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Friday, February 21, 2003

The Bush Diet Michel Kinsley nicely sums up the Bush budget "logic": Suppose you had a friend who was grossly overweight for years but lately had been looking very trim. Suddenly, though, he puts on 30 or 40 pounds and is waddling around like his old porcine self. He explains that he's found a marvelous new diet: "You eat like a pig and stop exercising until you get so fat that you just have to lose weight." Would you say that your friend is kidding himself? And if your friend went on to complain that he was getting fat because other people were eating too much, and this diet was the only way to stop these other people from putting those unsightly pounds on him, would you think his self-delusion was becoming clinical? Or would you start to suspect that the joke is on you?   3:05:37 PM  Permalink  comment []

Bruce Sterling Annotates Laurie Garrett's Email I hadn't yet read Laurie Garrett's leaked email about the Davos meeting. But here it is, annotated by Bruce Sterling. There's a lot of horrifying stuff in email, and Sterling's commentary is, not surprisingly, as smart as it gets, and brings a lot. Here's an example:  "Antiglobalization folks didn't stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards, etc." (((I've always figured that the summiteers and the protesting summit-hoppers would come to an understanding eventually. After all, the protesters are the only group who take Davos, WTO, etc with total seriousness. The tipping-point is gonna come when these Seattle '99 street canaille stop waving their anarchist black flags, and start waving light-blue UN flags, because they are all commercially underwritten by billionaire BINGOs (Big International Non-Governmental Organizations). And ladies and gentlemen, we have never been closer to that rapprochement. After 2/15, you can smell it in the wind. People, the war hasn't even started yet.))) ... "The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, 'Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner.' This year 'recovery' was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable – fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were 'deflation,' 'long term stagnation' and 'collapse of the dollar.' All of this is without war." (((Kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?... "Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich – whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody – are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes." (((Gee, y'know, maybe the Bush tax cut will win 'em over. Oh wait, these are EUROPEAN rich people.))) And much more.A must read. 11:11:11 AM  Permalink  comment []

Ten Things to Know about XDocs John Udell talks about XDocs & InfoPath. This is the first time I've looked at it in any detail whatsoever. It looks really great. Even if you've drunk the XSLT Kool-Aid and know how a powerful a language it is, you'll probably admit that XSLT programming is no walk in the park. The InfoPath designer can, crucially, generate the XSLT code needed to map between complex XML data and useful views of that data. Like all visual tools it has limits, which you can escape from by defining regions within the generated code for handwritten extensions. That said, the designer works very hard to make intelligent mappings between XML structures and user-interface controls. Such automation should help prevent XML transformation from becoming the IT bottleneck of the Web services era. I've been taking a big drink of that XSLT Kool-Aid lately, and agree with the above. As cool as XSLT is, and it's pretty danged cool, it does need something. A visual tool would be really nice. Via Dave Winer, this screen shot of InfoPath looks really intriguing.   10:41:31 AM  Permalink  comment []

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