Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

Last week Johnson & Johnson announced that it is lowering the maximum daily dose for single-ingredient Extra Strength Tylenol from 8 to 6 pills per day (from 4,000 to 3,000 mg). [more inside]
posted by hat_eater on Aug 4, 2011 - 54 comments

@Issue: is the online blog of The Journal of Business and Design. Topics of recent interest include Drawords, an ongoing caption this drawing project, and Typography in China, an explanation of the availability of Chinese typefaces. Also, @Issue interviews an iconic group that includes captains of industry and design.
posted by netbros on Jun 2, 2009 - 5 comments

George Soros' blog: hot on the heels of the early-adopter in chief, Bill Gates, George Soros has joined the blogging community. Needless to say, the onetime scourge of British monetary policy is not using LiveJournal but he does have a provocative position over the war in Iraq. Warren Buffet by contrast, despite having signed on as a Kerry economic adviser, appears to concur with the pre-emption doctrine. Does anything about the US election make sense anymore? The capital markets seem to have agreed that the outcome point is moot - can popular opinion (.pdf) be far behind? Some disagree. (.pdf)
posted by dmt on Oct 2, 2004 - 8 comments

A 'Superblog' for Business Geeks? The AlwaysOn Network, brainchild of Red Herring founder Tony "bloggers have shown us the value of truly participatory media sites, so we’re just going to bundle it up and polish it and commercialize it" Perkins, is inviting "the smartest chiefs, geeks, investors, boosters and wonks to come play in our spontaneous and uncensored arena"...and, oooooh, alleged celebrity bloggers. Will this be the /. for business geeks or just a case of more web recycling?
posted by boost ventilator on Feb 14, 2003 - 11 comments

Media Torrent: ""I think this is one of many weird phenomena that contributes to a national attention deficit disorder."The crawl -- that stream of info-morsels and promotional hooks that seemed so urgent right after Sept. 11, but now seems so annoying and distracting -- seems to carry Gitlin's point with it as it creeps across the screen." Is this a real problem, or is it just the old guys not hip to the kids' video world? (via i want media)
posted by owillis on Apr 1, 2002 - 22 comments