Career News 24/7: 09/14/12

Friday, September 14, 2012

The Browser daily newsletter [14 Sep 2012]

14 September 2012

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Best of the Moment

My Life As A TaskRabbit

Brad Stone | Businessweek | 13 September 2012

A "backbreaking, soul-draining journey into what Silicon Valley venture capitalists often call the distributed workforce". Essentially, you bid online to do the tedious or unpleasant tasks that other people don't want to do Comments

Real Estate In Literature

Ian Crouch | New Yorker | 13 September 2012

John Lanchester's "Capital" elevates houses to the status of characters. The story is as much about property values as about human values. And why not? Wealth fascinates us, and urban wealth flows mostly through real estate Comments

Paddled

Christopher Beam | GQ | 11 September 2012

When he moved to Beijing for work, Chris Beam thought his proficiency in ping-pong would help him win the acceptance if not admiration of new Chinese acquaintances. In this charming piece, he explains how wrong that turned out to be Comments

The Law That Explains The Folly Of Bank Regulation

John Kay | John Kay/FT | 12 September 2012

On Goodhart's law, which says that targets don't work. Changing behaviour to meet a target changes the relationship between target and objective. So the target becomes a poor measure of success as soon as it is adopted as a target Comments

'Surviving'

Mike Marqusee | Mike Marqusee | 26 August 2012

On surviving cancer. And beating off tiresome platitudes. "The perpetual injunction [is] to enjoy, to consume, to celebrate.... [but] the only way to 'live every moment to the full' is to live for a purpose beyond the moment" Comments

Pedestrian Mania

Brian Phillips | Grantland | 5 September 2012

In the 1870s Edward Payson Weston somehow became one of the most celebrated athletes in the English-speaking world despite the fact that his one athletic talent was walking. This is his remarkable story Comments

FiveBooks Interview

Robert Baer on Being a Spy

The former CIA operative lifts the lid on the reality of spying. He says the intelligence service knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war, but politicians and reporters didn’t listen

Featured Special Report

Globalisation

A collection of thought-provoking articles and interviews on the challenges of globalisation

Reader Recommendations

joespring Why did 10 people die on Everest this past spring? A must read by @GraysonSchaffer. t.co/Bogwfu6c #longreads #longform #browsings

Book of the Day

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Denise Hamilton says: “It’s a very lush, richly imagined book. It just bursts with sensuality and the smells of Paris in the 18th century”

Video of the Day

First Look: iPhone 5

LA. It's a city of pretty savvy shoppers, right?

Quote of the Day

Adam Phillips, on Sigmund Freud

"Freud's work is best read as a long elegy for the intelligibility of our lives"

STOCKS CLIMB TO 5-YEAR HIGH: Here's What You Need To Know, September 14, 2012

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Friday, September 14, 2012

Investors and traders are keeping this epic bull market alive.

First the scoreboard:

Dow: 13,593, +53.5, +0.4%
S&P 500: 1,465, +5.7, +0.4%
NASDAQ: 3,183, +28.1, +0.8%

And now the top stories:

Today's rally was modest. But it was good enough to establish a fresh 5-year high. It's worth noting that Middle East tensions sent oil prices north of $100 per barrel for the first time since May.
A couple of economic reports this morning remind everyone that the U.S. economy remains weak. August retail sales excluding oil and gas climbed just 0.1 percent, which was lower than the expectation for 0.4 percent. The headline number increased by 0.9 percent versus expectations for a 0.9 percent gain.
Industrial production was also ugly. In August, production fell 1.2 percent, reversing the 0.5 percent gain seen in July. Much of this was due to Hurricane Isaac. "Precautionary shutdowns of oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico in advance of the hurricane contributed to a drop of 1.8 percent in the output of mines for August," the Fed said in its statement. "The output of utilities declined 3.6 percent."
Consumer sentiment, however, jumped to 79.2 from 74.3 in August. This was the second highest reading since October 2007.
Bank of America's Savita Subramanian thinks that this bull market still has legs. In a note to clients today, she unveiled her 2013 S&P 500 target: 1,600. That's a 10 percent gain from here. "This would represent a new all-time high for the S&P 500, surpassing the 1565 level reached in October 2007," she wrote.
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