Not the party of Reagan

I’ve been amazed at the effect the Harriet Miers nomination has had on Republicans. It’s not that her being confirmed or rejected is that big of deal but instead it seems like the last straw for conservatives who have put up with unprecedented increases in entitlement spending and gutless leadership. While Bush has pursued the war on terror with a determination not seen since Truman virtually everything else he’s done has left conservatives wanting. Real conservatives don’t want their cake and eat it too. The Bush tax cuts made us happy but he followed them up with a god awful prescription drug benefit entitlement. The reconstruction, military response in Afghanistan, and economic stimulus after 9-11 was followed by more tax cuts and “No Child Left Behind”. After the “It’ll cost what It costs” comment from Bush after Katrina I think conservatives went into insulin shock and this horrible SCOTUS pick snapped them out of it.
I grew up being serenaded by benefactors of the Johnson welfare state blaming Reagan for consigning them to starvation and ridiculous TV movies about being homeless and getting no help from the Government. Nothing says spending cuts like a ketchup sandwich. It was glorious. When Bush was elected I dreamed of long nights watching cable news laughing at the strained arguments Democrats would make for why the cut of a certain block grant or entitlement DOOMED!! their favorite victim group. Well we’re now in the 5^th year and I haven’t once seen Bush called “heartless” 1/100^th as much as Ronnie or even Newt Gingrich. Welfare reform under Clinton was the closest thing I’ve had and that’s pathetic.
The sad thing is that we can’t even wish we voted for the other guy (or party) because they’re even more pathetic. They’re just like that cloying guy that’ll say anything to get in a girls pants (See Stiffler in American Pie/American Wedding). For as good as Andrew Sullivan feels telling conservatives “I told you so” about Bush, at some level he must be relieved that Kerry wasn’t elected. He would have been an utter disaster.

Don’t agree? Watch.

Now I’m just looking forward to 2008. Hopefully we get a do over with McCain (or Condi).


UPDATE: Ugh. This is just nausiating.

The inevitable outcome of government control?

The safety issues raised in the following articles are interesting but probably insignificant. The odds of being in a plane crash in either a Boeing or Airbus plane are probably equal to being struck by lightning and being struck by lightning while holding a 3 iron aloft, respectively; both are very unlikely. However what the decision making behind these obvious lapses in design reveal is a recognition of the unusual environment in which Airbus exists. However much corporate welfare Boeing receives it’s still a private enterprise largely subject to the same market forces and liabilities as any other company while Airbus appears to be just another corporation, it's really just an extension of the governments of Spain, Britain, Germany, Austria, Belgium and France. This allows Airbus the luxury to pursue a volume business model (more jobs) and be less concerned by profits and quality. The effects of this strategy have been 2 fold: Airbus has supplanted Boeing as the unit sales leader and troubling patterns of safety system failure are beginning to appear. Most troubling is that the Airlines least likely to afford a top notch service crew seem to have the largest Airbus fleets. USAir/AmericaWest are the recent recipients of Airbus aircraft that were practically given away. Those who support initiatives to move to a government controlled healthcare system and support continued monopoly over K-12 education should keep an eye on Airbus in the years to come. However well meaning, government rarely achieves an adequate representation of society’s interests.

Here’s an article about an Airbus whistle-blower who’s actively being persecuted by the Austrian government for revealing a flaw in the new A380 that could cause a catastrophic loss in cabin pressure:

A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built. The A380 is a double-decked engineering marvel that will carry as many as 800 passengers — double the capacity of Boeing Co.'s 747. It is expected to enter airline service next year.Mangan alleges that flaws in a microprocessor could cause the valves that maintain cabin pressure on the A380 to accidentally open during flight, allowing air to leak out so rapidly that everyone aboard could lose consciousness within seconds.

Most passenger jets have two cabin-pressure valves, with separate motors operating each. Because aircraft makers want redundancy on safety systems, the planes have three motors for each valve, with different chips controlling each motor. The Boeing 777, for example, has cabin-pressure chips made by Motorola Inc., Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Most jetliners also have a manual override so that the pilot can take control in an emergency. Airbus has acknowledged that its designers faced challenges as they attempted to reduce the A380's weight. Early on, the company elected to go with four outflow valves on the A380, with only one motor on each valve, which is slightly larger than a cabin window. Each motor uses a TTTech controller chip, and there is no manual override system."Just there, I would not be happy," said Chris Lomax, a retired engineer who helped design the cabin-pressurization systems for Boeing's 737 and 747. "If all four valves [on the A380] were driven wide open, it would be nip and tuck for the crew to get their [oxygen] mask on and begin a descent."

Here’s another article detailing 67 incidents simply involving the nose landing gear of Airbus Aircraft since 1989:

The problems with JetBlue Flight 292 marked at least the seventh time that the front landing gear of an Airbus jet has locked at a 90-degree angle, forcing pilots to land commercial airliners under emergency conditions, according to federal records.
The locking of the nose landing gear on Airbus jets is one of several recurring problems with the plane's nose landing gear.A Canadian study issued last year documented 67 incidents of nose-landing-gear failures on Airbus 319, 320 and 321 aircraft worldwide since 1989.

Another Reason Liberals Should Ditch Unions

Every time a conservative resists increasing funding on some additional social program (God help them if they’d actually cut), Democrats reliably trot out the underclass and play their ace card; “What about the children?” Whatever currency this bit of rhetorical manipulation has left will quickly disappear as stories like this percolate out of New Orleans.

Here’s an amazing article (also courtesy of Mickey Kaus) detailing how unions (and their liberal politician allies) are making the children of inner cities poor and stupid.

ROBERT THOMPSON wanted to give away $200 million to help children escape some of America's worst public schools. But for three years the successful businessman turned education philanthropist suffered the wrath of Michigan's Democratic establishment for his politically incorrect charter-school proposal. Then finally in August, Thompson found an ally willing to accept his charity. The nonprofit Skillman Foundation will join him in creating the first of 15 planned charter high schools in Detroit. The schools' goal is a "90/90 system"--that is, a graduation rate of 90 percent (up from the city's current 50 percent) and a college admission rate of 90 percent.

Officials reacted to Thompson's proffered $200 million not with gratitude but with rage. The Michigan Federation of Teachers urged a walkout, declaring a school holiday so that union members could march on the state capitol in protest of charter schools. State Democrats cowered before the union, while Detroit's politicians bristled at a white suburbanite's "meddling" in the city's affairs. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick--whose own children attended a charter school--responded to Thompson's offer by saying, with a dismissive wave of the hand, "Let us make the rules, and if he can't abide by the rules . . "
Says Thompson, "We thought if we tried to do good things, people would appreciate it. I guess we were naive." Shunned and saddened, Thompson withdrew his offer in October 2003.
Yet he persevered. "I thought, How can you change the world a little bit?" he says. "You can't let those kids down. You've got to figure out how to do this."
The breakthrough came in March 2005, when he received a call from another rich businessman with a passion for Detroit's poor: ex-Pistons basketball star Dave Bing.
Bing's color was a powerful political asset for Thompson, and together they approached the Skillman Foundation, a black-run nonprofit that has long worked with Detroit's public schools. Even so, Bing and Skillman came under immediate fire from Detroit liberals.
A group named the Call 'Em Out Coalition gave Bing a "Sambo Sell-Out Award" at its annual dinner for partnering with a white businessman. The award was bestowed by Democratic City Council member Sharon McPhail. And the Detroit Federation of Teachers expressed its displeasure with Skillman by threatening to end its cooperation with the foundation on other city school projects.

Here's hoping...

Drudge has his little siren up. Looks like Delay is going to be indicted and it says he may have to step down from his leadership position.

Compelling rationale for why Liberals don't need Unions

Mikey Kaus from Slate has a terrific response to Matthew Yglesias's contention that [Kaus is paraphrasing here], "by attacking the Davis-Bacon Act, I'm guilty of pursuing good policy. Instead, "progressive" Democrats should be pursuing not-so-good policies that nurture powerful pro-Democratic interests."

The two most interesting reasons are:

5) "Historically," as Yglesias notes, unions have selflessly helped Democrats solve a number of national problems (Social Security, medical care for the elderly, civil rights, worker safety, unemployment insurance). Unfortunately, what's left are the national problems where this New Deal pairing didn't work because unions actively stand in the way of solutions. Two of these problems, in particular, are among our biggest: a) Unionized teachers stand in the way of the educational changes that might ameliorate our twin education crises (inner city disaster and suburban mediocrity). And b) unions stand in the way of the best solution to the welfare problem (and hence the NewOrleans-style underclass problem, and hence the persistent-poverty problem), namely public jobs programs. Unions have always disliked public jobs programs because public jobs workers threaten to perform work that municipal unions and construction unions now perform for far more money (thanks, in part, to the Davis-Bacon Act). In my ideal of liberal activism, we make sure everyone who wants a job has a job. Then we worry about making those jobs pay $40 an hour rather than $8 an hour. Unions have always (quite rationally) preferred to increase their members' wages even if that means keeping unemployed workers on the dole. That's why FDR had to break a strike to keep the WPA going. Yglesias argues Democrats won't "be able to advance a sustained anti-poverty agenda" with weakened unions. I'd argue that they won't be able to do that without rolling a few unions.

6) The best way to raise wages at the bottom, we've discovered, is not to increase union power. It's to run a hot economy with a tight labor market like the one we had in the late 90s--when unions continued to decline but low-wage workers and African-Americans made huge strides. (Low inflation helped achieve that prosperous economy and preserved those gains--unlike in the 70s, when still-powerful, oligopolistic unions were the mainspring of a wage-price spiral.) Yglesias says it's "absurd" to fight poverty without unions, but the most effective program to fight working poverty that we've discovered is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has little to do with unionism and will survive unionism's inevitable withering. So will minimum wage laws.

World travellers

Hello all, I've just added two new links under the Friends section. One is Garrett Bucks' blog, who is currently in Sweden on a Fulbright scholarship. The other is Ian Miller's, who is doing the Peace Corps in Vanuatu. Enjoy their antics with mind-enhacing roots and Swedish pop stars.

Christmas comes early

Bonus Bonus!: NYTimes discovers that continuing the Howell Raines tradition of alienating half their national audience isn’t a good business plan.

The New York Times Co. said Tuesday it would cut about 500 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force, as part of an ongoing effort to reduce costs. The reductions come atop another 200 jobs that were cut earlier this year.

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. tries to explain the Times’ decline on the economy:

"We regret that we will see many of our colleagues leave the Company; it is a painful process for all of us. We have been tested many times in our 154-year history as we are being tested now.
Given the continued financial challenges and the cloudy economic outlook for the remainder of the year, we believe it is prudent and necessary to initiate this additional reduction. We will be working through the bargaining issues with our unions and will observe all contractual obligations, including severance where applicable. The Company plans to manage the staff reductions in such a way that we continue to provide our readers, users, listeners and viewers with journalism of the highest quality and that our operations function smoothly on a day-to-day basis. This will help ensure that we achieve our long-term strategic goals.”

But Gannett, owner of over 300 newspapers including USA Today, is doing just fine. Unless making money isn’t one of Sulzburger’s strategic goals he better wean his editors off of advocacy journalism real quick.

*Ask me about how the Sulzburger family stripped the New York Times Co. shareholders of all meaningful voting rights therefore removing the last barrier of oversight capabile of keeping the once great grey lady from slipping into liberal crapulence. Do it! Do it!

BONUS: The ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting believes NPR programming is extremely biased and that the resulting alienation this has caused is producing an audience that is completely counter to the populist objectives of the CPB’s founding charter; wefare media for the wealthy.

"Like many metropolitan areas, Washington has multiple NPR and PBS outlets. One evening this summer, Boaz was listening to public radio when a commentary by liberal former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was aired. Boaz switched to another NPR station, only to hear the views of liberal commentator Daniel Schorr. "That's not just liberal bias," Boaz says, "it is a liberal roadblock."

PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell assured the Senate subcommittee that "our viewers and our supporters reflect and mirror very closely the demographic make-up of our communities." Potential advertisers are told instead of a 2003 Mediamark poll commissioned by NPR. Compared to the general public, NPR listeners are 152 percent more likely to own a home valued at $500,000 or more; 194 percent more likely to travel to France; and 326 percent more likely to read the "New Yorker."


I really, really despise(d) Paul Krugman, but I know this already has been talked to death elsewhere so I’ll be brief. I’m just amazed that the ombudsman of the NYTimes has come out publicly stating that the left’s best known economist is a serial liar. Better still -- despite knowing of Krugman’s deceptions, the editorial staff of the paper has apparently decided not to enforce its own editorial policies.

An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who makes an error "is expected to promptly correct it in the column." That's the established policy of Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Her written policy encourages "a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece."

The following refers to a recent column in which he misrepresented findings of the media panel regarding the outcome of the 2000 election, and then lied about them again in his correction of the first column.

All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. Each Op-Ed columnist has a page in nytimes.com that includes his or her past columns and biographical information. Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn't explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong. Since it hasn't been officially published, that posting doesn't cause the correction to be appended to any of the relevant columns.
If the problem is that Mr. Krugman doesn't want to give up precious space in his column for a correction, there are alternatives. Perhaps some space could be found elsewhere on the Op-Ed page so that readers—especially those using electronic versions of his pieces -- could get the accurate information they deserve.
A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times's credibility more than having no policy at all?

So now having been officially reviled by his own paper, I don’t think anyone can argue he has any meaningful credibility anymore. He’s done.

Now I can focus on Robert Reich…

Hitch vs. Galloway

It's been podcast here for posterity. I haven't gotten the chance to listen to it yet, so I don't have a lot to say about it. However, I think Galloway is a contemptable turd on the order of Tom DeLay and I would looooovvvveee to see him verbally thrashed.

For the actual argument's sake I'd much prefer someone like Jon Stewart do battle with Hitchens (who has made some of the best reasoned cases for the war in Iraq that I've read), but this will do.

But I'm quite curious to hear what y'all think, so have at it...

Speaks for itself

More foolishness from Mr. DeLay:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.
Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible.
"My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I'll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet," the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.
Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

Then there's this from his collegues:

"This is hardly a well-oiled machine," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican. "There's a lot of fat to trim. ... I wonder if we've been serving in the same Congress."
American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said federal spending already was "spiraling out of control" before Katrina, and conservatives are "increasingly losing faith in the president and the Republican leadership in Congress."
"Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression," he said.
Mr. Keene said annual nonmilitary and non-homeland security spending increased $303 billion between fiscal year 2001 and 2005; the acknowledged federal debt increased more than $2 trillion since fiscal year 2000; and the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill is estimated to increase the government's unfunded obligations by $16 trillion.

I'm not putting this up there as a means to say, "Oh, look this is Republican, look how dumb and corrupt he is, that is a good example of how dumb and corrupt all Republicans are." I'm pointing at him because he, as an individual, is a contemptable liar who needs to be made fun of and put in his place (which should be as far away from the halls of congress and power as possible). Dean and Feinstein may be contemptable, but they're not quite as outragous (to me at least) as this piece of shit.

Good Roberts Piece

Here’s some pretty good commentary on the state of the confirmation hearings from Dahlia Lithwick – who I typically disagree with. After listening to some of the hearings yesterday on my way home from work, I too came to the conclusion that the Senators would have been best served to allow some to assume they're stupid than open their mouths and prove it. Especially Joe Biden – who I think may actually be retarded.

John Roberts is putting on a clinic.
He completely understands that he needs only to sit very quietly, head cocked to signal listening-ness, while senator after senator offers long discursive rambling speeches. Only when he's perfectly certain that a question has been asked does he offer a reply; usually cogent and spare. Here's a man long accustomed to answering really hard questions from extremely smart people, suddenly faced with the almost-harder task of answering obvious questions from less-smart people. He finds himself standing in a batting cage with the pitching machine set way too slow.
It's increasingly clear that Senate Democrats are giving up. They are taking a cue from the petulant Joe Biden, who telegraphs exactly who these hearings are really for when he refuses to let the nominee answer any of his questions. When Sen. Arlen Specter growls at Biden to let Roberts finish just one answer, Biden growls back: "I don't have much time." Later when Biden complains of Roberts, "But he's filibustering!" it's without any sense of irony. How dare this man use our own childish games against us?

LA Power Outage

The power is out in Los Angeles – and where the hell is George W. Bush?

Why hasn’t he said anything empathetic yet? It’s been hours!

Does he even care what the people of Los Angeles are going through? Not everyone in Hollywood can just get into a Range Rover and turn on the air conditioning. Some people only have Mercedes and BMWs and red Corvettes.

How long is the rescue effort going to take? Surely, Bush is not waiting on the mayor and the governor again. Big-foot them now! I’ll bet Bush is playing his silly banjo.

Hee Hee

Oh Tom you card.

Wow.

This morning, U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's visit to the Reliant Park this offered him a glimpse of what it's like to be living in shelter.

While on the tour of a shelter with top administration officials from Washington, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, DeLay stopped to chat with three young boys resting on cots.

The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked, ``Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?''

They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.

Great arguments on the Daily Show

Christopher Hitchens, the contrarian, and Jon Stewart get into a reasonable, fun argument on Iraq. Here's the video. (Check it soon, it may be gone or hard to find after two weeks or so.)

I'm not sure who I think "wins" but the discussion is invigorating. I could watch them go at it for hours so wish this clip wasn't limited to 8 minutes. Enjoyable none-the-less.

Hurricane Katrina relief

Here is a list of charities compiled by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit for Hurricane Katrina relief. I apologize for the belated nature of this post, please give what you can.

Where Oil Company Profits Go

I’ve been listening all week to scores of pundits including Bill O’Reilly argue for caps on Oil Industry profits stating that they are profiting “unfairly” and have become increasingly infuriated at how general economic ignorance on the part of journalists is adversely affecting the understanding of basic economic principles within the public. Oil Industry executives are not Ken Lay Monopoly men using profits to light cigars with $100’s. Like all commodities providers, when demand increases, profit increases, and this profit is invested to provide even greater supply to create more profits. It’s happened since the Roman Empire and is happening yet again.

Since 1981, Shell researchers at the company's division of "unconventional resources" have been spending their own money trying to figure out how to get usable energy out of oil shale. Judging by the presentation the Rocky Mountain News heard this week, they think they've got it.
Shell's method, which it calls "in situ conversion," is simplicity itself in concept but exquisitely ingenious in execution. Terry O'Connor, a vice president for external and regulatory affairs at Shell Exploration and Production, explained how it's done (and they have done it, in several test projects):
Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.
Please note, you don't have to go looking for oil fields when you're brewing your own.
On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.
While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.
Wow.
They don't need subsidies; the process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel. The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. The process recovers about 10 times as much oil as mining the rock and crushing and cooking it at the surface, and it's a more desirable grade. Reclamation is easier because the only thing that comes to the surface is the oil you want.
And we've hardly gotten to the really ingenious part yet. While the rock is cooking, at about 650 or 750 degrees Fahrenheit, how do you keep the hydrocarbons from contaminating ground water? Why, you build an ice wall around the whole thing. As O'Connor said, it's counterintuitive.
But ice is impermeable to water. So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it. The water in the ground around the shafts freezes, and eventually forms a 20- to 30-foot ice barrier around the site.
Next you take the water out of the ground inside the ice wall, turn up the heat, and then sit back and harvest the oil until it stops coming in useful quantities. When production drops, it falls off rather quickly.
That's an advantage over ordinary wells, which very gradually get less productive as they age.
Then you pump the water back in. (Well, not necessarily the same water, which has moved on to other uses.) It's hot down there so the water flashes into steam, picking up loose chemicals in the process. Collect the steam, strip the gunk out of it, repeat until the water comes out clean. Then you can turn off the heaters and the chillers and move on to the next plot (even saving one or two of the sides of the ice wall, if you want to be thrifty about it).
Most of the best territory for this astonishing process is on land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Shell has applied for a research and development lease on 160 acres of BLM land, which could be approved by February. That project would be on a large enough scale so design of a commercial facility could begin.
The 2005 energy bill altered some provisions of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act that were a deterrent to large-scale development, and also laid out a 30-month timetable for establishing federal regulations governing commercial leasing.
Shell has been deliberately low-key about their R&D, wanting to avoid the hype, and the disappointment, that surrounded the last oil-shale boom. But O'Connor said the results have been sufficiently encouraging they are gradually getting more open. Starting next week, they will be holding public hearings in northwest Colorado.

Awesome TOTN Segment

If you haven’t heard this yet, you should. I had to check the web just to make sure what I heard in the car really happened. Essentially Cindy Sheehan melted down under softball questioning on Talk of the Nation. As soon as the questioning moved away from being able to talk about how Bush is a kid killer she said she had to go and then pretended that her phone connection was breaking up when it clearly wasn't. The next guest pointed out that this is a commonly used tactic of hers when she is challenged.
This is the communications vehicle provided by anti-war organizations to her cause. I seriously doubt that she had less than “5 bars”.

Brothers Grimm kinda sucked

Just saw the Brothers Grimm. I didn't think it would be good, but I thought it might be ok, what with Terry Gilliam directing and all. There were definitely some decent scenes and redeeming elements, but all in all, not very good. It was very similar to Sleepy Hollow, which I also didn't care for.

Tech and the Freedom of ideas

MIT's Technology Review is a recent discovery for me. I started picking through them at the girlfriend's house and have found a treasure trove of geeky info. First off, in the most recent edition, there is an article about the next "big thing" in media storage, in the form of holographic disks.

Here are some of the more interesting bits:

...The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than three hours. It's likely to be one of the first commercial systems to use "holographic storage," in which bits are encoded in a light-sensitive material as the three-dimensional interference pattern of lasers. Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store data bit by bit on their surfaces, holographic discs store data a page at a time in three dimensions, enabling huge leaps in capacity and access speed.

...Meanwhile, CDs and DVDs have already transformed how people listen to music and watch movies. But each of these storage technologies has drawbacks. The density of magnetic materials in hard drives is fast approaching a fundamental physical limit. Flash memory is slow, and a DVD is barely large enough to hold a full-length movie.

...Storing data in three dimensions would overcome many of these limitations. Indeed, the theoretical promise of holographic storage has been talked about for 40 years. But advances in smaller and cheaper lasers, digital cameras, projector technologies, and optical recording materials have finally pushed the technology to the verge of the market. And the ability to cram exponentially more bits into infinitesimal spaces could open up a whole new realm of applications.

By storing and reading out millions of bits at a time, a holographic disc could hold a whole library of films. Movies, video games, and location-based services like interactive maps could be put on postage-stamp-size chips and carried around on cell phones. A person's entire medical history, including diagnostic images like x-rays, could fit on an ID card and be quickly transmitted to or retrieved from a database."

In the June issue, copyright lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Richard Epstein (this link is a crapshoot, for no rhyme or reason as far as I could tell, but keep tryin') go toe to toe on issues surrounding software licensing, i.e., the open-source model vs. the propietary model. I find myself more sympathetic to Epstein's argument, which falls between the two, describing the distinct advantages to both models being in the marketplace.

"My qualified defense of proprietary software rests on my general approach to property rights. It may seem odd that I see land law as a place to begin thinking about copyright law in the digital age, but in the law, continuity counts for more than novelty. While we always have to tend to the differences among different forms of property, we are likely to make fewer mistakes by proceeding carefully from established understandings.

Every legal system in history has blended two separate property regimes: the private and common. Both are important to software and copyright. Private property confers on individual owners exclusive rights to the possession, use, and disposition (sale, lease, mortgage, gift) of some given tangible resource. Virtually all civilizations start with a decentralized system in which the person who first takes an unowned thing is entitled to keep it against the rest of the world. Providing a plot of land or individual object with a single, determinate owner facilitates its effective use. The farmer who sows today knows that she can reap tomorrow, without fearing the incursions of others. The ability to sell, lease, or mortgage property allows for everything from a simple transfer of land from person A to person B to the formation of complex cooperative ventures among multiple parties. The GNU General Public License (GPL) that Lessig so admires offers a shining example of how this last, iterative process works.

Any system of private ownership requires state enforcement, first, to protect private property from forced occupation, misappropriation, and invasion, and second, to enforce voluntary deals. But any theory of property rights that includes a key role for the state should also emphatically reject the use of centralized state power to determine who shall own what resource or why. Governments, for instance, should not pick technologies.

In all legal systems, however, a system of private property rests on an infrastructure of common property. The air we breathe, the roads we travel, and the language we speak cannot easily be reduced to private possession. They remain part of the commons because their separation impedes respiration, transportation, and communication. At the edges, we recognize useful exceptions. Although everyone may use the word "monopoly" to describe a market with a single seller, only Hasbro may market a board game with hotels and a jovial top-hatted mascot under that trade name. The private creation of a trade name pulls that name out of the linguistic commons for the limited purpose of identification."

Fascinating stuff if you're into this kind of thing.

p.s. If this interested you, check out Peter Suber's Open Access Blog, a masterful compendium of news focused on the movement to usher scholarly writing to the forum of peer review without the costly, and antiquated, "journal" as gatekeeper.

Hilarious!

I saw this once before, laughed my ass off and then promptly forgot about it, so I felt compelled to post it this time. It consists of a series of frames from a bootleg "Revenge of the Sith" DVD and contains the "direct English translation of the Chinese interpretation of what the script was saying," and it's hilarious.
For instance: "Let the force be with you," becomes, "ratio tile, the wish power are together with you." While not terribly funny, it at least offers a comparison. This is just plain funny.

"Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection"
or
"I was just made by the Presbyterian church."

Devaluing a MIT PhD like no one else...

Whenever there’s a topical overlap between Paul Krugman and France, I gotta blog about it.

A few weeks ago the left’s favorite economist wrote “The French Choice”, a NYTimes editorial arguing that despite a yawning gap in fiscal measures of standard of living; the French just have different and arguably better societal priorities. Since no leftist economy has ever managed to exceed the US standard of living (except for when we briefly had our own leftist economy under Carter) this un-provable argument has always been the refuge of last resort for the intellectually dishonest; first in the context of communism and now in the context of France. Next to a lobotomy such twisted reasoning is the only way to quiet the cognitive dissonance of educated leftists actively pushing the very same policies which are now pulling their dream state under. “It’s not worse…it’s just different!”.

Actually it is.

The only empirical measure for Krugman’s claim that the only difference between the French and American economies is “priorities, not performance” is the utterly dishonest comparison of productivity per hour. Per hour worked, France’s economic output is slightly higher than the US but to argue that this in any way reflects the productive value of an economy is disgraceful – especially for an Economist with a PhD from MIT. It would be the same to argue that some lucky rookie baseball player who has a hit his first time at bat is as good or better than Barry Bonds who fails to get a hit over 60% of the time. Through policies such as the 35 hour work week and regulations which make it nearly impossible to fire anyone, only the very fittest population in the French work force is employed. Productivity per hour is the only measure which hides the vast number of unproductive members of French society. When the entire population is taken into consideration, a picture less favorable to Krugman’s argument comes into view:



While Krugman admits the obvious: “that the typical French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.” He attempts to put a happy face on the situation by arguing that having a minimum 7 weeks paid leave for the employed (it’s family fun all year round for everyone else!) is more than an adequate trade off for a lower standard of living. A generation ago, one could make such an argument and not get laughed at but the truth is that the current generation is swiftly becoming poorer. Fewer and fewer Parisians can even afford to leave their homes for the traditional August vacation. Instead they must sit on trucked in sand overlooking that glorified open sewer, the Seine.

And for as good as French schools may be, the future is bleak for their graduates. This quarter the US economy grew 35 times faster than the French economy.

Krugman is right to be concerned about France’s inevitable slide into poverty. It will be harder and harder for his lot to convince the US to take their medicine when the corpse of their last patient is rotting nearby.