Ben Slade

This article from the New Yorker talks about how the formerly successful the Republican strategy of polarization and division is now falling flat. "After Reagan and the end of the Cold War, conservatism lost the ties that had bound together its disparate factions." After that, "“The only thing that held the Republican coalition together was hostility to government.” But “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American,”

"Bush’s fatal incompetence and Rove’s shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement’s demise, they didn’t cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems."

“Republicans have been reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well.”

"...little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces."

My own take is that people are realizing that Republican easy solutions to hard problems not only don't work, but the quack medicine makes things worse. But the fact that people are disillusioned with the Republicans' easy answers doesn't mean they will want to take the bitter tasting medicine prescribed by the Democrats.

Malicious software is a growing threat to national economies and security interests, concludes an Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report (PDF format).

The report says communities that fight malware only manage to offer a fragmented local response to what is a global threat, noting that about one in four personal computers in the United States, or 59 million PCs, is already infected with malware. Furthermore, a booming malware market is making it easier to launch cheaper and more sophisticated attacks.

Zombie computers infected by malware are used to send out roughly 80 percent of all spam, and to attack commercial Web sites and other Internet-linked systems with crippling amounts of traffic as part of extortion schemes.

Although the largest botnets have included up to 1 million computers, and the number of computers infected is increasing, OECD found that the number of computers in each botnet is actually shrinking to avoid detection. OECD says that international organizations and agreements are needed to properly measure and counteract the impact of malware attacks. (this summary was copied from the ACM TechNews newsletter)

No story behind this picture. She's just cute:

Paul Krugman talks about how to really conserve gas, we have to be use more mass transportation. But mass transportation really requires denser metropolitan areas, a change that could take a long long time given how many houses have been built in the distant suburbs.

My take away from this? Buy real estate close in.

In the absence of the authority and political courage required to write off mortgage related losses, the Fed has been reduced to using short term solutions that - while allowing the extent of losses to remain concealed - postpone the moment of truth and the inevitable compromise the dollar.

Ultimately, the Fed and even the US government doesn't have enough money to bail out the subprime market, bond insurance contracts, and associated overleveraged hedge fund investments. Printing more money will inevitably hurt the value of the US dollar.

If Bernanke does this, he will instead export the crisis and stoke a global inflationary fever, risking a devastating boomerang: the rejection of the dollar as the global reserve currency and the possible crash of the global economy.

The current Internet email architecture is slowly dying. Garbage spam email is choking the system. The current ad-hoc, heuristic based spam filtering is a messy spam eater, eating 10-20% of good email while letting an equivalent amount of bad email get through.

While the current email architecture is based on the model of a cooperative university environment (both free and security lite), the next generation of email is being defined by GoodmailSystems to help businesses make sure their email makes it to the masses.

Basically, if a business sender meets certain minimum technical and business behavior standards, and pays a 1/4 cent per email fee, an unmistakable "certified email" graphic flag is displayed to the email recipient in a non-fakeable portion of the web page (or AOL client window) displaying the email.

By Paul Krugman in the NYTimes.com (12/3/07):

...nobody knows where the [subprime mortgage] financial toxic waste is buried. Citigroup wasn’t supposed to have tens of billions of dollars in subprime exposure; it did. Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers).

How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation” — two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts.

O.K., to be fair, some kinds of financial innovation are good. I don’t want to go back to the days when checking accounts didn’t pay interest and you couldn’t withdraw cash on weekends.

But the innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses. They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime [mortgage] crisis.

Also, from a similar column by Paul Krugman (on 12/21/07):

"Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs."

Here's a great example of the Republicans doing this from Tom Toles in the Washington Post:

This article makes the point that the consensus on the health benefits of fat reduction in the diet are not scientifically born out. Instead it's the result of the moral equivalent of the herding instinct for scientists.

Could this be true? A basic dietary assumption of the past 40 years was a whoops? And if scientists were wrong about something this fundamental, what else could they be wrong about.

Maybe Woody Allen's predictions in the movie "Sleeper" really will come true (Ie., in the future, steak and cigarettes are determined to be healthy)

An article in Time magazine talks about a new wave of video games requiring body movement to play the game.

Examples of this are the Nintendo Wii, Dance Dance Revolution, and video games bikes:

Image from the above mentioned Time magazine article

One more idea which I haven't seen yet is bicycle generator powered TV's. You've gotta pedal to watch. It would bring a whole new dimension to power hungry high definition TV's.