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Johnny Paycheck died in his sleep last night. He was particularly emblematic of the time when country musicians were the outlaws of the music industry.

So I just saw a pointer to this letter by Laurie Garrett, a first hand dispatch from the World Economic Forum in Davos. She says she didn’t intend the letter for public consumption, but I don’t really care at this point since everybody already knows about it. In it she says that the muckety-mucks who run this planet already believe that the world economy is really on the rocks, and that a protracted conflict with Iraq could accelerate the downward spiral that we can’t seem to pull out of. What if that’s true? Is there any sort of rational economic risk-reward analysis going on behind the scenes with the Bush administration? The word nobody dares speak above a whisper is deflation. I can tell you right now that just about anybody who works in the IT industry already understands the implications of deflation – as far as I know salaries simply aren’t going up for anybody if they work in IT these days. The bottom line with deflation is that every bit of debt you have suddenly becomes more expensive. Alan Greenspan has spent his entire career fighting inflation, but for Joe Consumer, inflation really isn’t so bad. It makes your credit card debt relatively cheaper to pay off, effectively lowers your mortgage, and generally makes life easier for people in debtor countries like the United States. Deflation has the opposite effect. I admit that I’ve left out all but the most basic economic considerations from my analysis of whether or not we ought to start a war with Iraq. I know that the war is going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars (at a time when nearly every state in America is in a major deficit situation), and the Bush administration won’t even cop to that. What if the war aggravates lots of the negative trends that are already keeping the economy in the dumps? For anybody who’s trying to make it in the current economy, things are already looking grim. It’s bad enough that our reputation around the world is at stake, is the global economy worth risking so that we can go to war with Iraq? The bottom line here is that we’ve gone 12 years since Desert Storm and let Saddam Hussein simmer. The same people who are now urging us to war let him off the hook back then. If finishing the job means dealing a mortal blow to the world economy, then mightn’t we consider holding out with the inspections just a bit longer? ...

There’s a new thread at Advogato suggesting a database containing links to all the world’s Javadoc. I think this is a brilliant idea, and it has the added value of being completely implementable, because of the Java’s clever way of avoiding namespace collisions in package names. Bad citizens can create namespace collisions, but the system does a pretty good job of discouraging it. Project maintainers could specify which packages they supply Javadoc for and the site could just match up search terms entered by users with those package names. Even better, all the project maintainers would have to do is point the site at the URL where the Javadoc is stored and it could yank down the Javadoc and build an index of the packages and classes documented on the site. I’m really loving this idea. ...

Danny O’Brien posted an explanation of what happened with the Jhai PC that was sent out by the people working on the project. I’m posting this to follow up on my question about the caption from the Jhai PC photo that went out over the wire. (A couple of readers have sent this to me as well, but I’m linking to Danny’s site because he already went to the trouble to cut and paste the email.) ...

North Korea upped the saber rattling ante today, saying that if the US imposes penalties on them, then they’ll pull out of the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean war. The White House dismissed the threat.

Am I the only person who programs in Java every day and finds absolutely no use for the Java Developer Connection? Someone pointed me at a bug report that you need to log in to see today, and I realized that I had completely forgotten my password. I know I signed up for JDC at one time or another, but I can’t remember why, or when I last logged in. This all seems like a failure on Sun’s part somehow, but maybe not. I know I spend a lot of time on the Apache Jakarta site … ...

Scott Rosenberg cautions Salon naysayers that rumors of their demise are once again greatly exaggerated. Basically, he says they’re seeking new investment, and when they get it, they’ll be OK. People who have doubted Salon’s resilience in the past have not been rewarded, so I’ll go ahead and assume that they’ll continue to trudge onward.

I find that many in the pro-war camp are eager to criticize (or, more often, ridicule) France rather than trying to understand it. This frustrates me not because I have some liberal compulsion toward mutual understanding, but rather because we have to live with the French regardless of how irrationally they appear to be behaving. Besides, I guarantee that America’s behavior appears just as nonsensical to many outsiders as well. In seeking some rationale for France’s ongoing machinations in preventing war in Iraq, I return to my old friend Stratfor. One of their free newsletters from last week provides a plausible explanation for France’s foreign policy that’s sort of tangential to the “experience with the horrors of war” thing that I talked about last week. ...

Currently, I personally oppose the war with Iraq because I’ve lost any faith I might have ever had that the Bush administration would do right by the Iraqi people during or after any war. If we let the country go straight to hell immediately after we destroy any infrastructure they may have rebuilt since the last time we reduced Iraq to rubble, then there’s no doubt in my mind that any good this war might have done by removing Saddam will be negated. That said, the UN has gotten itself into a real pickle. When they agreed to Resolution 1441, they agreed to use force if Iraq refuses to disarm. The purpose of inspections is to verify that Iraq is disarming, not to find weapons Iraq is trying to hide. It’s obvious that Iraq is not disarming (for good reasons, mind you). Now the players in the UN are trying to change the rules. Certain members of the security council don’t want war under any circumstances – so why did they compromise with the Bush administration? Did they think that Saddam would fear Resolution 1441 and actually start a verifiable disarmament process? That seems unlike to me. If I’m Saddam Hussein (and I have trouble putting myself in the shoes of a vicious, irrational powermonger), no way do I disarm. Personally, I have thought that Bush was going to start this war at some point no matter what. I’d bet Saddam agrees. So why reduce your own capabilities when you think that war is inevitable anyway? In other news, I’m somewhat awed by the massive turnouts at the antiwar protests worldwide (including America). This war is absurdly unpopular even with people who have no skin in the game. What happens if things go badly? When the bombing starts, civilian casualties will be inevitable? How popular will we be when video of destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools is airing every day on the TV news worldwide? ...

I should mention that Google has acquired Pyra. Congrats, Ev. The thing here is that there’s no way to know what Google’s plans are for this purchase. Will Blogger exist next year as it exists today? We really have no way of knowing. We also have no way of knowing what the purchase price was. It very well could be that Google purchased Pyra just to bring in the knowledge that will enable them to better take advantage of the blogging world in their existing offerings. ...