phik

This article in Money invites you to “Put today’s economic peril in perspective.” What a good idea:

Before you panic over today’s headlines, and how far stocks could fall, consider the relative health of today’s economy.

In the early 1970s, economic output was falling. But today, despite the sluggishness, GDP is still inching ahead.

In the early 1980s, unemployment hit 10.8%. Today, the rate is 5.5%, or about half that.

Inflation topped 12% in the 1970s and 14% in the early 1980s. Today, it’s at 4%.

What the article does not mention, of course, is that since the 1970s the official government numbers have become steadily less honest; just as SAT scores were manipulated to appear better, so too have GDP, unemployment, and inflation. What would that perspective be if we used the same methodologies, compared apples to apples?

Economist John Williams does precisely that, at shadowstats.com. It is particularly interesting to contrast the above with his recalculations:

In the early 1970s, economic output was falling. But today, despite the sluggishness, GDP is still inching ahead.

In the early 1980s, unemployment hit 10.8%. Today, the rate is 5.5%, or about half that.

Here, even the official Bureau of Labor Statistics will admit the awful truth when you look at U-6 — that’s the number that includes not just the “officially unemployed,” but also people who have stopped trying, or work part-time because they can’t find full-time work.

Inflation topped 12% in the 1970s and 14% in the early 1980s. Today, it’s at 4%.

You don’t have to be an economist to know which of those numbers ring more true.

[Update: Harper's did a similar story a couple months ago, excerpted here.]

I have always had mixed feelings about the terrible way that Apple treats their iPhone customers. Full-price locked devices; an exclusive agreement with an awful carrier that requires a multi-year contract; a completely closed platform. On the other hand, it was the most pleasant-to-use mobile phone I’ve ever owned, the devices became trivially unlockable, and thus AT&T avoidable.

By buying the hardware but avoiding AT&T (and the juicy subscriber revenue that gets passed along to Apple), I reasoned, I can reward them for making a good device, but punish them for the attempted lock-in. I could sleep at night.

And since I no longer live in a country with third-world mobile phone infrastructure — the United States — I have been eagerly and vocally anticipating the launch of the 3G iPhone since December.

Until, that is, the actual launch.

Last week’s keynote was, sadly, the most content-free Apple presentation I’ve ever seen:

• they mentioned the new operating system update only in passing, which leads me to believe that it will be forgettably incremental.

  Of course, they’ll still charge me the same incremental $80…

• they spent a disproportionate amount of time announcing enterprise calendar/mail syncing that catches up with what Microsoft and RIM had ten years ago — and Apple has the balls to charge $100pa for it.

  A survey of my friends indicates that 100% of them would like that functionality, but that 0% of them think it’s good value, or plan to pay.

  Especially Blackberry users, accustomed to getting this for free (or at any rate, silently built into the cost of their mobile plan)

• they spent almost an hour going through a seemingly endless litany of snoozer third-party applications en route to the iPhone. Two people in the audience were rushed to UCSF Medical Center with critical, boredom-related injuries.

  Like the Simpsons episodes that feature 30-second audio loops, this was transparent code for “we have absolutely nothing to announce, not even an iMac refresh, so we’re filling time with this garbage. Please short our stock.”

• instead of giving developers what they asked for — the ability to run background apps on the iPhone — they gave them another Apple lock-in, a service that stores and forwards data packets.

All of it underscored by the fact that Steve was off-stage most of the time, and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be the public face of that detritus either. There are also rumours about his cancer, but he was there; even if true, I don’t really think that was the issue.

If it weren’t for the announcement of the 3G iPhone, available in something like 70 countries, it would have been a total flop. There would have been riots at the Moscone Center.

But even that announcement comes with hidden poisonous spikes, already oozing thick venom. They’ve scrapped their old revenue-sharing plan with AT&T (though not the exclusivity) in favour of the traditional subsidized-phone model with which carriers are familiar — almost certainly the key to the new worldwide distribution.

In doing so, they’ve apparently decided not to sell unsubsidized phones at all. You won’t be able to buy an iPhone online. They won’t let you walk out of an Apple or AT&T store until you’ve activated iPhone — ie, signed a contract, and agreed to their ridiculous Terms, which you’d violate by unlocking your phone or installing unsupported third-party software. Things people actually want to do with their expensive hardware.

One analyst estimates that as many as thirty percent of first-gen iPhones were unlocked just to avoid using AT&T. Countless more were jailbroken to install third-party software.

So it was a year of retrenched Apple lock-in from start to finish, from the data “service”, to new iPhone distribution terms, the closed developer tools, and “only if Apple approves” iPhone software platform.

It’s such a disaster that I probably won’t get a 3G iPhone after all, despite my longing. We’ll see what the terms are like in Australia, where Optus and Vodafone are selling it. But I think I’m finished supporting this deplorable business model, just as I no longer buy music from the money vacuum.

From the May 29 Toronto Star “Today in Pictures,” including this 100% not-made-up actual caption:

Frat Boys Meet

U.S. President George W. Bush and graduate Theodore Shiveley … bump chests at the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.

<shaver> that is a top-line resume item for that guy
<shaver> Objective: to again do anything as cool as chest-bumping POTUS at my graduation

[Props to beltzner]

shaver recommended a masterstroke roughly approximating this recipe for ginger limeade.

We grated rather than sliced the ginger, replaced the still water with sparkling, and, critically, completed the grog by adding two cups of white rum — another cup may have been warranted, but we ran ourselves out of white rum at this point and decided that this was a natural signal to slow down.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which this beverage was a success. It is a challenge for which I am unprepared, indeed unwilling.

Today’s is the mojito, an “IBA Official Cocktail”.

Vlad, I can say with the conviction of seven Arabian princesses, makes a very acceptable mojito.

The chemistry of why baking soda and hydrogen peroxide are effective at removing skunk spray, from the chemist who discovered the concoction.

The oils smell rather different up close, compared to that lingering odor you get wafting down the street.

It’s been about seven months since my eye surgery, and I’m back in Boston for the half-year checkup.

I stopped aggressively moisturizing sometime around the first of the year, which was the last of my post-op caretaking regimen. There haven’t been any adverse effects — dryness, halos, or glare, and no issues at night.

Since my last visit in November — at which point my visual acuity was already quite satisfactory — the improvement has been so gradual that I hadn’t noticed. I’m now at 20/15 in the left, 20/20 right, and 20/15 together. She’s pretty confident that the right will continue to catch up over the next few months.

Great success!

Back in the heady days when Cluster File Systems was not a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, a near-constant thorn in my side were people who did not come anywhere close to understanding the protections (not) provided by copyright.

One partner got so worked up that I think they’d have actually sued if we weren’t so valuable to them, essentially because we reimplemented one of their APIs (and naturally, they wanted to claim copyright on our code). That they managed to find lawyers willing to litigate that claim was, I thought, impressive enough to let it go forward, but even a frivolous lawsuit costs so much in the United States that I never could have. In the end they decided it was not worth it.

Reading Wendy Seltzer’s “No Copyright for Games” today took me back to those days. Not exactly the same issues, but I feel for the Scrabulous guys.

From this week’s Democratic radio address:

We gave back to our men and women in uniform who are sacrificing so much — but because of President Bush, they remain in Iraq without a clear mission or endgame, and our Armed Forces are stretched to a breaking point.

Sure, it’s President Bush’s policy — but it’s Congress’s decision. Every time they provide war funding they’re re-approving the war and the tactics, every bit as complicit in its continuation as the President.

Sure, he vetoed the bill that contained a timeline for withdrawal.

But the President can’t spend money that Congress doesn’t give him. He can’t sign a bill that Congress doesn’t pass. That’s the great thing about our system. And the Republicans can’t pass war funding without help from the Democrats.

So it’s easy: don’t pass a bill with war funding. Make the President veto the budget. Make him shut down the government. Ending an ill-conceived war should be the top priority of any nation.

They have failed just as surely, and just as completely, as the Republicans did. Nothing has changed.

Since we apparently can’t rely on Congress, if you want the troops home there’s only one presidential candidate from either party promising to withdraw not just from Iraq, but from most of the costly, terror-inciting, none-of-our-business military bases worldwide: Ron Paul

I’ve been pondering lately why more of my friends aren’t on board with Ron Paul.

A fair number are on board. Some of the others are easy to understand: a couple are genuinely socialist, and most of the rest seem to be entirely uninterested in politics, or at least in talking about it. But there are also a few people for whom I thought Ron would be right in their wheelhouse, and for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened.

Robert, my friend, you’re the most perplexing of all. Of everyone, I think you’re the one who most consistently shares my own political beliefs, and your recent criticisms took me somewhat by surprise. There are a couple points I think need making:

• Gold — I’m not an economist. Though some will argue otherwise, there seems to be ample room for debate both for and against asset-backed currency, and I’m certainly not in a position to make convincing arguments. More interesting, if you ask me, is his desire to legalize competing currencies and eliminate the taxes on gold to facilitate alternatives to our fiat dollar.

  Regardless, whether he’s right or wrong, I think this issue should barely move the needle. Such a major monetary policy decision is not one that a President can make without Congress. I don’t know why people get so worked up about this particular campaign plank that would very likely be impossible to implement anyway.

• The “Amero” — I also don’t know why the NAFTA superhighway and closer North American integration are referred to (by most people, not just you) as conspiracies. Certainly the Congressman doesn’t refer to them that way.

  There is already a NAFTA superhighway, and an organization that supports it. The NASCO web site itself reads: “There are no plans to build a new NAFTA Superhighway - it exists today as I-35.” See also the Government of Alberta. Some politicians, such as Mexico’s ambassador to the United Nations, are quite outspoken about an American union.

  You wrote, “The North American Union, unsupported by facts, is simply not going to happen.” On what do you base this assertion?

  To be clear, I don’t think it’s imminent — I don’t think the presidents and prime minister are executing some grand vision — but I also don’t see anything absurd about it. There’s nothing unusual about government, particularly this one, striving for yet more government. Mexican politicians promote weakening American sovereignty at every opportunity. The narrowly-averted immigration proposals of last summer would have been a leap toward labour integration. Where is the absurdity?

  The EU took a good 50 years to develop from a trade partnership to a single currency zone with supra-national legislation; it didn’t spring fully-formed from some Belgian’s breast. These things happen over long periods of time, via small steps, most of which I imagine seemed reasonable on their own.

  But here’s my real question in the context of Ron Paul: why is it relevant?

  If you honestly don’t believe that our trajectory is towards weaker national sovereignty and all the rest — then what exactly is the harm? If you elect Ron Paul, you know that he’ll work to prevent it from happening.

  The only reason to be concerned about a Paul presidency is if you want an American Union.

• “a nativist and an isolationist” — You use these labels again and again, but even the definitions that you chose clearly don’t apply.

  “Nativism is an opposition to immigration”, which is a serious mischaracterization of his views. He’s opposed to illegal immigration, which is to say that he favours enforcing the law. Amazingly, that is what passes for “hard line” in the modern immigration debate.

  It’s true that he wants to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants, and I don’t disagree. It’s one of many powerful subsidies for illegal immigration.

  He also favours immigration reform — “The current system is incoherent and unfair.” — but not what (almost) passed for reform last summer.

  I don’t know how you get from there to “nativist”. Have you seen speeches or writings that support that claim?

  As for isolationist, if we must deal in labels, I think we should not have difficulty agreeing that “non-interventionist” is far more accurate.

  To be an isolationist you must first be a protectionist, which does not in any universe describe Dr. Paul.

  Ron has written and spoken extensively on his commitment to free trade, eliminating tariffs, open travel, and broad diplomacy. Global Trade Watch rates him second only to Kucinich on his free-trade voting record.

  He wants to end our embargoes and allow Americans to once again travel the world unrestricted. That’s isolationist?

  Indeed, let’s not confuse his numerous votes against managed trade with being against free trade. He dislikes NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, &c. because they create more government, more regulation, and less sovereignty, as opposed to actual free trade. Even CATO — which classifies such agreements as free trade — gives him a 76% free trade voting record.

  I can understand why you used “isolationist” — “non-interventionist” doesn’t have the same epithetical punch — but you’re too articulate to resort to that kind of rhetorical fallacy.

Next time I’ll write about why I like him, instead of just reacting to why Robert says he doesn’t.