Incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, bad journalism
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
Looking at the JavaScript, it was a setTimeout() for quite a long time.
I knew exactly what kind of company Forbes was after that.
'Real Rich' people can usually see past scams and similar bullshit.
If they couldn't, they wouldn't remain rich for long. :)
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.
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.
Edit: They also protect Facebook ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092 (which links to https://twitter.com/pixelscript/status/1436664488913215490 )
[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=...
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.
I would posit that when you write hit pieces (either for your own convictions or money), you are not a good writer.
If we required writers to be right all the time they'd fail at that like anyone else.
And it turns out we disagree :)
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."
(Edited based on information in a reply)
Just one of many "probably's".
Because there is significant evidence that the author is untrustworthy?
The lyrics are pretty prophetic, and I've no doubt she made this particular song private to avoid more self-incrimination.
NSFW
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
https://www.forbes.com/profile/elizabeth-holmes/?sh=4a110eff...
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)
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.
- 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.
source: a friend of mine got into 30 under 30 list this way
17 years old but still valid.
And will probably remain valid as long as we have journalism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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"?
I've always considered those terms useless unless discussing the Jacobins and Girondins
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Though whether or not Google will respect it is up to the mood of whatever dark force they harness to produce useless results.
I don't know if the article was updated, but you can see that covered right at the end.
Well, that particular Forbes contributor turned out to be quite rich, didn't she?
Entrepreneur Magazine has a similar model.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/1...