Dude, you cannot ignore this anymore.* We are screwed. Oh my god, really really screwed. China is screwed. For Chrissakes, Russia is screwed. Investors are so panicked they are paying the government interest for the privilege of buying their T-bills just to get the hell out of the market. Wait, really? Yeah really. Says Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke "We have lost control." Unemployment claims have already started flooding in. What's next? What's a "naked short"? Is it still cool to detest investment bankers? We scoured the internet for a preliminary syllabus.Can I really figure out the crisis on the internet? Okay, so not really. On Tuesday Slate's new business site The Big Money posted a story on the next dominoes. Morgan Stanley was not even listed. Morgan Stanley was not listed because no one was talking about Morgan Stanley failing on Monday. Well that was all the way back then, and this is now. So yeah, no one writing on the internet really has a handle on what's happening, but that is why it is so important to figure out who can at least tell you what just happened. In that vein, do you mean to tell me the systems of the financial capital of the universe made it possible for these guys to not only put up a hundred bucks to borrow five thousand bucks worth of a company's stock in hopes that the company's stock would plunge on account of all the guys borrowing shares with the intention of having it plunge, but to do all of this without even actually borrowing the stock to begin with? Uh yes? But not anymore because so-called "naked" shorting is being outlawed? Here is how Dealbreaker explained it last month:

Did the internet just cause Sarah Palin to destroy evidence? The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation. Now comes word that Anonymous, the fun-loving Internet trouble-makers based loosely around the message board 4Chan, gained access to another Palin email account: gov.palin@yahoo.com. It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin's email? Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.) The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing:

In December, Fortune magazine admitted it had been remiss naming insurance giant AIG one of its "10 Stocks To Buy Now" before a yearlong 18 percent decline. "We... didn't expect [the] mortgage unit to be such an albatross," editors wrote. To correct the error, the magazine had a fresh list of "The Best Stocks For 2008" — including Merrill Lynch. "Smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses," Fortune wrote, calling a recent correction in Merrill stock "an overreaction." Investors who followed this advice are now down 93 61 percent. All the big financial magazines butter their bread with dubious prescriptions for how hobbyist investors can beat market professionals, so Fortune is hardly alone in being humiliated by the ongoing market meltdown. We'll spread the embarrassment around after the jump.

It's about time the magazine world jacked Netflix's business plan. Maghound is Time Inc's new service that lets you, the consumer, choose which magazines you want to receive every month—with no hassles, and one low price! (Runs hand, model-like, over selection of 240 glossy magazines). Seriously, this may not save the magazine industry, but it's a good product for anyone who likes magazines. For these three reasons! 1. Gladiator Wars: Assuming Maghound takes off, it will offer a pure look at what consumers want to read (at least within the limited, non-Hearst pool of 240 magazines) when offered a broad array of choices. It could become the Billboard charts of magazine popularity. Plus you can watch magazines get dropped from subscriber lists immediately when people find out their content sucks! Now we just have to ask Time Inc. to make all this data public. 2. Price: Three titles for five bucks a month, five for eight bucks, seven for ten bucks. It's a deal and a half. If Maghound takes off it should cut into news stand sales, because it allows you to sample issues without paying the price of a subscription or the higher price of a news stand copy. 3. Expansion: The roster of magazines available now lacks big names like The Atlantic, The Economist, Esquire, and a bunch of others. But if Maghound proves to be a successful business, that list is bound to expand, because magazines—except very high-end titles—will see that it's in their economic interest to be included. So it's fair to expect more choice in the future. Or the thing will fold, but you only lost five bucks a month. So who cares? [Folio, Paid Content]

Money is burning in New York! The economy is crumbling in the heartland! It's not just the poor bankers who are going broke now; it's the cities where they live. And the cities where they don't live, which were broke to begin with. Michigan towns are already reduced to selling ads on their school buses. Could any municipality possibly be more desperate than that? Yes, New York City could:

A tipster writes us to complain about eBay subsidiaries Skype and PayPal's response to identity theft. Reading his letter, which we've copied below, you'll see the problem is not so much that Skype and PayPal wouldn't refund the money the thief spent using our tipster's account. Rather, it's how inefficiently the companies responded to the problem. They required our tipster send three fraud reports and a letter over several weeks before finally explaining that no, they wouldn't give him his money back. Another customer with the same problem writes on the Skype forum: " Is there no support here? Is Skype asleep?"

A select group of New York's "most discerning readers" have been invited to receive a free, one-year, no strings attached subscription to the failing, soon-to-be-nonexistent New York Sun! Their marketing department's belief that a taste of the Sun will cause you to "spread the word about our rare journalistic and literary excellence" is sort of funny but more sad. This is possibly the least valuable free offer of all time. The full exciting letter, below:

Running a free monthly magazine about outdoor sports in the New York area is probably not the most lucrative niche in the media, so it's perfectly understandable that a publisher would want to look for some creative ways to sell ad space. But selling the entire front cover for a product placement? That may be the point at which you cease to be an actual magazine. Although that didn't stop Metrosports NY from doing it:

You think you're clever with your Tivo, skipping over all the ads so you can greedily drink in the networks' hard work for free? You selfish, selfish person. Now that you freeloaders have succeeded in avoiding ads coming into your home, the marketing industry has pledged to bomb you with commercial messages every time you set foot outside your home. "We're digital, we're interactive, we're speaking the language of that 21-to-34-year-old," says one ad exec. That's why the real world at large is now just one more ad-supported medium! And, just how 21-to-34-year-olds like it, they're "right in your face." The term: "Place-based media." The meaning: Ads RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, everywhere-security kiosks, bus stops, the Duane Reade checkout line, jukeboxes in bars. Learn to love it. You gave them your permission for all this, after all:

Wacky Packages were the Consumerist.com of the 1970s (minus the journalism). They were sold in packs like baseball cards, but each card was some spoof of a consumer product, with Mad Magazine-style humor. Crest Toothpaste? Make that Creep Toothpaste, ha. They are simply mesmerizing. Every product imaginable, from deodorant to tuna fish to magazines, was subject to a vicious, wacky remixing. Now a book telling the Wacky Packages story has come out; making this an opportune time for a 20-part Wacky Packages Gallery Blowout! Click through for 20 of our favorites, which have been helpfully preserved on the internet. Ad criticism this sharp wouldn't be seen again for 30 years:

Silicon Valley's press corps is wringing its collective hands over the botched launch of Cuil, a Web search engine. Instead of complaining about Cuil's piss-poor search results, why is no one asking who paid for this debacle? The surprising answer: Wal-Mart.More precisely, Wal-Mart family money. Madrone Capital Partners, which manages venture-capital investments for the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, led Cuil's most recent $25 million financing round in April. Madrone's Greg Penner, who married Carrie Walton, Sam Walton's granddaughter, is on Cuil's board. And on Wal-Mart's. Penner, who lives in Atherton, has ensconced himself in Silicon Valley society, despite an atypical background for the liberal Bay Area: His parents are evangelical sex therapists who believe in counseling gays into heterosexuality. He is a protege of Stanford Business School's Jack McDonald, and served as an executive at Walmart.com, a short-lived dotcom spinoff of Wal-Mart backed by Accel Partners and later folded back into the retailing giant. Most significantly, he's also a board member of Baidu, a Chinese search engine which is eating Google's lunch in that country. The Waltons' investment in Cuil could be written off as simply an attempt to make money. But with Penner involved in two prominent Google's rivals, it's hard not to wonder if the Bentonville gang isn't hoping to do more than just add to its pile.

To pimp its sugary, 200-calorie iced coffees, fast food giant McDonald's offered to pay some local TV newscasts for product placement. And of course the newscasts went for it, since local TV journalism is where ethical standards go to die. Meredith Corporation is putting the drinks in front of anchors at the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas (pictured) and at two CBS affiliates elsewhere. Tribune Company has the coffee at its Fox affiliate in Seattle. Even national Fox News is playing ball, placing McDonald's product at the News Corporation-owned station in Chicago. Station operators offered the Times any number of excuses, but the best has to be from the news director at the Las Vegas affiliate: He argues the placement is ethically OK because it is restricted to the "lighter, news-and-lifestyle" portion of his morning news show. Sounds like the portion of the program that might normally be given over to, say, segments on weight loss, fitness or preventing kids from becoming obese. But these days, if the station wants to do any reports that might upset McDonald's, it is supposed to yank the lucrative cups:

In theory, Microsoft's license agreement for Vista says you can get a refund from your PC's manufacturer if you buy a model with Vista preinstalled, but replace it with Windows XP, Linux or another operating system. In practice, Equlibriate blogger Kim Kido, a k a uncle_benji, spent two months calling and emailing HP before the company finally cut her a $200 check. She's posted a detailed recap of the story, including screenshots of customer service emails and a photo of the check. I'm willing to bet Kido cost the company another $200 in customer service time. (Photo by uncle_benji)

The business of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door is surprisingly shady. It consists largely of crews of young people-some under 18-recruited by (often) criminal characters who haul them around the country in vans, releasing them only to make their way through neighborhoods, using any lies necessary to tug the heartstrings of people enough to get them to buy something. Then all the kids are rounded up again, given their meager cut of the profits, and they all go do drugs. Sometimes they rape people, or drive off cliffs. The Houston Press just put out a monster investigation of the industry, and it shows a long but clear path from the offices of Conde Nast out to the wild kids hustling in the hinterlands. And there are some true horror stories:

Remember Julie Roehm, the fabulous woman that Wal-Mart hired to be its head of marketing, then fired because she was fucking around with her married subordinate and hitting WM ad agencies up for jobs and being unwilling to become a part of the "Wal-Mart culture" by painting her office grey or whatever? Then she sued them in a huge, public, scandalous lawsuit. Emily Gould dubbed her the "Wal-Mart Ho," which I am too classy to endorse but not too classy to repeat. Anyhow, Roehm is about to become a reality show star! Is she the "next Paula Abdul"? Or just the Julia Allison of advertising?

Press releases: everybody hates them. Reporters hate them because they are trite, condescending, unreadable, superfluous, or some combination thereof. The flacks who write press releases hate them because they know that their intended recipients have nothing but scorn for their hard work. And the public hates press releases because the lazy media uses them anyways, producing tons of craptastic non-news. Flacks recommend buzzwords to get a press release picked up: "green," "environment," "foreclosure," "toxic," and, in Idaho, "polygamy." Wrong! Buzzwords are why people hate these things in the first place. After the jump, five real live ways to put together a good press release:

Activists in Philadelphia are upset about an ad campaign for Colt 45 malt liquor—specifically, its cartoonish wall murals in poor neighborhoods showing party people living it up while swilling 40s, with the slogan "Works Every Time." One woman tells the AP she wouldn't want her daughter looking at it because "She might think it's cool." Which is a reasonable response from a parent to ads for everything from malt liquor to Bratz dolls. One would think that companies in the vice industries would have learned from Joe Camel that there is nothing to gain but backlash from cartoon-style ads, but apparently not. Colt 45 has an equally objectionable website full of cartoons, which also shows a fundamental disconnect with the rotgut company's own customer base; bird watchers (educated guess, here) are not really a cost-effective target audience :

Celebrities: they're in ads! That's because celebrities tend to sell stuff to people, according to the New York Times, which broke this story wide open with an epic piece in yesterday's paper. There are three clear points that you, the educated consumer, must understand: Companies are run by starry-eyed celebrity hound white guys who will pay any price to hang out with a cool rapper or have their umbrella endorsed by Rihanna; many celebrities are themselves sheep, convinced that their endorsement deal is a meaningful attempt by a corporation to plumb the depths of their soul (it's really not! surprisingly); and finally, all of this is the fault of dirty gossip websites just like this one!

When the movie Super Size Me came out, showing the ravaging effects of a monthlong fast food diet, it was terrible PR for McDonald's. The company spent tons of money combating the perceptions from that one overwrought documentary, seriously! And now, in what can only be described as a gift from the marketing gods, some fat guy has gone an all-McDonald's diet and actually lost 86 pounds (pictured: before and after). But the company won't sign him as a spokesman. You shallow fools! You think he's too ugly, DON'T YOU?

Anti-American socialists like the watchdogs at the Anti-Advertising Agency often point out that the advertising industry is—without exaggeration—one of the biggest vandals in New York City. Illegal advertising includes everything from entire sides of buildings and scaffoldings covered in banner ads without permits, to virtually the entire "guerilla marketing" and "street team" industries. All those things are, technically speaking, vandalism. So the NYPD's vandal squad should be breaking down ad agency doors daily, right? This handy pie chart puts the law enforcement situation into perspective. Click to enlarge. [via AAA]