Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Give US the Money

The bank bailout amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at institutions that made poor decisions, while rewarding their executives with millions of dollars in cash, stock options, and perqs. Precisely what the banks are doing with our money, no one knows. Transparency seems to have been engineered out of the legislation.

Meanwhile, the Big 3 automakers come with their hats in the their hands, warning of the direst of fates for millions of workers in their supply chain and the workers they employ that enjoy so much the benefits of having a job.

Then there is Iraq, a place where American contractors have squandered $100 billion on infrastructure that is coming unwound as quickly as the checks are cashed, and falls to bits like so many sand castles in the desert wind.

The US, where bridges collapse periodically, where children are schooled in out-buildings. where the rail system is as modern as the Edison light bulb, gets nothing. Worse, the standard of living is falling for all but the wealthiest of Americans. They get paid less and less to do more and more. They live with the constant threat that their jobs may simply be erased, that their health care may bankrupt them, that they might lose their house because their American dream arrived with a poison pill of readjusting interest rates, that their government, which dutifully collects their taxes with brutal efficiency, will be incapable of meeting its contractual obligation to help them when disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane, an epidemic, a terrorist attack (which they promise is already gift-wrapped and in the mail), or one of the countless other threats from a planet that is being plundered and swathed in the muck of industrial production.

The model has outlived its usefulness. Even the 'Maestro', Greenspan, has to scratch his head and wonder aloud 'I never knew this could happen.'

Let's have the government do something for the citizens. I know it's a radical idea. It's not even my idea. The Obama economic stimulus package seems to be aimed at the goal of rebuilding the infrastructure of the nation, and modernizing our decrepitude. I applaud this. We must be vigilant, however, and proceed with our eyes wide open, with the GAO keeping its pencils always sharpened, with careful Congressional oversight, because, where large sums of money are being doled-out, corruption and graft are attracted like buzzards to road-kill.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Fear No Moose

moose Republican Spin-Masters are all saying the same thing: 'Democrats fear the addition of Sarah Palin to the the GOP ticket,' and I couldn't agree more. When I read that Gov. Palin is a life-long NRA member whose favorite meal is moose stew, I broke out in a cold sweat...

Moose, as you may not know, were created by God as the most Liberal of His woodland creatures, and are therefor greatly in favor of gun control. They are also steadfastly opposed to drilling for oil in their habitat.

As a matter of fact, moose privately fear that a McCain administration would open moose themselves to drilling. A single moose, richer in oil than all other mammals except the walrus and the Sultan of Brunei, could supply enough oil to power all of the lights in Wasilla, Alaska, for 16 hours.

Monday, August 25, 2008

One Year in the 'Burbs- Part I

human factory

On the occasion of my one-year anniversary in Suburbia, or "not-Manhattan" as I have been known to phrase it, I thought I would offer a few notes on the impact this experience has had on the complex and delicate clockwork tangle that constitutes my inner mechanism.

Let me first acquaint you with my mind-set vis-a-vis Suburbia, such as it was prior to our urban decampment, by offering up this quote from Lewis Mumford's California and the Human Horizon, written around the year of my birth (that's like 40 years ago) :

"Physiologically the worse for wear, our American reaches his dwelling, where he finds a house and a wife in the midst of what is usually called ideal suburban surroundings: a green ghetto, half natural, half plastic, also cut off from human contact, where his wife has for her chief daily companions in her solitude the radio set, the soap opera, the refrigerator, the automatic mixer, the blender, the vacuum cleaner, and , if she is lucky, the second car. They and their children finally, together or by turns, immobilize themselves before a television screen, where all that has been left out of the actual world, all their unlived life, flickers before their eyes, in images that give a faked sense of the realities they have turned their backs to, and the impulses they have been forced to repress. Even here, the machine-conditioned American has no proper life of his own: for what he sees and hear and interprets contains only so much of the real world as the great corporate organizations, military, commercial, and political, which control this medium, will permit for the furthering of their own machine expanding, power-buttressing, or money-making ends. Freedom of selection is chiefly the the freedom of choosing more of the same from another channel."

It still brings tears to my eyes, and he continues brilliantly for another twelve pages!

Well, it wasn't long after my arrival in Manhattan in 1998 that I detected the effects which perpetual overstimulation has on the nervous system. Walking down First Avenue one morning, I noticed that I was feeling rather like a french fry dropped into hot oil, with my every synapse crackling and sizzling from excessive activation. Eventually though, the mind reaches equilibrium with its environment- one acclimates to one's surroundings. All neuroses and anxiety disorders for which New Yorkers are famous result from this saturation of the mental floodplain. The pumps fail to keep up with the challenging influx of experience.

30bruni_CA1.600 Ten years later, in contemplation of my farewell, I searched inwardly to discern what I might be leaving behind, and the vague understanding I achieved was serendipitously captured by Frank Bruni in an amusing NY Times piece. He was attempting to explain why Manhattan diners would wish to eat al fresco, under unpleasantly demanding environmental circumstances. He came up with three theories and this was my favorite:

"Theory 2: New Yorkers have a highly evolved, unrivaled knack for glossing over the limitations, absurdities and dubious habitability of an unforgiving metropolis.

They walk into a friend’s 545-square-foot two-bedroom (one bath, no tub) and stammer: 'Just $4,965 a month for this?' They walk into the Spotted Pig at 5:55 pm on a Tuesday night and exult: 'Only a 90-minute wait?'

And they sit in a sidewalk cafe — sirens blaring, vagrants swearing and jackhammers jittering all around them — and sigh: 'It’s so relaxing to soak up the street life.'"

My own theory went something like: "Manhattan is great because you have the very best of everything, at your finger-tips, twenty-four hours a day." This was formulated around the time that I successfully located parts for the 40-year old toilet in our apartment, which, incidentally, were delivered same-day, by messenger, from Flushing, Queens. But that was all before the flourishing of Internet shopping.

After our move to the 'burbs I experienced a mild, yet fully-formed identity crisis. A shrub torn from the comfort of its nurturing asphalt garden, I dangled with my forlorn root ball exposed to scrutiny. Was it intact and vital? I did not know. What had I left behind? One thing about having a Manhattan address: you never tire of defining yourself by invoking it before strangers, and thereby it becomes part of you.

Let me return to my Year in Suburbia in Part Two of this post, but leave you with one clue: it all comes down to Summer vs. Winter.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Do I Like the Kindle?

kindlesk Well, yes, in a word, I do. As a matter of fact I like it very much. I suppose whether or not you would like it depends on what kind of reader you are.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Kindle, it's an electronic book reading device from Amazon.com. It's kind of pricey at $400 but, if you are the type of person who likes to make connections between many disparate sources as you read, and if reading makes you think and if thinking makes you write, then you should absolutely own one.

The main reason is that you can carry all of your reading materials with you in one slim volume, along with all of your clipped articles, highlighted paragraphs, notes in the margin, lists of books you want to read, periodicals that you would typically heap on the recycle pile-- just about everything you need for a reading-centric intellectual life.

I won't prattle on about the feature set, I don't want to be mistaken for a gadget-obsessive. This isn't about technology, it's about how electronic books can become the binding glue which sticks together the shifting collection of ideas that constitutes one's inner evolutionary process. Sure the "digital ink" is great, and way better than LCD, and it's true that the Whispernet content delivery and backup is fabulous, but the main thing is: the Kindle is a platform for consolidating your thought process and pinning it down to the dissection board. And doesn't that sound appealing?

Monday, March 31, 2008

Top 5 Things I Would Change about the iPhone

Don't misunderstand me- I like the iPhone a lot. I was pretty happy with my previous multimedia phone, a Samsung, but the iPhone is altogether different. It's the computer you will use the most. BTW- nothing I say in this post will be original, I am just trying to consolidate a few observations, since people are very curious about it when they see it. The most curious are the folks who really want to buy one but are waiting for it to "improve". To be frank, it's good enough now. However, if you want a few benchmarks for improvement, here are a few:

1- Flash, Flash, Flash. SteveJobs should be ashamed. Safari mobile browser does not support Flash. I still can't believe it. This means a rather large percentage of the web is represented by a "missing plug-in" icon. Restaurants, for example, seem particularly fond of Flash, and many many sites have their menus embedded in a Flash document. I'm thinking that there are more than a few folks who would want to use their mobile device to check out restaurants. The excellent Google maps application, which performs just as advertised, partly makes up for this glaring omission, but not completely.

2- Cut and paste. Yep. Can't do it. Wanna copy something out of an email and paste it in your calendar? You'll need a pen and paper, or maybe just another mobile device.

3- Voice-memo. MIA. Sure, there is an application for cracked phones, but if you don't want to mess around with jail-breaking, you are going to have to wait. I suspect this will be one of the early dominoes to fall with the release of the SDK. June '08?

4- No stereo bluetooth. I own a really geeky set of bluetooth headphones with a big blinking LED on the side and an antenna that sticks up. I do have a more slick looking pair, but it's much more fun to wear the geeky ones in public. Too bad I can't listen to my music with them.

5-Video recorder. Anyone who knows what I do will understand why I miss this.

6-Real GPS. Triangulation works adequately in most cases, but GPS is far superior for turn-by-turn navigation and finding precise coordinates. I could never have created my stroller-friendly Central Park East/West Crossing map with the iPhone.


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Ok, so it's six things.  Actually, seven, now that i think of it. A lot of folks complain about AT&Ts EDGE network, which is the data network that iPhone runs on. Yes it's pretty sluggish, and worthless at times in Manhattan. I find that the overall impact of this is mitigated to a high degree by the WIFI functionality. Most of my data-intensive browsing and YouTube watching tends to happen over a wireless 802.11 connection. Nonetheless, AT&T apparently has an entirely separate 3G data network. I'll admit I haven't done my research on this, but I think if you buy one of their laptop mobile networking cards you'll be running on something much speedier than the iPhone does. If this is true, it seems kind of stupid.

Enough complaining, i still love it. Email and web-browsing. Synced contacts and calendar. IPod functionality-- with lots of storage. An elegant operating system and a bright screen with sufficient real estate to enjoy a movie. It's a great piece of technology. It could maybe use 25% more battery capacity....