Not only has Microsoft decided to get out of the way of Mozilla Firebird, it looks like they’re making way for Thunderbird as well by mothballing Outlook Express.

It seems that with every passing day I become more convinced that rather than things being as bad as they ever were, they’re actually getting worse. Nicholas Confessore has an article in Washington Monthly that describes how Republicans have commandeered the lobbying establishment.

You may already know that there are few people in the world of business that I respect or admire more than Warren Buffett. I don’t so much admire Buffett for his success as a businessman as for his high ethical standards and for the fact that, at least in the world of government policy, he seems to prefer the good of society to self interest. I was therefore dumbfounded to read that Buffett is acting as an advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ow, my brain hurts.

Who knew that running a successful Presidential (or at least primary) campaign in many ways boils down to customer relationship management. Implementing such systems sounds like a fun job to me.

I was just thinking this morning about the extent to which my world view has been shaped by National Geographic. I’ve been a National Geographic subscriber for years, and I literally read every page of the magazine every month. I usually study the maps that are included with the magazine every other month or so pretty closely as well. The structure of nearly every article is basically the same: there is something stupendously beautiful, interesting, or bizarre in the world; mankind is screwing it up; some progress has been made in undoing those mistakes. I’m pretty sure that years of exposure to these articles has made me rather misanthropic. On the other hand, the photos are always incredible.

Via Unqualified Offerings, the outrage du jour: comic book store employee sells adult only comic selected from adults-only section of the store to adult undercover cop, and winds up going to jail for 180 days and paying a $4,000 fine. The argument that swayed the jury is that comic books are for kids and therefore dirty comics violate obscenity laws. As if I needed another reminder of what a closed-minded society of know nothings we inhabit.

Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus broke the news that there’s already a signed agreement between Pete Rose and Major League Baseball reinstating him for the 2004 season. As a baseball fan, this story interested me. Personally, I don’t think Rose should be reinstated. I won’t explain my reasons because anyone who’s really interested knows why people on both sides feel the way they do, and it’s just not interesting. The more interesting thing to me is that you’d never expect a story like this, a huge, important story, to be published first by the Baseball Prospectus. BP has always been about analysis, not news, so for them to break what would be the biggest baseball story of the season (to say the least) is shocking. Major League Baseball denied the story, but you’d expect that. For more background into how Baseball Prospectus found itself in the world of news reporting and news making, King Kaufman interviewed Will Carroll, one of the writers of the story, today for Salon.

I saw a link to a nice piece of sensible advice for programmers and other technical folks at Decafbad. It’s a brief explanation of how to structure your work and communicate with management to insure that you’re seen as a valuable and consistent employee.

Today, Fred Kaplan examined Colin Powell’s February 5 speech at the UN that laid out the case against Iraq. I did the same thing on May 7.

Slate has been working the Arnold Schwarzenegger beat pretty hard, consistently turning out articles discussing why California voters might not or should not vote for him. The most recent entry compares his gubernatorial campaign to his involvement with Planet Hollywood.