Colbert unleashed a blistering expose of Laura Ingraham’s implicit racism in her simple-mined political satire on Tuesday. The next day, Stewart raises the ante with a new segment called “I Give Up” in which he decries both Dems and the GOP for turning their back on 9/11 First Responders’ health problems. One politician offers a glimmer of hope for Stewart: former roommate and summer share Anthony Weiner, who serves as a proxy for The Daily Show host’s outrage at the end of the second clip. Kinda makes up for last week’s silly season of dramatic readings of Bravo transcripts and discussions of astronaut poop.
I used to think that business was war by other means. But that’s naive I supposed given that we are now acting like a traditional empire, extending our influence in increasingly war-like means.
The NYT first reported the disovery of mineral worth $1T in Afgahnistan, but in the clip above, Y! Finance’s tech-ticker hosts Aaron Task and Henry Blodget illustrate opposing but valid emotional reactions. Henry gleefully states that we finally have a strategic success in this war. An astounded Aaron asks, why are we doing geological surveys when we haven’t found Bin Laden?
As Henry says, maybe we’re better at finding minerals than terrorists. The truth of the matter might be that we’re better at making money off war than anything else.
War by other means…
vs
On being a woman
- SS: Maternity policies, personal touch, third-wave feminism
- CB: bad-ass grandmother, bunny dip, first-wave “plug-compatible” management
On the human touch
- CB: big on hugs and human contact: “When I’m with you in the moment, I’m with you, not over there”
- SS: her ability to reach out in a crisis, her tendency to promote people so they utilize talents they often did not even suspect they had
On previous Yahoo! managment
- CB: Yahoo! had a huge problem of all kinds of internal documents getting out to the press… If I found out who was leaking this, I’d just drop-kick you to Mars.
- SS: “My friend Sue Decker was then CFO of Yahoo, and she used to stay over sometimes, and she was coming over to pick up her bag. And I didn’t want her to see me and Mark together. So we hid downstairs in my basement. We’re sitting on the basement floor talking, pretending I wasn’t home.” At this point in the re-creation, Sandberg breaks into a horror-flick stage whisper: “I think she’s here.”
On staff retention
- SS: “Turnover for companies in India can be more than 100 percent per year. We heard horror stories of whole floors quitting. So we didn’t do night shifts, and we gave everyone stock and benefits and free food, all the things we do everywhere else. And the turnover’s the lowest we know of—by far. People don’t leave!”
- CB: The joke was never have breakfast with Carol, because it’s not a real safe thing to do. Anybody who knows me knows I don’t do breakfast. If I’m going to get up early in the morning to meet with somebody, there’s a reason.
On future business prospects
- SS: Facebook, she says, operates at the wide-open end (of the marketing funnel), creating positive brand affiliation and generating demand for products. Google makes money because it commands 50 percent of online advertising dollars spent on that final stage, the one that gets people to make a purchase. Facebook can dominate the other 90 percent devoted to “demand generation” ($621 billion a year!).
- CB: Tomorrow’s Yahoo! is going to be really tailored. I’m talking about both smart science and people culling through masses of information on the fly and figuring out what people want to know.
We will be delivering your interests to you. For instance, if you’re a sports fan but have no interest in tennis, we won’t show you tennis. We would know that you do things in a certain sequence, so we’d say, “Here’s your portfolio. Here’s some news you might like. Oh, you went to this movie last week, here’s some other movies you might want to check out.”
I call it the Internet of One. I want it to be mine, and I don’t want to work too hard to get what I need.
Yahoo! has been here for fifteen years. Unfortunately, we sit in a paradigm that values the new shiny penny.
That said, we’re very successful. A billion three cash flow a year, and six hundred million users. But we can be so much more, and that’s why I came here.
