Author: paul

quote of the day

The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information ; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information – what it puts in and what it leaves out.

…It used to be that editors and publishers had an idea why they were publishing a newspaper at all (Ralph McGill’s “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is hard to top).

,

[W]hy are newspapers, for instance, having such a hard time? I think it’s because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do. The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information – what it puts in and what it leaves out. [From Hugh McGuire: Porn Knows What It’s For — Do You?]

It used to be that editors and publishers had an idea why they were publishing a newspaper at all (Ralph McGill’s “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is hard to top). Now I’m not so sure. Is it because of the increase in corporate ownership, where a newspaper might be owned by some conglomerate with its own agenda?

not good news

The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018.

Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad.

In 2018, my oldest will be 21, my youngest 20. Professor Black reminds me that they were 6 and 5 when the war started.

2018. Mark your calendars.

The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018.

Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad. And they suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated.

Pentagon officials expressed no surprise at Mr. Qadir’s projections, which were even less optimistic than those he made last year.

This means the surge worked, surely.

[From Send lawyers, guns and money — Dad, get me out of this]

And this isn’t like Vietnam how, again?

lessons learned

First of all, it’s worth learning what makes up 25 pounds of food in a packing box (12 x 12 x 24 or something like that: not as big as a file box)…. It looks like we’ll be doing this regularly: my young Girl Scout was the first to do it and she and her mom liked the experience to make it a family trip.

The four of us spent Sunday morning at a local food bank, sorting through food drive collections and packing boxes of variety goods for needy families. It was a learning experience, in many ways.

First of all, it’s worth learning what makes up 25 pounds of food in a packing box (12 x 12 x 24 or something like that: not as big as a file box). You learn what items you can use to “make weight” and what items you can add to tip the scale without overfilling the box. And you are always looking for some kind of nutritional balance.

Second, but perhaps more important, you learn what’s worth donating when you see a food donation box. A short list, based on yesterday’s exercise, would include peanut butter, tuna, canned soups and meals (Chef-boy-ardee, anyone?), mac and cheese, canned fruits, crackers, and pasta noodles. These are all pretty solid nutritionally and last a long time. What not to include? Ramen noodles: we had 7 cases of them in the first Gaylord we unpacked. Very little of it went to the intended recipients. It has a nutritional value near zero, and we threw away most of them, some of it in the cases it was shipped in. What a waste. (As it turns out, their suggested donations pretty closely mirror my list.)

Cereals are also good choices. For some reason, those were broken out into separate processes, as were bulk/institutional packages.

It looks like we’ll be doing this regularly: my young Girl Scout was the first to do it and she and her mom liked the experience to make it a family trip. For a dozen people to spend three hours and help feed 220 people is pretty good leverage.

do early adopters always predict the market?

The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.”

…Genius Bar access has never been an issue for me: you can sign up online to make an appointment and get one same day, I expect, or if you are a Pro user, you can leverage that priority system

Some alpha geeks is about as useful a term as “some Democrats” or “some government officials” in political reporting. It allows the writer to project his (or those of one or two friends) onto a faceless unnumbered group of disaffected people, none of whom are quoted and whose complaints are delivered without any context.

Radar’s Nat Torkington has a smart take on this. (He’s away on vacation, so I’ll quote him.) “Success breeds risk of failure,” he writes. “Some alpha geeks are turning away from Macs. Not all, but some. The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.” [From Why Apple might not be able to get away with it anymore]

Taking these gripes in order:

  1. Flaky hardware has not been much of an issue for me: I have have drive failures but Apple doesn’t make drives. Everything else has worked pretty well, even this obsolescent iBook.
  2. Genius Bar access has never been an issue for me: you can sign up online to make an appointment and get one same day, I expect, or if you are a Pro user, you can leverage that priority system
  3. By the base apps, I assume the iLife and iWork suites are what’s meant. I didn’t realize there was any perfect software: I’d like to know about it if there is. But for the price of those suites, I think they offer pretty good value and if the alpha geeks are all that, where are the development efforts that will meet their needs? My read of this is that they don’t match the functionality of the Office suite. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to have the same “alpha geeks” claim that the bloat and excess of features of the Office suite was one of the reasons for switching.

This really seems like a weak argument. Maybe alpha geeks are not the core of Apple’s market (I think this is pretty obvious) and the loss of a few won’t matter all that much. It would be interesting to see where they go. Linux? Yeah, there’s a mass-market product 😉 Back to Windows? Good luck with that.

word of the day

One of the farmers we were chatting with said his kid said to him “Dad, if you didn’t raise animals the way you do, I’d probably be a vegan.”… One who eats food that was raised the way it should have been raised… like they used to do it before they learned how to ruin it.

retrovore n. The best moment at this market was when I found out I’m a retrovore. That’s a new word, invented today. One of the farmers we were chatting with said his kid said to him “Dad, if you didn’t raise animals the way you do, I’d probably be a vegan.” He said, “I probably would too.” That’s when they came up with the term “retrovore.” One who eats food that was raised the way it should have been raised… like they used to do it before they learned how to ruin it. —”Vegetables of Mass CONVENTION—Austin Edition!” by OrangeClouds115 in Austin, Texas Daily Kos Jan. 6, 2008. Categories: , , —More information about and related words at Double-Tongued Dictionary.

[From retrovore]

Somewhat related to organitarian.

agreed

I think only three of these are new and surprising–“it’s not just the lenders” seems to me to be mischaracterized, and not to carry the implications Tyler wishes us to drawn from it.

…Cowen claims that blame for the subprime lending crisis can can be apportioned to “predatory borrowers” or people who made false or ambitious statements on their loan applications.

I think only three of these are new and surprising–“it’s not just the lenders” seems to me to be mischaracterized, and not to carry the implications Tyler wishes us to drawn from it. [From Tyler Cowen Learns Four New Things]

As I still don’t know what libertarians really believe, this is one more datapoint. Cowen claims that blame for the subprime lending crisis can can be apportioned to “predatory borrowers” or people who made false or ambitious statements on their loan applications. But who makes money based on the loan going through? There is a disincentive for greedy lenders to look too closely at those papers and some of them got caught in that.

Next up, how patients are to blame for malpractice . . . .

facts are stupid things

People shot and killed are victims of sectarian violence.

People killed by bombs are victims of “al Qaeda.”

People shot and killed are victims of sectarian violence.

People killed by bombs are victims of “al Qaeda.”

“Sophisticated” bombs are all built by Iran.

“Al Qaeda” are Sunni.

Iranians are Shiite.

And only stupid bloggers notice this stuff.

[From Iraq Logic]

quote of the day

Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more.

For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern. [From Social networking through the ages]