Dana Blankenhorn

The End of E-Mail (As We Know It)

It's time to admit that e-mail, defined strictly by a client like Outlook Express, is dead.

Over the last several months I have been losing increasing amounts of e-mail sent to my POP3 e-mail box, whose address is based on my old Web site domain.

When this e-mail comes from business associates, from companies I'm writing about, I can make a call and get it re-sent. Sometimes I have to watch it fly away from my Mailwasher screen because I neglected to whitelist it, and that's embarrassing. Sometimes I never see it at all.

Recently I had a personal e-mail, sent from someone I knew, fall through the cracks. The story involves other people so I can't detail it. But the result nearly cost our family dearly. It still threatens us. The person in question was not a friend, they did not re-send, the e-mail was not expected, and the failure of that e-mail to arrive caused enormous misunderstandings, a short time later, whose repercussions may be felt for years.

People assume when they send an e-mail that it will get through. When it doesn't, they may believe the loss was deliberate. That's the way we are. We hit send and expect results.

Joi Ito For Prime Minister

Sometimes an answer leaps off the page at you and you have to state it, even when you know it's impossible.

Joichi Ito should be Japan's Prime Minister. He should at least make the run.  Or fund someone to run in his place. 

In a commentary on his home country published in today's New York Times,  Joi explains his nation's post-war history, explains what's wrong with the politics there, and does it all in a way even a gaijin (foreigner) can understand. He even explains some Japanese political terms in ways that made me fall in love with the place all over again.

Thanks to American anti-communism, Japan is stuck with a political elite, and a system, based on heavy industry, on deference, and on pork-barrel log-rolling. With the country's baby-boomer generation now preparing to retire, its leadership choices are stark.

The problem is that to get ahead in politics, everyone is supposed to start at the bottom, which is a boring, awful place to be:

I’ve rejected entreaties by both parties to run for office and have no regrets; according to my friends in junior positions in the Liberal Democratic Party, their first years have been spent in minor working groups, never being allowed to speak up at or attend any meetings of importance.

"Maybe it’s time for a revolution," he concludes, and he's absolutely right. The structure of modern Japanese governance was set by the U.S. The system is corrupt. The future looks bleak.

The Bigger Price of Autocracy

The autocratic mindset of the Bush Administration, from the Decider Guy to the politicization of every single part of the government, is descried by Democrats as anti-democratic, as being unfair, as being illegal, as being un-American.

But the real truth is worse. It's just bad business.

What is true in business is true in government. The fewer people you listen to, the more you make your organization a cult of personality, the worse its decision-making becomes. The worse its execution becomes. And this cost increases after your autocrat leaves.

To some extent this is inevitable in business. Every great business is entrepreneurial. Every great business has one leader, one vision, one direction, one strategy. Most businesses get in trouble when their entrepreneur leaves. IBM did. Apple did. Microsoft is in the process of doing that. Smart companies, like General Electric, choose new entrepreneurs carefully, and give them time to put their new visions in place. The GE of Reginald Jones was different from that of Jack Welch is different from that of Jeffrey Immelt (right).

But while strong leadership is imperative in business, you also need a great team. You need great people to implement your policies, to market your products, to guarantee customer satisfaction, and to retain good employees. If a business makes all its personnel decisions based exclusively on loyalty to the boss, that business is doomed.

Rate Cuts Won't End the Mortgage Crisis

The attempted bail-out of the mortgage market isn't going to work.

Here's why:

1. The obvious reason is you're buggering the dollar. You make dollars cheaper to borrow, they're worth less. The Euro is now worth $1.40, and as the impact of this filters down it's going to become worth more -- a lot more. That imports inflation, and inflation will force the rate back up before long, leaving us right where we started.
2. The less-obvious reason is that brokers and hedge funds were allowed to bundle a variety of mortgage fruits into seemingly-identical instruments. A $100 million "jumbo" mortgage bond will have sub-prime notes mixed in with the good stuff, and there's no way to price the risk. In the past bonds were small pieces of a single, large, predictable risk. Now they're sweepings of all the various risks a broker can get.

The Duke of Oil - Chapter 19

The following is a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents, which is updated as new chapters are written.

The Duke of Oil is the third in a series of sci-fi novels of the type known as alternate history. What's different is that this series takes place in our time, with characters familiar in your real life.

The first book in the series, The Chinese Century, was written late 2004. Its table of contents is here. The second,  The American Diaspora, was written in 2005. The table of contents for that book is here.

A synopsis of the series is here.

The Right Analogy for Bush

In retrospect one of the dumbest things liberals did regarding George W. Bush was compare him to Adolph Hitler.

For one thing it's an insult to Hitler. Hitler may have been evil, but at least he was good at being evil. The tens of millions whose deaths were attributable to his horrors attest to that.

On the other hand, Bush is not good at doing evil. If Bush had been in charge of the Holocaust the national language of Germany today would be Yiddish. (rimshot) There is nothing Bush  and his people have touched, not one thing, which has worked out, whether you thought his aim was good, bad or indifferent.

Iraq? Not working. Afghanistan? Not working. The dollar? Not working. The trains don't run, and the planes don't run on time. His supporters had excuses for all of it, and all of them are now fleeing his legacy, but it's like you put one of these morons in charge of anything and they immediately put on a dunce cap.

So the right analogy for Bush isn't to Hitler, it turns out, but Mussolini. Mussolini, in many ways, was a joke.  About the only thing he did well was to accumulate power. This moron's vaunted army needed 8 months to take out Ethiopia! Instead of making Italy feared, he made it the laughingstock of Europe. In some ways it remains so, two generations later.

Best Wishes

Get well soon.

Fortunately, the Patriots are slaughtering the Chargers so you're not missing much.

Oh, wait. They have a TV in the room. So you're not missing anything.

See you next week.

Piss In Their Pants Democrats

Losing becomes a habit.

Lose often enough and you can't conceive of winning. You don't accept delivery from change. You're a loser. (The source of the graphic is a right-wing idiot, but in this personification of the Democratic Party establishment he's dead-on.)

Washington Democrats are losers. They have become habituated to losing. The only way the party can achieve success is by replacing the whole lot of 'em.

The best example of this attitude is in a memo Digby of Hullabaloo recently got. "A very savvy friend of mine, a political player of many years," wrote this, and he's still worried about Dukakis:

The current overconfidence in Democratic quarters though is a bit unwarranted. One only needs to remember Mike Dukakis and his 17-point July1988 lead.

Michael F-ing Dukakis? This is piss in their pants Democracy in action. Dukakis ran in 1988, in a High Thesis year, a point at which the Nixon Thesis of Conflict had been validated by the Reagan-credited victory in the Cold War. The assumptions Reagan ran on -- low taxes, government is evil, kill 'em all -- were the common assumptions of the American people at that time. Dukakis leaned against those assumptions, saying "competence" was the issue.

But competence is never the issue. Not in politics. Politics is always the issue in politics. Always. That so-called 17 point lead was just a generic candidate running in a vacuum. The Thesis had not yet been heard from. Once it was the knees jerked and it was all over.

This Week's Clue: Health or Medicine?

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 37  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of September 17.

Enjoy.

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Recently I began blogging a new healthcare beat over at ZDNet.

I'm certain their idea was to bring in some advertisers who work in medical IT. I also assumed I would be writing most of my stories about technology -- about topics like electronic medical records and medical gadgets.

Instead I'm often blogging basic questions of human liberty.

Kubler-Ross and the Housing Crisis

Before the housing recession started most of the so-called analysts who thought there might be a downturn predicted it would be worst on the coasts, where housing prices had risen fastest.

I disagreed. I strongly believed the problem would be worst where homebuilding has been fastest. And it seems I'm right.

Every market fall goes through the five stages of grief, so this has a long way to go. (Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who came up with the five stages of grief in 1969, died herself in 2004.)

To review, these are:

• Denial (this isn't happening to me!)      
• Anger (why is this happening to me?)
• Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if...)
• Depression (I don't care anymore)
• Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever comes)