Marc Ambinder reminds us that Caroline Kennedy is a legacy pick, not a beneficiary of nepotism.
As a practical matter, I’ll throw in my hat with Ross Douthat. If Caroline Kennedy wants to enter a Democratic primary, raise money, and campaign for a Senate seat, I wish her well. To request appointment to the Senate on the basis of no practical political experience whatsoever is just silly. And the soap opera-esque aspects of the whole thing make me want to throw up.
I make pessimistic pronouncements about Ruby and suddenly interesting things turn up.
Matthew Yglesias explains what sucks about the South:
This is, of course, but a small slice of the larger southern politics tradition which has always insisted since the end of the Civil War that cheap labor and a low-tax, low-service, high-inequality social and economic system are the key to prosperity. This approach left the South perennially poorer than the rest of the country, but over the past couple of decades this made-in-dixie failed approach to economic development has come to dominate national policy. Not coincidentally, during this period the United States has begun to fall behind high-wage, high-service, low-inequality northern European countries in terms of average living standards.
I’ve lived in the South for essentially my entire life.
Scott Rosenberg has a good explanation of how the Wall Street Journal blew today’s inflammatory cover story on network neutrality, and also provides all of the essential supporting links.
Steve Jobs on what motivates Apple:
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.
Call it mortality-driven development.
Take a look at the Edmunds.com list of price change alerts for every model currently being produced. The constant stream of down arrows tells the story of the auto industry today. The US automakers are doing poorly, but so is everyone else. In many ways, the difference between how the US automakers are doing and how everyone else is doing is that their labor relationships go back a lot further than do the labor relationships of foreign automakers that are producing cars in the US.
The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein calls out Wall Street executives for failing to lead in the years when the entire economy shackled itself to the unsustainable rise in housing prices. In this case, leadership means accepting reality and helping other people see and accept that reality as well.
Throughout the expansion of the real estate bubble, there were plenty of people out there who were saying that the bigger the bubble got, the more damaging the collapse was going to be. Unfortunately, none of them were in a position to do much about it.
Here’s Pearlstein:
One thing we know about leadership is that it rarely involves using excuses such as “All the other kids were doing it.” That’s only a slight oversimplification of what we’ve heard from the masters of the financial universe in explaining how things could have gone so wrong. The more elaborate explanation goes something like this:
“Yes, we saw that there was a deterioration in underwriting standards for loans, and yes, we understood we were taking on additional risks to our company and to the system by making lots of those loans and putting them on our books. But you have to remember that this was where the big growth in the industry was coming from. If we had refused to go along, we would have effectively put ourselves out of the game. We would have lost market share. Our profitability would have been significantly lower. Our stock price would have been hammered. We would have been crucified by analysts and the financial press, short-sellers would have begun to circle, and before long some hedge fund masquerading as an ‘activist investor’ would have bought a stake and begun to agitate for a change in management.”
Pearlstein then goes on to describe what real leadership looks like. And what I like is that he makes the most important point — leadership is more than telling the truth. Anyone can explain what’s wrong and hope people listen to them — leadership is about bringing about needed change. None of the many economists, journalists, bloggers, or innocent bystanders who saw this coming were able to prevent the subsequent unraveling. But the CEO of one major investment bank could have. One highly placed cabinet official could have. One committee chair in Congress probably could have. The head of the Federal Reserve could have. The President certainly could have. They all declined because it was easier to try to blend in with the herd.
It’s not as though I, a programmer who blogs about whatever shiny idea captures his interest, is any smarter than the CEO of Lehman Brothers or wiser than the Secretary of the Treasury. I just don’t have any vested interests or any influence over what actually happens. The risks are much greater for people who are in a position of leadership, but they’re the ones who asked to be put in these positions in the first place. The fact that they opted into the shared delusion rather than facing reality is the most damning indictment of their leadership that can be made, and none of the excuses they’re making should be accepted.
I’ve had a blog post about Ruby sort of simmering on the back burner, but I haven’t written it because I don’t really feel qualified enough to substantiate the case that I wanted to make. As so often happens, somebody else has beaten me to the punch and written something much like I had in mind.
In this case, it’s KirinDave, who explains his suspicion that Ruby is a soft of dead end. There’s a funny thing about programming languages. They’re some of the only pieces of software that really seem to eventually be finished. Perl has seemed finished for a long time. I suspect that Python may be finished. C has been finished forever. Ruby, at times, seems over but not finished, if you get my meaning.
On the other hand, I find programming in Ruby enjoyable and educational, so it’s not like I’m looking to give up. It’s just that even after a couple of years of doing it, I still feel like we’re dating rather than married.
This morning a friend of mine sent an email asking whether Will Muschamp had opted out of being “head coach in waiting” at the University of Texas and taken the job as head football coach at Auburn. He said he’d heard something on the radio.
My first stop was Google News, but there were no stories today that mentioned Muschamp. I was despairing being out of the loop a little bit when it occurred to me that the next best stop was search.twitter.com and found that Twitter was abuzz with the latest Muschamp-related scuttlebutt.
I don’t think I realized until that moment that Twitter is perhaps the ultimate resource for tapping into the zeitgeist of the moment. Blogs are a great resource for tapping into what’s happening today, Twitter is where you find out what’s happening this second.
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Bank will pay executive bonuses in illiquid assets
This is the best idea I’ve heard of in some time. Credit Suisse Group AG is going to pay its executives bonuses out of a pool of toxic mortgage-backed assets that it cannot currently sell. I love this because it is both just and clever. The executives at the bank now have every incentive to figure out a way to make these rotten assets turn into something less rotten, and if they don’t, they’re in the same boat as the investors who purchased them.