Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

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The new rules, issued on Friday, make it harder for businesses to protect commercial secrets and for individuals to access websites from abroad that the Chinese government believes are politically sensitive, The New York Times reported.

The estimated number of Internet users in China has grown to more than 500 million, about 40 percent of the population, the Bangkok Post reported.

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Yet, these numbers never tell the full story, and another measure of joblessness shows an unsettling trend: sporadic unemployment for millions of the nation’s workforce.

In 2011, nearly 15 percent of the workforce was unemployed at some point throughout the year—a stark contrast to the official 2011 annual unemployment rate of 8.9 percent. The difference? The over-the-year unemployment rate takes into account the fact that many workers will be unemployed one month and then reemployed the next, while the average annual unemployment rate simply averages the amount of the labor force unemployed that very month. This means that the official annual rate obscures the unsettlingly high amount of job instability in the United States—a trend that is projected to continue into 2013.

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The New York Times is America's Last Newspaper, and because of that it is the recipient of a lot of grief that it doesn't always entirely deserve. Conservatives think it's the Daily Worker. Liberals blame it for Iraq and Bush's second term. Young people refuse to pay to read it.

The truth is, it is a good newspaper. It has great reporting that it spends a bunch of money on. It has a crossword puzzle. It has David Carr.

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Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked into buying things they don’t want or need. There’s no need to feel foolish; the retail industry spends an inordinate amount of time and money figuring out the science (yes, it is a science) of how to sell the most stuff. But it is a good idea for consumers to know what they're going into, especially around the holiday season, when stress levels are running high and stores are packed with shoppers spending money left and right.

Though far from a comprehensive list, here are six tactics retailers use to get you to part with your hard-earned dough.

1. Holiday ploys: The scents and sounds of the season.

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That’s right, HSBC is officially above the law. Too-big-to-fail has become too-big-to-prosecute.

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Before the financial crash sounded a high-decibel wakeup call, Americans had gone decades without serious public discussion about the intersection of markets and morals. Sold on Reagan-era market worship and frenzied deregulation, we looked more and more to markets to solve our problems and enhance our lives. But that’s slowly starting to change. We're beginning to ask the question: When everything is for sale, how much does it really cost us?

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In today's review of "Hyde Park on Hudson," the new Franklin Roosevelt biopic starring Bill Murray and Laura Linney, film critic Manohla Dargis goes for alliteration, calling it "presidential pleasuring."

And then it gets awkward.

Dargis notes that FDR has taken to driving his cousin, Daisy Suckley, in a car designed for him, which he "operates only manually." Before you can wonder whether you're already supposed to be snickering, Dargis bangs the point home. "Daisy," she notes, "will soon have something to occupy her hands with ..."

Want to know how that goes? "The violins surge, the flowers bob, and, alas, so does the president."

Alas! Dargis does, alas, pass on a joke about Daisy's last name. Oh, come on, you can't do that in the Times!

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New York Times statistics wizard Nate Silver became a kind of celebrity last month for calling every state correctly in the presidential election. Even so,  the public still doesn't know what to make of him. According to a new survey by liberal polling outfit Public Policy Polling, only 12 percent of responders had a favorable view of the bespectacled sage, and this in a group that went 51 percent for Barack Obama. PPP found that 10 percent had an unfavorable view of him and 77 percent weren't sure.

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Douthat calls for an end to our modern, feminist ways, which he calls "decadent." But I would like to offer a better, more humane solution to the problem of a declining future workforce: Instead of simply flooding the market with babies to buoy the economy, why not invest—with public funds, as a community—in the ones we have to get the same results?

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With that said, if the United States has a distinct advantage over its similarly–situated fellow travelers in Europe and elsewhere, it’s due to demographics. Thanks to mass immigration, our birth rate has held steady, and in a prosperous society, more people is a recipe for more growth.

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I’m a law dean, and I’m proud. And I think it’s time to stop the nonsense. After two years of almost relentless attacks on law schools, a bit of perspective would be nice.

For at least two years, the popular press, bloggers and a few sensationalist law professors have turned American law schools into the new investment banks. We entice bright young students into our academic clutches. Succubus-like, when we’ve taken what we want from them, we return them to the mean and barren streets to fend for themselves.

Taking  potshots at unnamed critics is fun.

The hysteria has masked some important realities and created an environment in which some of the brightest potential lawyers are, largely irrationally, forgoing the possibility of a rich, rewarding and, yes, profitable, career.

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The most likely explanation for that yawning disconnect is that the campaign figured it was better to appear to be entirely clueless about the race than acknowledge that it had been bullshitting its fat-cat donors about Romney's chances of winning in order to keep the cash spigot open.

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The Times claims that the issue wasn't the humor, however. It was the use of trademark Gothic style "T," which the parody account adopted and edited to include a beret. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, told Poynter, “We’re not seeking to disable the account however it is important to The Times that our copyright is protected and that it is clear to all users of Twitter that parody accounts or other unofficial Times accounts are not affiliated nor endorsed by The Times.”

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In an epic takedown on Tuesday,  the New York Times' Pete Wells peered underneath that famous, brightly colored rock called Guy Fieri and explored the wriggling mass of disgusting horror that is Guy's American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square. The result was unquestionably funny. Written exclusively in the interrogative, Wells' review was a smirking demand for accountability from its spiky-haired, human Ed Hardy tattoo host Fieri, a guy who's such a guy his name is Guy. "When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN," demanded Wells, "were you just messing with our heads?"

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Alas, it was not to be; the New York Times investigated the origin of the letter, which turned out not to be from Broadwell's husband. Though media outlets have since updated their stories to reflect the non-story status, today Chuck Klosterman shared his version of the "non-event" with Grantland:

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This insight has been confirmed numerous times in the past few weeks, as various pundits have taken innumerate pot shots at Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger and author, who as of today estimates that President Obama has a 77.4 percent chance of winning reelection next week.

The Villager gossip site Politico has featured several criticisms from its stable of contributors, who in the great tradition of political journalism have not allowed their ignorance of a subject – in this case probability theory – to keep them from opining on it.

Behold the wit and wisdom of Josh Gerstein  and Dylan Byers: Gerstein asks, “Isn’t the basic problem with the Nate Silver prediction in question, and the critique, that it puts a percentage on a one-off event?”  Meanwhile, Byers concludes that, “should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it’s difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning.”

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I have to say: Harris’ thinking seems not much better than John Sununu suggesting Colin Powell endorsed Obama because they're both black; it’s a strange notion that political support should demand so little. And it's a problematic argument, that the decisions of black intellectuals and voters about whom we support and how, are always grounded in race. This implies that we consider race before we consider anything else. This implies that we think with the color of our skin and the cultures from which we rise and above all else, so desperate must we be for scraps from the political table.

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