According to the WSJ tonight -- and I can almost not bear to type these irritating words -- Microsoft is messing with Yahoo again. The story says that Microsoft is working at pulling together a consortium of folks who might buy the pieces of a broken-up Yahoo, the search part of which would go to Microsoft.

Showing how boring this story has become even to professional journalists, that news plays second fiddle, at least in terms of word count, to a tick-tock about how the Microsoft/Yahoo deal fell apart last time around. It is replete with golf games, giggles, and a woman with a red umbrella. Nuttiness.

[via WSJ]

On a plane yesterday I read Dan Ariely's bestselling behavioral economics book Predictably Irrational. It is Yet Another Humans Don't Act Like Economists Think They Should (YAHDALETTS)book, up there with Freakonomics, Undercover Economist, and the rest of that sort of thing.

Was Ariely's book any good? It was fine. There were a few decent examples, and one or two things that got me going "huh" for a minute or so, but I found it more irritating than anything else. For starters, it was poorly written, like an editor had told Ariely to write informally, and the tenured MIT prof couldn't figure out what that meant, so he just tossed off mixed metaphors and dated colloquialisms as if that would get him street cred.

More broadly, however, I had a deeper problem, and it has to do with the whole subject. Because I just don't care anymore. I'm not interested in more freakonomo-clones about those nutty human satisficers. I've heard the stories. Over and over. And I've heard enough to make me wonder how all we supposedly idiotic humans manage to step off sidewalks without being killed if we're so dumb.

I'm really, really tired of carnie cognitive sideshows about stupid mind tricks. I get it. We're dumb. We're flawed. We take mental shortcuts. I get it. Really. Now stop telling me that, and tell me something how we idiots survive in our chaotic world.

What price will cause global oil demand to finally fall? While OECD demand looks set to drop, according to the latest IEA report, demand elsewhere is another story.

Because in a sense, oil markets can be thought of as trying to break the back/bank of countries with subsidy-driven demand growth for transportation. And, as the following IEA slideshow shows, that may happen sooner rather than later.

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Some new data out from Hitwise showing the traffic patterns that Google/Yahoo are having during the current market misadventures. Turns out that panicky investors are compulsively checking out what's up in markets via their favorite money & finance sites, like Google and Yahoo Finance.

As a related aside, searches for "recession" are on the rise, as we have talked about here. But what's particularly interesting is that most searches for "recession" end up at the Wikipedia definition thereof. It strikes me that people in the U.S. uncertain about the subject will soon be able to draw on personal experience for an answer.

In 1971 the city of Bolinas, California, stopped growing. Why? Because that was the year the city decided to stop allowing new water meters to connect to the city supply. And no new water meters means, for practical purposes, no new houses -- ergo, no more growth. You can see that in graphical terms via Trulia, with the city's growth essentially hitting a wall in 1971.

For practical purposes, the city hit a resource wall. No more water. Granted, that wall was externally created -- via legislation -- but the effect was the same: a resource constraint changed the evolving nature of a city.

Something similar has to happen with $5/gallon oil across the U.S., and it has to become even more pronounced at $7 oil, etc. Cities' structures will change, with most hitting an "exurbification" wall in 2008. Just look graphically at the evolution of cities like San Diego or Atlanta to see a pattern that will not be repeated in future.

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More here on Bolinas and its "no mo' meters" decision from a 2005 piece in the NYT.

A laugh is good on a day like today, so here is writer Michael Lewis on how Wall Street-ers can survive the current market mess:

Rule No. 3: Hide your motives. Or, specifically, minimize the appearance of financial interest.

Don't tell anyone how well you're doing for yourself, for example, not even women you have just met. Recessions blow in with them a general backlash against worldly pleasures and material obsessions.

You must reckon with this shift in public values, for it will occur even on Wall Street, and threaten to expose your ambition as freakish. A lot of people you thought you knew are about to rediscover what's important in life: wife, kids, the love of one's fellow man. But you are not.

Don't worry: it's temporary. This is still America.

But people are going to be watching you closely for any sign that you fail to grasp the relative unimportance of money. Mollify them. Acquire some painless habits, for instance, to suggest that you, too, have found meaning in something other than your success.

Sell the Mayback and buy a Prius. Have the gardener plant tomatoes in your yard -- but make sure he knows to put them in the front yard, where they can be seen.

More here.