Observations? Expectations? Prognostications?
The floor is yours…
Month: August 2011 (page 3 of 3)
Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.
Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:
Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.
If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.
Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?
Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?
None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — Read more
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
Through the Looking Glass.
Apropos of nothing, when you use the word CUT, what do you choose it to mean?
Courtesy of the Cato Institute
I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS
I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.
So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.
Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.
Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-“a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?
The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on Read more
The pitch…
That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.
Not enough? You want more?
How’s this?
I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.
I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.
I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.
I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.
Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.
I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.
Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.
I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.
As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:
To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?
Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…
Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that subhead?
There was, alas.
The good news is that, if you can hang in there, and if you have the guts to change a fundamental error in your thinking, I Read more