Monthly Archives: May 2008

The Clinton/McCain Big Idea: a tax holiday for gas guzzlers

Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of stupid ideas in my time, but the agreement between Hillary Clinton and John McCain on how to deal with high energy prices takes the biscuit. Here’s Thomas Friedman’s view…

It is great to see that we Americans finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead the United States, it takes your breath away.

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: We Americans borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build the country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

[…]

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Stand by for Boris ‘Bertie’ Johnson’s announcement that the proposed higher Congesion Charge for SUVs is to be reduced.

Fortunately, Obama is still rational about this.

Microhoo: the verdict

Posted on by

Rory Cellan-Jones’s verdict…

So Google played a blinder, Yahoo was more adept in defence than in previous games, and Microsoft bottled it in front of goal. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that we may get a rematch before the year is out.

iDeath

Posted on by

If, like me, you’ve ever wondered about the death wish which seems to afflict teenagers who walk and cycle everywhere with their iPods rendering them insensible to the outside world, then this poster by the New South Wales police may ring a bell.

Thirty years on…

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.

Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.

If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…

Clinton fantasies

Posted on by

Timothy Noah doesn’t think Hillary Clinton can win the nomination. Here’s why.

Please, let’s stop pretending there’s much suspense about who the nominee will be. As an arithmecrat, I will not consider anyone the winner until a candidate achieves 2,025 delegates. But neither am I obliged to believe Hillary Clinton has a plausible shot. She doesn’t.

His arithmetic is interesting — and plausible.

Bertie Wooster elected!

Posted on by

Yep. He’s London’s new Mayor. And all the while he thought he was running for the Wine-Tasting Committee of the Drones Club. Much public entertainment lies ahead.

Bad news for the Supreme Leader, though. The game’s over. And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Gordon Brown’s competence/incompetence. It’s simply that Labour’s time is up. Three reasons for this:

  • Events, dear boy, events: the long boom is over; house prices are on their way down; negative equity beckons; the feel-good factor has evaporated.
  • All governments run out of steam. I had dinner recently with a senior civil servant. I asked him what the atmosphere is like in Whitehall. He said that it felt like the beginning of the end — that the government had basically run out of ideas, that ministers were exhausted and becoming demoralised.
  • The great British electorate isn’t very interested in politics: Labour has been in power so long that it’s become boring. The man on the Clapham omnibus thinks it’s time for a change. It’s nothing to do with a belief that Cameron & Co are wonderful, or even competent. There’s no evidence yet that they could run a whelk stall. Their main merit is just that they’re not Harriet Harman/Gordon Brown/Jack Straw/Jacqui Smith/Hazel Blears…

    • Gin, Television, and cognitive surplus

    Posted on by

    Wonderful talk by Clay Shirky

    I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

    I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

    So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

    So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

    And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation…

    It’s funny: I get asked the same question a lot. How do I find the time to pay attention to all the stuff that’s on the Net? And part of the answer, of course, is that I don’t watch television. So I’ve got 22 hours extra a week free for intelligent pursuits. I was a TV critic for a major national major newspaper and, before that, a serious weekly magazine for 13 years, so I’ve done my time in front of the box.

    Actually, come to think of it, even when I was a TV critic I watched relatively little television. At a time when the average British viewer was watching 22.5 hours a week, I was watching no more than seven. I was just very selective for the simple and obvious reason that one cannot write a weekly essay about 23 hours of TV. And I’ve never, ever watched an episode of Coronation Street or EastEnders!

    Paying attention

    Posted on by

    Great post by my colleague, Martin Weller.

    It was the annual Open University internal conference this week, which had the title this year of ‘Making Connections’. There were some good presentations, but one of the key issues that arose was not what the presenters were saying, but what the audience were doing. My colleague Doug Clow was live-blogging the sessions he was in (e.g. see his account of my Learning Design session). He was told by three different people in separate sessions to stop as his typing was offputting. Doug gives his account here, and Niall backs him up here.

    The audience of this blog may find this surprising, since the idea of not live-blogging would seem odd, but it shows we take certain behaviours for granted in our ed tech world. I found it rather ironic though in a conference called Making Connections that Doug should get these comments. He was making connections with people who weren’t at the conference (see the comments on his post), and additionally a few of us were twittering through the conference so we were making connections across the sessions (I set up a Crowdstatus page for those twittering). Making connections is about more than chatting over a glass of wine (although that’s nice too).

    I think some people feel it shows disrespect to the speaker that you aren’t giving them your full attention. In fact, thinking through the act of people having laptops or other devices operating during a talk I give, I’m of the completely opposite view. If what I’m saying isn’t interesting enough for you to want to liveblog, twitter, look up sources or take notes on it, then I’m doing something wrong. And, if by some freak chance what I’m saying isn’t interesting, then I’d rather people were doing their email or reading blogs than sitting in my session feeling resentful because they are trapped. Hey, I’ve had people sleeping during a talk before – I’d rather they were tapping away on their keyboards.

    Yep.