Trailing seven month base employment rate for Clinton County. Source: Iowa Workforce Development

That’s a pretty serious story, considering that during most of last year, the county unemployment rate as fully a percent lower. A serious attempt at journalism here would have been to connect the obvious dots to the recent announcements by ADM of layoffs and plant closings.

This perspective is not provided in the Herald’s article because, you know the Iowa Workforce development press release doesn’t single out each county for analysis. However, literally 10 minutes on the IWD workforce website pulled up the necessary information. It literally took me longer to format the chart than to actually find the information. (Click on chart for larger, more readable version.)

The correction of an injustice or an inequity is not always a response to majoritarian opinion: far from it. Indeed, the point of such measures is often precisely to protect minorities, or to ensure that they enjoy equal liberties and opportunities to the majority.

If gay marriage is a just cause, then it is just whether or not most voters think it so. True statesmanship does not wait upon referendal permission. A government enacts civilising measures because they are the right thing to do, not because they are mentioned frequently in focus groups.

More to the point, the case for gay marriage is essentially conservative. I am grateful to Ian Ker’s magisterial new biography of G K Chesterton for the following observation by its subject: “All conservatism goes upon the assumption that if you leave a thing alone, you’ll leave a thing as it is. But you do not. If you leave a thing to itself, you are leaving it to wild and violent changes.” The example cited by GKC was the Vale of the White Horse in Berkshire, symbol of ancient England, and constantly in need of repainting.

Satellite View of the Uffington White Horse, UK (Source: Wikimedia)

Chesterton was scarcely a moderniser. But his point applies well to the institution of marriage. In an age of impatience, lives based on tactics not strategy, and instant gratification, matrimony is in dire need of renewal and restoration. Last week, Cardinal O’Brien argued that procreation was the essence of marriage. I beg to differ, and to suggest that the ideal at the core of this dilapidated institution is lifelong commitment and, crucially, a public vow by two people to forge such a shared life.

The entire idea of conservatism is not to prevent change. That is stupid and impossible (see King Canute). Conservatism seeks to preserve the best in culture, society and nature from chaotic change. That brand of conservatism that sees broad social threats from the breakdown of marriage and families in general as well as the threat of social and economic disaster from global warming is what is leading the leaders of the right all over the world to embrace not just gay marriage but also environmental preservation and alternative energy and greenhouse emissions control.

Note that these are all things that the American right doesn’t even believe are problems. Even where they grudgingly acknowledge them they conflate rational solutions (e.g. embracing all forms of family bonding as legitimate as a way of encouraging strong families in general) as either part of the problem or as socialist statist evils that are worse than the underlying problem.

There is almost nothing conservative about American “conservatism.”

The one passage that really stuck out for me:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Let us break this anecdote down a bit. Apple, like many companies, will “announce” a product weeks or months before it is actually available for sale. This is done to allow marketing departments to whip up customer anticipation for the product, allow reviewers to get their hands on the product prior to sale and so forth. The product announcement is made once final test-production prototypes are completed and internal testing makes sure the product is ready for full-scale mass production. All that is left to do is let the factory ramp up production so that inventories are prepared for the demand once the product actually hits store shelves.

But something happened in this case. Either through a mistake or via a last-minute product engineering “ah-ha moment” the screen specifications were changed on the cusp of the beginning of production — or even after production had started — necessitating the need for the above mentioned crash rejiggering of the the production line.

Therefore, according to Apple, production in China allows for the kind of flexibility (which can also be read as “ass covering” in some cases) and speed that is simply impossible in the United States. And that’s before we even start to consider the actual cost of making the things here due to the ridiculous labor cost differences between the U.S. and China. End of story, right?

Workers at the Foxlink factory in China catch a nap during lunch. Photo: Flickr user, dcmaster. Creative-Commons, non-commercial, attribution.

According to UK-based technology magazine, The Inquirer, the parts cost of an iPhone 4 (last year’s model), which costs approxmately $499 at full retail price, was about $187. Other anecdotal reports put the per-unit labor cost of an iPHone at between $7 and $20. The Inquirer article ignores the fact that all of the sub-components are manufactured in East Asia as well. Producing all of the components and the final product in a complete U.S. manufacturing ecosystem would, indeed probably result in a $1000 iPhone.

Instead, let’s imagine a world where Apple has decided to build a final iPhone assembly plant in the U.S. All the parts are still produced in East Asia, but Apple has decided to actually assemble the iPhone in a U.S. plant where the production can be closely monitored. And hey, it’s a P.R. win. The plant is located in a right-to-work state, let’s say, Tennessee. We’ll estimate that the increased transportation costs of the parts and labor costs amount to an cost increase of $65 per unit, between 3 and 9 times the cost in China.

The iPhone would either be that much more expensive or Apple could eat some or all of the difference and take a smaller net profit per phone. Apple is estimated to net between $180 and $220 per phone. In other words, it is certainly possible for Apple to produce the iPhone in the United States and still make a (albeit smaller) profit.

But, could Apple have pulled off its last-minute modification of the iPhone in an American factory?

In Tennessee, the word comes down from Cupertino. Engineers are flown in by corporate jet, managers wake up supervisors who roust employees. Employees would be then be paid LOTS of overtime to come in late, weekends, work double shifts, et cetera to pull it off. Sure, it would cost a small fortune in overtime and shipping and all the rest. Some employees would not be available or would refuse to work the crazy hours. It would be a logistical nightmare, but it could be done.

Or maybe not. Perhaps employee intransigence at the factory would make it impossible to summon the required manpower at the last minute. Perhaps a key shipper… Perhaps a Union shipper would not or could not get the new parts moved on the ridiculous timeline. In that case, marketing disaster. The on-sale date slips by days or weeks. The trade press is full of stories about “production problems,” and Apple’s glittering public perception gets a black eye. Some mid-level managers at Apple loose their jobs. There are hard questions from the Board of Directors and shareholders.

Or not. The marketing team could (also) be woken in the middle of the night and told to produce a new ad campaign: “Dear Apple Fans,

Love, Apple.”

But they don’t. Why? Because they don’t have to. The downside risk isn’t worth the effort. The “breathtaking speed and flexibility” that the anonymous source at Apple mentioned makes sure they don’t have to bother with that. Because the circumstances of workers in China are just a couple of notches above indentured servitude, there is a negligible cost for either planning mistakes or last-minute design changes. In any traditional, Western economy such things have the potential to cost a fortune and ruin companies and careers.

Because in China (and India, and all over the developing world) there are hundreds of millions of people who are so desperate to escape from the poverty that they will of their own accord subject themselves to utterly inhumane conditions with little or no ability to organize to better those conditions. It means that a nearly endless source of cheap, expendable human beings enables companies like Apple to make what we would consider a ridiculous expectation seem ordinary.

How ironic then that all of the high-technology products that are used to make what is left of industry and work in the West so much more efficient that fewer and fewer people can actually find work. How ironic that this high-tech system is totally reliant on the deployment of anonymous and utterly replaceable human beings on a scale that would make a Egyptian Pharaoh blush.

The speed of China’s development both economically and in its social sphere means that this situation is not really sustainable. Already, big Chinese companies are under pressure to pay higher wages and take more extreme measures to maintain their ridiculous labor cost advantages. Chinese workers are getting uppity and starting to demand some tangible benefits in exchange for all their sacrifices. Within this coming decade, China’s labor-cost advantages in manufacturing will start to erode significantly as China’s leaders trade off workforce costs in exchange for social stability.

But not to worry. Although there is only one China, there is still all of Africa.

The speech itself [Transcript here. ] is about 30 minutes with about 20 minutes of Q&A. And if you can’t bring yourself to watch the entirety, I’ll recap it here.

I want to be clear here. Neither I, nor Cory Doctorow or any other responsible person advocating for sensible copyright and electronic liberty is condoning theft. What we are against are two things really. One, the idea that just because a corporation has made a profit in a certain way, with a certain business model for a number of years, the legislature or the courts are responsible for guaranteeing those profits in the future regardless of changes in the underlying economy or technologies. Two, is the making of outright stupid laws that would break the Internet.

Now, while there is certainly some amount of outright theft of intellectual property on the Internet it has been shown again and again that Big Content regularly inflates its “estimates” for losses due to piracy. More and more what we are seeing is a desperate rear-guard action by the entertainment industries to hold back the tide of change. A really good overview of how all this affects culture (and how this is just the same old story) is this TED Talk by Lawrence Lessig.

Cory Doctorow Photo: Jonathan Worth

And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

He makes an excellent analogy for why this is just stupid. Wheels and bank robbers.

If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

So, that’s what’s wrong with things like SOPA, the crazy legislation currently making its way through Congress despite the fact that practically every business (except the content producers) involved in the Internet (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, Google…) and everyone who ever had a hand in designing the Internet is basically yelling, “Are you nuts?!”

But even if we dodge the SOPA bullet and whatever else comes down the pike from Corporate Content, we still have the problem of the fact that all of these content producers are more and more joined at the hip to the hardware and software industries. Think of the relationship between Sony (Entertainment conglomerate) and well… Sony (hardware manufacturer, producer of game systems, TV’s and PC’s).

So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app; we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

And finally, this entire shitstorm about copying games, movies and music? Hacking your car’s computer? Totally penny-ante stuff. Because looming on the horizon are technologies like 3D manufacturing and genome manipulation on the desktop.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

During the past decade, MSFT returned exactly zero to investors, including dividends. They are a bloated, bureaucracy run by bloated, bureaucratic CEO. The paradigm has shifted, and they have failed to make the turn. They missed literally every major new technology, every innovation, every great idea from search to social to handhelds to tablets over that period.

The Kinnect is certainly a hit, but its not the sort of product that moves the needle for a $234 billion company. X Box is also a consumer winner, but the firm spent billions to grab the franchise from Sony — with far less ROI than such a massive investment would should ever warrant. Everything else from Online to Search to Social to portable music to even their well reviewed but 5 years too late cell phone — has been a bust. Their bread and butter franchises — Office, Windows and even SQL — are under assault from completely new product categories to which they have no response.

If you want to trade Mister Softee, go right ahead. But this is no widows & orphans stock, no buy & hold investment. They are in the process of turning into Maytag, a boring producer of appliances, with a modest dividend and not a whole lot of growth ahead of them.

(Emphasis is the original author’s.)

Microsoft 10 year stock chart. (Source: Google Finance, 2012/1/11)

Here is a link to a document that I’m going to bring. (PDF file).

The document has a bunch of good links to studies and strategies for shrinking cities. This is a known thing and there is a lot on it. The scope of the problem can be seen quite clearly n a few images. Here is a graph of Clinton’s population at each decennial census.

Below are two images. (Click on them for larger versions.) These two photos are taken at the same scale from Google Earth. The top is Clinton. The shaded area is a rough outline of the core of the city from Camanche Avenue in the south, Mill Creek Parkway on the west, up to Cragmore Dr. at the north and the river on the east.

The bottom picture is this area (rotated 180° to fit better) projected onto a same scale map of Chicago. Clinton’s core area covers Chicago from the Congres Expressway (I-290) along and west of the Kennedy Expressway, all the way up to Irving Park Road. Clinton, with a population of 26,700 has an infrastructure footprint nearly as big as the entire North Side of Chicago which has the advantage of having twenty times the population.

He does a great job of explaining for security professionals some of the “core truths” about the Internet and society. The speech in full is on his website. A couple of highlights:

Ten years ago, your verdict about the meal in front of us could only have been shared with a few – your neighbours, your friends, your partner. The only opinion that mattered, that would have travelled, would be the professional critic’s, distributed in print.

The same goes for theatre, or television, music, or our views on the Prime Minister. Now, of course, there is a place to review everything.

We assume that every meal we eat, every hotel bed we sleep in, every piece of culture we consume, is something we can have an opinion on, and have it be given the same importance as an opinion from anyone else. There are rating sites online for you to rate just about anything, legal or not, and the sheer weight of amateur reviews outdoes the professionals for authority most of the time.

It’s another example of a network beating a hierachy, and it’s all pervasive in the national discourse. We are used to having our opinions matter, and so now, at the one end, politics is more shrill – more rabble-like – and at the other end, we have rioting.

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.

He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to “security warnings.” There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about the wrong things, we become less able to decide which security warnings are actually important.

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.

A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.

Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.

What’s worse, is that the phrase “security precautions” has become a synonym for “pointless annoying thing to do because politicians are either stupid or oppresive”.

This is bad. But it’s a very common belief. The speeches given after the London riots, about closing social networks down in times of national emergency were triply stupid in this respect.

1. They disregarded the centrality of those services in people’s lives, which made people look out of touch with modernity.
2. They were technically dubious (which pretty much everyone who would have been affected well knew),
3. They reinforced the impression you get when you go through an airport, that this is all self-justification.

In total it both makes one both feel less secure, and be less secure.

Taking the pulse of the GOP race this morning we find: Michelle Bachmann is now her party’s frontrunner in the race to be the next President of the United States. And while you let that thought marinade in your brain juices for a moment, consider that barring her total implosion, she will remain the leader probably until the New Hampshire primary in February next year and possibly until Super Tuesday in mid-March. It will be until then that the party’s base of zealots, cooks and cranks will control the direction of the small-state caucuses and primaries.

Tim Pawlenty is out. But then, no one really expected Mr. Excitement to go very far did they?

Mitt Romney will spend the next five and-a-half months treading water until the primary calendar starts taking into account the opinions of voters who matter: independents and non-activist Republicans. During this time he will try ever harder to somehow seem relevant to the crazy base; saying things that neither he nor anyone else will believe that he means. Which is too bad. Because whatever his manifest other faults, Mitt Romney is a smart, practical, pragmatic politician. It is his unlucky lot to be running for office in a party that values none of these things.

Knowing all of this perfectly well, riding in to save the day is Texas Governor, Rick Perry. Perry will instantly become a candidate to be reckoned with. He combines the credibility of a three-term, sitting governor with the fundraising prowess of a Texan. And the cherry on top: he is as serious about his Christianist beliefs as it is possible to get. For all that Michelle Bachmann’s religious zealotry is manifestly, creepily visible in her eyes, there is something of an aura surrounding Governor Perry. In his good looks and smooth demeanor, he is the very model of a modern televangelist-cum-politician. The man veritably oozes righteousness and charm.

But for all this will appeal to the weak-minded and religious base of the Republican party, Rick Perry has an actual track record that will send chills through the great middle of the American electorate. It takes nothing but the most cursory review of Governor Perry’s record of governor to find a litany of lunacy, hypocrisy and outright evil.

My personal favorite is his supervision and approval of the execution of at least one innocent man. Perry pushed forward the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham who was initially convicted of arson in the murder of his three children. Willingham steadfastly proclaimed his innocence and refused a plea deal that would have given him life in exchange for a guilty plea. Although new evidence was brought forward that gave strong indication that the fire was not caused by arson and several witnesses in the case proved unreliable, a new trial was never granted and he was executed in 2004. In 2oo8 the Texas Forensic Science Commission concluded that arson did not cause the fire. When the commission convened to hear more evidence in the matter, Perry quickly fired and replaced three of its members, scuppering the investigation.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Texas governor’s contempt for justice and the institutions of the United States. He has most notably been quoted multiple times calling for the secession of Texas from the United States. All this time, while decrying the tyranny of the Union, and railing against the first stimulus package, Perry has continued to rake in stimulus money and used it to top off the state’s budget. As he continued to blather meaningless rhetoric about is fiscal conservatism, as he cutt health care and child health programs in a state with both the hghest percentage of citizens without health insurance and with childhood poverty rates reaching third world levels of 27 percent, the state faces a $27 billion deficit.

None of these things as well as the very long list of other fringe behaviors are going to make Rick Perry an attractive candidate to the large and growing independent wing of the U.S. electorate who, more than anything else want an end to absolutist posturing and gridlock and a return to normality. Instead, they will be treated to many more months of the Parade of Freaks that is the GOP presidential pool as they vie with each other to establish which is the true standard bearer of the party’s new theme, the Audacity of Crazy.

And in the White House, I imagine President Obama sneaking a smoke on the portico and smiling wryly as he contemplates the pundit hand-wringing over his vulnerability in 2012.

Carthago Delenda Est

Andy Kaufman, "Mighty Mouse"

However, when the Financial Times, writes the following, it is time to sit up and take notice.

We now also understand that the US is not going to make meaningful investments in its economic future. The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long term and the short term. The US suffers with an increasingly third-world level of infrastructure, third-tier education system and enormous gaps in the preparedness of its workforce. The debate has now ended; money to upgrade those faltering systems will not be forthcoming. And by the way, the US is not going to take on any other major problems either – immigration, tax reform or climate change, for example. It is not going to do so for the same reason it has failed at sensible economic management: because the Tea Party has a veto.

For those of you not in the know, the Financial Times is the 120+ year-old, London-based newspaper of the banking world. It is to banking journalism what the bowler hat and umbrella are to the banking dress code; eternally small-c conservative. So, when the FT starts calling bullshit on the insanity of the Tea Party and the Republican Right in general, you know that we’ve gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, Alice.

Carthago Delenda Est

Yeah, so three months and no posts. I don’t have much to offer in the way of an excuse really. Work has certainly been a factor. But more than anything it has been a combination of a numb depression at the direction of things in both DC and in Des Moines. It really does seem more and more like our political system and its denizens are simply incapable of rising to the occasion of the very serious challenges our society faces.

Take the debt ceiling battle in Washington. For a month now, I’ve wanted to produce some sort of analysis and prediction for where this was going. But every time I thought I had a handle on the situation; every time it looked like cooler heads would prevail and the right thing, or even half-right thing would be done, the forces of dumbassery raised their heads and smacked reason to the floor. And now look where we are: less than 72 hours from the United States of America defaulting on its sovereign debt. Staggeringly foolish. Unthinkable even two or three years ago. And yet, there appear to be quite a large number of people in Congress who seem quite content to go down that road in pursuit of the purity of their political dogma.

There will only ever be one first time or even the only time for the US to break the trust the world puts in its economy and currency. Once that trust is gone it will be a long time, if it ever comes back.

It’s a perfect storm of both circumstance and social dysfunction really. A combination of extraordinary circumstances that have created a number very complex and threatening situation for the state, the nation and the world. I’m not just talking about the global debt crisis either, though that is the Sword of Damocles du jour. It’s everything; the crazy historical revolutions in the Middle East, our involvement in the basket case that is Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, the two-headed snake of peak oil and global climate change, the whole ball of wax.

And what have we got to deal with it? An equally perfect storm of political dysfunction. Our population is ever more ignorant of the issues related to and the workings of their own government. And ignorant people are easily persuaded by simple-sounding black-and-white political nonsense. We have a mass media and journalism sector that had been shattered by technology and unable to do its job of telling truth to power in an effective way and cannot counterbalance that ignorance or attempts to capitalize on it. We have an electoral system that is ever more influenced by anonymous bags of money. And finally, several decades of redistricting have produced a House of Representatives where only a small fraction of seats are actually in competitive, equally partisan districts. Most House seats are “safe” Democrat or Republican, leading to the worst tendencies of both parties to be over-represented in the People’s House.

So, what happens next? Nobody knows. And that’s the problem. At this point it looks like a 50-50 shot that Congress will be unable to come up with even a half-assed measure to assure the markets. Further, it looks like President Obama will not — rightly or wrongly, and I can go either way on this as well — take the responsibility on his own shoulders by invoking the 14th Amendment to order the Fed to pay the bills and issue more bonds. If that happens we really are in Terra Incognita, and hard country it will be too.

And what are we, as a people to do when our political leadership screws up on such a monumental scale? Even if Washington pulls the fat from the fire at the last minute with a semi-useful, short-term plan, it would still amount to an epic fail. Are we to continue on the same course, setting the stage for one dysfunctional, manufactured crisis after another up to and beyond 2012? Does anyone really think that in this divided nation the next election will change anything?

What’s the alternative? I find that I am more and more entertaining as a reasonable plan the “Cairo Option.” Take to the streets, shut everything down, demand change and responsibility. In our divided nation, there would be little in the way of consensus of what, specifically that change should look like. But I’m pretty sure that a baseline demand that our politicians start acting like responsible adults would get a working majority. Yeah, this would probably turn into social unrest the likes of which have not been seen in fifty years and more. But really, what other options do we have? It sounds insane, until you realize that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. An the status quo really is insane.

Carthago Delenda Est