Hi Bev, I'm not an economist. I don't know if you are. But from what I can tell there appears to be close to a unanimous consensus among economists that because of high demand and tight supply the savings will not be passed on to consumers but rather taken by the oil companies. Absent strong reasons to the contrary, my choice in this sort of case is to credit the opinions of the experts on the topic. Especially when they all seem to agree.

Posted at May 6, 2008 8:32 PM in response to Concert of Great Powers

I think the video's being fraudulent is probably a decent reason on its face for not covering it, no?

Posted at May 3, 2008 1:17 AM in response to TPM - Why Nothing on Obama's Press Release?

I completely understand the logic of using color or some other sort of signal to show the user what's new since the last time they visited the site. There are some software and server capacity limitations that make that challenging however. We're meeting next week with the head of the company that makes the software and our own tech people to see what's doable. But for the moment just wanted to make clear that we understand how helpful it would be. It's just a matter of seeing what's possible in our current set up.

Posted at May 2, 2008 1:39 AM in response to Better Reader Posts

unless i'm not understanding your question, there is a digg button. it's part of the 'share' link that's on all posts at all the tpm sites.

Posted at May 2, 2008 1:32 AM in response to Better Reader Posts

At the risk of saying something totally fatuous these are great ideas. And I'm happy that the community is generating, because your ideas or 'our' ideas are going to be better than the stuff that Andrew and I come up with on our own. The key, and this is largely on us, is to get a group of committed cafe denizens to hash these ideas out and then to have a good means of communication between those folks and Andrew and I, because we're the ones who actually have to get the stuff down on paper, figure out what we can afford to do on the tech and then commit time to yelling at the techies long enough to make sure it gets done.

But let me tell you about one thing we have on the drawing board that I think may be a small part of a solution.

As I've mentioned a few times, we're going to build two new features that allow you to manage and deal with the site. One we're calling "My Discussions" or something along those lines and that will be a page that list all the most recent responses to your comments and posts. It will basically be a reverse chronological order list of "Joe responded to your comment on Genghis's post blah and blah and said XYZ." We're going to post a little more detailed description. But basically this will allow people to follow the conversations they're involved in.

Second, and this is what i think is relevant to this conversation. There will be another page called "My Favorites"... and this will be a feed of all the cafe reader bloggers you've bookmarked/favorited. So as a reader I can say, I'm not just recommending this one post. But I want to make sure I see every one of Genghis's posts. So I'll have a section where all the posts of the bloggers I find consistently good will appear their. We'll also have a list somewhere of the most 'favorited' cafe bloggers. So in addition to the recommending, which tends to be ephemeral, this should also have the effect of creating some permanence to the community's collective sense of the best material the site is producing. I think this can go some way to getting us to the middle ground Hoppy is talking about.

There's a danger of a sort of embedding insiderism developing. But I think with the regular feeds there will be enough turnover and cross-fertilization that this will either not be a problem or will be a manageable one.

Please let me know your suggestions.

Josh

Posted at May 2, 2008 12:12 AM in response to Better Reader Posts

artappraiser, to reverse the paraphrase, that is not a feature but a bug, or at least a bit of functionality that is slated to be changed for precisely the reason you refer to.

Posted at April 28, 2008 10:52 PM in response to Who Loves You?

I can answer a few of these questions. At least two of the three of your suggestions are already on the drawing board. first is a robust editing interface that will have edit, preview, the works. thread tracking is also on the drawing board. i think i know what you mean by consistent html scheme but i'm not certain so perhaps you can clarify.

Posted at April 28, 2008 10:51 PM in response to Who Loves You?

This is sort of my experience too. His voice has seemed sort of silent for a few weeks. Of course, he's out in the field campaigning, not focusing on national media and catering to political junkies around the country. But what I really think this is is that he's not controlling the agenda. Hillary's controlling the agenda, defining the race at the moment. And that's made him recede into the background, even as he's a constant topic of conversation.

Posted at April 26, 2008 11:03 PM in response to Where is Barack Obama?

To answer the question, sometimes it's not that we've missed something but that we're working on several stories and only have so many reporters to go around. In this case, we did flag this story in the campaign wire today. However, the quote struck us as ambiguous. We were sure whether she was saying that she didn't know about this until Obama brought it up in the debate, which seems highly improbable, or whether she simply meant that she hadn't known about it at the time, which strikes me as unlikely, but less clear cut. Greg put in a request for a clarification. But he had to leave early today. So I assume they had not gotten back to him by the time he left. Look forward to something on this from us tomorrow.

Posted at April 24, 2008 11:37 PM in response to Hillary Lied About the Weather Underground - No Mention at TPM

Poll numbers have a way of cutting through theories and casual impressions. Both Democratic candidates are roughly tied with McCain. Until I see that significantly change I will view claims that Obama has imploded with some skepticism.

Posted at April 23, 2008 8:22 PM in response to Obama and McGovern