Mike Shaw
My Music, My Weblog, and other random stuff!
Why the Tea Party and Occupiers both get it wrong.
Oct 13th
So the “Occupy” movement is currently the darling of the media and internet. Criticism, support and comparisons abound. Some compare it to the Arab Spring, but until they are walking into bullets or disappearing in a large government building somewhere there’s really no comparison. There are also many who have billed it as a progressive tea party, which of course makes the tea partiers mad.
But from my perspective, I don’t see any more coherency in the Tea Party message than in the Occupy message. The were just as many contradictions there (“Government out of our lives, and hands off Social Security!”) as there are in the various Occupy displays. But the Tea Party was able to affect elections and congressional votes, and that’s what counts. I doubt the Occupiers will have that success, but if they do it will be just as pointless in the long run.
Both groups miss the point of what’s wrong with our country. The problem isn’t less or more capitalism or government. The problem is we have eliminated great gobs of free market capitalism. There is a huge difference.
Capitalism is about ownership and profit. Free market capitalism (FMC) is about competitive ownership and profit by free players in an framework ruled by supply and demand. Economic freedom comes from free market capitalism. Plain ol’ Capitalism oppresses just as well as any government (because ultimately they becomes one and the same.)
In the two governing groups, we know where Democrats stand when it comes to FMC. Generally they will do whatever they can to try and engineer reality for the greater good or to solidify their own control. But when you look close, Republicans have done just as much to destroy FMC for the smaller good or to solidify their own control.
Whereas Democrats are always pushing policies that benefit large, established government; Republicans are always pushing policies that benefit large, established businesses. Republicans love increasing the power of monopolies via Intellectual Property, Patent, and copyright laws. They love big banks and telecom companies and tweaking the rules under the direction of the big players. They love big agribusiness and subsidies. They pass laws that benefit those businesses, talking about how these capitalist measures will increase jobs and benefit everyone. The problem is, they won’t. When you institutionalize big business, it’s no better than institutionalizing big government.
Laws that benefit big business (capitalism) are just as destructive to equality, employment, and Democracy as laws that benefit big government. What we need is more free market capitalism.
The first response to this will usually be from progressives and how free markets (lacking in regulation) actually caused our current crisis’. Up next I’ll discuss why the opposite is actually true. Regulation created this mess.
Notes on the passing of Steve Jobs
Oct 6th
I’ve never been a “Mac Guy” per se. I was definitely impressed by OS X (enough that I got an iBook, and later a Macbook). I have many Mac-crazy friends. My family also has countless ipods, iPhones, and an iPad. But even if you don’t have Apple products, the products you do use are heavily influenced by Apple and thus Steve Jobs.
But whatever you think of Apple, clearly Steve Jobs led a remarkable life. In reviewing his bio, I noted a few things:
Coca-Cola Freestyle: Abject failure of design.
May 26th
I’ve mentioned the problems in balancing the Transformational and the Operational in the past. Here’s a great example of a failure: the new Coca Cola machines, designed by Ferrari people.
They look cool. They offer 100 or so different drinks. But they’re terrible. Why? They completely ignore the transactional nature of getting a fountain drink.
First, look at the characteristics of the “old” way of getting a drink:
* People get ice independently.
* People get drinks independently.
* The number of users is only physically limited by the relation of wants to available flavors
* Personal space is the only other limitation and it’s self balanced based on the aggregate needs of the users.
All this equals out to a massively parallel and self balancing transaction. 5 or 6 people can get a soft drink in under a minute.
But now, you’ve replaced this whole setup with a completely serial (linear) path. Every person must individually:
* Get ice
* Decide what they want on the screen (note that the time taken here is a characteristic of a primary feature)
* Select it
* wait for a much slower dispenser to finish.
Some of this will go away as people get more familiar with it. But it doesn’t change that it is now a much longer process where each step must wait on the next, and each user must wait on the next too. I personally observed 8-10 people in line during a busy lunch hour. I waited at least 4 minutes. Not terribly long, but your establishment is not going to make too many friends creating needless waits like that.
How in the world is complicating the high markup world of soft drinks a good idea? Further highlighting the lack of business insight is the Iced Tea factor. If you want ice for your tea, you still have to wait in line with the soft drink people. Tea has absolutely huge margins for a business. Why in the world would you tacitly discourage it?
Failing to understand the multiplying factors in transactions is a very common problem, and we see it in tech all the time:
* Replacing legacy text-based systems with bulky, HTML driven systems.
* going with low cost physical options (such as dot matrix) instead of laser and thermal
* The basic flow of screens and clicks
In my real job, I found that all these little milliseconds were adding up to big time…um…time over a day. In banking and credit union-ing, this means long lines of people waiting to get money. This is not a good thing, particularly when you’re trying to get those people to increase their relationship with your institution. While we will never avoid lines altogether, we made a great deal of progress by switching hardware and systems and eliminating all the small “please waits”.
Early studies in management used techniques such as chronocyclegraphy to assess the efficiency of every little movement by a worker over time. While this is now subtly deemed oppressive and almost inhuman, the concepts still live on in eye tracking and mouse movement analysis. However, I doubt anyone paid even 1 minute of attention to the impact of these Coke machines. “The kids will love ‘em!”
So, in short, it’s just another way people have attached a computer to something and made our lives worse by not using corresponding design technology. Well, unless you think that dis-incentives to gulp about 400 calories of corn syrup are a bad thing. These things could actually save some lives in about 40 years!
The Bin Laden Death Party
May 4th
So Bin Laden is now cryogenically frozen in Area 51 with Elvis and Bruce Lee. Or, as conspiracy theorist will have us believe, he is dead.
Which led to tons of positive response across the twitterverse, facebookverse, ground zero, 24 hour news channels, and red-blooded wolf shirt wearing Americans everywhere. Some Christians celebrated death. And predictably some Christians starting being critical of other Christians…because hey! look! Other Christians are doing something and I have a Bible!
But if you really look at the situation, it’s much more complex than that. The concepts are more complex. The reactions are more complex. You can’t generalize everything into one big blob and say “this is bad” or “this is good”, much less “this scripture applies”. So here’s a quick breakdown of *some* of the reasons, and what I think about them.
(Note that these are from a Christian perspective, so getting all meta on it by criticizing Christian concepts won’t accomplish anything.)
“Yay! Some Muslim guy is dead!” – Not good. Generally we should never be happy when a lost person is dead.
“Yay! A bad guy is dead!” – That’s ok. When a bad guy is dead that means they won’t be doing bad things anymore.
“Yay! Our enemy is dead!” – Not good. Loving it when crap happens to your enemy is a gang mentality. Christians are supposed to do the opposite for the Bigger Purpose.
“Yay! A bad guy who did some bad things is dead!” – That’s ok. Justice is a Biblical principle. (Yes, mercy is too.)
“Yeehaw! He just busted down the gates o’ Hell!” – Not good. Trivializes hell, which is a pretty damned serious topic.
“Yay! It’s over!” – That’s ok. In some ways this means the 9/11 chapter is over. Until a TSA agent grabs your junk or you get 20 years for buying a counterfeit watch because somehow that’s related to terrorism.
“Waving flags will help terrorism!” – Well, everything helps terrorism. Buying a tank of gas helps terrorism. Not beating our women helps terrorism. Justin Bieber helps terrorism. Not beating Justin Bieber helps terrorism.
“Martin Luther King would said the following…” – 78% of statistics are just made up on the spot. And to quote Thomas Jefferson “you can’t believe everything you read on the internet”. Seriously, I think about 78% of the quotes on the internet are inaccurate. But a web poll could clear that right up.
“USA! USA! USA!” – This is a tricky. In the few minutes it takes you to find scripture regarding nationalism, our failing Democracy will have borrowed several million dollars. Or printed it, depending on which suppressed news report you ignore. It’s hard to decide what we think about the crumbling of our government because all the singers are so good this year.
So in short, we’re all wrong! And you’re all wrong! And we’re all right! And wrong! And when was the last time YOU read Habakkuk hmmm? Because I did. Twice!
Does Charlie Sheen Need Jesus?
Mar 8th
I’ve seen statements like this for many days now, after the ‘event’ that is Charlie Sheen has unfolded.
The short answer? Yes, of course. But there is a longer answer, which starts with a “yes, but…” And that is: Yes, but he has physical needs that must be attended to first.
Doctors will say they won’t diagnose a condition without examining him. But the 1000 pound elephant of winning is that he’s experiencing some sort of manic condition. To anyone who’s had the unfortunate experience of dealing with someone in this state, it’s obvious. Eerily obvious.
When this condition becomes serious, the person can’t perceive reality correctly. Their ability to function is impaired sometimes to the point of making life threatening decisions. In this sense, a person in Sheen’s (apparent) condition is in the same situation as someone who is starving or drowning. The immediate need must be met before you can really even begin to talk about spiritual matters.
In fact, while I am a complete believer in the life changing power of Holy Scripture, I would hazard to say that it is probably not advisable to quote it to someone with Adonis blood….even if you manage to get a word in edgewise with someone in such a state. So what to do?
James 2:15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?
I’m not saying Sheen isn’t responsible for his actions. There is enough there to know what’s right and wrong. I’m also not saying that God can’t miraculously heal Sheen. But God could easily feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and take care of every orphan in the world. There’s a bigger picture and a reason people have to be involved.
If we can’t minister to his needs directly, what we should be doing is praying for Charlie Sheen’s healing first, and salvation second. Yes, to my non-Christian friends this sounds nutty to include salvation, and even to my Christian friends it seems a bit hokey to pray for a tabloid celebrity with millions of dollars and (in his words) “the gifts of the universe.” But I’ll tell you why it’s important.
One of the biggest problems with mental illness is the stigma and our collective cluelessness in how to deal with it. When you say “my friend has cancer”, people know what to do. But when it’s mental illness, people are pretty much on their own to draw conclusions. Those conclusions almost never help, and you really just don’t know how damaging and bizarro they can be until you’ve tried to get some assistance in such a situation.
When you see Charlie Sheen, realize this is happening all around us. The stigma keeps it quiet, but the needs are huge.
Imagine it’s not Charlie acting crazy on TV. Imagine it’s your loved one talking about having Tiger Blood or being indestructible. Imagine it’s your mom or dad, child, spouse, or best friend who is completely lost in a distorted world of perception that is slowly destroying any semblance of hope. Don’t abstract this. The “crazy” person is someone you love. Mentally picture yourself in that situation 24/7. You can’t turn off the TV because the TV is your life, and it’s not pundits in pancake talking about the “trainwreck”. Instead, un-televised authorities say there’s nothing they can do, judges yuck it up with the attorneys, doctors go home at 5, and everyone else looks through the window with an opinion.
Meanwhile, a loved one slowly drowns just off shore and takes lives with them. Charlie Sheen is happening right now in our churches and neighborhoods.
Yes, Charlie Sheen needs Jesus. But he needs to be physically rescued first, just as Jesus commanded. There are also millions of healthy people dealing with the fallout every day. And they could use a hand too.
Mike’s Worldview: Oil Part 2 – “Drill Baby Drill” is For Bumper Stickers
Feb 28th
So now I’ve talked a little about the uniqueness of oil, that it’s very portable and it contains a hunka hunka burnin energy. These two factors make it completely unique.
Now let’s talk about how it’s unique from itself, and why oil reserves don’t matter. Not all oil is equal. Some oil is good quality, and some bad. Some oil is easy to get to, and other oil requires extreme effort to get to it. Both of these factors can radically increase the cost of oil.
First, you have to look at production costs.
In the past, oil cost pennies to pull out of the ground at which point you’d sell the place and move to Beverlee. But now the prospect of just using a pipe or squirrel gun to get oil out of the ground is like writing a hit called “that thing you do”. It only happens a long time ago or in movies. There is very little of this oil left. Oil is now drilled in increasingly complex ways. If there is any lesson in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s that we’re going to distant extremes both physically and technologically in these efforts. This is very expensive and much much different than our efforts in the last 100 years.
Production costs vary by country. Some places in the middle east are as low as $5 per barrel. Other places can go to $100 or higher, and the cost continues to go higher as wells pass their prime and fields mature and run out of the relatively easy oil.
Second, you have to look at oil quality. Oil sands, tar shales, coal liquids, etc. require huge efforts to convert them for use (plus you have to trash a whole bunch of nature to get some of them). Paradoxically, some techniques require correspondingly huge amounts of natural gas to heat the material before it can be extracted. This creates all sorts of strange cost computations when you figure in the market for natural gas.
When you hear people say that the U.S. has just as much oil as Saudi Arabia, they never bring up the substantial difference in production costs.
So whenever you hear experts talk about huge oil reserves or vast new oil discoveries, your first question should be “How much does it cost to get it?” If it costs 100 bucks just to get the oil, then this will not result in the cheap oil that our entire set of sociopoliticaleconomic systems were built on.
Then there’s the question of production capacity. How quickly can we get the stuff out of the ground, and is it fast enough to satisfy demand?
Imagine the garden hose at your house was the only one in the neighborhood. You have a very large supply, but could you supply enough water for everyone? Depending on the neighborhood…maybe. Now add another house to the list every day. How long before all heck breaks lose? This experiment is exactly what’s happening in the world today with oil.
So in these two questions alone, we see that “drill baby drill” is little more than a political slogan designed to reign in people who really haven’t put much thought into the details. How much does it cost to pump/produce the oil, and how quickly can it be extracted? If you have a large amount of expensive oil that can only be extracted slowly, it doesn’t really matter how much you have.
It’d not just oil. It’s cheap, high-bandwidth oil that we need. And if that’s gone (either nominally or for real) what are we going to do? The answers to these questions become pretty scary when you see not just how dependent we are on oil, but that there really isn’t any other alternative. That’s next.
Mike’s Worldview: The Oil Conun-drum part 1
Feb 25th
Get it? Conun…drum? Never mind….
I’ve blogged a bunch about oil in the past. My own personal opinion is somewhere between Road Warrior pessimism and Free-Market optimism. But by now the writing should be on the wall for all of us. We see how the price affects our individual lives and our collective economy, and we see that even when ‘experts’ say all is well, things still seem to be very volatile.
We’ll never be able to predict the future, but we can get a thorough understanding of the problem. As I’ve read/researched, I’ve found that what’s really happening is very, very different than that conventional wisdom on energy we get from American Idol.
So first, let’s take a quick look at what oil is.
From an energy perspective, oil is solar energy from millions of years stored chemically and compressed into a portable form. This energy becomes immediately available to us when we heat our home in a few minutes, or peel out of the mall parking lot.
And that’s the first thing to understand. When we use oil, we are releasing energy in a few seconds that really took years (tens, thousands, millions…) to collect. This is it’s first primary value. Solar power is collecting this energy real time. Wind and hydroelectric are collecting solar power stored mechanically, but fairly recently. When people float ideas for other power sources, there is a built-in disadvantage in this time warp.
The second value is that oil and it’s products are portable (stable and moveable). You can carry a bottle of gasoline around, and unless you are a 14 year old male, really stupid, or both…generally that energy is not going to be released in an uncontrolled manner. Of the other raw collection and storage methods, nothing even comes close to oil. Would you let them store Uranium in your neighborhood at the corner gas station? And have you seen just how huge the batteries in an “electric” car are?
Speaking of ‘lectricity….This is a very important thing to understand about electric things. Electricity is not a source of energy, it’s a way of storing energy from something else. It’s very portable, but it doesn’t inherently have millions of years of energy in it like oil does.
So this is the first thing to grok about oil. It contains huge amounts of energy stored over millions of years. It’s very portable. And lastly, it’s very unique in these two factors. Whether it be politician or PhD, any time you hear someone mention alternative energy those are the first two questions to ask. Where did the energy come from and how much is there compared with oil? How portable is it, and how does that compare with oil?
Confessions of a data hoarder…the data abides, dude.
Jan 12th
I have a healthy obsession with data. A key component of my job is preserving it, and I’ve developed an inherent love for it.
This is easy to do because the cost of storage has plummeted. You can get a Terabyte of storage for $60 bucks, which will hold
* a billion pages of text, or over 5 million books, far more than you’ll ever read in a lifetime…more than you could read in 30 lifetimes
* over a half million digital pictures, which would take you 17 work weeks to look at (at 5 seconds a shot)
* a quarter million songs–which you could listen to 8 hours a day for 6 years.
It won’t be long before the music and video stored on the average desktop could last longer than a human lifetime. With this kind of cheap storage to throw around, why would you ever delete anything? There is a constantly expanding store of data…just let it ride. Of course this brings up interesting questions of indexing and search-ability, but who wants to be a billionaire? We’re gazing at the universe here.
From a spiritual perspective, I’ve always found the implications of data to be directly related, particularly in these two verses:
John 1:1 In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Words are data…in a strange way anything can be seen as data, even if it’s too big to truly comprehend. If we can hold more data than we could ever read or view on our desktop, why do we balk at the presence of things we don’t understand? The presence of every atom in our body is data. Everything we’ve seen or heard is data.
Psalm 121:7 The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
“Jesus Saves” jokes aside, the idea of Almighty God backing us up to tape and sending us to off-site storage is an oddly comforting (if completely hokey) thought. Data holds our entire sociopolitical structure together. Tyler Durden understood that and one of the scary things about Fight Club was the way such an act would cut to the core of our subconcious value systems. Doesn’t the data that defines us hold the bigger things together as well?
But enough hokey right-braining. Back to hoarding. Ok…we’ll keep right-braining but no more hokeyness.
Even a blurry picture or bad recording to me has value. Even a bad scan of half a photograph has value. Nowhere in the universe will information randomly collide and produce a discolored picture of my son drinking a juice box. I guess maybe on a distant planet somewhere a rock formation may resemble it, but it’s highly unlikely. Even then it cannot be appreciated or preserved.
So even bad bits have value, provided they are ordered in a higher order of recognition. “BECAUSE, man, somewhere in one of these…memories is the evidence!”
The implications of all this have not even begun to be pondered. Our descendants will have access to millions of lifetimes of data. They’ll know us far better than we know our ancestors. Can we really be private when data is permanent? When who we are can’t be obfuscated, won’t we have to redefine “starting over” to something more honest? When a library can be burned down with a power surge, aren’t things actually more fragile than, say animal drawings on a cave wall? What about standards–will they be able to read PDF’s in 100 years?
This is all very heady stuff. I think I need to go delete some coffee.
Politic’in’ Ain’t Easy: The Ganglike Mentality of Political Demonizing
Jan 8th
I’m planning on getting back into blogging/bjournaling in 2011, so this is just as good a time as any.
It seems like tragic and downright depressing events in AZ today have brought out the best and worst in political commentary. So far it’s outside the mainstream but it will likely expand. Without going into it, people are going to blame the shooting of a congressman on the rhetoric of talk show hosts and politicians.
This is not a phenomenon isolated to any one political group. Whether “All muslims are terrorists” or “all Christians want to kill gays”, every side of anything has it’s component of folks who will take a shortcut and make the other side look bad by generalizations and associations.
Remember when the guy went into the Discovery channel with guns and bombs? He actually named an author as an inspiration, and demanded that the channel promote the views in a couple books. Had this person killed anyone, would their blood be on the hands of the cited author, or environmentalists as a whole?
Of course not. But there were no political points to be made in such an association.
Defamation by association is the mentality of a gang. Whether you’re red or blue, blood or crip, the ultimate goal is to shortcut humanity and pop an intellectual cap in the other side. It doesn’t matter about the tactic or the real people involved. Just do a driveby association.
I’m no fan of Palin. But it’s impossible to create any real association between the “crosshair image” and the actions of this guy who’s trying to recalculate grammar, re-adjust the numerical years, quantify mind control, and talk about creating a currency of the sun and the moon.
I’ll go ahead and call it. The shooter in AZ is clearly psychotic. I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve had some unfortunate encounters in observing mental illness. The Youtube videos and writings of this person are strange, rambling talk that have no resonance with reality, much less political rhetoric. If anything, he would have seen a talk show as mind control.
He was clearly experiencing some serious mental difficulties. And if there is any serious issue to be discussed over his influences, it should surround how we deal with mental illness. But that’s another post.
So whatever your political thoughts, don’t ignore the human reality of all this and be a gangsta. They don’t solve anything, even in the movies.
On Politics
Oct 29th
In a nutshell: I used to be more partisan in my political beliefs, I was state chair of College Republicans (including sitting on the state steering committee) and my degree was in Political Science. I’ve basically lost hope in the process, since it’s too broken to fix itself before collapse.
However, I do enjoy watching it and analyzing the same way I’d watch football or a movie.
So I’ll admit I’ll get a long chuckle from watching the incredibly arrogant Democrat party get its donkey handed to it next week. How they ever thought they were going to pull off those kinds of stunts and still get re-elected is beyond me. Maybe they watch too much prime-time.
Whatever the case, their cluelessness enabled a leaderless, abstract opposition to completely clobber them. This is also known as the Tea Party effect.
The Tea Party effect is a logical response to that arrogance and cluelessness. However, this tea will be served to the country before it’s even lukewarm. Unlike the takeover in ’94–which was basically a midterm carefully nationalized by an organized Republican party (via the Contract with America)–this takeover won’t even have a sketch of what sacred ground looks like.
You see, the motivation behind the Tea Party would historically have been drawn off to a real 3rd party where ideological and logistical organization would have taken place. Solving current problems of our runaway government is going to absolutely require this type of organization. Instead, the raw material was funneled into the old rusty machinery of the Republican party, which these days is far more like a t-shirt and bumper sticker company than a political organization.
Unfortunately this obtuse power shift means the only mandate that R’s will have is that “well, they aren’t Democrats”. This won’t be sufficient to fundamentally fix any of the problems of Government, but they’ll still be really busy. Which brings us to the other key difference.
The other key difference is that in ’94 the well organized Republicans marched head first into the buzzsaw of the Clinton campaign machine. It wasn’t long before Republican politicians were out to steal babies and run over your dog. The inept (and very presidentially Democrat) machinery of the Obama Whitehouse will have but a fraction of that coherence.
So, you’ll have a bunch of newly elected Republicans with no guiding ideology, no mandate to actually get anything difficult done, and an imperative to “look busy!” This will lead to the following results.
Contemporary Republican Bizzarro Free Market Capitalism:
* More policies that favor large, established businesses
* More policies that create very monopoly-like industry sectors
* More policies that favor mass consumption and minimal production and/or innovation
Contemporary Republican Bizzarro Concepts of Freedom
* More policies that strip individual liberties (All for National Security, of course.)
* More policies that make removal of said liberties very profitable to someone
* More drug enforcement policies that are worse than the drugs themselves
In short, you’re going to have bigger government…more intrusive government….and more centralized economic planning. Just, you know…the Republican kind. And all of this will be ensconced in very warm sounding names. “The Thomas Jefferson Airport Funding Act”, “The Telecom Wholesomness Act”, “The Bill for Automotive Prosperity Act”. You’ll feel downright patriotic when grandma gets tazed for baking a pie without the proper permits.
These actions will continue to infuriate real conservatives, continue giving Joe and Jane American the uneasy feeling that something just ain’t right, and contine making bumper sticker conservatives happy until the next rout. At which point the whole process continues until we’re broke or the whole thing collapses when the money machine wears out.
The problem is that details matter. Capitalism (the real kind) matters. Freedom matters. The Republican party has a pretty bad record in these recently and they’re about to be back in the political driver’s seat. And thus our long, national broken record will continue.
The March of the Naked Body Scanners
Oct 23rd
So JFK has those naked body scanners now. To recap:
Israeli airport security experts laugh at these things. And they know air security better than anyone and they say it’s a waste of time and money.
The government has repeatedly lied about how these machines work. First they said they can’t store images, now they say they can…but just “aren’t set to save them”.
The very nature of these images, the dismal record of the government in keeping anything secure…things like images, video, and oh…hundreds of thousands of top secret government documents should immediately cause outrage.
The consistent and blatant corruption and crime by lower level TSA personnel make any trust of scanner operators laughable.
All this pretty much guarantees that these images will be abused in some form or fashion….
…and…my goodness…stop and think for a second. The government is taking naked pictures of citizens. How the heck did we get here?!?!? Why aren’t people freaked out about this? Why are we doing this?!?!?
Well, the machines are expensive. There’s your answer.
But even with that, don’t look to a new Republican Congress to change this. In the increasingly bumper sticker driven world of our political system, “war on terror” trumps any concept of liberty or personal privacy. And again, these things are making alot of money for a district somewhere.
The joys of the oldies station and real music
Sep 3rd
Of course I’m old enough that I don’t need a reason to complain about music…but hear me out. My complaint about “music these days” is that it’s all the same. There is very little diversity in any Genre. Top 40 is processed Sex. Alternative is electronic’y U2 derivative. And can anything define “sameness” better than Praise/Worship/Inspirational? There are a few pockets of originality, but not much.
For the most part, my radio stays off. But a couple a weeks ago my wife used my car and left a new oldies station on–97.7 the Peach. I didn’t really think about it, until about a week later when I realized I’d been listening the The Peach every day.
They play music from the 60′s and the 70′s, and I’m amazed that I’m listening because I’ve never been into that era/genre. Then it occurred to me that:
- The music is actually music. Melodies and everything.
- There are quite a few different sounds from those 2 decades.
- It’s actually very happy music.
- Even the music that’s not happy doesn’t take itself too seriously.
- Most of the music is new to me.
Basically I’m discovering new music from the 60′s and 70′s, because that music is both newer and more musical than current fare. No real punchline here. It’s just amazing that even with all of the new delivery channels, the music keeps getting samer, to the point where the old stuff is more original and exciting.
E-readers: preliminary review of iPad vs. Nook
Jul 29th
As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying out a B&N Nook and an iPad for use in corporate document delivery and overall communications. Here’s a quick snapshot of my findings.
A couple notes, the Kindle didn’t make my initial cut for various reasons, primarily because it’s more of a retail outlet than an e-reader. I probably will try the Sony e-reader eventually. Lastly, I’ll limit comments about the iPad to the evaluated purpose. As a general computing device I find it very cool yet overwhelmingly annoying.
So here is the snapshot eval:
As a book store the B&N option is my choice. B&N books are viewable across several devices (including the iPad), and so far they seem to have a decent selection relative to the other stores (although none have a great selection yet).
As an e-reader the Nook is my choice. The e-ink is a pleasure to read from, especially in sunlight. I’ve used it for a couple hours and it felt like reading a book. The only drawback is that you can’t see it at night, and in dim light it’s a little blurry–unlike a real book. Hopefully this will be better as they improve e-ink screens. But either way with electronic ink you have to have a lamp or use a booklight, which is pretty funny when you realize what you’re doing.
Despite the slowness of the page turns, reading also seemed faster in general because it’s still faster than dealing with pages in a book. And clicking the side buttons was actually alot easier than hitting the touchscreen on the iPad.
The iPad is a TFT screen, which means that it’s like staring at a computer for several hours. I found my eyes feeling strained and tired from looking at the iPad screen, even after adjusting the brightness.
The interface for the Nook is a bit atrocious, and I wouldn’t look forward to helping non-techies on the device. However my daughter, an avid reader, also enjoyed the nook. Even with the interface quirks, the B&N Nook is a winner for reading e-books.
As a corporate communication device the iPad edges out the Nook. There’s just too much you can do with an iPad. You can read PDF’s and power point presentations, as well as keep a photo gallery (which look great when viewed) of reference material. You can store video and audio as well.
Having said that the iPad’s maddening limitations and hod-podge data storage would be a severe limitation on corporate use. I ended up having to email stuff to the iPad in order to display it, and it seems that all the viewing apps want to put them in their own little areas. Hopefully they’ll fix this in the anticipated iOS 4 release.
The Nook in comparison was extremely easy to add documents. It connected immediately via USB with a very straightforward file structure. However, the Nook’s screen is also way too small for corporate documents although they’d look great on the e-ink. Word doc and powerpoint viewing isn’t supported as far as I can tell.
iPad wins this one, but they really need some refining before it’s practical in a corporate environment.
So there you have it. I still think the e-readers rapidly falling price is going to make e-books a tougher and tougher selling point for the iPad, but the iPad is clearly a compelling device. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Technology and schools…rookie mistakes
Jul 27th
Last night I saw a special on the OLPC computers in our area, and whether they’re making a difference. The results seemed to be disappointing.
Then today I saw this article today about how a school board had made a bad hardware decision and had to void a contract. It contained this quote at the end:
“Some parents weren’t happy about the program, judging by comments left on stories at local news outlets. Some kids’ grades have slipped, one comment said, “because it has become TOO important to socialize on the netbook and not turn in assignments or even do the required work.”
Read more: Indiana school district fights HP over netbooks – San Francisco Business Times “
When I was in 6th grade, our middle school had a big room full of TRS-80 computers. It was impressive, but for the most part the school had no idea what to do with them. We would do these little math quizzes and such, but a few of us spent most of our time hacking them to give us arbitrarily good grades on the quiz.
Thus, there seems to be an built-in rookie mistake in most school systems, which is to place the strategic technology thinkin’ on the hardware and not the software. They seem to be buying these things with very little strategic thought with regard to what they’ll be used for.
If the students are using them for facebook, games, etc. It’s not because they’re slackers. It’s because the slacker software is very well spec’d, designed, written, and implemented. Facebook has scads of developers. I’d wager that most of the educational software is either non-existent or just plain bad in these “every kid gets a laptop” plans.
(In many business organizations, technology is seen as a supporting role. Maintain the printers. Replace a bad network card. Implement software some other department decided on. Personally, I see technology as a huge strategic advantage. A company that integrates tech knowhow into it’s strategic thinking and decision making can absolutely whollop competition through better performance and cost savings. Technology shouldn’t be seen as the cost of doing business, it should be seen as a way to outthink your opposition.)
This is not to say that all schools are like this. While touring my alma mater for our 20 year reunion, it was clear that the rooms full of macs were being used for a purpose (multimedia, etc), and that there was an agenda at work.
It seems to me there needs to be a strategic role for technology in educational planning. Otherwise a ton of money is being wasted and alot of folks are getting rich gaming the system.
The E-Reader Wars
Jul 8th
The e-reader wars have begun. Apples iBook/iPad combo is the media darling, but the rest of the world is rapidly comoditizing in response.. B&N’s nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s ‘something’ have all had prices slashed lately. (I would say the name of Sony’s reader except they’d probably require a royalty on the intellectual property.) B&N takes the threat so seriously that they’re basically selling out to the e-future, losing millions to make sure their reader is prominent.
Since I’m paid to be a strategic I.T. person, I see a huge potential for the corporate world. I’d love to use these readers in our various board and committee meetings, which would avoid all that paper and make a more effective meeting. So we’ll be purchasing a demo unit of all the popular readers to see how they would display these documents.
Well, we’ll try all of them except the Kindle. The Kindle doesn’t support the formats we need. It’s basically a one-show pony and only really works with the Amazon store.
Which gets to the first major problem with all these e-readers. They are not conceived and produced as e-readers. They’re primarily e-storefronts for the various companies that make them. There is some notion of an interchangeable product, but it’s still locked down to the whims of the “content providers”.
Media players (iPods, etc) took off because the companies had no choice. People were going to be making mp3′s and playing no matter what. These mp3′s would play on anything that supported the format, and if you wanted to catch that wave you had to make an mp3 player. In this way, Napster set the stage for the iPod.
There is no such analog in the book world. There are not hordes of book lovers loading their paperback collection into book readers. You can download bootleg books, but the majority of folks will be building the collections via purchase…and the occasional Gutenburg freebie.
This will severely curtail the growth of the e-reader market. And you have to wonder how much time they have to capture the imagination of readers. Even with the price cuts, you can buy 15 books and an e-reader….or 30 books. That decision is going to be way too easy for most folks.
And what about libraries? Are you going to be able to borrow an e-copy of a book? Nah, there’s just still too much retail design in the e-reader market. I wonder if anyone has even thought of the corporate document angle?
I do like the Nook so far. I’ll post a full review later after I’ve had a chance to look at the other options. But no matter what people say it’s not going to surpass regular books any time soon.
Meanwhile, I have been going through a couple thousand comics at home. I did this about the time I saw the Marvel comic app for the iPad. Which led to some further thoughts about digital formats…but that’s for another post.
Requiem of the Blue Chair
Jul 6th
There was a funny routine in interactions with my father-in-law. It is funny to me now because of how consistent it was. It happened after most visits where we had a sit-down lunch or dinner.
First, we’d go into the living room and sit in front of the TV in the two blue recliners. Many times we’d have ice cream and/or coffee. Golf would be on. Recliners would be engaged.
Then we’d talk about what was going on with jobs (or college, back in the day). He’d always be interested, with the sly implication that he was making sure that I was taking care of his daughter. As such, there was always some advice or input. Some of it was a bit too conservative for my taste, other times it was really excellent guidance particularly with regard to management and career strategy.
When the ice cream was finished, I’d set my empty bowl down on the coffee table in between the blue chairs. My intent was to return it to the kitchen in a few minutes, but my father-in-law would usually take both his and mine in before that.
About this time I would pick up the paper, which was always lying on the floor in front of the chairs. My father in law would say “hey, you need some light, don’t you?”
I’d say that I was fine, but he’d go turn on the light anyway. Over the years, in the houses where there were several switches, he’d hit the ceiling fan or other lights at random until the right one came on. Isn’t it strange that no matter how long we’ve lived in a house, we still have to hunt for the right switch when there are more than two?
Then after reading some newspaper and perhaps discussing the electronics in the Best Buy ads, he’d give me the TV remote and we’d both either doze off or keep talking about things for a little while longer. If a golf tournament was on we’d discuss golf, even though I’m a terrible golfer. Other times the kids would lobby for Spongebob which meant naptime for the adult males.
This routine occurred in some variant from the time I was 17 years old, which is almost 20 years.
I never realized it was a routine until a couple weeks ago when I sat down in that blue recliner with ice cream in hand and a paper at my feet. While the quiet noise of NickJr. echoed through the dim room, I ate ice cream alone.
Latest economic numbers are in
Jul 2nd
Kinda sad…if you’re one of those people into thriving economies of liberty and democracy.
I maintain that all of this talk about “when things get better” and “when the economy improves” are missing a key component: how?
I believe our economy is:
* Too dependent on government spending (Thanks Dems!)
* Way too biased toward established mega-business (Thanks Reps!)
* Gutting it’s manufacturing base (which results in over-dependence on consumption and debt)
* Way too engineered by elected officials. (Thanks everyone!)
All of these characteristics work toward one result–”bye bye growth”.
Now granted, growth has it’s own set of problems. But our economic model currently depends on it, and before you change that you better understand the implications. But it’s kinda hard to get that picture when several generations have only had half the pieces to the puzzle.
It looks like the Rep’s are going to make significant gains in Congress, partially due to this mess and partially due to the President’s Quixotic health care efforts.
This will not improve anything. It will just result in more anti-growth policies of a different tact. Meanwhile, the sea keeps receding towards the debt tsunami just over the horizon.
When Al met Tipper
Jun 16th
So this is kind of old news. But I’ve been thinking about it for awhile.
Because if you value marriage (your own, or in general) it’s important to think about why a 40 year marriage would end. I look at my wife and I know I want to be with her rockin’ on the front porch, or wheelin’ around an old folks home, or doing whatever it is that the elderly will do when we’re old. Which is in…um….a few years. Unless you count our recent date to Cracker Barrel and Hobby Lobby, in which case the future is now.
After examining family history and current trends, I’m pretty sure she’ll be in some sort of scooter and I’ll have completely lost my mind. Hopefully her scooter will be the levitating kind and I’ll have a genetically engineered cyborg service monkey to remember things for me. If not, then we’re going to need each other. If so, then holy crap…I want her to be there when I say “I told you so!”
Either way, it’s us until the end.
This might be something specific to my generation or just folks I know, but many of us have seen that careers, money, politics, houses, cars, etc. are really dumb things to get married to. And yes, people try to do that. Over-commitments to these are temporary and in the meantime they enslave you.
When the proverbial stuff hits the fan (or just ends up in a pair of Depends), you have your relationships–with God and with each other–and whether or not you believe there’s anything after that, those are far more rewarding.
So why do long term marriages end? We’ve all seen short relationships fueled by emotion and feeling that dissipate pretty quickly in vague I-don’t-love-you-anymore’s. But what can terminate a relationship that was by appearances based on commitment and by fact endured for decades?
I have no idea about any of the specifics regarding our former VP and his wife. But I do know that whatever happened is probably the result of decisions and behaviors over those years and decades. These things don’t just suddenly happen.
As you start to examine the lives of yourself and others, it’s amazing how decisions early on can drastically affect the years to come. Often decisions with negative consequences are made when things are going really well. Song of Songs 2 speaks of the “little foxes” that attack a garden when things are in bloom.
Proverbs 5 contains a pretty heavy set of warnings about consequences. These warnings are generally regarding the disasters from infidelity (loose cars, fast women in particular). These are big things, and obviously when you take a hammer to commitment it can fail suddenly. But what about little day-to-day things?
Proverbs 5, does say one thing that I have taken to heart in regard to this. When the Verse 18 says “may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.” I think it’s saying something regarding consequences of day to day behaviors. Early in our relationships, just about everything is about the other person. Generally we’re out to impress them, cater to them, and show them our best. We want to hang out with them. We bathe. We buy stuff and write things to them and let them know we’re thinking about them.
In short, we were youth and we were rejoicing like a Bryan Adams song. We were probably a bit cheesy and over-the-top.
Yet these are the behaviors of our youth. Why would we abandon them? Have we gotten so busy with kids, jobs, and life in general that we didn’t even realize they stopped? Have we equated maturity with a more stoic interaction? Are we avoiding problems that are much more serious than we want to admit? Have we devolved into desperate security?
There could be many reasons, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to take stock of our daily investment in our marriages. Is it rejoicing?
After consideration of these, I believe that a long term marriage doesn’t end at the end. It ends in the middle and just takes that long to ultimately wind down. The way to prepare for weeks, years and decades ahead is with decisions now. Take some time and/or money each day and week to devote it to your marriage. Make the decision to put some joy in it.
Because a cyborg service monkey is no comfort to an old man, no matter how awesomely cool!
The Approaching Hope of Habakkuk
Jun 7th
So I’ll admit, the last post was a bit of an exercise in tone. Some of the most informative sites I’m reading seem to specialize in a cynical and pessimistic tone. Unfortunately, most of these sites have been an excellent predictor of the increasingly wobbly economy. Certainly better than the commoditized status quo of CNN/Fox, and just about anything is better than the Rah-Rah of CNBC. So I wanted to try my hand a bit.
However, “to the bitter end” conveys an excessively worldly approach on it’s own. So I figured I’d round it out with a little absolute Truth. Fortunately, Chris’ sermon on Sunday provided excellent material.
Habakkuk 3:17 Though the fig tree does not blossom and there is no fruit on the vines, [though] the product of the olive fails and the fields yield no food, though the flock is cut off from the fold and there are no cattle in the stalls,18 Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the [victorious] God of my salvation! 19 The Lord God is my Strength, my personal bravery, and my invincible army; He makes my feet like hinds’ feet and will make me to walk [not to stand still in terror, but to walk] and make [spiritual] progress upon my high places [of trouble, suffering, or responsibility]! For the Chief Musician; with my stringed instruments.
Personally, I think “the bitter end” of what we’re doing is going to ultimately a good thing. Our failed experiment in government-god, fueled by cheap debt and energy, has left us much worse off than we know. It’s time to end it and start being human again, for better or worse.
And, no..this is not some nihilist view that it’s all about to go to crap and never come back. It’s not even a Christian view that we’re in the end times and that it’s all going to crap in preparation for the second coming (although the blood red oil in the gulf, frogs in Greece, earthquakes, etc. do look very end-times-ish).
History is chock full of “bitter ends”, followed up with rebuilding periods of varying lengths and implications. If we are indeed about to see one as I think, it will be an extraordinary opportunity to build something better. And besides, no amount of socioeconomic junk has ever stopped the cause of Christ…even when people have tried to stamp His name on it.
Through it all, God is sovereign and we can and will rejoice in the Lord. No matter what happens we know who’s running the show. And our cup is always overflowing.
The Approaching Tragedy of Keynesianism
Jun 4th
Just a refresher course: We are currently firmly ensconced in the loving shadows of a relatively recent economic theory called Keynesianism. In a nutshell, Keynesianism is a tacit rejection of free market economics, instead relying on government (or other monetary overlords) to actively jump in and out of an economy to make sure “Good Things” happen. By “Good Things” we mean people spend to oblivion to make sure the economy is moving….(these are all my definitions, not Keynes’)
It can be seen as a competitor to Supply Side economics which, while more recent label than Keynesianism, is considered by some to be the engine that built the (formerly) best economies in history–with the help of a whole lotta cheap energy. Supply side economics has slowly had it’s tail handed to it over the last few decades…
…because free market supply-siders sold their soul to wealth accumulation short cuts, trading the basic principles we learned in Henry Ford’s factory for policies that looked like supply side, but weren’t. Flattening out the tax curve does not mean that extra money at the top end will automagically build a factory. People figured this out pretty quickly and the Keynesians made wild progress by calling supply-siders “trickle-downers”.
Of course this only ruined the party for a little while. Trickle-downers soon realized it was a whole lot easier to accumulate gobs of money in a command style stimulating economy. They kept their supply side tattoos for nostalgia, but settled in to the cheap money party just as easy as everyone else…more easy, even.
So instead of building factories whose workers can afford to buy the very products it produces–you take those jobs, move them to factories with the overhead of Mola Ram’s Temple of Doom. Then give your former workers a “service job” and a credit card and convince yourself that the “information economy” means something. A few Ivy Leaguer’s and sharp country boys get rich on finance charges and naked body scanner patents. And when things don’t look so good, just tweak the “seasonal adjustments”.
It’s demand-side genius until the credit is used up.
Boom, everything grinds to a halt, the Keynesian Cult starts chanting “Stim-u-lus…Stim-u-lus…” We all buy iPhone apps that flash “when things turn around…..” on the screen while any true wealth producing industry crashes and burns in bubbles of increasing frequency. A generation that has grown up under this hollowed out debt feuled economy doesn’t see how insane this is. The stock market will go up. It always has.
Meanwhile, the intoxicating smell of free money becomes irresistable to politicians. Keynesian money injections get you elected, especially when they are legitimate, named applications of the economic theory. But hey…doesn’t really matter what you call it as long as they’re building a shovel-ready bridge or a jetfighter in the district.
And before you get to anti-politician, remember this is a completely rational response on their part. We vote that way.
Then slowly but surely the overall market realigns itself around the characteristics of Keynesian policies. No matter what fancy pants economists say, there is always a market. We saw it as our focus on consumption allowed huge swaths of manufacturing to be moved overseas. We see this today as the labor market is being converted to a great cinderblock warehouse of entitlements, defense contracts, and transfer payments.
And unfortunately because the government is the Great Decider in this market, lots of rich and powerful entities will latch on to the government to ensure that “Good Things” are the kinds of things that make them even more rich and powerful. Expect to see huge accumulations of wealth and income disparity as the government decides more and more. The hilarious thing about this is that they’re plowing that wealth into the very dollar they’re exploiting.
Contemporary liberals will mistake the gas for the brake pedal and attempt to remedy this with even more government control. Contemporary conservatives will all apply at Haliburton and Goldman Sachs in the hope of working for government one day. The citizens of the U.S., now primarily consumers, will continue to hang Chinese-made flags out on the 4th of July until grandmom’s social security check bounces. Then everyone will get all mad, go to a tea party meeting, and vote radically the same in the next election. Because no matter the rhetoric, we’re all dedicated Keynesians now. Dedicated to the bitter end.
