*No offense to the P-elect, but it is a little sickening.

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Also, Friedman lives in a 114,000 square foot house? Please tell me that's comic exagerration. Plz.

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I love the chart showing the rise and fall in Valerie Bertinelli's ass. Excellent!

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I imagine being given somewhat free-reign for teenage troublemaking in Wild West post-Soviet Moscow would have been more than a little crazy.

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Early years

Taibbi spent his childhood in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, attended Concord Academy, and attended Bard College at Annandale on Hudson, New York, spending a year abroad at Leningrad State Technical University. His father is Mike Taibbi, an NBC television reporter.

Career

In 1992 Taibbi moved to Uzbekistan, but was forced to leave six months later after writing articles critical of the country's president, Islom Karimov. Afterwards, Taibbi worked for The Moscow Times as a sports editor, before moving on to work in Russia and Mongolia as a professional athlete and as a correspondent for Montsame, the Mongolian National News Agency.

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@Matt Taibbi: Lions are a herd animal that hunts. Also humans.

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[www.nytimes.com]

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Gladwell is guilty of severe oversimplification as well, but at least his books are a little more limited in scope.

Relatedly, I don't know how many times I said "duh" while reading Freakanomics -- and I ain't too good at arithmetic. But I did enjoy the book because it was interesting and the authors weren't making shit up.

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It's typical Neo-Liberal nonsense. We'll just end up buying the solar panels from China until our workers have been beaten down enough by pverty and debt that they're willing to work at the same level of wages and benefits as their competitors abroad. You want to let the "invisible hand" do it's magic: how does $2 an hour in a factory sound? Because that's what Friedman's world view means for Americans: competing with countries on a "level playing field" while those countries have millions of dirt poor people more than happy to work harder than you for a lot less money.

Hope you like being poor, because that's what a "Flat World" means for the richer countries. A level playing field: Indian workers moving from $1 a day to $5 a day while Americans go from $20 an hour with benefits to minimum wage.

And, of course, Friedman's mall-building billionaire wife can build those shopping malls in Indian for their "new wealth" while we squat in our abandoned box stores.

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