tech ronin

Bush Iraq war $ will bring US to its knees

Read it and weep: The Three Trillion Dollar War. The Iraq war has already cost us more than the twelve year Vietnam war and twice the cost of the Korean war.

The Bush tax cut, shoddy reporting, a timid congress and a huge real estate bubble lulled Americans into a stupor while our future was being flushed down the toilet. If pro-war McCaine wins the election, I'm outta here.

US infrastructure both old (highways, bridges) and new (broadband, fiber) is long overdue for an upgrade relative to our aspirations and size. Our primary and secondary schools are obsolete.

Imagine what that wasted money could do for infrastructure, schools, job retraining and healthcare. We are spending $12 billion a month. Let's shut this war down now!

The crazy thing is that besides this horrific financial loss (and carnage let's not forget), we are less safe from a military standpoint. Way too many of our troops and military hardware are in Iraq. This leaves us unable to respond to other legitimate threats.   

Someone please pull the plug on the outdated and, as far as I can tell, greedy and malevolent leaders responsible for this mess.

New York Times 10-Pack, Part 2

It took me about 2 hours to pick out 10 articles I wanted. Once I got past about 5, I figured I might as well use it up the whole quota. I wasn't confident that I would get back here and use up the last 5 within my 30 day limit. I'm not an NYT regular yet.

All my articles were about China. I think I pretty well cleaned out the articles of interest since January of 2003. SARs was taking up a lot of ink in 2003, so that limited the output of other more interesting articles on China.

Here are the other 9 articles I bought today:

• Shanghai Journal; Splendid Skyline. Do You Feel Something Sinking?
• Shanghai Journal; All Aboard! But Don't Relax. Your Trip Is Already Over.
• North of Beijing, California Dreams Come True
• Beijing Journal; Chinese Take Recklessly to Cars (Just Count the Wrecks)
• Beijing Journal; A Factory Is Transformed by the Art of Real Estate
• Beijing Journal; Why Is That Woman Reading Aloud in Heavy Traffic?
• Beijing Journal; Sadly, There Goes the Neighborhood. There's No Stopping 'Urban Renewal.'
• Beijing Leaders' Populist Touch Is Not Felt by Most Rural Poor
• Chinese Official Fights Corruption, and Loses, for Now

So I spent $15.95 on this nice little mix of short articles. Was it worth it? Maybe. I have to say that Ted C. Fishman's book, China, Inc. beats the heck out of them for sheer quantity and depth of information and I spent about a dollar more on it. The writing is possibly better in the short articles, but Fishman is a good writer too - he's written for NYT, Harper's, Time and Esquire. The Amazon price on the new hardback is $17 bucks. In this case the book won. Other times, especially with time critical information, the articles might win.

But, Amazon wins by a mile in user experience. I found that it was pretty slow going searching through the NYT archives to find the best stuff. I couldn't force it to give me two separate words like China + lifestyles unless I put them together as a phrase which was too limiting. Using the two words without quotes gave me all sorts of lifestyles information about other places besides China.

I felt a little like I was slogging through sand. It wasn't the snappy experience that might have had me going back right away. This is one of those cases where an improved shopping and buying experience would lead to lots more sales.

Another thing I wanted to mention is that I really like the New York Times, but I don't want the huge amounts of paper I would get if I subscribed to the paper version. And I'm not big on ink either.

About halfway through, I decided to Google to see what kind of information I could get. The results weren't very satisfying. I got little teaser articles or short blurbs.

Then I tried the Newsweek website to see what they had on China, thinking a weekly magazine could go into more depth. They did. I found only one article of interest, but it was almost 4000 words. They charge $2.95 for a single article - a better price than NYT. The article I bought individually was called Does the Future Belong to China? It was worth the $2.95 I would say. This was a big overview kind of piece. Not as many interesting little stories, but well done and recommended if you haven't seen it and want to better understand China. Part 1.

Technorati Tags: Books, China, newspapers, NewYorkTimes, NYT, reading

Apple's Anti-Blogger Suit Sucks

I am fervently hoping that Apple's action against Think Secret and two other blogs will blow up in its face. They deserve it. Steve deserves it. Hard ball tactics like this don't work anymore - or at least, I hope they don't.

The Apple faithful like me are hard pressed to stay faithful when stuff like this happens. Of course, I'm a blogger and I am offended by the argument Apple made last Friday that bloggers are not legitimate members of the press. Screw that!

I'm hoping that Apple and Steve are going to get a first-hand education in the power of the blogging community. Don't mess with us. Bloggers are members of Apple's *Think Different* target group. We are your community and we are an extremely vocal group. If marketing is relationship and conversation, Apple is really harming their brand.

No one has ever accused Steve Jobs of modesty. Is Apple's success of late going to it's head? Arrogance is one thing, but this is getting self-destructive.

I love that the bloggers in question struck back this week with the request to have the whole thing thrown out as a violation of first amendment rights. Go bloggers!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Steve Jobs, law, first amendment