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Tuesday, February 10, 2004 |
 One thing I can add to the Bush controversy from my personal experience is that pilot training is very, very expensive. I have heard estimates that it cost the military $1.5 m to send me to pilot training back in 1986 (in Lubbock TX). Given the expense, and the competition for pilot slots (particularly for the Guard, which has few slots), it is very unlikely that a pilot would be allowed to stop flying unless he/she was an unsafe pilot. My assumption is that Bush was a good and solid pilot. So something else is at work here.
5:54:39 PM 
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This is a horrible display of media manipulation. The nonprofit, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, stole and leaked confidential data that indicated Robert Atkins (author of the famous diet) was obese when he died. The news stories exploded all over the world (267 on Google News alone), all with the title: "Atkins was obese when he died." Unfortunately, the information is apparently baseless. According to the AP, Atkins was in a coma during his last week of life where he was pumped with fluids. These fluids accounted for his extensive weight gain. He also had a condition of cardiomyopathy (a viral infection of the heart), which is may cause a person to retain fluids. This group obviously did this to discredit a diet that clashed with their low-fat orthodoxy. Shame. This is a level of desperation and maliciousness that denigrates the committee and their cause. Totally irresponsible.
5:17:34 PM
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Josh Marshall is tracking all the details on the press frenzy around Bush's fuzzy service record. A couple points need to be clarified though.
Lots of people are going to say that the media delights in randomly tearing people down. It typically isn't random. In my view, the press delights in tearing down high viz hypocrites. If you say one thing (in Bush's case: wrap yourself in the flag and call yourself the "war" president), and do the exact opposite in secrecy (not show up for military service when required to), you are going to get mauled. The only way to deal with this type of revelation is to come clean. A selective release of records, which is what the WhiteHouse is apparently going to do, will make this issue a bloody mess. I hope they don't take that route.
Kerry is also doing two things that aren't that smart. First, he is denigrating the Guard as a way to serve the country. Second, he is claiming that combat experience is a requirement for the presidency. Both statements aren't even remotely true. He should back off this inflamatory rhetoric immediately and let the media do its job.
4:14:38 PM
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Downbrigade makes a case for video aggregators. It is already here in the form of RSS enclosures (I still get lots of video and audio clips from Adam Curry delivered automatically to a folder on my desktop). However, not everyone has the bucks like Adam to pay the hosting costs this entails. What is needed is a P2P system that hooks into aggregators and weblog tools.
This is, of course, something that I have been an advocate of for years and years. It just hasn't made it fruition yet. However, with video phones just around the corner, the time is ripe for some movement in this direction. What is needed to get this moving:
- A P2P system like Onion Networks that generates unique file names for all files on the system and content check to ensure there isn't any corruption of the file on the network. Like Onion, this system needs to be viewable by all active participants on the network (systems like KaZaA and Morpheus only show you a small portion of the network, which in turn requires up to ~40,000 copies on the network in order to be seen by everyone). If a file is seen by all network participants, the publisher gets immediate help on bandwidth costs when the first person downloads the file to their system.
- The P2P system should generate a unique code for each file placed in a folder on a weblog publishers desktop. This code could be cut and pasted into a weblog post. When a reader clicks the post, they are requested to download an RSS aggregator to view the content.
- An RSS aggregator with connections with desktop P2P software. Additional control, provided the aggregator software, would let you determine when you wanted it downloaded (now or later). You would also have the option of downloading it as part of your RSS feed if you trust that person.
The end-user experience should be as simple and subscribing to an RSS feed and setting the preferences for that feed (enclosures or no enclosures). Alternatively, if an end-user (reader) clicks on a link to a P2Ped video file published on a weblog they aren't subscribed to, a windlet would pop up to ask them to download some aggregator software -- or -- if they have it already it would ask them whether they wanted to dowload it now or later.
The end result would be a system that scales (to millions of users), is inexpensive to operate (which means almost anyone could do it with a DSL connection), and is fast (since downloads can come from multiple sources with the same file). It would allow us to move to a world where publishing a news channel is as simple as taking the video and putting it into your weblog. Raw video news all the time. I wish someone had the cohones to put this together.
NOTE: If Dean had only spent $100k of his money on putting the parts (the software is already there -- all we need is a high viz demo) together on a system like this, he would have a way to truly put the screws to big media.
11:13:13 AM
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Jeff Jarvis reports that weblogs are still powering online campaigns. This time the juice is in running ads on personal weblogs and not only through direct appeal. Nice. BTW, he is also doing a great job blogging the Emergent Democracy Conference.
10:39:21 AM
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Calpundit pulls documents and does analysis that demonstrates that Bush didn't show up for duty after May of 1972. It is very interesting analysis. NOTE: the reason I don't like this entire thing is that it makes the Guard look like a hide-out for cowards. This couldn't be farther from the truth. I couldn't care less about the politics of this. My father spent almost all of his adult life flying in the Guard and went to whatever location they sent him, without question. Some of his best friends died young while flying jets in the Guard. Perhaps he has some insight into this. If he does, I will post it.
8:40:42 AM
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Yesterday, I posted a note from Stephen Roach, the Wall Street Economist from Morgan Stanley (he gets paid millions for being right, not for being political). He states that we are 8 m jobs behind where we should be right now with an average recovery (which started in late 2001). How can that number be true? The easiest way to see what is really going on is to look at the absolute numbers of jobs or economy has created rather than fudgy stats about who is looking for work.
Brad DeLong has an excellent graph that shows in absolute terms how many jobs our economy supported over the last four years. Note that the peak was at the end of 2001. Since then, we have lost 2.2 m jobs. In that same time period, the number of new entrants to the job market has grown, due to normal population growth, at nearly 200,000 per month (or 7.2 m workers over the last three years). Combined, that's a net deficit of 9.4 m jobs to stay even with our employment rate at the end of 2001.
So, given these numbers, 8 m new jobs to isn't a typo. So, why the difference between these numbers (generated by an establishment survey that covers 1/3 of all workers) and the unemployment numbers? Unemployment statistics are generated through a household survey that asks people about their job status and whether they are looking for work. The household survey only asks this question of 0.006% of all US households. This sounds about as useful as presidential poll.
FWIW, our economy has even lost jobs since the start of the recovery. This isn't a usual pattern. Something more is at work. Global job arbitrage, enabled in large part by the Internet, may be the culprit.
8:18:43 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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