Put-upon Pinch Sulzberger told Haaretz.com earlier in the week:

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

That’s fine by me, Pinch. if you stopped printing it right now, I wouldn’t miss The Times, (otherwise known as “New York City’s third newspaper”) nor would I care about others missing it.

________________________________

UPDATE: This is uproariously funny –

….. it sounds like Sulzberger is still basically a believer in the TimesSelect model, as he insisted that in the future all readers will have to pay to read the Times online. As for why readers would opt to pay to read the Times, when there are so many sources of news out there, he said the paper can be a trusted “curator” of the news.

If there is anyone more simultaneously clueless and full of himself representing an institution with the same characteristics, I don’t want to meet them.

Expressing sentiments held by BizzyBlog much more eloquently than I could, Karlgaard explains it all in the Feb. 12 issue of Forbes (requires subscription):

A writer calling himself “Adam Smith”–you’ll see the irony in a moment–nuked me recently on my Forbes.com daily blog. He wrote: “You are too much of a materialistic person to understand the purpose of life. [You big mouths at magazines] find followers who want nothing but money, which they think buys happiness. It’s not too late for you to drop your crap and look for the meaning of life–it is certainly not in making money. I wish you luck.”

Sorry, Mr. Smith. I do not consider moneygrubbing the purpose of life. Never have. The use of God’s gifts comes closer for me.

Still, moneygrubbing–a.k.a. the search for profit–has its purpose. Money (profit) is a tool. It is capital. Without capital there is no capitalism. Innovation starves. Prosperity weakens. Societies stagnate. God-given gifts wither. This is especially true for humanity’s wonderfully zany outliers: artists, inventors, entrepreneurs. They need capitalism more than anyone.

Money is good, therefore, because capitalism is good. It delivers the goods, literally, and better–broadly and individually–than does any other system. Hugo Chavez would argue that point, but he’s nuts.

Can we go even further and say that capitalism is good because it is moral? Following that logic, can we say: The purer the form of capitalism, the more moral it is? Is capitalism perfectly moral–enough to sustain itself over many generations?

Yes, say Ayn Rand’s followers. But most of us would not go that far. We think a capitalism that lacks outside moral influences and pressures, restraints and safety nets would, sooner or later, fail.

……

Conservatives and liberals agree on little these days. But most agree on this: Capitalism works, but it is insufficiently moral. Conservatives–allow me to paint them with a broad brush–believe capitalism works best when it is spun with golden moral threads, when it weaves in those old values learned in church, charities, service clubs and the like.

Liberals are more skeptical. They know capitalism will produce losers as well as winners. They feel the winners must be forced into helping the losers. Forced help hurts everyone, say conservatives. Redistribution discourages winners from producing and losers from trying. It leaves everyone bitter.

….. Generally, Democrats favor forced redistribution more than Republicans do. Republicans–again, in general–would prefer to fix capitalism’s shortcomings through good works and giving.

….. What did Adam Smith–not my blogger critic but the real one–say about capitalism and morality?

The great Scotsman seemed to say two contradictory things. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) he wrote these famous words about self-interest: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” This sounds like selfishness: Greed is good.

But Smith never believed that. In his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith defined self-interest not as selfishness or greed but as a psychological need to win favor within one’s society. Smith revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments after he wrote The Wealth of Nations. He did not change his belief that moral sentiments and self-interest are the same thing.

Let’s not forget our Adam Smith. When we do, capitalism loses its moral authority, and the redistributionists win.

The above explains why practices such as predatory lending, payday loans, deceptive credit-card tricks, and other clearly indefensible business policies are not deserving of any kind of blessing. A truly enlightened capitalism would either sharply curtail or prohibit such practices.

From Metro Houston, I’ll say it is:

Jan. 27, 2007, 7:29AM

MISSOURI CITY — Fire investigators and Quail Valley residents used the words “amazing,” “unbelievable” and “miracle” to describe the survival of a 69-year-old woman after an explosion destroyed her brick house early Thursday.

The blast, which knocked out dozens of windows of neighboring homes, had such force that debris was scattered hundreds of feet away, and trees next to Ann Patterson Smith’s home were full of shingles, insulation and two-by-fours.

The only thing left standing on the smoldering concrete foundation was the brick fireplace. A dazed Smith stood clad in her pajamas amid the debris and suffered only minor burns.

Her brother, Fort Bend County Commissioner James Patterson, visited her in the hospital shortly after she was admitted and said his sister could not remember what happened.

“Her survival is unbelievable,” Patterson said. “God must be watching over her.”

Patterson said he was encouraged by the hospital visit.

“She has a little burn on her left hand and arm and a burn on her left foot,” he said. “She has a spot on her nose and her hair is singed, but she was able to disagree with the doctor about the treatment. That’s a good sign.”

Smith, the owner of Pamela Printing in Sugar Land, was in good condition at Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital. Investigators said the cause of the blast is still being determined.

The explosion happened just after midnight at the house that sits on a cul-de-sac near the Quail Valley golf course.

“It’s a miracle that she survived and kind of a miracle that nobody else was injured,” said Jim Wyatt, who lives across the street.

Wyatt said it was about 12:15 a.m. Thursday when his house shook.

“It blew my front door in. My wife looks across the street and said, ‘Ann’s house has blown up,’ ” he said.

Wyatt quickly dressed and ran outside.

“I wasn’t expecting to find anything, you know, and as I am climbing over the rubble, I see her standing up in her pajamas barefooted,” he said.

Wyatt worked his way over the rubble and was joined by a few other neighbors who were also shaken from their beds.

“She was disoriented and confused. She had no idea what had taken place,” he said.

Police and firefighters were on the scene in minutes, and people who live in the immediate area were evacuated.

Investigators will not say whether natural gas leaked and then somehow accumulated in the home and was ignited.

“Ann made the comment to me that she had smelled something strange in her house,” Wyatt said.

Missouri City Fire Dept. Lt. Lee Atchison said officials are still trying to find out what caused the house to explode.