This Is A Place For Open Discussion

Posted: December 12, 2010 in Uncategorized
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But this is a kingdom not a democracy. I have an advanced degree in philosophy and love debate. I’m very tolerant of unpopular “politically incorrect” views even when I disagree with them. What I won’t countenance is outright nonsense, venom, and spleen. “Hit and run” posts by anonymous posters won’t be tolerated. Name calling I’ll handle on a case-by-case basis. Something like “James, you’re an idiot if you believe…” would likely be tolerated whereas “James, you fucking kike…” probably would not. Let’s keep our abuse of each other free of scurrilousness. I hope I don’t regret starting this blog, which I’ve done in response to the astounding lack of real discussion and debate in everyday life, especially when it comes to certain topics like religion and gender. Got something on your chest? Well here’s a good place to vent. Let’s see how it goes.

If you’d like to start a topic, get in touch with me with an abstract if not a full post and I’ll let you know if you can be a guest poster.

Oklahoma Tornado Horrors Sure To Bring Out The Hypocrite In Its Republican Senators

Posted: May 21, 2013 in Politics, Safety, Republicans
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Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn, Oklahoma’s senators have more in common than their party affiliation. Both have repeatedly voted against disaster aid for other parts of the country, most recently Hurricane Sandy.

With 50 dead (at least 20 children) and perhaps a total of 120 or more fatalities expected, and with countless homes leveled, businesses destroyed, and with damage to publicly-owned infrastructure, how long do you think it will take for them to make the case for getting some Federal disaster aid for their constituents?

My bet is that we’ll hear from them in the next few days, if not today. And yet, according to this article in  HuffingtonPost.com:

Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn…are fiscal hawks who have repeatedly voted against funding disaster aid for other parts of the country. They also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers federal disaster relief.

Late last year, Inhofe and Coburn both backed a plan to slash disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. In a December press release, Coburn complained that the Sandy Relief bill contained “wasteful spending,” and identified a series of items he objected to, including “$12.9 billion for future disaster mitigation activities and studies.”

Yes, of course, being prepared for future such disasters must be the epitome of wasteful spending.

Is It Time For A Second Revolution?

Posted: May 5, 2013 in Politics, Radicalism, Uncategorized
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In the U.S., we’re in a crazy period. Home values have been rising and “flipping” is starting up again in places like Miami and Las Vegas, recently the stock market has been closing at record highs. The jobs report tells us that jobs are being created at a very slow pace and that new unemployment claims are down, in part because some have simply stopped looking for work.

At the same time, the new jobs don’t pay as well as the jobs they are replacing and the income gap is wider than ever and widening more every day.

Is it time for a revolution?

No, I don’t mean an armed insurrection, but I do ask whether it’s time to hit the streets and let the powers that be that we don’t like the way things are going and want to see some positive changes.

I’m 66, and when I was in college, there was a minor insurrection at the University of California at Berkeley that later became called “The Free Speech Movement.” In a nutshell, the movement protested a campus policy that the only politicking allowed on campus was for the Democratic and Republican parties. This policy prohibited the setting up of information stands in support of libertarians, Communists, the Congress for Racial Equality, and other non-mainstream interests.

One of the leaders of the movement, grad student in Physics Mario Savio, gave one of the greatest short impromptu speeches of the 20th Century, if not all time. It’s less than 500 words in three paragraphs, and the last paragraph is the one to remember:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Is it time yet? If not, when? What will it take for us to get pissed off enough to take the country away from the overlords?

Apple Needs A New Steve Jobs. How About Jack Dorsey?

Posted: March 21, 2013 in Business, Science and Technology
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Apple wavers between being the #1 or #2 most profitable companies in the world, but Apple depends upon one thing more than any other for continued success. Innovation in the sense of either leapfrogging current technology and taking it to a new level or coming up with a product you didn’t know you needed until they showed it to you. the iPhone is a good example of the former and the iPad is an example of the latter.

At this time, predictions of possible new products are pretty much a yawn.

Steve Jobs was a genius at thinking up new products. He was equally good at design such that the entire product line had/has a very consistent and distinct look to it. It wasn’t just the innovation and ease of use that sold Apple products, they look cool, too, which contributed to a fan base paying high undiscounted prices for their products. An Apple laptop can cost round about twice as much as a similar machine from HP, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, or any of their ilk.

Let’s face it, Apple’s current CEO, Tim Curry, is no Steve Jobs. He may be a great businessman but does anyone believe he’s dreaming up any new superproducts? I don’t think so. Sure, there are very creative people at Apple. Dreamers. However, there’s no scuttlebutt of another world beater product that has the high tech world abuzz. Without a replacement for Steve Jobs, Apple will continue to be on decline. Right now, it’s losing market share in the smartphone area to Android phones every day. iPhone users are making the switch to Samsung Galaxies and other high end Android phones.

What Apple needs is another idea man, and there is another idea man out there: Jack Dorsey.

Who is Jack Dorsey? He’s the guy who invented Twitter. He’s also the founder and CEO of Square, the company offering that device you can stick in your smartphone’s audio port and accept credit cards. No more embarrassing/humiliating approval processes as used to be the case. If you have a checking account, you can have a Square device. He’s a dreamer who gets things done and makes things happen, which is something Apple needs dearly.

Before anyone points it out, there’s a problem: Jack Dorsey seems to be thinking of running for New York mayor. That would be interesting, but I think Apple needs him more.

Pope Francis’s White Smoke Could Turn Into A Black Cloud

Posted: March 14, 2013 in Religion
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While Pope Francis (formerly Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires) is basking in an aura of sublime saintliness, one wonders if the skeletons in his closet will come out to haunt him.

“What skeletons?” you ask.

Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky chronicled how the Church and Bergoglio were involved in this dark era. As described by Hugh O’Shaughnessy of The Guardian in 2011:

[Verbitsky] recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment. (source)

If you go to the same source, you’ll also read about allegations that he turned two priests over to the government and who then joined the ranks of “The Disappeared,” the numerous dissidents who vanished during the political turmoil of the 1970′s.

It’s possible (remotely, I admit) that following the first Pope to resign due to infirmity, Francis may be the first Pope to resign amid scandal.

Here’s Why Ending Saturday Service Is The Wrong Way To Keep The USPS Going

Posted: February 20, 2013 in Business, Government, Uncategorized
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The United States Postal Service (USPS) intends to eliminate Saturday service cum August. They are doing this in an attempt to become profitable for they are losing money like a seive.

Its problems don’t have anything to do with mismanagement. A couple decades ago, we paid our bills with checks sent through the mail. Many of us still corresponded through the mail, too. The Post Office was supported through business mail (aka “junk mail”) to a larger degree than today. Business interests now pester us online where the cost per ad view is far less than that using even low-cost bulk mail rates (and let’s not forget printing costs, either).

Congress controls the Post Office, and they have made life tough on the Post Office by requiring it to prefund 75 years’ worth of future Post Office retiree health benefits in just 10 years. The agency has paid more than $21 billion into a special fund for this purpose.

No other government agency, for some reason, is similarly burdened.

The Post Office is saddled with some unique labor problems, too. It’s committed to labor contracts with no-layoff clauses, making it hard to adjust to the lower volume without either raising prices or cutting back on services. It’s one of the few industries which responds to lower volume by making its services less attractive. You don’t need to be a Harvard economist to see that that doesn’t work.

Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors in the field of delivering physical documents and packages.

This is why the USPS has decided to end Saturday service.

Here’s the problem with that “solution,” though: Look at their history of raising the price of postage on a regular basis to cover their costs.

If cutting Saturday delivery doesn’t do the trick, what’s next? Cutting Wednesday delivery?

No, cutting service is the wrong approach.

Why is the Post Office the only government agency saddled with having to make a profit or to be at least revenue neutral? (And if you run a business shooting to be revenue neutral, you’re going to aim at making a profit anyway, in order not to be revenue negative.)

Perhaps in response to lobbying from the Post Office’s main competitors, it operates under rules making it relatively unable to take away business from those interests. Whenever it starts to impinge on the UPS, FedEx, Pitney-Bowes and other competitors, Congress gets complaints about how unfair it is for a government agency to be taking business away from the private sector.

The Post Office is really an amazing agency, despite the complaints which most people pass along without really thinking about them. What it does every single day is almost astounding. Even without using Priority Mail, most stamped items can go cross-country in just two or three days. Shorter distances often are delivered overnight on just a first-class stamp. I mailed two Netflix movies yesterday. I’ll have the new movies in tomorrow’s mail. Amazon regularly delivers goods in about two days from the day of order even under their supposed “standard” 5-7 day shipping that costs me nothing. Netflix and Amazon couldn’t do these things without the cooperation of the Post Office.

It’s time to speak up and protest the end of Saturday delivery. Things will just get worse from there.

More Bad News For Apple: Wozniak Badmouths The iPhone

Posted: February 17, 2013 in Business, Science and Technology
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In my last post I accused Apple of entering its late middle age. In many areas, phones powered by Google’s Android are overshadowing and bettering the iPhone.

The banter between loyal Apple fans vs. the world will probably never end, but it doesn’t help Apple fans any more now that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has admitted that he thinks the iPhone is “… somewhat behind with features in the smartphone business.” That’s right, he said it. He also mentioned in the same statement that Samsung is a big competitor because they are currently making great products – key word there, currently.

Here is the exact quote from Wozniak during his visit at the Businessweek’s Best Brand Awards:

“I am proud that we have such loyal fans. But this loyalty is not given; the need to have the best products is always there. Currently we are in my opinion somewhat behind with features in the smartphone business. Others have caught up. Samsung is a big competitor. But precisely because they are currently making great products.” (here)

Apple has its fan(atic)s, and while they won’t jump ship right away, they are already seeing Android phone users enjoying features unavailable on iPhones. Here’s a rundown of 10 features as yet unavailable on the iPhone (read about any you don’t understand here):

Larger screens on Androids
NFC support
Custom homescreen widgets
Standard USB ports
Choice of software keyboards
Attach any file to eMails
Share using any service you want
Viewable file system
Haptic feedback
Pen support

We might add one more very important feature: bang for the buck. Almost all Apple products cost anywhere from 50% to 200% more than equivalent non-Apple products. In fact, I can’t think of any that don’t.

Now, not all of these features are available on every Android device, but none of them are available on the iPhone.

While mindless Apple fans will doubtless line up for the Apple iPhone 6, 7, and 8 when it comes along, expect the lines to get shorter as time goes by. Unless a Steve Jobsless Apple gets a lot smarter than it’s been lately, it’ll continue to lose ground. It may, finally, have to give in to the open system world. Part of what’s holding it back is that it’s a closed system with a tendency to use proprietary designs where standard alternatives are available.

If Steve Wozniak still has any influence at Apple, perhaps Apple can be saved. If not, Apple may go the way of the Motorola, Nokia, and Sony cell phone brands. Remember when you could say that Nokia was the leading cell phone maker and seemed almost unassailable? It’s still hanging in there. Apple may not disappear entirely either but, like Nokia, it could become a minor maker if it doesn’t address the threat Google poses.

Apple Creaks Along Into Its Late Middle Age

Posted: February 12, 2013 in Business, Computers, Science and Technology, Society
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If you had asked anyone even just a decade ago if Apple Computers would become the richest corporation in history, you’d have received a huge round of guffaws from a skeptical financial community. Overthrow the likes of Exxon? You need to get your head examined.

But then Steve Jobs got busy and along came items like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and of course their anchor product, the MacBook laptop computer. Their interfaces are well-known for their ease of use, which might be described as “so easy, a caveman can use it.” Apple users have actually been encouraged to be proud of NOT knowing how a computer works on the inside. As a long-time Windows user, I know a bit about the hardware and softwRE architecture of my computers. Were I an Apple user, I’d be happily ignorant of things like drivers, DLL’s,

Apple users have smugly asserted that their computers are immune to viruses and malware. That’s only true to a degree, and mostly because the Apple user has tended to be a small target, a relatively poor student or a small business. For every Mac, it’s been estimated there are around seven PC’s out there. If you’re shooting critters against the side of a barn, it’s much easier to hit a fox than a rat. Relatively speaking, Mac’s simply haven’t been worth the effort of the bad guys.

There has been a belief propagated by Apple users that Apple hardware is better and more reliable than that of its PC rivals, but that simply isn’t true. Apple computers are made in the same Chinese factories making HP, Dell, and other PC’s. Apples arrive DOA and fail at much the same rate as Windows machines. Its so-called “geniuses” offering Apple support in the stores are the same sort of guys working down the street at the computer repair store. Some good, some brilliant, and some totally incompetent.

However, that is changing and now Mac users should be running anti-bad guys software, too.

If Apple only made computers, it wouldn’t be the success it is. Steve Jobs steered Apple in totally new directions with its non-computer products, especially the iPhone at first, but then the iPad.

Speaking of software, while we talk in terms of Mac’s, iPods, iPhones, and iPads, it’s really the software which has made Apple the success it is. As I said, the hardware is rather pedestrian and not all that different from what you can get in the Windows world. It has a certain consistent look to it because if there’s one area where Apple wins hands down, it’s in the consistency of their products appearance. They all look sleek and well-made, but that’s mostly just for show. Looking better doesn’t make them better.

More than anything else, it’s been the iPhone which has propelled Apple to become the richest corporation in the world. However, along comes Google with its Android phones. Suddenly, the iPhone doesn’t look like the unique world-beater it once was, and I’m not even referring to Steve Jobs’ “Your holding the phone the wrong way” defense of his phone having a poor reception problem and dropping lots of calls.

Take my phone for example, it’s an HTC EVO 4G 3D. Yes, it does take actual 3D photos and videos viewable on the phone itself. No iPhone can do that yet. Its 4.3″ display is noticeably larger than the iPhone’s 3.5″ display. The pixel density on the iPhone is technically better, but most people won’t notice the difference unless the phones are actually displaying the same image side-by-side.

Yes, Apple phones have quite a few more apps than Android phones, but many of those apps overlap each other with slight differences in features. The more desirable ones are also available for Android phones, or else there’s an equivalent or better one. Perhaps the several Siri-like programs for Android aren’t quite as good yet, but then Siri isn’t all that good, either. Entire blogs are devoted to the dumb things Siri sometimes says. And let’s face it, what can Siri tell you that you can’t find quickly and with better accuracy using software that isn’t voice-based?

Apple’s browser, Safari, is just okay. Most Apple users end up with Firefox or, embarrassingly to Apple, Google’s Chrome as their everyday browser.

And let’s not even get into the Apple Maps stumble, which forced Apple to go back to the maps application of its archrival, Google Maps. In case you don’t know what the problems were, this page should be good for some laughs.

Apple loses more market share to Android phones every day, and there are no rumors of any sort of killer advance to be offered in opposition to Android. And now we have the entry of phones and tablets running neither Apple’s OS nor Android but Windows. The Windows phones are slow to take off, but Windows is a very familiar OS, so expect Windows phones to gain market share as time goes by, if only gradually.

And speaking of Windows, it must be noted that the usual jab against Windows versions of the past, that it was buggy and crashed a lot, isn’t heard so much anymore because Microsoft has made a huge and very successful effort to provide a dependable OS. Starting with Vista, and even more so with improvements of Windows 7, it now works quite well with minimal annoyance, and what annoyances are left are usually easily swept away. Windows 8 is taking off a bit slower than Microshoped, but that is largely due to the radically different interface which takes a little time to learn to use effectively. Time will tell if Windows 8 works well enough on a small screen to penetrate the smartphone market, though.

And much the same is happening in the Android world with a plethora of tablets with advanced features being offered by a variety of competitors. You see, Android is an open system. Unlike Apple’s almost military control over its hardware, software, and apps, Android is open with Google neither approving nor disapproving of the products Android developers come up with. Each new update of the iPad so far is just an upgrade of the same basic design, whereas Android tablets offer a wide variety of options and features offering some real choices.

At one end consider the 7″ cameraless Nook HD which, along with its new big brother the HD+, has a display resolution about equal to the “Retina Display” touted on the latest iPads, but with a detuned and Nookified version of Android designed to make it a very fancy Barnes & Noble-oriented eReader with some Android features. At the far other end you have the Google Nexus 10 with front and back cameras as well as a 2560 x 1600 display resolution leaving the iPad’s 2048 x 1536 and the Nook HD+’s 1900×1280 display resolutions in the dust and at a price, $399, which makes it a far better value than the iPad. (It should be noted that the Nook HD+ has a 9″ display not the 10″ of the iPad and Nexus 10, making its resolution quite comparable.)

There is talk of an Apple watch on the horizon, with supposed (or speculated) features like seeing text messages and getting GPS-based local information on one’s wrist. Apple under Jobs was known for, as some have said, “products we didn’t know we needed until we saw them.” Frequently, those needs have been along the lines of needing to be an early adopter of new technologies, but not always. The iPhone was more than merely cool. It made many people’s lives easier and better. It remains to be seen if a high-tech wristwatch can do that. Perhaps if you can use it to make voice calls or conduct voice-directed text messaging while driving. Without something like that, it might turn into one of Apple’s many (but easily forgotten) flops.

At this time, Google is gaining ground on Apple. For a long time I went with PC’s rather than Macbooks and Android phones rather than iPhones for fear that Apple was taking over the world. Now, it’s starting to look like Google might do that instead. At least Google is an open system and doesn’t try to manage things to trap the world into using its own products—or those it approves—exclusively. Many of us view that sort of thing as belonging within our own sphere of control, not that of the device’s manufacturer.

I’m a lot more comfortable with Google than Apple, so I’m not unhappy to see Apple going into gradual decline.

On the other hand, Apple has surprised us before, but with Steve Jobs at the helm of product imagining and development. He may have left a couple projects yet to be seen in the development stage, and we may see a few of those in the next few years.

The question is, can Apple keep up with Google and Microsoft without Steve Jobs. I don’t think so.

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