Am I the only one who sees what a hugely missed opportunity this first generation of iPad is? It seems so because I’ve read nobody talking about it.

Everyone seems to see a table at either a kind of laptop, a weird new gaming/app platform, or as a big over sophisticated ebook reader.  Some also imagine that people will find new and amazing use cases nobody has imagined yet.

That may well be but there to me seems to be one obvious use case that the table design form is perfectly uniquely suited for that the iPad just isn’t capable of doing out of the box that it totally should be.

Think about what the iPad essentially is. It’s a BIG iphone.  What possible good reason would you want your phone to have a bigger screen? Hint. It’s not so you can type easier.

Imagine if your ipod had a high quality video cam built in.  Not facing outward but facing the user. Suddenly it becomes a big video conferencing phone. It’s the perfect form factor for it. Small enough that you can carry it in one hand, big enough so you can get a good view of the person you are speaking with. Imagine a world where you could easily share pictures and video with family and friends and business partners without the need of hauling around a huge laptop, unfolding anything or bothering with a mouse or keyboard. A few quick screen touches or even an audio command and you could be in a video conversation or you could be recording a video to upload onto youtube at a touch of a button.

One of the most devastating critiques for the ipad to me is the criticism that the ipad is a step backward because it makes the web substantially more “read only”. It’s annoying and difficult to type and create on an ipad. There’s no stylus for easy writing. It’s not a multitask platform, and doesn’t even have a regular camera for capturing pictures. It makes it easy to consumme apps iin the app store or read online books and watch static videos but doesn’t make it easy to create and contribute your own apps, your own books, your own blogs, your own movies, your own pictures.

Of course a video cam built in would have totally fixed that. Rather than trying to build upon older inputs, it would have been uniquely suited to give people the ability to experiment with the read/write interface of the future. Namely the video input. We can imagine people coming up with apps that make great use of this video cam feature, building in motion capture like the wii or utilizing facial recognition, etc. People would innovate. It would popularize the video interface in ways no other piece of hardware has yet managed to do. Soon everyone would have an ipad and everyone would be using it to video chat. It could even, I believe have ushered in a new era as often depicted in science fiction movies, where video communication soon phased out and replaced older school telephone communication as the new normal.

But alas. The iPad for some reason doesn’t have what should have been, in my humble opinion, it’s most important component: a video camera. Rhe device could have, and I believe should have, been built around maximizing the utility of such a device. But it wasn’t. And so all those possibilities are simply not going to come to pass yet at least not with this generation of the iPad at the lead. 

Perhaps the technology just wasn’t there yet. AT&T networks couldn’t handle the video chat bandwidth and webcams weren’t small and cheap and high quality enough to integrate.into the device. I don’t know.  But it sure feels to me like a huge missed opportunity.

And so right now I really don’t see any purpose of ever buying an iPad since I already have a perfectly good laptop and a perfectly good iphone. The ipad just doesn’t seem to me to add much.

People often speak as if businesses and governments were some inherently different things. They say that through those differences government is bad or business is bad or government is good or business is good.

I don’t buy it. Businesses, government, religions, educational institutions, sports teams, they’re all the same kind of thing. Basically they’re just social organizational structures for ordering groups of people.  There are no inherent differences between them. Indeed add faith in some kind of dictating higher power to a business and it becomes a religion, add some tax structure to an educational institution, give it an army, and make it sovereign and it becomes a State.  They’re the same.

The State government is just the biggest, meanest grouping of peeps around. It’s the one with the ARMY. Often these days it’s the one with the NUKES. If a Business gets big enough to have its own army and police force that can beat the crap out of the State’s army, it will become the government. When that happens sometimes we call that a “coup”.

Since ALL of these institutions are basically the same, what’s good for one is basically good for all. So really we should be aiming for the same goals in all of them. Goals like these:

1. more democracy
2. more transparency
3. less corruption
4. some system of justice and accountability
5. more competition
6. an effective incentive system
7. fair treatment of its constituents
8. more innovation
9. efficient organization
10. devoted followers/loyalty?

And so on.  I put the question mark on the last because I’m not sure it’s ever a good thing but it might be provided you had all the rest.

Of course the big one on that list is democracy. That’s numero uno. That’s what enables all of the other things to even have a chance to happen. And when you think about that it should be pretty clear why I am a liberal and not a conservative.   Sure our government has a terrible dysfunctional form of democracy. But at least it HAS something resembling a Democracy. It’s something we can build upon and make better. In contrast most businesses, churches, educational institutions and other groupings of people have none.  And in many ways the advocates of these social organizations go out of their way to try and resist these institutions becoming any more democratic. And that’s when the really bad things start to happen.

Catastrophe prediction is probably the one most thankless job in the world.

Consider the Y2K problem. This was talked up enormously in the media prior to the year 2000. The closer it got to 2000 the bigger a “story” it became. Then… when the year 2000 happened, virtually nothing happened. A few minor bugs were fixed and everything was fine.

But there’s two ways that story can be told. Was it, say evil people overselling a point, directly manipulating people for some nefarious unknown purpose? Perhaps it was a conspiracy to create more jobs for old COBOL programmers or maybe just the age old plot to make government bigger and more powerful so it can encroach on our lives all the more.

OR, maybe it was somewhat simpler. Maybe some well meaning individuals who actually knew something about programming realized there was a problem early and started sounding the alarm early. Thanks to their efforts organizations got afraid so they hired new workers and spent the man hours to correct the problem wherever it occurred. The alarm continued to be sounded right up until the turn of the year largely because it can be hard to say for certain whether and where the problem has been fixed. Each institution acted independently to shore up their code base and considering the radical complexity of the many systems we rely upon there was always the possibility that something important could have been missed. It was thanks to the concerted effort of many individuals responding appropriately to a serious warning that catastrophe was averted.

Two different stories. Same observed outcome. What is the truth?

Well one thing is for sure, it’s the FIRST story that remains in the public consciousness. It’s the first story that everybody remembers. I hear it all the time. People laugh about “Y2K” and use it as an example of fear mongering and “crying wolf”. And not just laypeople too. Programmers I hear laugh and joke about this as much or more than I hear regular citizens. Deniers tend to provide one of two arguments: 1. “nothing happened when the new year rolled in so there must not have been a problem” and 2. “well it was really easy to fix in MY organization so the problem must have been way overstated”.

Both arguments are based on very shaky evidence and strange logic. In the first, it should be obvious that the fact that nothing did happen is no kind of evidence at all that nothing COULD have happened. It’s quite possible that nothing happened because the problem was fixed. In the second, it tends to to rely on a very narrow view of the problem due to a limited perspective focused on your own organization and your own experiences. Just because your job didn’t involve dealing with difficult y2k coding issues, does not imply that no such difficult y2k coding issues actually existed. What’s more even if the problem wasn’t or didn’t turn out to be as large as it appeared to be at first, doesn’t mean people didn’t have good reasons for believing there was a big problem in the first place. To make a really good argument against the response to y2k you’d have to analyze those actual reasons and show conclusively that on a whole it was unjustified fear mongering.

But those perspectives have clout. People remember them. Y2K will ever be imprinted on the consciousness of many as an exaggerated hoax regardless of what the truth is. And those who predicted it, whose predictions it could be argued saved us from untold economic harm are given no thanks for their efforts and are likely ridiculed as “alarmists”.

Maybe you don’t buy it in the case of Y2K because you think that really WAS a hoax.  But there are numerous other examples.

Take for example the risk of aerosols destroying the O-zone layer. Again, there was a serious risk there according to scientists who study the matter. One way you can tell the story is “alarmists worried about nothing and now all of a sudden notice how they aren’t talking about it anymore! There must never have been a problem in the first place!”  But another way to tell the story is that the US, where most of these dangerous particles were being produced implemented a law that created a cap and trade system to limit to the pollutants. This encouraged most companies to switch out to less dangerous alternatives that became available. And BAM! Catastrophe averted.  But those who predicted it still deemed liars and pretenders by the highly skeptical public that lack the knowledge or the expertise to confirm or deny the predictions.

Here’s an example where the opposite occurred.  Take the economic crises we’re facing now. There were MANY economists who predicted various components of the crises from the housing downturn to the financial crises to the derivatives crash. Some even predicted ALL of these components. Many were sounding the alarm early and often. Yet… in this case… nobody listened. So then, exactly as predicted, the economy collapsed. So you’d THINK the people who predicted it would be praised and elevated into positions of authority so they can prevent such a thing from ever happening again right?

Nope. They remain outcasts. Not only do they have to deal with, personally, the effects of the apocalypse that they failed to prevent, but they also have become complaining to them that they didn’t sound the alarm louder, that they weren’t serious enough, and that they didn’t try hard enough. People come up with excuses saying they didn’t really understand the financial situation and were just making stuff up because they’re natural “contrarians” and “naysayers” who were just trying to get in everyone’s way. People make excuses for the people who didn’t listen saying “how could they have known?” and “nobody could have predicted” even as the people who DID predict it are tearing their hair out in frustration.  And of course the very same people who made the colossal mistakes resulting in the financial collapse are elevated to positions of power where they assure everyone that they can “fix” it.

A similar story can be told about the dot comm bust or any other financial collapse or recession throughout history. A similar story can even be told about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For as much as people don’t like to talk about it, there were predictions that the US was vulnerable to an attack and that there were specific people wanting to attack us. And there was a whole body of literature discussing the ways in which our foreign policy increases the likelihood of our being attacked. There are even those who thought up the idea of using commercial airlines as weapons. It was not some far flung possibility.  There were catastrophe predictors there too. But as with all catastrophe predictors they get little or no love.

Katrina is a similar story too. Many experts begged the government to pay attention to the levies years before the hurricane hit that flooded New Orleans. They predicted that the levies could not handle the storm surge and needed to be rebuilt or we’d have a horrible disaster on our hands. But the army core of engineers was off building roads in Iraq and Afghanistan and everyone assumed they were just overstating the case. They weren’t. Tragedy did strike. Haiti can be seen in a similar light since there was reason to believe that severe nasty earthquake would hit there in the near future. It did. No amount of prediction could encourage the world to pay attention and do anything to prepare for the eventuality.

And now… well we continue to ignore potential oncoming predictable disasters and just assume that things will be just fine while we continue to spend so much of our resources on other countries across the world that did not even ask for our help. The predictors are no more esteemed now than they were before their predictions were vindicated.

Need more examples? Think about the swine flu or any kind of viral epidemic. There are those who spoke out loudly about the risks and have been doing so for many years. Governments listen and put into place very complex reaction systems and spend a lot of money stockpiling antivirals and trying to make their system for dealing with whatever happens as efficient as possible. But do they overreact sometimes? Sure. That doesn’t mean however that we aren’t immeasurably better off BECAUSE we reacted to the possibility of a catastrophe swiftly and surely than we would have been had we been caught entirely with our pants down. But now, since the Swine-Flu wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the bad predictions were, people generally just assume that it was all a big silly hoax. And the next time there’s an epidemic people will say the same thing. They’ll argue for no response and doing nothing and call the catastrophe predictors whiners or liars or worse. Never does it occur to them that maybe part of the reason the swine flu epidemic WASN’T that horrible was BECAUSE we listened to the people who told us years and years ago that we have to be prepared for the worst in case of a virulent epidemic that could cause untold harm to our society.

So what’s the real problem?

Basically people HATE catastrophes. And that’s wholly natural. So nobody WANTS to be told that we’re speeding toward a cliff. We’d all rather think we’re on the right coarse, going fast, having ourselves a good old time. Even if it would be easy and painless to slow down and keep an eye out for any oncoming precipices, we’d rather just keep going. We tell the person looking at the map to keep his trap shut and stop being a downer.

Sometimes we do turn at the whining person’s urging though and go off on a different road. But then we don’t see the cliff we would have fallen off. So we still assume the whiner was just whining and that we just humored him by taking a different road. We’d prefer to think that everything is and always was a-okay.

Of course in those cases where we do go flying off, we aren’t inclined to thank the person who told us of our oncoming doom. That just reminds us of how stupid and arrogant we were to ignore him. And at the time we’re too busy nursing our wounds from the collision to be bothered with assigning blame or praising farsightedness. POST-catastrophe is the last time when anyone is thinking about any kind of positive thoughts or willingness to pat anybody on the back. Usually the catastrphe predictor is concerned least of all with taking credit or making his or her own case for themselves.   They too were on the car and they too have their own injuries to nurse as well as a dealing with the guilt of not having found a way to get their fellow riders to choose a different safer course.

We always prefer to think we are immortal and that our society will persist without end. We like to think we’re really in control of our destiny and that when bad things happen it’s freak chance and accident rather than predictable problems that can be overcome through concerted dedicated effort. 

And we know full well that it’s a lot easier and safer and more comfortable to simply go along with it even when we see substantial evidence to the contrary.  It’s not a hard logic to follow. IF the catastrophe hits and nobody survives nobody will care that you predicted in the first place. If the catastrophe hits and you do survive nobody will thank you for having been right, likely they’ll hate you for it. And if the catastrophe is averted people will just pretend there was never any real catastrophe ahead in the first place and call you a liar and an “alarmist” for having dared to express an opinion opposed to the status quo.

That’s the way it goes. We all know it goes that way. Yet why do so many people devote their lives to the thankless job of trying to bring attention to the many problems that can and must be averted?

Perhaps because it is the right thing to do.  Or perhaps because they believe in what they are saying and maybe they too love this world and this society in which they live so at least if they can make a difference, even if they are never thanked for it, at least they and everyone else will be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

This image is kinda funny since it seems to be comparing unlike things. But it should be a pretty useful visual aid.
The left side of the image is average health care costs by country. The right side is outcomes. Well actually it’s just one outcome, albeit probably one of the most important outcomes in health care, namely life expectancy. But if you were to draw a similar picture with many other measurable outcomes like infant mortality or preventable deaths you’d get a very similar chart. The US ranks 46th in life expectancy and 41st in infant mortality according to the CIA World Fact Book. In overall health care performance in 2000 according to the WHO, the US ranked 37th in overall performance and 72nd in overall level of health.

Worse, the projections are that the situation will only get worse. Right now we spend 16% of our GDP on Health Care, more than any other country, and by 2017, the CBO estimates that will grow to 19.5% of GDP. Per person we pay more than any other country in the United Nations. 62% of bankruptcies in the US identify medical costs as a significant factor driving the bankruptcy.

However, there are some things we are good at, most commonly stated is Cancer survival rates which the US ranks consistently above all other countries. But given all the rest, is that single statistic enough for people to say Health Care reform is okay in the United States and that we don’t need change? Surely that’s a ridiculous argument.

The facts as represented visually by this image demonstrate clearly, anyone who suggests we don’t need health care reform in the United States or that the US has the best Health Care system in the world, is either a fool, a liar, or just doesn’t know what they are talking about. In any case, anything that person tells you should be suspect.

This is the opening presentation of a debate on Copyright Law. The proposition was “US Copyright Law excessively restrains the development of Intellectual Property”.  At the beginning of the debate 18% were in favor of this. By the end of the debate 51% were in favor.

This is less impressive than my last post but still pretty interesting. I’m mostly posting it because I heard Fox News didn’t even bother to cover it. Presumably they decided that these Q&A’s make Obama look too good and thus don’t fit in with their agenda of anti-Obama-ism.

I figure it’s worth it to spread it around to more viewers who might not have gotten to see it. Enjoy.

Everybody should probably watch these videos:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now, I don’t agree with President Obama on a lot of things. I think most would say I’m significantly to the left of his rhetoric on the political spectrum on almost every issue and even further to the left of what his administration’s actual policies have been. Nor do I generally agree with the President’s overall strategy for pushing for his overall agenda.

However, one thing I can’t comprehend is how people can seriously think that President Obama is, as I recently read in one comment on a blog, a “joke”. I can’t conceive of how people can say he’s not “serious” or that he’s a clown or stupid. That just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

If nothing else should demonstrate that fact in stark unavoidable terms it should be this video. Obama was invited to speak and answer questions in front of House Republicans. There he showed that he was anything but un-serious.

Not only did he do so but he did so with remarkable effectiveness. He demonstrated pretty much as clearly as you can possible do that he is nobody’s fool. The President showed on this day that he has a mastery of the policy issues related to his agenda and the ability to clearly articulate them in a manner that anyone can understand. He was able to easily counter every Republican talking point. Further, in the process he managed to shine a light on the hypocrisy of his enemies and present a clear picture of what he is trying to do in Washington. And he did so while remaining cool, collected, and polite.

In the past you’d see some these arguments against Obama expressed by talking heads all over the country but they were just thrown out there without dispute. So people would think that Obama was just ignoring these criticisms or that he wasn’t even aware of them. This is the first indication I’ve seen in a long time that Obama not only hears these critiques but he actually takes them very seriously and has detailed answers. And not the administration as a whole, but Obama personally has that knowledge and understanding. He’s intimately familiar with the policy and the politics surrounding health care reform, the deficit, the stimulus, etc. In contrast his opponents didn’t seem to be prepared for his arguments. They seemed to think that their arguments, mostly false and misleading, would simply go uncontested. But Obama didn’t let them slide. He challenged every false assumption and absurd premise put before him and did so in a  measured and rational tone as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be being accused of plotting to destroy the nation to your face.

In short, when I saw this video it seemed to me that the President basically just intellectually pwned everyone in that room. At that moment, I was proud to have him as my President. He almost convinced me that his strategy might work.

Almost. I don’t think it will work. The President seems to think he can heal Washington first. He at least acts as if he thinks people are deep down reasonable and are just playing games and politics but that in the end they’ll come together to do what’s right for the country. That eventually these extreme positions will collapse under their own weight as the American people get tired of the partisan wrangling and push their politicians to do what’s wright.

I’m just not convinced. I find it hard to believe that most of the politicians in the Republican party are credible partners or have any interest in changing how Washington works. I think that many of them are basically captured within a world view that paints the world in stark visions of right and wrong and good and evil and which puts democrats and Obama starkly on the wrong side of that equation. So even the ones who are sincere in their desire to help people, will never accept anything proposed by or supported by Democrats. And indeed many Democrats have adopted or are in the process of adopting the very same world view only with the sides switched.  These democrats are likely to be equally un-inclined to work to produce change.

Plus it appears to be in everyone’s  political self interest to be obstructionist. When Democrats are in power, obstructionist Republicans increase their probability of being elected by always being on the offensive and vice versa. Why should they go against their interests just because some of their opponents tell them it’s the right thing to do?

That being said I hope it does work. I hope the  partisan rancor that underlies virtually all political decisions in Washington can in fact be put aside in order to do good. But it didn’t happen in Health Care and it didn’t happen in the Stimulus and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen on Financial Reform either where Republicans are already gearing up to paint any bill the Democrats put forth as a “permanent bailout” in order to defeat it. Any lack of progress the Democrats make is a step toward victory for the republicans and the ultimate lesson the democrats will learn from this is to be equally as obstinate as the Republicans are today when they regain power. Thus the vicious cycle continues.

I applaud the President’s sincere efforts to change the system from the inside. I’m glad he’s willing to meet with Republicans like this and debate with them evenly and honestly and openly with CAMERAS present so that the American people can watch it.  I want him to do more than this and hold lots more debates like this, not just with conservatives, but liberal critics too. And I think Republican leaders should be invited to Democratic meetings and be forced to defend their proposals on national TV to a barrage of criticisms. This kind of thing would make the political process more open and keep people honest. It would do a long way to blunting the effectiveness of absurdities like the whole “death panels” rhetoric that dominated the summer of health care debates.

But I don’t think Washington ultimately will be fixed solely from the inside. I think it takes outside pressure of an extreme degree to push to remove the money from politics and reform the workings of the Senate to make it more answerable to the people and express better the will of the majority.   I think you need to do a lot about changing around the incentives in politics so that the best strategy is not a dishonest strategy of denial of whatever the other party wants but an honest strategy of cooperation. But Washington won’t do that just because the President or anyone asks them nicely to change. They need to be pushed from the outside.

And I think the first step is in something like this: