One of the creepiest aspects of the Perfect Financial Storm is the way Dubya has been reduced to being a bit-player in his own Administration. It’s clear from the few public statements he’s made that he hasn’t a clue what’s going on and is reading from a script written for him by others.
Good stuff here…
For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.
This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering…
Yep. Looks like Kodak are phasing it out.
Only one commercial lab in the world, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan., still develops Kodachrome, a once-ubiquitous brand that has freeze-framed the world in rich but authentic hues since it was introduced in the Great Depression.
Eastman Kodak Co. now makes the slide and motion-picture film in just one 35 mm format, and production runs — in which a master sheet nearly a mile long is cut up into more than 20,000 rolls — fall at least a year apart.
Kodak won’t say when the last one occurred nor hint at Kodachrome’s prospects. Kodachrome stocks now on sale have a 2009 expiration date. If the machines aren’t fired up again, the company might sell out the remaining supplies, and that would be the end.
“It’s a low-volume product; all volumes (of color film) are down,” said Kodak spokesman Chris Veronda.
Sigh. There goes part of my youth. And of Paul Simon’s.
Terrific post by Dave Winer.
Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. It’s the lack of specificity that makes it so chilling.
Consider the whole scenario. Powell can’t tell us what the danger is because that would violate some security that he can’t violate. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I’ll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.
We all paid a huge price that day, and the bill may be coming due today, because they’re presenting us with the same scenario, this time about the economy. And we’re not going for it. You can see it in the way things flipped around overnight. A lot of people woke up this morning, like I did, and realized — wait I’ve seen this movie before.
Now we have another impressive Almost Presidential secretary, Henry Paulson, who says there’s impending doom, but he can’t say exactly what it is, it’s not security this time, but fear of starting another level of bank runs. Senators and Representatives come out of a Thursday night meeting with the secretary (would they have believed the President) won’t say exactly what he said, but they are stunned. The next day buried in a sea of press about this event is an almost innocuous paragraph in a NYT piece that talks about a flight to safety from the US Treasury money market. OMG. A point made by the secretary to the Congresspeople, a lot of your constituents have their savings in money markets. The Senators think to themselves, Fuck the constituents, that’s where my retirement savings are! (And by the way, mine.)
And who elected Hank Paulson btw? Dave’s point is that
we can’t do it on the terms that Paulson asks for. There has to be some pain and there has to be oversight and checks and balances. There’s no such thing as a law passed by Congress that can’t be judged by the courts. Not in the USA, not under our form of government. And no way is Bush going to get that by us.
So here’s what I propose. The Republican slogan today is Country First. So let’s see the Republicans do a little of that famous Country First stuff.
Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson.
It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.
Hmmm…. I think we know the answer to that one.
James Miller pointed me to an interesting post by Robert Reich, the Harvard academic who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor for a while:
The public doesn’t like a blank check. They think this whole bailout idea is nuts. They see fat cats on Wall Street who have raked in zillions for years, now extorting in effect $2,000 to $5,000 from every American family to make up for their own nonfeasance, malfeasance, greed, and just plain stupidity. Wall Street’s request for a blank check comes at the same time most of the public is worried about their jobs and declining wages, and having enough money to pay for gas and food and health insurance, meet their car payments and mortgage payments, and save for their retirement and childrens’ college education. And so the public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?
So if you are a member of Congress, you just might be in a position to demand from Wall Street certain conditions in return for the blank check…
He goes on to set out five conditions. The one I like best is that banking bonuses be based on a five-year rolling average of performance.
Great post by Jeff Jarvis…
We’re spending $700 billion to bail out the idiots who got us into this mess and we end up with nothing to show for it but the bag we’re left holding and maybe a disaster averted (we hope).
We could be spending a lot less to get a lot more. A national wi-max buildout would cost between $5 billion and $14.5 billion. That would enable every American to get high-speed access to the internet and to its education, commerce, connectivity, innovation, jobs, and value. With a lot left over.
Or take the $700 billion and divide it by America’s 114.5 million TV households. Minus the 40-percent-plus margin that cable companies make on internet access (that’s the number I heard from them), we could provide broadband access to every one of those homes for about $300 a year. That means we could give every American free broadband access for 20 years.
We could buy 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines. Want world peace and understanding? Give one to every Muslim on earth and every citizen of China (or since China can afford them, make that everyone in India or everyone in Africa and South America combined) and you’d still have more than 500 million machines left over.
Or we could give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions. We could give 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions like mine. That alone would improve our competitive position and transform dying industries.
Or we could more than triple total annual R&D spending in the U.S. I can’t find total R&D on alternative energy but with this money we could multiply what Google.org is spending by a factor of 35,000…
Friday was Talk like a Pirate Day. Nice to see that Google has finally caught up with the trend.
Inevitably, the conversation in our household turned to Captain Pugwash, the notorious TV pirate. And — as you might expect — there is an excellent Wikipedia article about him. Pugwash also has an extensive presence on YouTube — which a humourless lawyer might conclude was itself an act of piracy. Here’s an example of this delicious type of recursion.
And the indefatiguable Snopes.com has a brisk refutation of the allegation that the names of Pugwash’s crew were sexual double entendres.
Simon Caulkin has some interesting reflections on the managerial aspects of the crisis…
The credit crunch conclusively demonstrates that we can no longer afford a corporate model that generates repeated crises for society as a whole as a byproduct of pursuing vast rewards for a few. This makes a mockery of the corporate social responsibility movement, of which the City is a pillar. CSR is simply incompatible with the unbridled incentive schemes, lemming-like pursuit of risk and unaccountability that have produced today’s meltdown. It is time to bring CSR inside – to do what New Labour flirted with ever so briefly in 1997 and then abjectly abandoned – and lay on companies the formal obligation to take into account the wider interests of all stakeholders, including the community, on pain of having their charter removed. To the conventionalists who object that the notion of benefiting all stakeholders is a recipe for fudge and compromise, tell that to rivals of Toyota (largest auto company in the world), Whole Foods Market (fastest-growing retailer), John Lewis, and many other successful companies that include wider social wellbeing in their corporate aims…
And, in case anyone thinks that the Cameroonians will do any better, here’s a sobering thought from Nick Mathiason’s piece about the cosy relationship that New Labour cultivated with the City.:
But just as Labour grapples with regulating the City, it seems likely that the reins of power will be seized by the Conservatives, bankrolled by hedge-fund managers, spread-betting tycoons and blue-blooded Tory bankers. It could soon be political business as usual.
This morning’s Observer column…
Every cloud has a silver lining. Ask the cybersquatters. Even as the short-selling vultures began circling Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Merrill Lynch and co, a legion of entrepreneurs began betting on domain names for hastily merged financial institutions. For example, when Barclays and Bank of America began to emerge as buyers for Lehman, names such as barclayslehman.com and bofalehman.com were promptly registered by enterprising hopefuls.
Some of these domains were being offered for sale on eBay last week. For example, www.bankofamericamerrilllynch.com was available at a starting bid of $1,500…
“At this point I should note that for the first time, both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies,” Mr. Gates said. “A fat lot of good that’s done us.”
US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, speaking at an Oxford Analytica conference yesterday.