Paul Boutin has started writing a new column for Slate. In his initial offering, he argues that geeks should stick to coding around laws rather than lobbying to change them. I’m not sure I agree. It’s unlikely that geeks can beat the power brokers at their own game, but making people aware of the nasty things done in Washington and statehouses around the country is a noble cause. I didn’t realize how out of the mainstream most of the political issues we have to deal with every day are until I had to, in essence, explain what Eldred v Ashcroft is to my wife last night.

As we contemplate starting a whole new war in Iraq, it’s worthwhile to look back on last year’s war in Afghanistan. The United States (with NATO backing) appears to be trying to disengage, despite the fact that there’s already an immense power vacuum in Afghanistan and removing international peacekeepers would certainly lead to a complete collapse of the Karzai government. One UK paper is also reporting that Karzai’s US Special Forces security detail has been replaced with mercenaries hired by the US State Department. Before we went to war with Afghanistan, I didn’t believe we’d do much to help rebuild the country, and it looks like I was right. My fears for Iraq are the same.

Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick has a love story praising the innovative stuff coming out of Microsoft. The stuff he talks about doesn’t sound particularly innovative to me, although the OneNote application for note taking does sound pretty neat. More importantly though, it’s stupid to talk about Microsoft’s innovation without talking about the innovation stifled by Microsoft. I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but note taking applications and displays you can carry around the house don’t make up for the lost innovation in the areas of operating systems and even worse, productivity suites, thanks to Microsoft. Most people live in their browsers, office apps, and email clients, and yet competition here is almost dead. Now that Mozilla is finished, browser innovation is again creeping forward, and hopefully Chandler will do the same thing for email clients, but we’re not there yet in terms of competition.

When you look at competitive software markets, you realize how much is being lost to Microsoft’s monopoly. The pace of innovation in Java IDEs is staggering. Intellij, Eclipse, TogetherSoft, and Borland are moving the ball forward at an unbelievable pace. Microsoft’s development tools and J2EE are also advancing at a very rapid pace. Competition drives innovation, that’s the bottom line. As much as Microsoft spends billions of dollars on research and they want to make lives better for their customers, the lack of head to head competition leads to stagnation. The fact that we’ve suffered under Microsoft’s monopoly for so long leads to people forgetting that.

The St Louis Post-Dispatch has a long article today about the options for governing Iraq once we’ve invaded and kicked out Saddam Hussein. Basically, the article dismantles the plan put forward by the hawks in the Bush administration — that there’s a suitable Iraqi government waiting in exile for the day they can begin governing. Close inspection none of the exile groups can muster anything resembling a consensus, and that none of them have any support within Iraq. If we invade Iraq, it’s going to be up to us (and the United Nations) to administer and provide security for the country during a transition period that ultimately gives way to a legitimate, representative Iraqi government. That’s what we did after World War II, that’s what we’ve done in Kosovo and Bosnia, and that’s what we’ll have to do in Iraq. If the Bush administration isn’t ready to take on that responsibility, they may as well leave Saddam in power.

The NYT Magazine has a long article this week on Scott Ritter, who doesn’t really seem to have a lot of credibility left.

How come nobody ever told me that when I wrote invision I meant envision.

It’s tough being the most powerful man in the world. You win some. You lose some.

I have to believe that one of the scariest trends for anyone who programs is the migration of jobs to offshore development shops. Frankly, I don’t put stock in any numbers that I read in forecasts from Forrester or any other analyst, but the bottom line is that IT jobs moving overseas is the real deal. Norm Matloff and other people complain bitterly about the abuse of H1B visas by the high tech industry — H1Bs are nothing compared to entire projects moving offshore.

I really think that an increase in computer skills and other knowledge work overseas is great for economic development in the countries where it catches on. As more skilled jobs move to other countries, the wages in those countries will go up, moving those countries more toward the developing world. For the American programmer, though, competing with an equally well trained programmer overseas who gets paid a fraction what you do is a grim proposition.

Ultimately, I think that everyone has to consider how they add value to the organization that pays them. The rock star programmers don’t have anything to worry about, nor do the people who are speccing out the projects and defining requirements and architecture. For the regular programmer, I think the answer is to compete on service. You have to show your employer why having your team in the building justifies the increased cost over that team of people 8 or 10 time zones away. If you’re just as difficult to communicate with as a guy who’s sitting in front of his computer in Bangalore, India, then I’d suggest that you either become good enough at your job to deserve prima donna status or you get ready to lose your job to offshore development.

The new Homeland Security bill, which ballooned from about 40 to nearly 400 pages after it returned from the conference committee, has a number of time bombs in it that are threats to freedom and privacy. For example, the bill says that you can go to jail for disclosing anything that’s a threat to “critical infrastructure.” What’s critical infrastructure? Who knows. It doesn’t surprise me that the Bush administration, which thinks very little of the public’s need to know anything about what the government is doing, is criminalizing the disclosure of information.

My RSS feed has been broken for some period of time. It’s fixed. (Looks like I need to add it to my aggregator so I can make sure it’s not broken.)