Change is good
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The print media is in its death throes.
I remember when this started, in 1995. I was at Interactive Age, a magazine dedicated to covering the Internet. It was closed, quite suddenly, and the reason, I later learned, was the rising cost of newsprint.
But newsprint is not the culprit this time. The price for newsprint today is less than it was then.
It was oil, delivery costs, that killed the industry.
Every talking head telling you "now is the time" to invest in real estate is selling the idea that real estate is a great investment. Every single one. (The home shown was bought last year.)
I'm not selling you anything. If you can find a bargain to live in, something you can afford with a conventional mortgage instrument (30 years fixed), then go for it. But you're not investing. You're getting a place to live in.
Real estate is not like stocks. It takes months to close a real estate transaction. It takes more months for sellers to get real, especially with all these talking heads going "buy buy buy."
This is always true in a real estate crash, but we haven't seen one in over 30 years so there is no one out there who has experienced one and can tell us what to expect. You've got to rely on history.
Every once in a while some leftist dimwit bemoans the fact that liberals don't get good gigs running talk shows.
That's right, dimwit.
Fact is, liberals will never be a force in talk radio, not for a long time, if ever. Any more than you will see Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Or Gene Simmons at a Snoop Dawg concert. (Which may be the more correct analogy.)
As I have said before, talk radio is right wing rock and roll. Liberals are no good at that kind of hate. When they try it, as at Air America, it generally falls flat.
Why? Because liberals, by and large, don't want to be yelled at. We prefer to speak for ourselves. Conservatives all want to cheer a parade. Liberals all want to lead it.
The domination of traffic by the Daily Kos shows the truth of the Internet Thesis.
The IN in the word Internet -- it stands for Intimate.
No Web site has succeeded in scaling intimacy as well as DailyKos. Not Facebook. Not MySpace. Those sites offer people the chance to build monuments to themselves, to flit about like fish in the ocean and form schools. That's not intimacy.
Intimacy means real, individual, one-to-one and one-to-several interaction. It means serious discussion on a serious level. It means getting soul-to-soul with people, and with the subject under discussion.
This is a business story, people. It's not a political story. Kos simply has better tools than any similar site on the planet, and the best news is they're getting better.
If black Mississippi were a separate country, its infant mortality rate for 2005 would behigher than that of Panama, Jamaica, Jordan, Mauritius, Bosnia, Latvia, Estonia --higher than 97 of the 224 countries measured by the CIA World Factbook.
In that year, Mississippi lost 17 out of every 1,000 live births. This means that, out of every 1,000 kids born in Mississippi that year, 17 did not make it to one year old.
I wonder what God thinks of that? (Oh, rates for white infant mortality in Mississippi are close to the U.S. national average of 6.37. Singapore led in 2007 at 2.30 deaths per 1,000 births.)
Continue reading "The Most Shameful Statistic of Our Time" »
As regular readers of this blog know, Alberto Gonzalez is a Rice graduate. Class of '79. He was a member of Lovett College which (believe it or not) calls its student government the Central Committee.
I'm a Rice grad too. Class of '77. So it pains me to say this. Gonzalez must be impeached.
Regardless of the merits of the case, it's pretty clear that Congress has completely lost confidence in Gonzalez and the President likes him.
Here's why.
You haven't heard from Rice scientists lately, so let's take care of that as we start a new week.
Dr. Boris Yakobson and his team in the Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science department have come up with a conceptual framework for a Boron Buckyball. (Boron, for those unfamiliar with it, has the atomic number of 5. It sits on your periodic table snugly between berylium and carbon, and is structurally most similar to aluminum.
Continue reading "Rice Science Imagines a Buckier BuckyBall" »
We were having dinner last night, parents and two teenagers laughing merrily, when something important occurred to me.
Today's generation of kids, the Internet Generation -- they're good people.
Sure there are exceptions. The news tells you about the exceptions. But I know more kids than my own and taken all in all this is a fine generation of American young people.
I would like to take some credit for this but I can't. Or I won't. Both of my own kids have had troubles growing up, troubles they have faced squarely and dealt with. I suspect this is true in many families. No, most families. No, practically all families.
Few companies have worked harder to be worthy of their trust than Google. (To the right, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.)
You can easily argue along the margins, about their cooperation with China, for instance, or some aspects of their San Francisco deal (whatever happened to that by the way) but I think they have tried to live up to their informal motto, "don't do evil."
What do I make, then, of the protests against Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, and its privacy implications?
No company, and no government, should be given absolute faith, absolute trust, and absolute control over the data users create. Everyone needs to have someone looking over their shoulder, someone with the power to cause enormous trouble.
In the American system we call such things "checks and balances."
No war can be won on a partisan basis.
This is true for the War in Iraq, but it is equally true for the War Against Oil that must follow it.
There's a great example of this in today's news, from Canada. The Conservative government's Minister for the Environment, John Baird, testified yesterday that meeting the Kyoto emissions targets will lead to the worst recession in 60 years. He predicted rising unemployment and higher home heating costs.
Liberals who support Kyoto accused Baird of "scaremongering," but this is beside the point. Don Martin of The National Post called it all politics, and that's just the problem.
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