Senate's Sweet Sixty, as Ben Nelson Supports Health Care Reform Bill

“The new frugality,” is what the Washington Post dubs the story of a younger generation learning how to make do with less. "Many people had not been conscious of what their lifestyle cost.” A financial advisor told the paper. “Now, all of a sudden, they have become conscious of how they spend their money." Experts think it could take years for consumer spending levels to return to their previous highs—years that could alter the dynamics of a generation used to growing up in boom times. "For many people, this was a shock. People in their 20s to 40s, who grew up in this period when the stock market has been good for most of their lives, had a great belief in the stock market," a behavioral economist said. "This failure has shocked people to the ground and will stay with them."

Meanwhile, a touchstone of the older generation, the Reader’s Digest Association, is trying to reinvent itself for the modern world, reports the New York Times. Dewitt and Lila Wallace started the publishing company during World War I. The couple quickly found themselves overwhelmed when their modest growth plans were blown away by the actual demand for their popular summaries of books and periodicals. “The original content aggregator, a kind of proto-Matt Drudge, the deeply conservative Mr. Wallace culled articles from the booming world of magazine publishing, mostly for rural readers who didn’t have access to newsstands.” Today Mary Berner, a former CEO of the Fairchild magazine company, is trying to recreate that success, but also drag the company into a presenting a new face to the world. To that end, the company has moved from its historic leafy campus into real offices in White Plains, NY and Midtown Manhattan. And a group of women known as, “the blondes” have been put into senior executive positions once occupied, one gathers, by tweed jacketed quiet types. In fact the company is sitting on an impressive stable of content, not just magazines, but websites and other multimedia properties. But one of the company’s biggest missteps seems to have come not between the covers of a magazine, but on the markets, where a big IPO eventually turned into a private equity deal that has “saddled Reader’s Digest with $2.2 billion in debt.”

A more recent overnight success, Google, is perfecting smartphone technology that will let users snap a photo of nearly anything, only to have the company spit back a fact sheet on whatever the object is, whether a wine label, a mountain, or a margarita. The Times says that “Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.” Calling the product “Goggles,” a Google executive admits the product is not perfect, and not original, but the implementation and connection to a database like Google, is what makes this app, well, killer. As far as the perfect goes, the paper says, Goggles had trouble recognizing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, when the image was shot with several trees in the way of its suspension span. But it did recognize it when the picture was snapped with fewer obstacles in the way.” One thing that is already worrying privacy experts is the potential for face recognition via camera phone. Google has turned that buggy feature off for now, but admits that more computing power could soon make it a reality.

Finally, the United States senate has the sixty votes it needs to pass President Barack Obama’s health care reform, reports the Times. Though Joe Lieberman of Connecticut seemed to be the last vote earlier this week, it came down to meeting the demands of Ben Nelson of Nebraska to get to the magic number. “Mr. Nelson committed his vote after winning tighter restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions, as well as increased federal health care aid for his state,” says the paper. Nelson later said that he reserved the right to not vote for the bill after Senate-House reconciliation, should that process introduce programs he opposes. But for now, seemingly with the votes of the entire Senate Democratic caucus and no one else, health care reform, which impacts 1/6^th of the country’s entire economic output, appears to be moving forward.