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Thursday, August 12, 2004 |
Reason interviews John Perry Barlow
Reason has published the best interview with John Perry Barlow I've read. He talks about becoming a reality TV star, a Democrat, and getting busted for marijuana possession at an airport.
I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don’t have misgivings about Kerry that equal the terror I have about another four years of Bush. What he’s done to aspects of the Constitution that are there to assure individual rights is breathtakingly bad.
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I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I’m for ’em!" That’s great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What’s that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!" Link [Boing Boing]
10:39:29 PM Permalink
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Hoist by Their Own Petard
I do wish the Economist had bylines:
Economist.com | America's economy: ...for George Bush the news that only 32,000 new jobs were created in July is doubly troubling... the first president since Herbert Hoover to face the electorate with an economy that has fewer jobs than when he took office.... What makes this all the more embarrassing, however, is that the White House has lately gone out of its way to claim responsibility for the short-term performance of the jobs market.... George Bush's team was quick to claim credit earlier this year... [for] job growth. John Snow... 300,000 new jobs in March “clearly demonstrated” that Mr Bush's tax cuts were working.... “driving job creation”. The administration did not simply claim that the huge fiscal expansion... had helped cushion America's recession (which would have been correct). It went much further. Tax cuts, intoned every Bush official, were the elixir behind the jobs recovery.
Now that the payroll figures have weakened, the Bush team is squirming. White House aides offer a slew of reasons why the statistics which just a few months ago “clearly demonstrated” the wisdom of Mr Bush's economic policies should now be discounted. The president himself pretends the bad news simply does not exist. “We have a strong economy and it's getting stronger,” he claimed only hours after the jobless figures were released on August 6th....
America's economy has cooled.... It is too soon to say whether this is a temporary blip or something worse.... Either way, the current hiccup can hardly be blamed on Mr Bush. And, in any case, there is precious little he can do about it. The short-term vagaries of the business cycle are beyond the reach of any president. That is why claiming otherwise when the news was good was a foolish risk for the Bush team to have taken. They gambled on the economy, and for the moment at least they appear to have lost.
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]
10:27:16 PM Permalink
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Newt's Radical Proposal
WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2004) Praised by the members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Newt Gingrich's testimony yesterday was serious, thought-provoking, and entertaining. [AlwaysOn Network]
The major threats to the US are not terrorism. The major threats to the US are nation states using a nuclear weapon or WMD, biological weapon of mass murder, or an electromagnetic pulse weapon would be a weapon of mass disruption. You have to be more concerned with how we understand China than Al Qaeda."
"Any of these weapons could literally destroy the American way of life as we've known it, and would shatter our civil liberties. And EMP would literally return us to a pre-electric age in seconds. And all of these are undervalued."
3:25:51 PM Permalink
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Silly writing and the changing world of the pundit
Last week, John C. Dvorak published a piece in PC Mag about the 10 worst laptops of all time. It was a silly piece: basically a list of products, saying they were crappy in one way or another. Few pictures, and no lessons at all about why these things were bad, or what lessons their crappiness taught that could inform future designs.
This week he's at it again, with an article about the 10 most important software programs. It's a kind of "old veteran" piece that you usually only get from the sports pages or politics. Where the article fails is the way Dvorak doesn't use this is a starting point to say anything interesting. Is there a common thread to these programs? Is there something their success can teach us about where things are going? Are there any ironies?
It's funny, this kind of article was much more interesting 10 years ago, when the universe of readers was smaller, when there proportion of inside-baseball readers to general readers was much higher. Now the number of inside-baseball readers as a proportion of the software-using universe is very small. And the vast majority of people don't give a shit that there was something called dBase that was a "remarkable product in its day, and its influence lives on in all low-end commercial database software. It popularized the concept of a relational database manager, although it didn't quite follow all the parameters." What does that tell you? Why should I care?
These days opinions are easy to have and publish. God knows I publish enough of them. But why should anyone read them? I know I could better serve myself and my few readers by focusing on an area of technical expertise. But instead I just try to point to stuff I'm reading and thinking about, as it occurs to me. Back in the days of editors and publications, it was almost assumed that you had something to say simply because you were published! It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. A name mattered back then; Dvorak was selling to editors and not to individuals. His kind of often brainless provocation was useful because it generated a buzz, and sold magazines. Individuals are a tougher sell: there's a lot more to attract/distract their eyes than was the case for editors.
None of this is to say that the "10 Most Important Software Programs" couldn't have been interesting. Certainly it's worth looking back from time to time, and this history is very interesting. But a simple list with the kind of comments he's making is just not very useful or interesting.
10:12:39 AM Permalink
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Matutinal Steel, Redux
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the word of the day, "matutinal," and Henry James' sentence "his cheek bespoke the joys of the matutinal steel." Searching for that exact phrase on Google turned up one entry. Today, that search turns up two entries: the original, and my post! Soon this one will appear as well!
9:31:47 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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