If we leave aside bullshit wedge issues such as gay marriage, etc. it seems reasonably clear that one of if not the overarching, meta-debate between (loosely) “progressives” and “conservatives” really comes down to an argument for what is the best way to get the American economy growing again. And that argument is: which is more important, reducing the deficit and balancing the budget (conservatives/Chicago School Economics) or for government to open the spigots of spending to generate demand for goods and services (progressives/Keynesian Economics)?
I think popular deficit anxiety is related to a mistrust that what worked to end the Great Depression will still work today. The political will to achieve sufficient stimulus spending to kick-start the American economy out of its shortage of aggregate demand in the 1930s arrived in the form of an existential military threat: for four years, the government blew out all the stops on spending and printed money like there was no tomorrow. (Wars make it easy to get people to think that way.) At the end of the war, the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and the de-militarising economy faced a realignment that dwarfs anything today’s creative-destruction fans could imagine. But that late-1940s economy could count on two things: lots of young families who’d been starved of consumer goods for years and had built up a tremendous appetite, and a technological moment in which all sorts of fabulous new consumer goods were just being invented and advertised and pouring onto the shelves. In an industrial economy that was inventing amazing stuff people had never seen before—Whirlpools, Buicks, split-level ranch houses—demand was not hard to create. Today’s post-industrial economy is still creating a lot of amazing stuff people have never seen before, but a tremendous amount of it is downloadable and free. Much of the rest is fabulously expensive, and only useful if you have a rare genetic disease.
Early Monday morning, Israeli commandos took control of a flotilla of ships attempting to deliver aid supplies to the Gaza Strip in defiance of Israel’s blockade of Gaza ports. The boarding and subsequent violence that killed 9 people occurred in international waters.
So, this is kind of a big deal and one way or another is going to have a long-term impact on things in what used to be called, the Near East.
Video provided both by the protesters and by the Israeli Defense Forces shows that the pro-Palestinian activists on board the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, were not offering mere passive resistance to the IDF. On the other hand, they were civilians on board ships in international waters being illegally boarded by Israeli soldiers and they had a right to self-defense even if such was near-suicidal.
For everyone who does not closely follow the always-convoluted-anyway threads of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, here is why this is a big deal.
I had a loong evening a couple of weeks ago struggling to get my shiny new Motorola Droid (running Android 2.1) to synchronize Contacts, Calendar and Mail with my Microsoft Exchange 2007 server. Although I love the phone as a stand-alone phone, obviously for work purposes the ability to sync and sync properly with Exchange is a make-or-break feature.
There have been numerous reports of issues with Exchange synchronization and Droids. I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon and well into the night pouring over them. In the end my problem was simply a faulty configuration of the firewall rule that prevented the Droid from making an SSL connection to our server on port 443. Doh!
In fact, most of the issues I read about seem to involve server configuration problems, not Droid feature related. Once I got my server configuration and firewall settings sorted, everything worked a treat with no third party applications required.
If you are an end-user without control of your company’s servers, most of this will be useless to you. For Exchange admins, here is the rundown. Read the rest of this entry »
Although I now proudly call Clinton home, I lived in Chicago for almost 11 years. It was the longest time I ever spent in one town in my life. (We moved around a bit when I was a kid.) And so, when people ask me where “I’m from” I ususally say, “I grew up in Iowa but I’m from Chicago. Which is true. Strictly speaking I moved back here from Chicago in 2000.
I’m pretty bummed that some sort of server upgrade ate most of the 2005 – 2007 posts of this blog. There were a couple of nice posts about how weird I find it that although you can get from Clinton to The Loop in two and-a-half hours, most people in Clinton would never think of making the journey on their own.
Which is a pity. Because that’s an easy day trip and we’re talking one of the great cities of the planet that is closer than Cedar Falls, Ames or Des Moines.
All of this is apropos of nothing save that I love the tumblr blog, Fuck Yeah! Chicago.
There has been and will be a lot of ink spilled (literal and virtual) regarding the meaning of the Deepwater Horizon disaster; especially what it says about our dependence on oil. But if you want to really understand it — and what it means for us — you can probably do no better than the following 100 words by, Paolo Bacigalupi, who just won the Nebula award for best Science Fiction novel:
An oil company doesn’t just wake up one day and say “Gee, I think I’d like to drill for oil 5000 feet below the ocean’s surface! That sounds like fun!” They do it because they’ve run out of easy oil. They’re throwing every bit of technological know-how into projects that are just at the edge of human ingenuity and technology to get out the energy and keep the party rolling. And they don’t stop drilling at 5000 feet, that’s where they start. Sometimes, they go as deep as 35,000 feet.
That’s amazing technology. It’s also called going after the scraps.
And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell isn’t it?
This profile of his new young-adult novel, Ship Breakers also includes a nice Environment 101 analogy that also hits the nail right on the head with regards to the problem of energy consumption, carbon emission reductions and why it is so hard to get global agreement on such things.
Finally utterly disgusted with the sluggishness, low storage and poor application support for the BlackBerry, I bought a Motorola Droid today. I like having a real keyboard to type on and am revelling in the fact that apps are useful and easy to use.
Now, must get our Exchange server patched to allow for sync.
So, let’s say you run a largish corporation. You have a large workforce comprised mostly of highly-skilled people with offices all over the place. You expect to continue growing the business, but many of these people work on projects with a duration of a few months to a few years. How do you cut costs further than you already have over the previous 15 years through productivity improvements, ordinary downsizing and so on?
IT giant IBM told Personnel Today that the firm’s global workforce of 399,000 permanent employees could reduce to 100,000 by 2017, the date by which the firm is due to complete its HR transformation programme.
Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, the consultancy arm of the IT conglomerate, said the firm would re-hire the workers as contractors for specific projects as and when necessary, a concept dubbed ‘crowd sourcing’.
“There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings,” he said.
Okay, first of all “crowdsourcing” as it is normally understood is the idea that an organization’s customers, stakeholders and other interested parties can often come up with a solution to a particular problem better than insiders who are often blinded by organizational groupthink and prejudices. Thus the problem is thrown out to the public where people, usually for free or for credit only work away at all or parts of the problem.
Wikipedia is crowdsourced.
What IBM is doing is firing a two-thirds of its workforce and then hiring them back on an as-needed basis, sans benefits like retirement and HEALTH INSURANCE.
At first blush (and second) this looks like a pretty cold-blooded, typical Evil-Big-Corporation thing to do, you have to admit that for a company that is in IBM’s line of work — increasingly in the business of using smart people to solve problems on a project basis, less in the “making stuff” business — then this kind of business model makes a lot of sense. Given the increasing ubiquitousness of broadband connections and applications “in the cloud” that allow for long-distance collaboration it is probably inevitable.
Which brings into even starker contrast the need to get away from the employer-based model of health care financing and to an individual-based, portable model. All of which means we are going to have to revisit the single-payer and cost containment parts of health care again sooner rather than later.
So, can we make it official that Arizona has dethroned South Carolina as the epicenter of crazy-ass politicians in America?
Director, Robert Rodriguez, (El Mariachi, Spy Kids, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City) pulls together an all-star cast to mess with Arizona’s new immigration law.
Nichole Gelinas at The National Review makes a couple of good points about how markets can help price oil production externalities. But this is nowhere near a comprehensive solution, nor is it any argument against other policies designed to influence demand for oil.
Gelinas makes a good point. But this is hardly a comprehensive solution either to pricing externalities or to controlling oil demand. Note first this free-market pricing of risk will only work if the U.S. government holds oil companies’ (in this case BP) feet to the fire for the full cost of damage and cleanup. Which will require that a reasonable number of pro-business politicians ignore the special pleading of BP and do the right thing. Because, in the case of the Deepwater Horizon spill, those costs are likely to run well into the tens of billions of dollars; enough to wipe out the better part of a couple of years’ worth of BP profits.
But U.S.-based production accounts only for a smidgen of world oil production. Oil is a fungible asset. BP sells its oil from the wellhead to refiners who get crude from all over the world, refine it, then sell it back to BP’s chains of gas stations. The oil from a BP pump doesn’t necessarily come from a BP well somewhere. I might come from a Petrobras or a Yukos well.
Those who think that free-market approaches to pricing in externalities and risk would be well-advised to do a little research on the success of the residents of the Niger Delta region in getting adequate settlement for the environmental degradation of their region by various oil companies. Hint: not much. Or of the efforts of environmental activists in Russia. Hint: they end up dead.
