Are We Debating the Right Topics?

Bob Yaro, quoted in The Geography Of Nowhere:

"When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization...they are going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment."

I will come back to this. Today, in Virginia, our illustrious leaders further buried their heads in the sand and I want to juxtapose the two issues.

Vista? Really?

Users Not Rushing on Vista, Office 2007But IT managers such as Jim Prevo, CIO at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. in Waterbury, Vt., fear that their users will need more training than usual on Office 2007. Prevo said he was initially stumped by the simple task of opening a file when he installed a beta copy of the desktop suite. (Computerworld)

What a scary statement, especially from someone who really grasps the issues involved. When a CIO is saying that more training might be needed and in the past there has been generally little user training provided to most end-users on the interface. A user interface should not require extensive training in general, but it seems that with each new edition of Windows, productivity declines instead of increases while hardware and support requirements increase, with no appreciable benefits. The complexity that is in the software, both the user interface and the office suite far exceeds that required by the vast majority of end users that the hardware sits idle and the bloat of the software takes up more and more space every time it is patched. There is something sad about having a machine, sitting mostly idle for surfing the web, with billions of dollars of development behind them.

What Would Sun Tzu Say? On Iraq

I guess this is a good day for juxtapositions...also from Sun Tzu on Waging War:

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Could it be said any clearer? And this from a man dead some 2000 years?

On the All-Volunteer Army

All-Volunteer Army has Failed, says Boston Globe Op-ed "War is the great auditor of institutions," the British historian Corelli Barnett has observed. In Iraq, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. The defects of basic US national security institutions stand exposed. Failure to correct those defects will only invite more Iraqs -- unnecessary wars that once begun prove unwinnable. (On-Point)

This is an interesting piece, but what I find even more interesting are the follow up comments. While most of these well educated gentlemen (and ladies) seem to be well briefed on their Clausewitz most seem to be missing their Sun Tzu and their Heinlein. Both men would tell you that the volunteer army will work, but not in the mode and method that it is currently being utilized.

Sun Tzu said of Waging War: When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. This is Iraq today.

Heinlein went one step further. In Starship Troopers Heinlein perceived a nation-state where citizenship and the right to vote was only conferred upon those that had served time in the military. Further there were jobs that could only be granted to veterans because only veterans had been there done that to understand and fully grasp the complexities of the issues. While some of the theory falls down, I have been thinking what sort of nation the United States would have been if you could only vote (and one assumes also run for office) if you had to serve time in the military? And in Heinlein's definition, this was a voluntary commitment. You could be just about anything you wanted to be without doing a hitch, but you could not be a full citizen. An interesting concept if carried to its logical conclusions.

Just What You Need To Make You Feel Better

I am convinced, more than ever, that the inmates are truly running the asylum. I don't know if that phrase predated Edgar Allan Poe's The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather or not, but after watching the opening of last night's State of the (dis) Union address, I have to wonder if he was really writing about Congress. One of the talking heads that was filling time before the President started blithering noted that Jefferson, although required to present a State of the Union by the Constitution, felt that doing so in the House was akin to the Throne Speech of England, and thus too regal and not seemly and submitted his report in writing. Every President up to Hoover did the same thing. As this pundit also pointed out, no President in the TV era is ever likely not to present the State of the Union in Congress. What bothered me though was that it did seem like king George was presenting a Throne Speech. What was worse, was the politicians, that not three months ago would have nothing to do with him were trying to touch and be seen with the anointed one like he was a king, or at least a rock star. It was disgusting if nothing else. Grandiose and flamboyant.

That was about all my stomach could take. My doctor has suggested I cut back on my intake of useless political rhetoric. Seems it is bad for my digestion, but I could not help taking a look at the text of the speech this morning and I really tried not to laugh too hard.

First up, the President's desire to reduce gasoline use by 20 percent over 10 years. This from someone whose family has made its millions from the oil industry. The irony is just flowing off of this one. I am all in favor of reducing gasoline use, but I would be more interested to see real attempts at finding a real, viable alternate fuel that does not require oil to produce it. And the world is a long way from that goal. A more realistic request from the President would be to reduce gasoline use by 20 percent in five years and require that minimum EPA fuel efficiencies for all vehicles be no less than 30 miles to the gallon. Would it reduce the types of automobiles on the road? Sure. Would it mean some car makers would go out of business? Yes. But if the United States is serious about this (which it is not, we all know that), then those are some of the tough decisions that have to be made.

The President pitched a balanced budget without tax increases. This of course is the same as asking a family of four to stop eating so they can pay their mortgage, which, by the way, is one of the hard choices that many families are being forced to make. Unfortunately, it is not one the Federal Government is likely to make anytime soon. I am not saying there is not fat in the budget that can be trimmed, there is a lot of it, but again, it will require some hard choices and many Americans will feel the impact of those choices. However, we know that those choices will never be made, so a balanced budget is a pipe dream that gets trotted out at these things to make it look like the President cares when, quite frankly, he and the Congress do not. Along with this little issue is the issue of Social Security reform. Frankly, this is a dead horse and has been for most of this Administration. Yes, Social Security does need to be reformed, but this is no the solution.

While we are on the topic of unworkable solutions, Iraq was brought up (big surprise there). At staggering costs to the American people, both in terms of arms for the troops and subsidies for the disfunctional Iraqi government, this single sink hole is one of those areas where the President has not only lost his way, but doomed his legacy to be remembered as one of the worst in the history of American Presidents. His suggestion that pulling the troops out will only destabilize the region is bunk and anyone who truly understands the region knows this. If the troops were pulled out tomorrow, the governments of Iran, Syria, Turkey and others would quash any civil war inside a week, if it lasted that long. It is unlikely to spill out of the region except in direct response to crushing the United States and its allies and with the exception of Iran, no government in the region wants that to happen. There are just too many economic risks and they know it. So sending more troops into the region to die for a war that should never have been started is a waste of resources and human capital and it would go a long way to the supposed balanced budget if the Department of Defense just folded its tents and came home.

What I did not see, nor did I really expect, is anything talking about the crumbling infrastructure here in the United States. But I guess we are going to have to experience a major failure of the power grid or the transportation network before we see anyone in Washington look to the nation as a whole and truly begin to evaluate the State of the Nation.

What is a Housing Start (and why should you care)?

So just what is a "housing start?" Well according to J.H. Kunstler, in his book The Geography of Nowhere, a housing start "...represent monoculture tract developments of cookie-cutter bunkers on half-acre lots in far-flung suburbs..."

I like this definition. In fact, I like this book because it is, for me, beginning to answer a number of questions about why things are not working they way they should in the United States. For example, while I love my house, from the outside it is almost impossible to tell it apart from its neighbours, despite the amount of work put into keeping it up. From mowing on regular intervals to some decorative stone work (not too much though or it will offend the Architecture Committee of our community) it really does not look any different than any of the twelve hundred odd houses in the community and the community looks a lot like every other community build in this area in the late 1990s. This is a problem, least of which becuase I find it increasingly difficult to give people directions to it.

I visited Hawaii for a conference in 2000. It was my third trip to the Aloha State. I like Hawaii. But when I returned from the conference and was asked how it was, I replied that I could have been in Cleveland for all I saw of Hawaii. In retrospect, this was a symptom of something I have only just begun to understand, in part through the lens of this book. The United States is becoming more and more homogenized. Gone are the quaint little stores and other things that make a community "unique." Here in Manassas, we have an "old town" neighbourhood, some of the buildings dating back to the Civil War, and yet, there is very little about this "old town" that recommends it. It has a nice wine shop and a couple of good restaurants that I would recommend, but beyond that it has three banks, a half a dozen antique stores, six odd "barber shops" catering to men or women and the rest of the town is real estate offices. The few merchants, rightly, bemoan the lack of foot traffic. After all, there is nothing to do if you arrive at a restaurant and you have to wait for a table, nor is the town particularly interesting to stroll through after you finish your meal because there is so little to look at. Yet the number of houses, malls and rester aunts within 3 miles of this district are always busy and the residents, generally well heeled.

Perhaps the United States really does not understand any more what it takes to be an interesting nation. Because right now it is certainly looking like a very veneered environment.

MySpace - Caveat Emptor

MySpace Hit With On-line Predator Suits Jan 18th - 11:21pm By JESSICA MINTZ AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) - Four families have sued News Corp. and its MySpace social-networking site after their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, lawyers for the families said Thursday. (WTOP News)

"In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users," said Jason A. Itkin, an Arnold & Itkin lawyer.

This is just an arrogant statement by Mr. Itkin. Shall we review?

The parents suing MySpace have children that are 15 years old. That makes the parents, given the law of averages and general biology, at least as old as I am - in other words, old enough to 1) know better 2) pay better attention to what their children are doing on-line 3) have instilled in them, at least a modicum of intelligence and awareness of their surroundings and the dangers inherent thereto.

To the parents out there, did you not teach your child not to talk to strangers? Not to believe everything they read and certainly NOT to go anywhere without knowing exactly what it was they were getting into? I am not suggesting for a moment that you swaddle them in extraneous safety gear. After all, we are the generation that did not wear helmets to ride bicycles and had our playground equipment mounted over concrete, but there are some very disturbed people out there. I went and checked out some of the profiles on MySpace, just for fun, and discovered that of the half dozen or so I could stomach, many were clearly fake (and I am thinking computer generated too) and it took me less than 10 seconds to come to this conclusion. The signs were all there. I am willing to bet that more than half of the people on the site are misrepresenting themselves, and that is a conservative estimate.

It is not, nor has it ever been MySpace's responsibility (or any other site really) to make sure their environment was "safe." Any assumption of that is a byproduct (and a bad one) of the training wheel mentality fostered by America On-Line and other "ISPs" that in the early days of the Internet sought to provide an entree into the rough and tumble (and frankly inhospitable, command-line, geek dominated) world of the inter-networked computer. What today is called the World Wide Web is only one of a dozen surviving protocols from those early days of pioneers that were more interested in making it work than "social networking" but for every successful venture, a few bad apples crop up and the Internet of today is nothing like the science experiment it started out to be, and it behooves us as users (and parents of users) to teach our children that the world is not a safe place and people lie to get what they want, and the more they want it, the more creative the lie. This case should be rejected out of hand and the parents bringing this sort of frivolous lawsuit should be indicted for child endangerment and gross stupidity.

Caveat Emptor. And carry a knife. You have been warned. The Internet is not now, nor has ever been a place for the faint of heart or the stupid of mind.

But Where are We?

"An industry survey estimated that only one third of the nation's auto dealers were making a profit. No sales gimmick could overcome the fact that the industry was now turning out far more vehicles than it could sell" (The Geography of Nowhere)

What is interesting about this quote is that is is not a survey from 2006, or from 1986, but from 1926! I came across it in a book I am currently reading about how the automobile, along with some odd twists of fate, has taken a nation of definition and reduced it to almost nothing more than strip malls and asphalt.

One of the questions that James Howard Kunstler asks is "Why did America build a reality of terrible places from which people longed to escape?"

This is not a trivial question, especially here in the shadow of the Nation's Capital, where Stafford county is advertising that is is "close to DC, only 25 miles away." Of course, if you live here, you know that while it may be 25 miles away (an amazingly short distance) on paper, at rush hour it will take at least 90 minutes to reach the county line, if things are going your way and it is at the beginning or end of the rush (say 3:00 PM or 8:00 PM - and no, I am not kidding). The reality is that the roads are choked.

Further, Kunstler points out about the Interstate Highway Act "...if the build-out stopped, the whole economy would nose-dive again, since it now was the economy." This is even more true today. As housing starts go, so, it seems, goes the economy. The biggest threats to the stock market this quarter have been from poor performing house builder stocks. But more importantly it seems, every square inch of undeveloped land has been converted into a housing development. And not cheap houses either. On a drive in the country the other day, I came upon a development of single family homes starting at $500,000. This is on a road that is already over crowded during the morning and evening rushes, leading to an interstate that is already crowded, and literally in the middle of geographic nowhere. You do not just run out for a jar of mustard from one of these houses. The nearest grocery store is 20 to 40 minutes away depending on which direction you go (and not including when you go). The nearest schools would take a map, but you can be assured that the children being bussed to them (walking is out of the question) would be spending as much time commuting as their parents are likely to.

It seems that the United States has become a nation of commuters. We do not know how to do things without our cars. And as the price of gas continues to rise, and the distances between communities, services and work increases, this is not a good state of affairs to be in.

Apple Introduces A Phone. Do You Care?

Will Anyone Answer When Apple iPhones Home? Jack Gold January 10, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Apple has finally announced its long-rumored iPhone. True to the Apple"i" tradition, the iPhone is filled with features and touts an innovative interface more akin to a kiosk or video game than a telephone. By making music, videos and Web browsing available to its users, Apple hopes to set the standard in the entertainment/phone, all-in-one device market, much as it did in the music player market. Can it succeed? (Computer World)

First, let me point out that I am not an Apple person. Sure, I think the Mac is a useful toy for most who want to learn and there are niche functions where the Apple is the go-to machine, but there has always been something overly boutique about the system. With the adoption of OS X, the platform kind of came close to breaking into the mainstream, but when you add in the just enough differences for compiling software (carbonizing) to make it more efficient and the outrageous hardware costs (who, in their right mind puts down $2000 for a laptop when you can get comparable hardware for $800), the Macintosh is still playing on the fringes. Of course, the Mac/PC wars will continue to rage. You can rant about how your MacBook Pro can run circles around my Gateway or ThinkPad, but frankly, unless I am rendering graphics (which, really is not something you do on a laptop anyway), the difference in speed is a phony made up radio value that as a consumer, I cannot, nor will ever be able to appreciate and as a technologist I take with a heavy dose of scotch.

So, SteveO and Company decide to enter the already saturated fray of the cellular telephone market, thinking that they can invent a better mouse trap. Forget that Verizon (and others) already provide you on-demand audio and video through their galaxy of hardware. Forget that most phones today have the ability to play MP3, Mpeg and other media streams. Forget that most phones today are priced less than $100 and are usually given away when you sign the contract and forget that Palm and RIM (Blackberry) are constantly getting dinged for their form factor when you ask about their product's phone qualities. Apple thinks that a snazzy interface will cause millions of people to rush out an buy their new MacPhone (iPhone is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, a company that has been around not quite as long as Apple, but has just as many expensive lawyers - and after the "Apple" suit with Apple Records, Apple, Inc, may not be willing to go toe-to-toe over the name)

I have to agree with Mr. Gold on this one. If the MacPhone does not quickly show its value to the corporate customer, it will die a swift and quiet death. And as much as it pains me to acknowledge this, most corporate email systems run on Windows.

How To Lie With Maps...even if it is an accident

500 communities put back on Georgia map By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 4, 9:43 AM ET ATLANTA - Po Biddy Crossroads will be back on the map. So will Hopeulikit and Doctortown, and hundreds of others that were erased. (Yahoo News)

Georgia is not the first map publishing entity to clean up their maps by deleting features. Cartographers have been doing it for as long as maps have been written down for reasons as simple and innocent as reducing clutter to as nefarious as making a place not exist for political reasons. There was a push afoot in Virginia to delete Route 29 between Gainesville and Centreville, the thinking that people would take another route and thus reduce traffic on the two-lane part through the Battlefield. Of course, this sort of thinking is as malformed as thinking traffic can be reduced simply be refusing to enlarge the road. If you know something exists, then deleting a line on the map will not make it disappear. And depending on what it is, deleting it may be more obvious than just leaving the feature there.

If you are interesting in knowing more, noted geographer, Mark Monmonier, has an excellent book called How to Lie with Maps that I encourage you to read.