Pangloss

If Al Gore or John Kerry were president right now we'd be in exactly the same boat (if not worse, assuming a Republican-controlled Congress). The problem is going to require a coordinated, long-term effort by both the executive and legislative branches to solve. This is one of the reasons we need to move PAST petty partisan politics (like "Bush sucks").

I've been thinking lately that the old axiom about casual computer buyers wanting to be compatible with their friends' computers may no longer apply anymore. Most casual users buy computers today to do web browsing and email. I've noticed amongst my friends that they don't really seem interested in swapping programs anymore. I know it's still popular in high school and college circles, but amonst working adults it doesn't seem to be a big thing anymore. They're more interested in swapping songs and (to a growing extent) copied movies (e.g. "rent-and-return"). But you can do these things in any OS, really. And I cannot remember the last time I used, or saw someone else use, a floppy disk. It's all email and memory keys today. And that's totally cross-compatible. So I think we're pretty much "Microsoft by momentum" these days. So cheap Mac hardware combined with a good add campaign could really win over a lot of converts to the Apple tent. The only problem is, Apple still makes most of its money selling hardware. So it's really pretty hard to imagine them selling OS-X on shelves. It would undermine their hardware business completely. Why buy an expensive Mac when you can run the same OS on a Dell at half the price? On the other hand, this would give them the opportunity to COMPETE with Dell, IBM, HP, etc. If they can make a Pentium machine for about the same price as Dell or IBM, and still make money, they might have something. Especially if you can buy a Mac, from Apple, that's pre-configured to dual-boot either OS-X or Windows. That would be really cool.

That's the hope, but we'll have to see what happens.

Oh I'm sure he's preparing a nice, long book on the subject, which he'll be more than happy to sell us for $13.95. And no doubt that will become his 13th number one bestseller. But this was just a fluff piece; a personal reflection. Not a news story. Yes, I thought it was interesting, and I think you're looking too hard for trouble. Back up and enjoy the moment. It's not time to call Oliver Stone just yet. And remember: Sometimes a cigar is really just a cigar. ;-)

Fascinating article in the Post today -- Bob Woodward's personal story about how he came to know Mark Felt, including his own story about how he came to work for the Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060102124.html In a sense this is the story I've been waiting all week to read, really. Mark Felt's story is interesting. Bob Woodward's story is fascinating. My two bits' worth, anyway.

One could also make a similar point about liberalism, and in particular the "classic liberalism" you often here talked about. But even more recently, with things that were started by liberalism but moved into the common set of accepted valued. Things like casual littering, for example, or racial sensitivity.

News.com is stating that Apple will announce on Monday that it's abandoning its IBM partnership and switching to Intel chips. Wow. http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html?part=rss&tag=5731398&subj=news

BTW, I was educated at the high school level in public school in suburban Atlanta, and I can second Mokele's post. We were NOT taught "southern history" -- I don't really even know what that means. I didn't learn anything about Atlanta's history and only a smidgeon about Georgia's history in school. I learned American history. We also had AP history available (I took AP english instead -- from a PhD). I will convey this amusing story, though it is a bit of a digression. When I got to college (Georgia Tech) I had a class in "US History since 1865" (note that title carefully). The class was taught by a visiting professor under a cultural diversity program who came over from Atlanta University (the famous collection of minority colleges that includes Morris Brown, Morehouse and Spellman). The entire course focused on the history of slavery in the US! We never could figure out if he just didn't read the title of the course correctly or he just didn't care. So much for liberal concepts of diversity.

Let me go ahead and toss something out on another aspect of regionalism, while it's fresh on my mind. I don't mean this to be a comprehensive answer, by any stretch. The point I want to make is that the transformation of the South from "pure Democratic block" to its current state is something that is (a) very misunderstood (especially by the far-left and the far-right), and (b) influential in a lot of different ways. It has affected the political landscape of the entire country. In some (important) ways, the that change has had an impact on the competitiveness of the political environment all over the country. It even affects your internal elections in New York, bud. Yup, you read that right -- I'm saying that the transformation of the South has had an impact on how elections go in the North. Or as Earl and Merle Black put it in "The Rise of Southern Republicans", "A newly competitive South means a newly competitive America". They spend an entire chapter making their case with some fascinating insights and statistics. Well worth a gander. But getting back to the issue of regionalism, let me include another key point from the same book: In other words, politics in the "new South" is now competitive. And adding in the point I made above, that competitiveness, born in the South, has been infused upon the rest of the nation. Not bad for a bunch of uneducated po' folks digging their way out of the rubble of the civil war, huh?

Nice job on the buttons, they look great!

Thanks. I'm not trying to dodge anything, but let me tackle this first point (about education) in as comprehensive a manner as I can, at which point I'll probably run out of steam and pause for a response, but I'll be happy to talk about the broader issue of regionalism (e.g. blue-state/red-state politics) as well. This is the main point that prompted my response. Just looking at the issue of education for a moment, I think that's a statement you've made, and therefore you need to defend, rather than vice-versa, but I'll be happy to post my thoughts. The issue of public education always seems to come down to two areas of focus: "Spending" and "quality of education" (generally based on test results). What I want to do here is just mention a few points that I believe clearly contradict your statement that the South "has yet to recover from the civil war". First, on the subject of spending, while NY does have the second-highest education spending after CA, it's worth noting that third is Texas and fourth is Florida. So a lot of this really has more to do with the population than any sort of regional dedication to education. ("School Funding, Taxes and Economic Growth", NEA, April 2004) However, there is still something to be said of the notion that more money is spent in New York. Per capital spending is generally higher in the NE versus the SE, but (and this is a key point here) the cost of living is also substantially higher in much of the NE versus the SE (see my "third" point below for sources on this). So surely "has yet to recover from the civil war" is a vastly inaccurate assessment. Second, while overall jobs in education are declining (according to the NEA), New York shows much higher job losses than Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and somewhat higher or about the same as North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia. Only Texas showed a substantially higher figure. When "amenity and competitiveness" was factored in, a lot of the southern states came out ahead of NY. (Ibid.) Third, Teacher salaries are higher in NY/NJ than, say, FL/GA, but it also costs more to live there. For example, the average teacher salary in Georgia in 1999-2000 was $41,122, versus $51,020 in NY. (EVS: http://www.asbj.com/evs/05/EVS05_northeast.pdf and http://www.asbj.com/evs/05/EVS05_southeast.pdf). But according to MSN House & Home's fun little comparitive analysis tool, if you make $50,000 in New York, you only need $29,482 to have the same SOL in Georgia. So really the teachers there are ahead of the ones in New York. (http://houseandhome.msn.com/pickaplace/comparecities.aspx) Fourth, on the subject of quality of education, while some NE areas place ahead of SE areas, it's worth noting that a lot of NE areas fall way behind a lot of SE areas. For example, go to this tool (http://houseandhome.msn.com/pickaplace/findcity.aspx) and ask it to spit out a report based on education being the ONLY criteria, set it for the US, and choose "7.0 or higher". You'll find that there are some schools in CT and NJ are near the top. But it's very revealing that the list is not at all isolated to the NE, which would support your regionalist assertion. California actually tops the list, and schools from Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Maryland are right there near the top. The list is rounded out by schools in the midwest, and in fact of that whole first page (20 entries), only 5 schools are from the NE. Yup, you got some good schools up there. But I see no sign here that the south is still recovering from the civil war! So, without ducking the rest of the discussion, I'll throw it back to you for the moment: Can you defend your assertion that the South is still recovering from the Civil War?

I will be happy to defend my assertions about cultural elitism and regionalism if you start a thread on the subject. It simply has nothing to do with Bush and the stem cell veto. Are you up to it, or are you going to continue to demonstrate your continued reluctance engage me whenever I challenge your sillier assertions around this forum?

I'm curious what some of our European friends here think of the idea, popular in some circles in the US (particularly the right side of our political spectrum) that Europe's economic woes are fundamentally based on its more socialistic economy. Or as today's editorial on the Wall Street Journal's "Opinion Journal" puts it, "a product of the welfare state". Is that a fair statement? http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006768 Some points that they make: - Much higher unemployment - Much lower growth rate - Half of Europe's new jobs '80s & '90s are in the public sector - State ownership and subsidy of key industries - Rules that make it difficult to hire and fire workers - Prohibitions against closing down plants - Heavy protections of labor unions against competitive forces - Mandatory worker benefits including health, child care, paid parental leave, & 4-6 weeks vacation - Shortened work weeks - And of course, vastly higher taxation to pay for all of this. Their point being that they suggest (or actually come right out and state) that the US's "allegedly cruel and "laissez-faire" [state] has done much better both by economic growth and worker opportunity". They go on, of course, to talk about how the US should not go in that direction. As I mentioned above, this is a common perception in the US, and I have to admit they defend their point well. But of course the US is not alien to the concept of safety nets, and there are obviously other factors at work here as well. Europe has had to incorporate a vast amount of third-world infrastructure over the last 15 years, for example, such as a highly pollutive, coal-based Eastern German power grid. Could these factors be more relevent than the taxation situation? Is it better to think of Europe as being more like America in the 1940s, using public employment to climb out of the great depression, perhaps? Are there not signs of success and achievement on the horizon, like the impressive new Airbus A380 project? So I'm curious what you all think.

Oh, no the "regional rah rah" comment was definitely aimed at him. It was not intended as a personal attack, though. I wasn't trying to put words in anyone's mouth earlier, just briefly point out why I think that kind of regionalism is part of the problem rather than part of a solution. As for Rev, he can kiss my lilly-white straw man. ;-)

I don't think I'm the one who's appearing foolish at the moment, but we can discuss the subject of regionalism if you like. I'd be interested in seeing someone try to support the position that the cultural elites of the northeastern states actually do have a point (as opposed to being the cultural fascists I believe they are). Why don't you start a new thread on it and summarize your position (like your points on education), and I will respond (and I promise not to Godwin it).

Oh, you have weather over there too? That's so cool, I had no idea we had so much in common!

Not really interested in responding to either a personal attack or a regional rah-rah. Pass and pass.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ridge/ This is, I believe, part of the stuff that Rick Santorum and the AccuWeather folks want to stop (see recent discussion on the politics board). This particular system integrates weather radar with "geospatial elements", i.e. terrain, highways, and political lines (county/state borders, etc). I'm not certain of this, and it doesn't say anything about it in the PDF that's linked on that page, but I believe the system also incorporates new passive RADAR technology that exploits the proliferation of digital television broadcast signals. Passive RADAR is nothing new, but digital signals are supposedly better at reflecting off weather (sure seems to be the case in OTA HDTV reception), and combined with modern computer power, the potential is apparently pretty good. Anyway, I just thought people might want to check it out. You can go to that page and click on the dot nearest you, and it will bring up a display of your area with weather radar overlaid on top of it. Kinda cool. Be sure and play around with the buttons on the left, that's what makes it cool. Especially the looping feature.

I'm a graduate student in computer science, and my feeling about it is that Wikipedia is an excellent tool, but it is not a primary source. It gives you a great starting point, and can really help you get up to speed quickly on an issue and its background. LexisNexis and my other school resources become my second stop instead of my first stop, which is really good because those resources are generally not organized around the concept of a general introduction, summarization, etc. They're designed to give you primary source material. The combination is inredibly powerful.

I agree with Bud that it's not about religious beliefs. It's about politics. I don't think it's an active effort to keep the US behind in the sciences, though -- I think it's a lack of understanding on the part of the far right about the important role science has played in our success, the ability of other countries to advance science without us, and an inability to look past certain ethical points to look at larger ethical considerations (i.e. they wouldn't necessarily even object on moral grounds if they looked at the whole picture objectively instead of ideologically). I disagree with Bud's point about the south still recovering from the civil war, etc. You'd be hard pressed to find a more ignorant fool than a yankee who's confident in his knowledge that liberalism equals righteousness and that the northeast is the center of the civilized world. Typical blue-state foolishness. The kind of thinking that generates more failed Democratic candidates. You need to move past that kind of nonsense. The problem we have right now in this country isn't the far right. It's the confluence of power in both extremes, to the detriment of the center. Our inability to compromise will, some day (hopefully not in my lifetime), be the death of this nation.

No, I don't buy the premise. Searching for novelty or inquisitiveness does not equate to evolution, and I know too many liberals who are far too set in their "I'm not set in my ways" ways (like free speech advocates who demonstrate the most virtriolic hatred for free speech one can imagine). Ideologies are about closing minds, not opening them. Doesn't matter what they consist of. You're welcome to back it up, though.

No, do tell.

Hehe, it would be interesting to see extremists on both sides having fits of apoplexy if someone were to seriously suggest an IQ test for the Presidency. But I'm afraid you'll never get folks to agree on the parameters. I also think it's way off to think that an intelligence requirement will help you "avoid some our current embarrassments", as Coral put it. I can understand the sentiment, but most of what happens in legislation and foreign policy has very little to do with intelligence, even when perfectly intelligent people are in charge. Politics, sad to say, is not a matter of logic. It's a matter of salesmanship and marketing. I think Bush's IQ is well over 110, by the way (not that you claimed otherwise, Coral, I'm just throwing it out there). It's not a linear progression, so that's not really saying a whole lot -- I'm not exactly mounting a major defense of Mr. Bush here in saying that. ;-)

Great article in the new issue of Time magazine about the Wikipedia. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1066904,00.html?promoid=rss_top

Thanks for the links. I've been kinda distantly following this but I hadn't seen any pictures or video on it yet. The idea of having content automatically generated and generated by other players is interesting, and seems to address the problem of originality in emergent games. Whether or not he can actually accomplish it is another question.