Facebook is the new AOL
Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else.
Matt Haughey say something both true and profound.
Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else.
Matt Haughey say something both true and profound.
Most people know that the employment situation right now is pretty terrible, but the precise way in which it is terrible is poorly understood. The absolute numbers are very high, but the suffering is not evenly distributed. The statistic I see getting thrown around a lot is that unemployment for college educated people is 5% — essentially full employment. Nobody I know has had any luck hiring programmers lately. Unemployment among those with only a high school degree is at 15%, up from 12% this time last year.
Over at FiveThirtyEight, bonddad breaks down all of the unemployment statistics to provide a broad picture of what’s going on in the job market. Here’s the conclusion:
The great recession wiped out lower education/manual labor jobs. And the experience of the manufacturing sector after the last expansion indicates those jobs aren’t coming back.
Given that, it seems easy to argue that our number one long term domestic priority should be to pursue policies that educate more people by improving schools, making college more affordable, and removing obstacles that prevent people from going to school. There’s a lot of talk about cutting government spending, but the best and most realistic option for tackling the deficit long term is to lower the pace of government spending increases (most importantly on health care) and increase the amount of revenue through economic growth rather than tax increases. How do we do that? Educate our citizens.
If there’s one person I listen to on health care, it’s Atul Gawande. His piece on the problems with fee for service in health care was probably the most influential piece on health care costs that anybody wrote last year. Salon magazine just ran a new interview with Gawande about his book on checklists and more generally the importance of building effective systems rather than focusing on individual performance. I think there are lessons for everyone in both observations. Gawande was also a guest on the Daily Show this week.
Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works:
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology. Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.*
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
The metaphor of the bike shed discussion has served me well over the years. Here’s a theory of how it applies to politics:
In the book “Stealth Democracy” (which I previously blogged on here), John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that voters have very weak policy preferences. Indeed, you can get a lot of people to change their mind on policy by asking them whether, thinking through the potential consequences of that policy, they’d like to change their mind. You can get even more of them to change their mind if you pay them a compliment first.
Which makes sense. People don’t know very much about policy. The twist in Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s argument, however, is that people do know quite a bit about process, or feel they do, and in contrast to their weak policy preferences, they have very strong process preferences. The strongest among them is the belief that the people sent to do the people’s work shouldn’t be working on behalf of special interests, which explains the fury over the Nelson deal. Similarly strong is the aversion to partisan conflict, as most people think that these problems have common-sense solutions, and too much conflict suggests the two parties are deviating from that middle path.
People may not know the details of the health care reform bill, but the know that the legislative process that produced it stinks.
Jessamyn West on the value of libraries:
My Jessamyn corollary to this is “With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone.
Be sure to read the whole thing. It reminds me of a 2002 piece by Tim O’Reilly that made an impact on me, Piracy is Progressive Taxation.
Since it was posted yesterday, I have been both horrified and fascinated by the results of this DailyKos/Research 2000 poll of Republicans. It’s impossible to cherry pick the results from the list to make my point because so many of them are so very distressing. Andrew Sullivan posted a great explanation of what this is about:
It has a parallel in the way in which non-violent Islamists have doubled down on medievalism as they feel an overwhelming sense of their own failure to succeed in modernity. There is a profound insecurity and dysfunction in these subcultures which cannot make the transition to modern life and thereby surrender more totally to the ancient past and to hatred of those who succeed. The hatred of Obama – a clearly decent and obviously Christian man – is not about him. It’s about them. It’s about their resentment of a man who has integrated his own identity and made a place for himself in a pluralist world. They cannot do that – so, like Palin, they invent a world of ancient virtues and moral absolutes that they routinely fail to live up to in reality. I mean: look at Palin’s family and Obama’s. Whose is the more traditional? And yet Palin is allegedly the avatar of family values – and Obama is a commie subversive.
I just don’t know what you do with a person who believes that ACORN stole the 2008 election on behalf of a foreign-born socialist who hates white people and should be impeached. These same people are ready to ban openly gay teachers from public schools unless they agree to teach the book of Genesis in science class. I don’t think education is the answer.
I beat up on the Republicans a lot, but I want to point out the alternative budget proposal put forth by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. His proposal eliminates the deficit and takes care of the entitlement crisis. It does so by eliminating Medicare and giving seniors vouchers they can use to buy health insurance. If health insurance premiums go up at a higher rate than the voucher amount, it will fall to seniors to make up the difference. His proposal is not something I’d support, but it is an honest attempt to engage with the budget problems the country faces long term, which is more than you can say for most of what Republicans put forth. He argues in favor of his proposal in this interview with Ezra Klein.
Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.
Facebook developer Haiping Zhao announces HipHop for PHP, a tool that translates PHP to C++ and compiles it using g++.
People are weighing in since Amazon “capitulated” (their words) to Macmillan yesterday. The most entertaining rundown was written by John Scalzi. The most insightful was written by Tim Bray.
© rc3.org. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Skinny Theme.