Since the news business alone doesn't seem to be making enough money to keep New York Times owner Carlos Slim satisfied, the company has been expanding into other areas, like giving advice.

Page A3 of my November 16, 2017, New York Times, under the headline, "Here to Help: Home Maintenance Tips For The Winter, includes the following on how to "make sure your home is prepared for the harsh weather": "Make sure your snow blower is in good working order before it snows. You do not want to be caught in the first major storm with only an orange shovel to dig yourself out."

The Times doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that some of its readers live in apartments, or dormitories. Or, if they own homes, they have small sidewalks or driveways and choose to use shovels because they are quieter and more environmentally friendly. A shovel, unlike a gas-powered snowblower, doesn't contribute to global climate change or fund Saudi-backed terrorism or Russian political adventurism. Or maybe some Times readers prefer not to own their own snow blowers, but to hire someone with a plow to come clear their driveway. Maybe some Times readers have their own plows on the front of their own pickup trucks, parked in their driveways that are too long for a snowblower. The whole thing is just presumptuous, and it verges on bad advice.

The same article goes on: "A portable generator can provide you with a lifeline in a blackout. Power it up every three months, and have it serviced twice a year (even if you never use it)." Again, the Times doesn't consider that some of its readers live in urban apartments where there is barely room to store a non-collapsible colander, let alone a generator that "you never use." The environmental consequences of needlessly powering up a generator every three months also go unconsidered. And what sort of lives does the Times imagine its readers to have, that they have the spare time and spare cash to spend on twice-annual service calls for a never-used portable generator? Of the thousand-plus Times newsroom employees, how many of them are skipping work twice a year to stay home and wait for the portable-generator service guy to show up and get paid to have a look at the generator they never use?

The advice runs under the headline "here to help," but it's not actually helpful advice. It's actually unhelpful advice, because it creates anxiety — "My gosh, I only had the portable generator serviced once this year, instead of twice"; "How can we save for college and retirement and also pay for organic produce and my costly New York Times subscription when all our disposable income is being consumed by the twice-annual servicing of our portable generator that we never use?"

This "here to help" feature has been running for months, maybe even years, now, but the Times still hasn't updated the "Today's Paper" page of the website to include a digital version of it. The article that ran in print seems to be a highly abbreviated version of this "annual home maintenance checklist."

For Times readers who have time left over after maintaining their portable generators and snowblowers, the newspaper's health column has another job to saddle them with:

If you buy conventional apples, wash them in a solution of baking soda and water. A recent study by Dr. He, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found baking soda solution was more effective than either plain water or a bleach solution at removing pesticide residues from the surface of the peels, but the fruit had to be immersed for up to 15 minutes before being rinsed.

Even then, washing didn't remove pesticide residues that had penetrated deep into the peel or through the peel to the flesh of the fruit.

Again, this is bad advice. How many Times newsroom employees are washing every piece of non-organic fruit they buy for 15 minutes in a baking soda and water solution? How do they have time left over to live the rest of their lives? The Times column contradicts another recent Times column, by Aaron Carroll, who concluded, "If there's one thing you should cut from your diet, it's fear."

I asked Dr. Carroll on Twitter what he made of the pesticide column and he wrote back, in part, "There's no evidence of harm." I'm pretty sure he was referring to the pesticide residues, not the 15-minute baking-soda bath for each piece of fruit. Dr. Carroll also recommended his new book, The Bad Food Bible: How And Why To Eat Sinfully. It would probably make good reading while you are waiting for the portable-generator servicing guy to show up, or for the 15 minutes to run out on the timer for the baking-soda apple bath.

Andrew Ross Sorkin's New York Times column last week ran under the headline "How Valuable Is a Unicorn? Maybe Not as Much as It Claims to Be." It reported that eye-popping valuation for venture-capital-backed companies "may be a bit of myth — or perhaps wishful thinking." Citing Stanford research, it warned that the "headline" valuations were tricking people.

On the front of today's Times business section is an article about BuzzFeed building a movie studio in Southern California. In passing, the Times reports, "BuzzFeed, which is now valued at about $1.7 billion." No caveats about dilution or special terms for some investors or how that number may be a myth, a trick, or wishful thinking. It's almost enough to make one wonder whether the reporter of the BuzzFeed story, Sydney Ember, or her editor even bothered to read Sorkin's column, or, if they did, whether they took it seriously.

Amidst a Times arts section article about a late-night talk-show host, Robin Thede, comes this passage:

Ms. Thede explained, "We're not going to spend a half-hour telling you Trump is bad, because black people didn't vote for him anyway. They know that."

No challenge or explanation from the New York Times on that, which seems off base, because some black people did vote for Trump, and also because most people aren't just "bad" or "good" but are some combination of both.

Today's New York Times devotes an entire page to not one but two separate articles marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara. It's hard to recall another historical figure whose 50th death anniversary has been marked with such extensive and mostly positive coverage by the Times.

The headline over one of the articles is "Execution Still Haunts Village, 50 Years After Che Guevara's Death." At the Forward and the New York Sun we had a rule that if the word "still" was the most appropriate word for the headline or the lead paragraph of a story, the article had to be spiked, because it was a sign that it wasn't news, it was olds.

For better, more accurate journalism than the Times has to offer on this topic, I recommend this 5 minute, 49 second John Stossel video.

Amid a Times business section article about S.I. Newhouse Jr. and the New Yorker magazine comes this paragraph:

Mr. Gottlieb took the job anyway. If he did not reinvent the magazine in his five-year tenure, neither did he turn it into a moneymaker. The median age of the magazine was rising, and Mr. Newhouse decided to make yet another change: He fired Mr. Gottlieb and replaced him with Ms. Brown, the 38-year-old British editor who had made a splash with the celebrity- and royalty-heavy Vanity Fair.

"The median age of the magazine was rising"? What does that mean? I can understand if the median age of the magazine's readers was rising, or of the median age of its editorial staff was rising, or if the median age of the pile of the magazines on my nighttable was rising. But to say that "the median age of the magazine was rising" without further explanation is an example of imprecise writing, the avoidance of which is one reason that some people, regardless of their ages, like and admire the New Yorker in the first place.

In the middle of a Times Magazine profile of the writer John McPhee comes this passage:

Almost immediately after that hiking-guide of an opening, "The Pine Barrens" unleashes all kinds of color and legend and bizarre characters, including a deep-woods cranberry farmer who invites McPhee into his shack while eating a pork chop in his underwear.

That sentence could have used some editing to make it clear that it was the farmer, rather than the pork chop, that was in the underwear. One sees these sorts of misplaced modifying phrases in the Times more and more often. You'd think maybe in a profile of a writer known for his writing craft, the newspaper would do a little better.

A Times news article reports about disappointing returns from Harvard's endowment:

The endowment has experienced turnover in recent years. After the 2005 departure of Jack Meyer, who had served as chief executive for 15 years, Jane Mendillo took over. She was succeeded by Stephen Blyth.

Actually, after the 2005 departure of Jack Meyer, Mohamed A. El-Erian took over. It's strange that the Times wouldn't mention that, since El-Erian can often be found commenting on the markets and on public policy, including from the perch of the Times' own op-ed page.

The New York Times uses, of all places, an obituary of Senator Pete Domenici as a forum to re-litigate the Reagan economic record:

Mr. Domenici supported the conservative theory that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. But he went on to grapple with the president himself, as well as with Republican colleagues in the Senate, on the long-term fiscal consequences of the White House's proposed tax cuts and increases in military spending, questioning whether they might spur inflation and defeat any chances of balancing the budget.

Congress passed steep tax cuts in 1981, and critics of the legislation said the reductions only deepened the federal deficit and fueled a subsequent recession. Reagan agreed to a huge tax increase in 1982 to reduce the deficit, and the economy began to rebound.

Got that? The 1981 tax cuts "fueled a subsequent recession," but "a huge tax increase in 1982" meant "the economy began to rebound." In this Timesian economic model, the Federal Reserve and inflation and the dollar don't exist. Tax increases are stimulative, while tax cuts trigger instant recessions. No wonder the Times loved him, writing about what it calls "Mr. Domenici's near-spotless political career":

His bipartisanship made him one of the most respected members of the Senate. "Mr. Domenici enjoys a universal reputation as one of the Senate's hardest-working, most intelligent and most intense members," The New York Times said in an editorial in May 1995...

The New York Times, whose billionaire owner Carlos Slim is unwilling fully to fund the paper's newsgathering operations, has lately resorted to turning over space on its front page and news columns to outside non-profit organizations.

The problem with this approach is that, in some cases, the non-profit news organization's standards are even worse than those of the Times itself.

Such is the case with a front-page article about a doctoral program candidate whose application was rejected by Harvard. The candidate had spent more than 20 years "in an Indiana prison for the murder of her 4-year-old-son."

The article, supplied to the Times by the Marshall Project, slowed me down to begin with by including a reference to "a prison library that hewed toward romance novels." My authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged defines "hew" as "to cut or chop with an ax or similar instrument." There doesn't appear to be any pressing reason for this unorthodox usage. It would have been better to changed "hewed" to "tended," or to rewrite it to "a prison library dominated by romance novels."

Then the article refers to "staff members of both Harvard's history and American studies departments." In fact Harvard does not have an American studies "department." It has a program, but the program draws on faculty from other departments, such as English, History, and African and African American Studies.

This subtle but substantively serious error is repeated throughout the Times/Marshall Project article. There's a reference to "John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors." Stauffer is actually "Professor of English and of African and African American Studies." He's not an "American studies professor." The Times article goes on to say, "Professor Stauffer emphasized in interviews that he and his departmental colleague, Dan Carpenter, were simply trying to ensure that Harvard did its due diligence about the candidacy." In fact Stauffer and Carpenter are not "departmental colleagues," despite the Times' inaccurate claim that they are. Stauffer is in the English and African and African American Studies departments. Carpenter is in the department of Government.

This is one of those errors that would have easily been discovered had the reporter showed the article pre-publication to the people he was writing about. Most news organizations discourage that practice.

The new Congressional editor of the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, had a recent Times article claiming that "Mr. Trump appears to have so little regard for or understanding of Congress."

That article appeared on page A2 of my edition of the Times.

The page one, lead headline in the same paper was "U.S. Ends Program Giving 'Dreamers' Legal Protection; Outcry Is Swift and Emotional, as Trump Tells Congress to Fix Immigration."

The headline across page A11 of the same paper was "Trump May Leave Final Iran Nuclear Deal Decision to Congress."

Trump may have "so little regard for" Congress, but the Times itself is reporting that he is giving it responsibility for two matters — immigration law and a treaty involving Iran — that President Obama had arrogated to the executive branch notwithstanding the Constitution.

On the basis of those two things, at least, it appears to me that Mr. Trump has a higher regard for Congress than his predecessor did. Mr. Weisman's comment is more telling about his own regard for or understanding of Mr. Trump than it is about Mr. Trump's regard for or understanding of Congress.

The reductions in the Times copydesk and the buyouts of experienced employees have been much in the news. It's hard to escape seeing evidence of it in the actual newspaper. Here are two recent examples.

A Tyler Kepner "On Baseball" column includes this sentence:

After the initial disclosure of the Boston sign stealing by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times, Commissioner Rob Manfred all but said "boys will be boys" in a meeting with reporters at Fenway Park on Tuesday afternoon.

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times was stealing signs for Boston? Boys will be boys in the commissioner's meeting with reporters? This sentence manages twice to violate the Strunk and White rule to "keep related words together." The sentence could be easily fixed in a variety of ways. One possibility:

Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times broke the news that Boston had been stealing signs. After the Times story was published, Commissioner Rob Manfred met Tuesday afternoon with reporters at Fenway Park and all but said "boys will be boys."

A Ginia Bellafante "Big City" column begins:

Disasters are meant to inform each other, the mistakes of one recovery observed and presumably avoided in the next. Those tasked with remaking Houston in the wake of the current devastation, will have a thick playbook of error on which to reflect.

Never mind the worldview implicit in the idea that disasters are "meant" to do anything. What in the world is that comma doing after the word "devastation"?

Concern for this sort of thing may seem quaint in an age when people communicate largely by text messages in which grammar is ignored, or photographs in which punctuation is absent. But if the Times, with its vast staff of highly educated employees, can't be bothered to get this stuff right, why should taxpayers or volunteer donors keep spending millions of dollars to subsidize the use of the newspaper in school classrooms? For use in English classrooms as examples of how not to write?

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator B.R. for sending the tip.

David Leonhardt has an op-ed column about income taxes that is so misleading and inaccurate that if it came from President Trump, the Times would be up in arms about it. The column is worth spending some time with as an example of just how flagrant the Times can be in trampling the truth.

The most glaring falsehood concerns the actual top federal marginal tax rate. Mr. Leonhardt writes, "Since 1987, the top rate has hovered between 30 percent and 40 percent."

Actually, in 1988, 1989, and 1990, the top rate was 28%.

Mr. Leonhardt can maybe claim he was rounding up, but when Mr. Trump rounded 37.4% up to "almost 40%," the Times jumped all over him about it.

Mr. Leonhardt writes:

I am convinced that the current top tax rate, 39.6 percent, is too low.

It has contributed to soaring inequality, with the affluent having received both the biggest pretax raises and the biggest tax cuts. Plus, there is no evidence that a modestly higher rate would hurt the economy. The recent president with the strongest economic record, Bill Clinton, increased the rate...

That is misleading on at least two counts. First, describing "the current top tax rate" as 39.6% ignores state and local personal income taxes, which, as the Times itself has acknowledged in a front-page news article, bring the top combined federal and state rate up to 51.9% for Californians and 51.7% for residents of New York City, who pay a city income tax in addition to state and federal income taxes.

Second, economic growth during the Clinton era is attributable to cuts in capital gains tax rates (driven by the Republican Congress) and cuts in tariffs (NAFTA, GATT), which Mr. Leonhardt doesn't mention at all. As I've written elsewhere:

The growth really got going after Clinton signed NAFTA and got tariff reductions though GATT/WTO that Lawrence Summers has called "the largest tax cut in the history of the world." And after 1997, when Clinton signed a bill cutting the top long-term capital gains rate to 20% from 28%.

Mr. Leonhardt's case for higher taxes is embedded in an anecdotal paean to George Romney, described by Mr. Leonhardt as "a highly successful and personally decent man who thought that making even a couple million dollars a year was unseemly."

Mr. Leonhardt writes:

A half-century ago, a top automobile executive named George Romney — yes, Mitt's father — turned down several big annual bonuses. He did so, he told his company's board, because he believed that no executive should make more than $225,000 a year (which translates into almost $2 million today).

He worried that "the temptations of success" could distract people from more important matters...This belief seems to have stemmed from both Romney's Mormon faith and a culture of financial restraint that was once commonplace in this country.

Romney didn't try to make every dollar he could, or anywhere close to it. ...

The old culture of restraint had multiple causes, but one of them was the tax code. When Romney was saying no to bonuses, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. Even if he had accepted the bonuses, he would have kept only a sliver of them.

There are at least three problems with this argument.

First, again, it ignores the effect of state and local income taxes. Back when George Romney was running American Motors, the federal top rate was 91%, but the Michigan state income tax didn't exist. It was established in 1967 and now stands at 4.25%.

Second, Mr. Leonhardt's two explanations of Romney's behavior are in tension with each other. One explanation is culture and religion — Romney thought making too much money was "unseemly." The other explanation is the tax rate — even if Romney did want to make a huge amount of money, he couldn't, because it would be taxed away. Mr. Leonhardt attempts to bridge this difference by claiming that the tax rate caused the cultural restraint, or at least was a contributing factor. That's convenient, but not satisfactory. Certainly there are other people in countries, or states, with high tax rates who do try really hard to make every dollar they can, even to the point of moving to other places with lower tax rates. That suggests that maybe tax rates are weaker contributors to culture than Mr. Leonhardt would have you believe they are. Even if confiscatory tax rates might have some salubrious effects on culture, they may also have some deleterious ones: why work hard if the government is going to take away nearly everything that you earn? If it's a culture of excess or greed that Mr. Leonhardt is really concerned about, maybe it'd be more effective to address it head on, rather than by raising the tax rate and hoping that will help.

Third, though Mr. Leonhardt portrays George Romney as a success, in business terms the story is less clear, especially long-term. American Motors no longer exists as an independent company. It became part of Chrysler, which has had to be bailed out by taxpayers twice, first in 1979 in the Lee Iacocca era, then again in the 2008-2009 George W. Bush-Barack Obama-Steve Rattner era. It's one thing for Mr. Romney or some other American Motors executive not to try to "make every dollar he could, or anywhere close to it." It's another thing to fail in the competition with Japanese automakers who made better cars, so that American Motors shareholders fail to get a decent return on their investment.

This is the same David Leonhardt, by the way, who was described by Yale's president Richard Levin in a speech as a big success story of liberal arts education, and who wrote an August 4, 2011 Times item headlined "Stocks Are Still Expensive." The S&P 500 Index has roughly doubled since then.

"Surprising Briskness In Economic Growth" is the headline the Times printed over a news article reporting that the economy "is showing some unexpected vigor."

This is "surprising" and "unexpected" only to those liberal groupthinkers who thought President Trump's attempts to cut taxes and regulations wouldn't translate into improved economic growth. Investors certainly expected growth, which is part of why they've bid up the prices of stocks since the election. Certainly a lot of the Americans who voted for Trump expected that he would boost the economy, and aren't particularly surprised that he's starting to come through on it.

One of the most egregious ways that the New York Times demonstrates its liberal bias is by slapping the label "conservative" on conservative news outlets and think tanks, while omitting the "liberal" label when describing liberal news outlets and think tanks.

One recent example comes in a James Stewart column about tax reform in the District of Columbia. Mr. Stewart refers to "the conservative website The Daily Caller" and "conservative supply-side advocates like Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform." But "the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center" gets no ideological label from the Times. Nor does its senior fellow, Steven M. Rosenthal.

Another recent example was a Times news article that refers to "the conservative Washington Examiner" but that also mentions and quotes the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University without mentioning that institution's ideological leanings.

Does the Times really think its readers are such delicate flowers that they need to be warned in advance of the risk that they might be exposed to a conservative opinion? If the Times feels the need to apply these ideological labels, the least it can do is be even-handed about it. Otherwise people might want to start referring to the paper as "the liberal New York Times."

Times coverage of the Whole Foods "price cuts" associated with Amazon's purchase of the grocer has been astonishingly gullible and lame.

A page one news article by Nick Wingfield and David Gelles appeared under the print headline "Amazon's First Act at Whole Foods: Slash Prices." That article included not a single actual price. I mean, there were references to company stock prices in the article, but the only reference to food prices that included actual numbers was a quote from "Brittain Ladd, a strategy consultant who previously worked for Amazon on its grocery business." The Times quoted Ladd as saying, "I won't be surprised if some prices are lowered 15 percent to as high as 25 percent in some categories."

How many other businesses can get a front-page, totally unskeptical, New York Times article out of a vague promise to cut prices, without any specific details about how much prices will be cut?

I'm not sure why — maybe it's respect for Amazon owner Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Washington Post, or maybe it's just a lack of skeptical editing. Maybe the skeptical editors took the buyout the Times recently offered experienced employees, or maybe they are off on summer vacation.

Equally lame is what passes for a Times effort at a follow-up, which appears in today's business section under the byline of Kevin Granville and the headline, "The Amazon Effect: How Prices Dropped at Whole Foods."

The Times went shopping and "bought products that Amazon had indicated would get a lower price." One wonders why the Times bought only those products, rather than a representative basket of groceries, which might more accurately reflect the impact of the price cuts on an ordinary shopper.

Another big flaw in the Times approach is the comparison: "a basket of goods purchased at Whole Foods at Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan last Thursday with the same items purchased at the same store on Monday." That's a fine comparison, but missing is a comparison of the prices at Whole Foods — either pre- or post-Amazon price cuts — against prices at other, competing grocery stores, such as Trader Joe's or Fairway. Would the Times write about a price cut on Fidelity index funds without also checking the prices at Vanguard or Charles Schwab? If it did, readers would have a legitimate gripe, as they sure do with this coverage, which has basically been free advertising for Amazon-Whole Foods masquerading as news coverage.