Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator

by josscrowcroft • 13 years ago

93 31 13 years ago

kunle• 13 years ago

The rough part about seeing this is, it really could be him! Well played sir.

sfaruque• 13 years ago

The About page, http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php, doesn't say much on how this was done. So far, I see a pattern in the writing style with a lot of:

An interesting thought occurred to me today—what if X_Profession sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our Y_Issue crisis?

But does anyone know how the rest of it was generated?

AdamTReineke• 13 years ago

From the "content from Michael Ward" link at the bottom of the article. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/create-your-own-thomas-fr...

ayushgta• 13 years ago

Nicely done!

anonfunction2• 13 years ago

Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite authors but I've never got into reading his column in The New York Times. This is a really good spoofjob though, I actually thought he wrote most of this.

dinkumthinkum2• 13 years ago

What is it about Friedman that you find ... has value? I'm genuinely curious.

scarmig5• 13 years ago

His intrepid quest to justify elite opinion by searching through every city in the world to find a cabbie willing to say it.

anonfunction2• 13 years ago

The first time I had heard of him was when I found my roommates book The World Is Flat, at the time I had just graduated high school and was considering going to college full time. However I knew I didn't want to do that and through reading Thomas's book I somehow came to the conclusion that's not needed, that I can work anywhere doing anything, while having more freedom and making more money, not the response I've gotten from most people regarding globalization mind you.

My then girlfriend got me Hot, Flat, and Crowded when it came out because she knew how much I liked that one so much. I had been working for a solar energy company in Southern California and the book gave me a lot of talking points to sell the product. Of course the timing couldn't have been better with the "Million Solar Roofs Program" our Governator enacted. I still believe that the next big revolution will be, has to be, a green revolution.

Here's a key part about the program I mentioned via Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Solar_Initiative)

The California Solar Initiative has "a total budget of $2.167 billion between 2007 and 2016 and a goal to install approximately 1,940 MW of new solar generation capacity." [2]

The CSI initially offered cash incentives on solar PV systems of up to $2.50 per AC watt. These incentives, combined with federal tax incentives, could cover up to 50% of the total cost of a solar system. The incentive program was designed so that the incentives would reduce in steps based on the amount of solar installed in each of 6 categories. There are separate steps for residential and non-residential customers in the territories of each of the State's 3 investor-owned utilities. As of July 2012, the rebates range from $0.20 to $0.35 per AC watt for residential and commercial systems and from $0.70 to $1.10 for systems for non-profits and government entities.[2]

ghshephard• 13 years ago

As a frequent reader of Friedman - I was blown away the first couple times by how clever it was...until I got to articles #3,4,5 (#6 was good) - and then #7,8,9 were basically repeats as well.

It's basically just a template engine, in which (as far as I could tell) there are only a few article written, and they just substitute appropriate Countries, Sayings, Nouns, Names, Topics in the appropriate places.

It's one of those things that looks amazing, until you realize how it's done.

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

That sounds like it nails the Friedman op-ed experience ;)

dinkumthinkum2• 13 years ago

I think there is an irony you are missing. :(

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

Drat, and I thought they'd rigged up a full-blown Markov Chain.

specialist• 13 years ago

Nicely done. Add two dashes of unrepentant war mongering and no one would know the difference.

scarmig5• 13 years ago

Suck on this, as they say.

And by they, I mean Thomas Friedman, when it comes to justifying wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

akanet• 13 years ago

In the very same vein, behold: The Krugman Times - The NY Times by its only columnist

http://krugmantimes.com/

My site takes the current view of the NYT and replaces all the material using text extraction. This op-ed generator appears to use mad-libs with defined templates.

skannamalai3• 13 years ago

This is terrific. Especially if you share Matt Taibbi's opinion that Friedman's writing is a bloviated mess of half-baked ideas and nonsensical metaphors.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/23/tom-friedman-stri...

However, I am surprised by the several posters here who feel this is a great approximation and yet also that Friedman is a great author. I am curious how a predictably impenetrable and meandering style is worth reading.

VolatileVoid• 13 years ago

Sure, except that Taibbi's writing is /also/ so predictable that he practically <expletive> <amusing metaphor> Goldman Sachs.

See what I did there? :)

skannamalai3• 13 years ago

I feel you, I don't love Taibbi at all, but at the same time, he's not on the NYT's most e-mailed articles list every week. You can escape Taibbi, whereas Friedman is like Sauron's eye, gazing into your soul no matter where you try and hide.

scarmig5• 13 years ago

Another Taibbi contra Friedman classic:

http://rolocroz.com/junk/friedman.html

Sure, it's catnip, but we all deserve catnip sometime. Living life without catnip is like a trout driving a car without a steering wheel, which leads you to a oval world pretty quickly.

mitchi• 13 years ago

contra or contre?

skannamalai3• 13 years ago

thank you, this is the one I vaguely recalled existed, vs the link the one I posted. I remember reading this with a sigh of relief with the reassurance that I wasn't, in fact, crazy.

droithomme• 13 years ago

Wow, this is super impressive. It maintains a consistent theme throughout the article.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

akanet, I think you're hellbanned. Which is a pity, because that link is hilarious.

josscrowcroft2• 13 years ago

Ditto above, I wondered why that comment was marked dead...

ksherlock• 13 years ago

Could you repost the link please?

scarmig5• 13 years ago

http://krugmantimes.com/

Can't say I love the implementation.

bmmayer12• 13 years ago

Hey all--Brian here, I built this little ditty. To answer some questions: Yes, it is a template engine, and there are only two templates. The foreign policy one was written by Michael Ward with some modifications, and the domestic policy one written by a friend of mine. Coded in PHP/MySQL. All articles have permalinks. That's basically it...probably could have done it a better way but it was literally two hours of fun work a couple months ago and until today, I had forgotten about it. Thanks for the kudos and support!

josscrowcroft2• 13 years ago

Congrats! Had my sides aching for a good long while. Wonder who else you could do?

I bet there's an opening for a Charlie Brooker Guardian column generator, and a "Danny Wallace humorous anecdotal garbage about modern man and parenting" generator

bmmayer12• 13 years ago

I'd personally like to do a Paul Krugman generator. But I don't have the CPU power to crank out that level of bullshit.

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

Excellent job and congratulations. If you can add Markov Chain text-generation I'll die a happy man knowing that we have conclusive proof Thomas Friedman can't pass a Turing Test.

Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator

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