Elizabeth Drew’s article in the New York Review of Books explains in detail the goals behind Dubya’s tax cut, the political wrangling it took to get the legislation passed, and the weird details of the legislation itself. It’s the best article on the tax cut that I’ve yet read.
I’m sorry I’ve been ragging on Dubya so much this week, not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because it’s tiresome. That said, I read today that Dubya’s widely publicized trip over to the Habitat for Humanity construction site was scheduled to last all of 15 minutes. Being that the whole thing was set up as a photo op, and he really didn’t help out in the building of the house at all , why does the media even report on it? And just so you don’t think I’m too biased, I know that most politicians do this sort of photo op oriented crap, and I hate them for it. I don’t have a problem with people doing things for publicity, but they at least ought to really do them, not pretend to do them just long enough to have some pictures taken.
Salon picked up $2.5 million in additional financing from the usual suspects, and will be adding some of their new investors to the board. They also laid off 14 people, and are switching Table Talk to a pay service (you may have already known that). Supposedly this cash will be enough to float them along until they can turn a profit. Let’s hope.
It looks like Borland might be working on interoperability between .NET and Java. I’m still not sure what the best strategy is when it comes to addressing .NET. Is it better for Java and Unix people to work on interoperating with .NET, in order to take advantage of the useful parts and out of fear of being left behind if it really takes off? Or is it better to ignore .NET and force users to choose whether they want to be in the Microsoft camp or the “anything but Microsoft” camp. Right now, I’m leaning toward interoperability. Besides, I’m kind of excited about C#, or at least I will be when you can compile C# code with gcc.
I have neglected to congratulate Ev over at Blogger for launching an XML-RPC interface for their application. Let a thousand front ends for Blogger bloom!