-engineered the stolen Bitcoin black market.


I know it's schadenfreude, but the when I read she enjoys rapping I had to find it[1] , and was not disappointed.

The lyrics are pretty prophetic, and I've no doubt she made this particular song private to avoid more self-incrimination.

NSFW

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGkz_lQhpyM&t=1s


That was some of the worst rapping I've ever heard.


She’s on Apple Music and other streaming platforms, someone did a deep dive on her online persona https://www.theverge.com/22924237/razzlekhan-bitfinex-hack-l...


It's been made private on YouTube, but Vimeo still has the official music video for her song Versace Bedouin and several others:

https://vimeo.com/348396244


Went through some of the articles. How are they worse than most of what you see on similar news sites? And why would they have to take any of those down?


> why would they have to take any of those down?

Because there is significant evidence that the author is untrustworthy?


This reminds me of Gordon Kelly, a senior contributor, whose every articles that pointed Chrome's weakness would often headlined "Google Just Gave Millions Of Users A Reason To Quit Chrome". Sure enough, the headlines will be edited after awhile, but I consider this kind of original headline a clickbait. I eventually have to delist Forbes from my reading feed. It's that terrible.


it was the same author’s “Apple iOS [every version] Has A Nasty Surprise” headlines that made me drop them


Clickbait is a charitable interpretation. Perhaps one less so would involve betting on related stock prices before publishing such a headline.


Interesting, I didn’t realize that the headlines were being edited. But yeah the original headline is definitely clickbait.


I have been wondering for a while now, how does Forbes still maintain its brand?

It has now been at least two decades that it has had close to zero credibility, but somehow in general population it is maintaining its brand as a legit publication


People always have been misled by branding. For example, AT&T today actually has (almost?) nothing to do with the original AT&T; the name was effectively purchased.

These days, I find very few people will even engage in evaluating the credibility of what they read - they seem to scorn the issue. Look at all the links to Wikipedia here on HN, for example - something I didn't see until maybe a year or two ago: Wikipedia was always seen as a bit dubious and uncertain. I haven't seen anyone argue otherwise, but again they seem to scorn or resent even raising the question.


> For example, AT&T today actually has (almost?) nothing to do with the original AT&T

Of all valid examples available, you picked AT&T, which is definitely out of set? Seriously?

Okay, they do not control the Northeast (that's Verizon), but other than that it'll be the equivalent of asking if Russia can trace back through the pre-1919 Russian Empire or the current Germany from Prussia.

P.S. Please look at this merger chart: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BZ033_LIONDO_9.... Although it's unlikely that AT&T and Verizon will merge again (unless the US FTC lost all anti-trust enforcement), your statement can at least be proven wrong in this context. Maybe use Polaroid as an example next time?


Wikipedia is a gigantic hit and miss. I often loathe to see it linked as gospel truth.


> Wikipedia was always seen as a bit dubious and uncertain

Base knowledge has to come from somewhere, so where it would have been an encyclopedia fifteen years ago it is wikipedia now. That's just the times moving on - if you have material concerns with the linked articles you are free to edit them (although it must be said you will have a hard time doing so with rich folks - they have firms to whitewash their pages).


> Base knowledge has to come from somewhere, so where it would have been an encyclopedia fifteen years ago it is wikipedia now.

That agrees with the parent and GP comments: The assertion was that people rarely evaluate credibility, and the common citation of Wikipedia is given as an example. So we all agree that Wikipedia is commonly used.

If you mean that Wikipedia is inevitably used, that seems hard to suppot. There are an incredible number of sources available, and there's no reason Wikipedia had to be popular now. If people cared more about accuracy, a source with more focus on it would be more popular. I never use Wikipedia beyond checking the schedule for sporting events.

> if you have material concerns with the linked articles you are free to edit them

The problem is that I don't know what is accurate and what isn't on Wikipedia, and I don't have time to research everything. Also, editing Wikipedia is often very difficult and frustrating.

> although it must be said you will have a hard time doing so with rich folks - they have firms to whitewash their pages

And a hard time with anything controversial, or a page where an editor or editors who feel ownership, or one with an astroturfing campaign, or many others. Wikipedia is the original disinformation source, discovered long ago by some groups.


Ignorance most likely? I've noticed things getting worse, but everything in this article is new information to me. I also didn't know Huffington Post was written by contributors.


I think it’s all about placement and reach. They are good at SEO and article promotion on social media. Since people see it all the time they just assume it can’t be that bad.


Back in the day, Forbes had standards. To get your startup featured, you had to know a guy! LOL.


My early 2000s girlfriend worked for forbes.com and told stories of the shitheads she worked with. I don't doubt you needed to know someone to get your name in the pages, but chances were they'd be clueless braggarts.


I remember just a couple of weeks ago a tweet from Forbes Spain saying unemployment in Spain was going down (https://twitter.com/Forbes_es/status/1486640126071480320). It felt outrageous as Spain currently has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1115276/unemployment-in-...). We are currently living under a totalitarian government and it saddened me that Forbes was yet another media paid by our totalitarian government covering their shit. I don´t know why, but for some reason Forbes was in my mind as an economic-freedom newspaper like. But as the title says, it´s just another platform for for scams, grift, and bad journalism as the other media payed y the government like El País.


The tweet isn't wrong in that Spain's unemployment rate has indeed been lower in the fourth quarter of 2021 than in a long time. [0] I'd be curious to understand why you would call the current spanish government totalitarian, they seem to be overall rather moderate, and won a solid majority in the last parliamentary elections.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/unemployment-rate


Especially considering Spain has some experience with literal dictatorship.


Probably because it's not the specific party they want in power.


Forbes named Holmes the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire--worth $4.5 billion--in 2014, when she was 30 years old.

https://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/?sh=4a110eff...


To be fair to Forbes, the media was all over her as a female Steve Jobs and declaring it the beginning of the girl boss era. A lot of people who criticized her were shut down as being sexist.


> A lot of people who criticized her were shut down as being sexist.

Yep, this, sadly... $current_year, everything is *-ism.

But, a good book was written on Holmes and her company: "Bad Blood" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood (not affiliated, just a fun read)


To be fair to Forbes, it is also how basic maths works. Her share of the company was worth $4.5bn at the time.

There are genuine criticisms to be dished out, but reporting the current valuation of a company as the current valuation of the company doesnt really rank up there.


The only reason I read Forbes is that some science writers I enjoy are still on it:

- Starts With A Bang [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/ ], a column by Ethan Siegel, who covers cosmology

- Grrlscientist [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/ ], an evolutionary ecologist who covers fascinating stuff on biology (especially on birds)

Otherwise, I may occasionally glance at other Forbes articles.


for 5000 Euros, Russian Forbes will add you to one of their lists

source: a friend of mine got into 30 under 30 list this way


I know people who are "Forbes contributor" through their PR consultant. They don't write anythything themselves, the PR consultants interview them and write the articles for them. They are not limited to Forbes obviously, everything from local news to CNN journo writing about their company to wikipedia articles and a lot more.


http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

17 years old but still valid.

And will probably remain valid as long as we have journalism.


I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the bulk of pieces in news papers, magazines etc are not written by the headline author, but by PR agencies on behalf of the person / company that did something amazing.


I know there are PR agencies that get paid for a "personal branding promotion" that get you in a top X list of Forbes for some amount of money.

The founder of Helbitz, Salvatore Palella, was one of them. He paid an agency and they push Forbes magazine to have its photo in the cover.


I subscribed to Forbes for a few years in the 1980s. Not because it had any decent journalism as far as I could tell but because it just seemed so deranged it was fun to read. The regular columnists were mostly (but not all) a collection of lazy Ayn Rand acolytes (I mean Rand acolytes are nuts, but the ones in Forbes back then didn't even try), a few old fashion racists (Hanke, Brimelow), and the odd thinker with an opinion piece on a topic I'd already read to death somewhere else. The "articles" were mostly reflexive genuflection to people who'd somehow acquired wealth. It's as if the entire operation consisted of people who were simply phoning it in.

It astonished me that when they switched to being a blog site it actually appeared that standards had fallen.

BTW I dumped Forbes and kept the UK magazine The Spectator. It was and is full of lazy rightwing rubbish too (though of a different strain) but has much more variety (had personal ads for a while) and the level of writing itself was generally quite high, in particular while Boris Johnson was editor (I know, that seems hard to believe).

Unfortunately these days I struggle to find a right wing, much less left wing, journal-of-rants that's worth bothering to read.


This to me exemplifies "read outside the bubble, think critically" -I also read the other point of view. I find it jarring, bizarre, assumptions from topsy-turvy land but this always makes me think "yea, thats what they'd say about you too mate"

It is hard to find good, rational, oppositional writing. Its so easy to find pretty ranty, bad oppositional writing.

Really? I increasingly think editorial, and somebody supervising the pub/comment is best. I know, I know, its not very "trendy" but man, wading through the dreck of people like me, commenting like me: it's killing it.

If you want an example, "comment is free" in the Guardian. Its an insider-bubble.

Reddit is just as bad. Heaps of pile-ons. I want to read serious, committed, christian-right points of view who believe charity, modesty and a gun solve all the problems of america, and I don't want to wade through trumpy shit to find it.

(contextually it should be clear I am not christian, right, or believe in charity over taxes)

Murdoch blew it. The Australian has become delusionally bad. I still think centerist-right papers like the Independent can do ok, I read german news, and RT, and WashPo when I can, and graze links of Drudge. He is as crazy as a loon but he kind-of finds things I can read. Slate is crap. I don't need guides to washing my purple love machine. Politico and TheHill are ok, sometimes but annoying videos.

Is TheAtlantic soft-pop right? Feels it.


Interesting the Atlantic is considered to skew left


Like The Spectator, The Atlantic has been around for over a century (Speccie must be close to 200) so such things have drifted around for a while.

Genteely apolitical papers like The New Yorker are less likely to; papers written for a cause (such as The Economist) are more likely to retain some political consistency for more than a century.

I agree though: the Atlantic's position is hardly left wing except in comparison with, say, Fox News or The Wall Street Journal.


A lot of 1940s/50s/60s/70s views of what left-right means, have been broken for decades.

Reagan would not be alt-right. He was pretty far right to me economically and politically. There are socialist economists who still respect the chicago school, god alone knows how. MMT is killing it for a lot of rightist people even though its pure keynesian. (if you call anything modern, its suddenly ok?)

We fling "kleptocracy" pretty hard at modern Russia. I find it passing strange that we don't look in a mirror sometimes. We berate china for insisting that schools teach history aligned to their own political system values. Isn't that almost exactly what the religious-right wants to do in the USA?

It's a myth often repeated that the financial times has a marxist editorial. Certainly it's printed on pink paper, so there's that. And a lot of marxist economosts read it. I tend to think money-journalism tells the least lies, it generally doesn't work when you do. All other journalism, I am less sure but maybe its Gell-Mann Amnesia?


I had to look up MMT as I hadn’t come across it before. Its Wikipedia article¹ introduces it as:

> Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires. MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of macroeconomic theory, and has been criticized by many mainstream economists.

> MMT says that governments create new money by using fiscal policy and that the primary risk once the economy reaches full employment is inflation, which can be addressed by gathering taxes to reduce the spending capacity of the private sector. MMT is debated with active dialogues about its theoretical integrity, the implications of the policy recommendations of its proponents, and the extent to which it is actually divergent from orthodox macroeconomics.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory


> A lot of 1940s/50s/60s/70s views of what left-right means, have been broken for decades.

I've always considered those terms useless unless discussing the Jacobins and Girondins


> And a lot of marxist economosts read [the FT].

Marxists, Keynesians, the Austrians, “neoliberals” and Friedman all base their vocabulary and fundamentals on the labor theory of value and an economic model based on the Victorian industrial economy, which we no longer have and which was already visibly on its way out 25 years ago.

I haven’t seen any good writing (not that I’m steeped in the literature) that rethinks these fundamentals. MMT is pretty bogus but to its credit nodes at least revisit some of the fundamentals.


I dont think you entirely have this right. Labour theory of value is useful in very narrow ways. It doesn't tell you anything about the money supply. The victorian economic model has been subsumed by more recent developments which include MMT, and complex derivatives and IPR. Victorian economists who had good maths would be fine. Victorian economists who believed their own bullshit might struggle.

Robotics poses many questions about price/cost disfunction. As does the effect the internet/dot-com boom has had on the return on investment for tech capital outlay. (time was a telephone switch was a 50 year investment and an office PBX had a 15 year tax write off. Computers have 3y MAX life and typically return in 18 months or less, so when everything is a computer, how can it have an asset depreciation schedule more than 3 years worst-case?)

IPO is a cancer on society. Don't get me started on NFTs and the chain hype.

Australia, which gutted out its manufacturing, is riding a boom in Oil, Coal, Iron ore and now Lithium. we're good. (while it lasts) But the jobs distortion reality field here is huge: People fly-in fly-out so in principle there is no pressure on local housing in the rural mine locations. In reality, there is huge price pressure everywhere, irrespective. Nobody talks about the future burden of 65+ year old retirees who expect public health and return on market to fund their lifestyle from a shrinking workforce, or the massive rort in house value. When the boomers die, either millions will disappear in hyperinflation, or in depreciating asset value, or there will be a glorious transfer of wealth to the balding younger generation who secretly wished their parents had died sooner.

You might hate Varoufakis, I don't know, but "adults in the room" is entertaining to read. He did a lot of work on inflationary trends in MMORPG before helping Greece pour fuel on the fire. I wish more was written about that. Massive raids on the intergalactic scene do two things: they bond the tribe, and they're potlach, destroying surplus capital to renew the energy in the game.

I like reading 'the tablet' -they've always had to take the long view.


> I dont think you entirely have this right. Labour theory of value is useful in very narrow ways. It doesn't tell you anything about the money supply.

I said that modern economics is dominated by people who "all base their vocabulary and fundamentals on the labor theory of value and an economic model based on the Victorian industrial economy" not Victorian economists themselves, though that's very interesting too. What I meant by Victorian economy was one dominated by largely interchangable labour working in large manufacturing facilities (now we would say "factory"). There's a pretty clear line from Smith, describing a largely preindustrial economy (his famous example was a "workshop", but he wrote more extensively, a fact most who quote him don't know), to Ricardo (technically pre victorian but the first to use modern thinking), to Marx (very insightful to really come to grips with that industrial economy for the first time; a shame his analysis and recommendations were mostly rubbish.

That model of the economic drivers of an industrial economy (palimsest factories -- and workers, mass movements and very long product cycles) powered through WWII (convert an IBM card sorter factory into making machine guns? No problem!) and even into the 60s, but has long been woefully inadequate for an economy in which most jobs are non-fungible skilled jobs (even, or especially, factory jobs) and the collapse of mass movements. And even an economics built on a model of today's economy will soon be inadequate, as you say, for a robotic future where the marginal cost of production tends towards nil. But that's still a long way off.

Speaking of Victorian economists themselves, it's absurd that we speak of mercantalism vs free trade in the same terms as were used 150 years ago. When I am unlucky enough to read a lazy johnny-one-note like Navarro talking about the economy I always imagine him with huge muttonchops like a character from Lytton Strachey. Of course those guys didn't really understand the macroeconomy and were stuck on the gold standard, for all the bubbles and crashes it caused. To that extent I agree what you said about their model of money, at least, being subsumed by more complex and sophisticated instruments more suited to a growing economy. Too bad the model of productive economic activity is still stuck in the past.

> Australia, which gutted out its manufacturing, is riding a boom

Yes, sadly Australia's long boom was really China's, as successive governments of both the coalition and labor chose to turn the country into an extractive resource province of China. The cost, the "Dutch disease", is well known but was blithely ignored. In many ways, both good and bad, I don't recognise the place any more. But compared to most places, in which I include the US, it's still the lucky country.

> You might hate Varoufakis, I don't know, but "adults in the room" is entertaining to read. He did a lot of work on inflationary trends in MMORPG before helping Greece pour fuel on the fire. I wish more was written about that. Massive raids on the intergalactic scene do two things: they bond the tribe, and they're potlach, destroying surplus capital to renew the energy in the game.

Hate is a strong word I almost never use, and as far as Varoufakis is concerned I don't pay much attention to him. TBH I wonder how much he really did on MMORPG economics as as far as I can tell he was almost never at the office, which I believe was part of the reason for his departure. Certainly I don't think he covered himself in glory in his time as a practicing economist in a Greek government.


I'm curious about what you think economics could be based on (especially since its clear you don't subscribe to wild eyed optimism regarding near future post scarcity economics)?

Not seeing the "labour theory of value" style reasoning from non-Marxist economists; if anything I'd have thought the criticism was the opposite (purely market based measures of purely extrinsic value, with any structural change that further decouples purchasing power from people or work assumed to be relatively unimportant, macro that assumes unemployment is a signal for the priority of inflation targeting, not underused capacity to create value, micro-view of capitalists substituting capital for labour and labourers substituting labour for leisure according to their relative (expected) prices looks very different from Victorian assumptions about iron laws of wages etc). Modern economists haven't abandoned the idea of labour productivity as influencing output (and nor should they) but they've conceived vastly greater roles for credit, "human capital", roles of monetary or fiscal policy, corrective taxation and redistribution and even basic labour-drives-change models incorporate ideas like efficiency wages and search costs.


There are a couple of interviews with me floating around talking discussing some of the mechanics of a post-scarcity economy. I'm excited for it, but am doubtful I will see it in my lifetime. I mean, I was eager for it in the 1980s when I was actually supposedly working on it(!) but I don't feel we're really even on the path yet. As Gary Marcus has quipped: "you don't get to the moon by building more ladders."

On the economics side, tracking of things like the unemployment or labor force participation rate; NAIRU, and all that Keynesian blah blah are stuck in a model and measurement system that is as utterly divorced from how the practical level of the economy works as GDP. It's not like everybody doesn't know this (except cough at the policy level and among the general public).

Yet monetary policy and much of academic macro appears to me fixated on the most abstract and abstruse, and I wonder if that is a kind of uber-bikeshedding, where you focus on what you can reason about, like string theory or high dimension manifolds. I understand that impetus -- it's why I gave up on CS research and decided to work on practical things. But the foundations of the practical side of macro, as I said, seem to have given up on the concrete regions of the economy (I know I am being quite unfair here to economists like, for an arbitrary example, Autor). The famous abstract homo economicus, non-existent as he ever was, has almost faded away. Let us not forget that those new and exotic credit instruments, at the end of the day, need to lead to benefit of some sort for the person on the street. The existence of some new instrument is not sufficient justification for its existence. Yet that's where a lot of attention goes, probably because finance is no longer considered a service industry like gardening, doctoring, or lawyering, but a calling to service...of itself.

To me the economics that is exciting right now is the empirical micro work that spread from MIT over the last few decades and finally even got a Nobel. But little to none of that seems to address the issues of a post-scarcity world, apart from a few isolated and heavily constrained UBI trials.

And that's what I liked (and all I liked) about MMT: at least it reimagined the whole structure of macro, and caused me to think. But the "worker" is still not really visible, any more than old homo economicus. Oh yeah, and what about "citizen"?


Left of the public? Maybe. Left compared to other newsrooms? It's centre-right compared to most newsrooms.


As an ex-Soviet teenager I loved reading Forbes in the early 90s. Thomas Sowell was my jam. The business success stories were so addicting.

It was the time when their advertising slogans were: "Meet Michael Dell. He started reading Forbes at 19".

So obviously I wanted success by association.

As time moved on (and I moved away from Randism) I read Forbes less and less. I noticed that online standards were much looser than print.

What really shocked me when the local (Easter European) print edition of Forbes had a glowing article about a disgraced kleptocrats wife. It was so obviously paid for and below any standards of journalism.

So I started thinking whether my early positive opinions of Forbes were somewhat clouded by my youth.

EDIT: It seems only New Yorker has stayed true to its quality. That is the articles do not try to outrage you and give respectable space to multiple viewpoints. As in after reading an article about fracking in a small town you would not be gathering pitchforks nor wishing for a private market solution. Just mild and considerate.


I read the American Spectator for a year or so. William F. Buckley Jr. was a regular there, if I recall. I was young so a lot of the thirst for battle was lost on me. However the quality of writing was undeniably high, and for the first time, as a lover of literature but basically in a very liberal bubble, I got the sense that there was a kind of intelligence that I really was missing. I didnt care about Left or Right affiliation at that time.

Forbes at the same time seemed like more Hollywood in print, idolizing all things money. Sort of ridiculous to my mind, with expensive looking ads, and pretty decent typesetting for a magazine. Hard to describe the print world today among all the phone users and instant news everything.


https://web.archive.org/web/20110805101637/http://www.nation... is a very well-written review by him.

It's the only piece by him that I have read, I think, and when I read his name it immediately jumped to my mind.


BTW that American Spectator was a completely unrelated magazine, not that that implies that there is anything wrong with it!


I can't handle the British Spectator editorial. It's pretty unashamedly what it is, which I suppose is the point, but it's too depressing. Given the past editors, you would want to think its tolerably accurate to the desires in the heart of the UK Tory party.

Perhaps I am alone in finding wry amusement that Michael Heseltine cannot but be considered left-wing now. Sure, he was always a "wet" but he was still a member of the Thatcher cabinet, and all it stood for. Well.. right up until the Westland Helicopter business.

The spectator doesn't like him. I think that speaks volumes.


I still stick to the FT, occasional Economist, and then a bunch of specialized academic stuff.

Forbes and Fortune were interesting in the 80s (in many ways they epitomized the 80s) but declined rapidly from there. By the dot com bubble they were a bit of a punchline with no setup.


Based on your tastes you might find Takimag and the Unz Review entertaining.


Taki Mag is my conservative rag of choice. I enjoy it because it's the most honest reflection of popular right-wing sentiment (it's racist). Has funny writers I can't help but like, like Ann Coulter and Jim Goad.

As far as the left goes, I've really been enjoying Red Sails recently, though it's basically two peoples' blog. Lots of well written pieces from an explicitly Marxist-Leninist perspective, which agree or disagree, is way more interesting than the "AOC/Bernie said X" snoozefests Jacobin churns out these days.


Everyone who’s anyone on the left reads Sailer’s Takimag column regularly. It’s pretty funny. Although in my opinion he’s most entertaining when he nerds out on golf course design and moneyball.

Red Sails is a great recommendation. Thanks!

Do you happen to know a good English language magazine or blog for Xi Jinping Thought? As far as I can tell Marxism/Leninism is just an historical curiosity, but Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is a truly effective if not palatable living Communist system.


Maybe I was not precise enough with my language when I said ML. The people at Red Sails are very optimistic about Chinese socialism. They express this in their own pieces, but also share translations from Chinese figures.


I loved "China Reconstructs" -the highest form of art was always there. I have a very tatty print of "the village fish-pond" -even the carp are smiling.


BTW Taki was a regular in the Spectator of the 90s.


Is there any way to omit web sites such as forbes.com, Buzzfeed and Business Insider from my google searches?


Lookup uBlacklist, your internet search experience will jump back 10 years.


-site:

Though whether or not Google will respect it is up to the mood of whatever dark force they harness to produce useless results.


This guy is my favorite Forbes clickbait artist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/


There is so much fail missing that it is almost favorable to Forbes. I was really disappointed not to see the OneCoin cover for example. On the other hands it says "incomplete" in the title.


> I was really disappointed not to see the OneCoin cover for example.

I don't know if the article was updated, but you can see that covered right at the end.


True, it is there now, but it says the cover is fake. It actually was on the cover of at least the BG and CZ editions of Forbes.


> Forbes, the magazine David Carr once called "a synonym for riches [...]"

Well, that particular Forbes contributor turned out to be quite rich, didn't she?


One thing the article does not mention is that the "Forbes Technology Council" designation is pure pay-to-play. Vendors pay about $3,000/year to get that designation for their CEO and the marketing team writes his/her stuff. A quick search on Linkedin for "Forbes Technology Council" gives over 1,000 results.

Entrepreneur Magazine has a similar model.


There's isn't any evidence that there was any sort of "fraud" involved in the Bitfinex hack. It was just a hack.


Coffeezilla 5 minute TL;DR: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2iPY59FTLN8


Forbes has been owned by China since the early 2010s.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/1...




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