Daily Archives: June 22, 2006

Bloggers and the Democratic Party

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Interesting piece about the effect bloggers are having on the Democrats…

Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the 64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.

Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and anti-war bloggers outraged at Mr Lieberman’s gung-ho support for the Iraq invasion.

Reconsidering Bill Gates

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David Pogue has a thoughtful post about BillG. Excerpt:

Some people won’t be happy no matter what Mr. Gates does. They say he made the decision for P.R. value, or even as a plot to boost Microsoft’s software sales. “Interesting theory: ‘Buy Windows Vista. Do It for the Children,’” writes one critic online. “Ah, Bill, you are a shrewd weasel indeed.”)

But despite all this, and even despite Microsoft’s history, I find it almost impossible to remain cynical about Bill Gates’s intentions. I think he’s changed. Maybe when you’re in your 50’s, you start to think about how you’ll be remembered.
It’d be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates.

But he’s not. He’s channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either–he’s also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it’s done right.

In fact, when you step back far enough, Mr. Gates’s entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale.

I know this is going to earn me the vitriol of Microsoft-bashers, but I’ll say it anyway: Bill Gates has the money, the brains and the connections to really, truly make the world a better place. I admire him for the attempt. And I believe that if anyone can succeed, he will.

He just might be right. David also links to Bill Moyers’s remarkable interview with Gates.

Later… One of the comments to David’s post contained a link to an interesting New Yorker article about the Gates Foundation’s work.

Homeless connectivity

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Amazing Wired News story…

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. “I’ve always been trying to stay up on internet technology,” Ivy said.

Ivy isn’t the only homeless person who makes it a priority to keep gadgets handy even when a cooked meal is hard to come by.

Many of those now living without a permanent roof over their heads have cell phones in their pockets or laptop computers at their hips. While people living in shelters and alleys have found it difficult to cross social divides, the digital divide seems to disappear on the streets. Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “More have e-mail than have post office boxes,” Stoops said. “The internet has been a big boon to the homeless.”

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel…

Thanks to Cory & BoingBoing.

Hello Mother, Hello Friendster…

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Tom Lehrer, where are you when we need you? This from today’s New York Times…

Summer camp directors have a new scourge, and it is not mosquitoes or impetigo. It is the Internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, where young people often post personal or revealing information.

Camps say they are increasingly concerned about being identified in photographs or comments on these sites, even innocuously. They worry about online predators tracking children to camp and about their image being tarnished by inappropriate Internet juxtapositions — a mention, say, of the camp on a site that also has crude language or sexually suggestive pictures. “This is probably the No. 1 issue facing all camp programs,” said Norman E. Friedman, a partner at AMSkier Insurance, a major camp insurer.

Getting to the bottom of the car business

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Most motoring journalism makes one lose the will to live. The one shining exception is the writing of the Guardian‘s Giles Smith. Here he is on the new Renault Megane Sport Hatch 2.0 165 Turbo…

The Megane was the car with which Renault pretty much singlehandedly woke up a snoozing hatchback sector. While all the dynamic designers and blue-sky thinkers had gravitated towards the SUV department, or were squeezing their brains to come up with ever more malleable family wagons with internal bike racks and fold-out summer houses, the ancient art of hatchback-building had suffered a precipitous decline, leaving only a joyless amalgam of inseparable lump-alikes and blob-u-wants, each one categorisable according to how much it did or didn’t resemble a VW Golf.Renault shook things up by producing a hatchback in which the better part of the design budget had clearly gone into resculpting the rear end, producing an unusually curvaceous back window, wrapped tight around a self-consciously plump and pert boot lid.

I don’t know whether Renault was cannily ahead of the wave here, or whether it merely lucked out. But in an age much given to low-slung jeans, pan-generational adoption of the “builder’s crease” look, and long and surprisingly academic debates about the relative merits of rears belonging to Kylie and Beyoncé, a car whose prime and unashamed asset was allegedly its “shakeable ass” did indeed look inspired.

Renault, in short, gave us the boot as booty, and a grateful and amused Europe responded by buying Meganes in millions. The idea of the car as a penis substitute is familiar to the point of cliche. But the French company was surely among the very first to explore the possibility of the car as a bottom substitute…