Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Oh Acorn, thanks for your service.

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

I have to wonder how many of these new registrations represent people who wouldn’t have actually registered otherwise. That is the real question of how much value this group provides. If they’re only registering people who would have actually made the effort to register anyway, then they’re not providing much of a service.

A couple years ago, a buddy asked what it would take for oil prices to go back down. My answer at the time was “global economic slowdown.” That seems correct. Or as Mr. Bingley said this morning,

OPEC Cuts Production

And oil drops to $64 a barrel.

That tells you how concerned folks are about the demand side.

OPEC agreed to cut 1.5MM BPD, and the price drop was about $5/barrel. We’ll see how well OPEC can manage that cut.

Gasoline futures are now at $1.46/gallon. If that holds, folks in the Southeast should expect to see prices continue to plummet. If that price holds, then average prices in Virginia and South Carolina will quickly be in the $2 to $2.25 range.

Another question to throw out there… does anyone know of a good way to search, or perhaps filter, email?

In particular, I want to be able to simply and easily view mail in a folder (or, ideally, all folders) between a range of dates. Ideally, I think there should just be slider bars that I can move around to filter out dates that I’m not interested in.

Anyone? Anyone?

Does anyone know of a good news aggregator that is basically similar to Fark but with less humor and better reading comprehension skills?

I’m tired of Fark because too many of the links are attached to summaries that are flat-out wrong (because of the limited reading comprehension skills) and/or the links tend to go to the same handful of blogs which tend to not be super useful and which also tend to suffer from reading comprehension errors, thus compounding the errors and increasing the probability that whatever “news” I get is even worse than the “news” as it actually appeared. And then, of course, people start commenting about the summary without reading the article which leads to mob-like discussion which can be good for no one.

I’m also looking for a site or blog that is really good at distilling the news to its simplest form.

Anyway, anyone know of anything?

Just ask this guy.