It ain’t exactly something you’d find a normal person drooling over, but if the average person lived in my house and all your tools seem to disappear into the same magic black hole that swallows all my socks then I think average drooling would commence.
This 21st century variant of the Swiss Army knife is exactly the kind of thing I desperately need.
Onyx version please. You can find it here.
Thanks to bookofjoe for the tip.
According to this story in the Seattle Times the US military is paying to place pro-American stories in Baghdad newspapers. From the article:
While the articles are basically truthful, they present only one
side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the
U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews
indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such
articles — with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite
Terrorism" — since the effort began this year.The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S.
military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington, D.C.,
firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories.
Upon reading the article my first thought was of Voice of America, and wondered how this was different. Then it occured to me that VOA is openly acknowledged propoganda while this is, well, sneaky. My second thought was that the guys and gals in the Pentagon have started to borrow ideas from the Department of Education and having witnessed first hand the goings-on at that not-so-esteemed federal agency I find that prospect horrifying. My third thought was that these military folks must be priming themselves for jobs at the New York Times or the Washington Post.
<Insert sarcasm> Of course there are smaller concerns like the building of trust with the Iraqi people and establishing a democratic government in Iraq. I’m sure that this story will cause the average Iraqi to be even more trusting of their new leaders in Baghdad, I mean after all it’s written in black and white. Now they can go to bed comforted by the fact that they are being openly and fairly governed by their new government, and it’s all being checked by an active and diligent Fourth Estate. <End sarcasm>
If the military wants evidence that this might not be the brightest idea all they have to do is look at the level of trust we have here in the US in our 230-year-old-basically-stable democracy to see how little effect government propaganda combined with a colluding, ass-kissing media have on the average person’s perception of the government. Sheesh.
As usual I began my day by reading the local newspaper, The Winston-Salem Journal. I think the Journal compares well with other small-city newspapers and I actually enjoy being able to read the entire paper over a cup (or six) of coffee. But as I read the business section today I became confused. My problem began with an AP story that had the headline "Looking Jollier" (ed. note: they use a different headline for the online version of the story) and details the rising consumer confidence index. As part of the story they have this sentence:
Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said that sales of new single-family homes rose by 13 percent last month, the biggest one-month gain in more than 12 years.
Great news that new home sales are increasing right? Well, yesterday there was another AP story on the front page of the business section with the headline "Sales of Existing Houses Go Down." "Okay," I tell myself, "so sales of new homes are soaring while sales of existing homes are tanking. But wasn’t there something else in yesterday’s article about future building?" So I pulled up the old article and found this:
The weakness in existing home sales followed an earlier report that construction of new homes and apartments fell by 5.6 percent in October, the biggest setback in seven months. Applications for new building permits, a good sign of future activity, fell by 6.7 percent, the biggest decline in six years.
Hmmm. What does it all mean. To make it even more interesting, or confusing depending on how you look at it, there’s another item in today’s paper that says that the sales of existing homes in the local region rose two percent in October, which means that the local market did better than the nationwide market.
So what am I to think? Obviously there’s a mixed economic picture, but since I’m not an economist I’m not sure exactly what it all means. I could hope for the newspaper to provide me some guidance, but they are only spitting out data, not providing context or guidance. In all fairness to the paper this is simply one story of many that they can cover, and Lord knows they’re stretched thin by their current business problems. But maybe they have their current business problems because of stories like these.
It has become abundantly clear to anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave the past 10 years that information (news) is a commodity. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can spew data to the world, but what takes time and talent is providing background, a sense of scope and most importantly perspective. Is it because most people equate perspective with opinion that the folks in the news business shy away from injecting their own thoughts or analysis into stories? If so I think that’s a flawed assumption that leads to a product of limited or no value.
Let’s be clear: straight opinion belongs on the op-ed page. But editors and reporters can create value by giving us the news and then providing some perspective without crossing the line into opinion. Some newspaper pieces identified with the tag "Analysis" that we see in the paper on an infrequent basis are a good start, but they are too few and far between. What we need is for each story to be "framed."
Most stories in most papers are simply regurgitations of what happened, when it happened and to whom it happened. Rarely do newspapers frame the story for us, give us an idea where it fits in the larger picture. It’s this framing, this perspective, that would give a story depth and value.
For an example look at the two stories I highlighted. Instead of simply reciting this economic data give me an overview of the data and then put it in perspective and make it relevant to my life. For instance, does it mean that while the national housing picture is indicative of a slowdown the local housing market is actually on the rise? Tell me why that is. Tell me that it’s probably because the local economy has been hammered for the last five years while the rest of the country has been on a great economic ride. Tell me if we’ll see more construction jobs here, if local housing inventory is shrinking, if the value of my house is probably going to continue to rise.
In short tell me what it means, because if you don’t I probably won’t continue to subscribe and I know for damn sure that the kids coming of age now will have no time for you. But just like me today’s young adults need someone to help them understand what all this information means, and if you could tell them they would pay for it.
As things stand I’m still confused.
Here’s an interesting story about a community college that cut its electric bill by 90%, not to mention greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, when it started heating the school by burning wood chips. Some other local government agencies are converting to "biomass energy plants" as well.
Tim Maker, executive director of the nonprofit Biomass Energy
Resource Center in Montpelier, Vt., said about 30 schools in his state
are heated with woodchips. He said biomass heating plants are popular
in Montana, Nevada, Utah, North Dakota and Idaho, where forests provide
a renewable supply of wood."Biomass is a commonsense approach to
getting fuel," Maker said. "When you look out the window, chances are
you’ll see trees. So you start asking if your fuel is going to come
from Iraq or that hillside out your window?"
Kind of puts the tree-huggers in a quandary doesn’t it?
This has been the "Year of Dell" here in Forsyth County, North Carolina. The state of North Carolina gave Dell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of incentives to build their newest plant in the state and then Forsyth County/Winston-Salem chipped in tens of millions of their own to attract the company to our fair confines. Obviously this caused much debate within the community, and although my gut tells me that these corporate incentives stink in principle my head also tells me that if that is the playing field we’re on then we must compete aggressively.
Personally I think the jury is out on whether the deal is good for the county/city/state. I honestly think that Dell will come through with the jobs they promised, but if the deal was made simply on the merits of Dell’s direct employment numbers then the folks who made the deal on behalf of the governments are fools. They aren’t fools; they’re counting on the Dell deal to attract other companies as suppliers (that is happening) and even more importantly they are sending a signal to other tech companies that this is a great region to open for business. I hope they’re right; I hope that Dell leads to more tech companies moving here to replace the emaciated textile, furniture and tobacco industries. We’ll have to wait and see.
My biggest worry, though, is that if something doesn’t change this will be just the beginning of a corporate welfare trend that can be quite harmful in the long-term. Our neighbors to the west in Tennessee are already seeing an increase in companies looking for incentive deals similar to one it gave Nissan to move it’s headquarters there from California, and I’m sure NC is getting similar inquiries now as well. Let’s not beat around the bush here; what the states are doing is bribing companies to open shop there. They aren’t saying "Look at our great business environment with an educated workforce, a safe place for your employees to live and a progressive tax structure." They’re saying "Look at our great business environment and the $200 million we’ll hand you to move here." That’s bribery and you or I would be put in jail if we did the same thing.
Unfortunately all the state economic development folks think they have to do this in order to compete. But do they really? Dr. Jeffrey Cornwall of The Entrepreneurial Mind has this to say:
Since most of our economic growth and new job creation are a result of
entrepreneurial development, spending so much trying to attract
corporations to move their operations may be misguided. If there are
enough slack resources in state funding to offer rich incentive
packages, let’s cut tax rates instead and let the market generate jobs
and growth, as lower taxes and less government spur entrepreneurial
activity.
I agree with him. What if NC and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County had used that same $200+ million dollars in incentives to create incentives for local entrepreneurs to build businesses based on the skills and infrastructure being left behind by the collapsing textile and furniture industries? Yes those industries are getting their asses handed to them by the Chinese, but there are some smart people out there who can figure out a way to create new market niches that our own people can fill.
That leads me to an article I read in Business 2.0 the other day about the US cotton industry, which is the recipient of lots of subsidies from the Federal government. Let’s just say that the system makes it hard for the US to claim a free-market environment with a straight face. And even worse, since some of the subsidies are paid to foreign-owned multi-national companies some of these subsidies benefit other countries.
The cotton people make the claims you always hear in stories like this: without the subsidies the average farmer will go under, whole farming communities will be devastated, etc. Of course most of the subsidies go to large corporate operations as there aren’t many family farmers left, and it ignores the fact that the subsidies artificially suppress cotton prices. That means that most cotton sells below cost, which on the surface means that without subsidies the industry would crash. But without the subsidies prices would go up and growers could actually make an honest profit on their operations.
In fact some farmers are already planning for the end of subsidies by growing specialized cotton that sells at high prices and is in great demand due to it’s limited quantity. That’s true free-market innovation.
So what’s my point? My point is that by using incentives and subsidies we are engaging in corporate welfare. We are incentivizing our businesses negatively and we’re instilling in them the habit of looking for a handout. And we have to remember that prices always go up, so it’s only going to get more expensive to bribe these companies in the future.
And what about the hard-working entrepreneurs who get no handouts? What message are we sending them? Do you think that they feel the same level of resentment that the average hard-working individual feels when they hear about folks who abuse the welfare system? Do you think they feel that the Dells and Nissans of the world are a 21st century version of carpetbaggers? Wouldn’t you?
To my way of thinking these incentives and subsidies are literally un-American. We need to get back to competing on true merit. Yes, I understand that other countries tilt the playing field in certain ways (dumping, unfair tariffs, etc.) but until we clean our own house we don’t really have a leg to stand on when we ask them to do the same. I say we clean up our own act and then act quickly and aggressively to make sure others do the same.
Remember Michael Brown? You know, the guy who screwed up FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina so royally that even the Bush Administration had to fire him, uh, I mean let him resign. For any of you who are worried about where Mr. Brown might have gone to make a living after such a public professional fiasco, you need worry no more. According to this article he’s launching a consultancy focusing on, you guessed it, disaster preparedness.
You know we consultants are starting to give lawyers a run for their money in terms of PR. Me thinks I might need to change my descriptor to something like "professional advisor."
There’s a guy who was making a pile of money selling Legos online. Pretty smart. He got his merchandise by visiting Target stores, switching barcodes from cheap Lego sets to more expensive Lego sets and then buying the more expensive set at the cheaper price. The tag switching thing is pretty smart, but doing it only at Target stores was pretty dumb because the folks at Target noticed a pattern and one of their own store security people caught the guy while he was trying to buy 10 sets of the Star Wars Millenium Falcon set. They found a bunch more in his car along with a laptop that had Target stores plotted out on a mapping software. That’s dumb.
You can read all about it at Loose Wire.
I haven’t updated my "Smart People" section in a long time so here’s a good one to get it going again. Matt McAlister writes some very interesting stuff about the evolving world of online content, and this latest piece is a fine example.
If you’re interested in publishing or the developing online world I strongly suggest that you subscribe to his feed.
A couple of convicts from Louisiana escaped from prison, got themselves some fake student IDs from Tulane and after the Katrina disaster made their way to the University of Tennessee where they posed as brothers of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity from the Tulane chapter. The Lambda Chi Alpha brothers at Tennessee opened their hearts and their doors to the cons, as did some co-eds. The men were recaptured after one of them was caught passing counterfeit $10 bills at a gas station.
The full story is here along with a picture that ought to warm the hearts of real Katrina victims.
The picture to the left is from Sports Illustrated’s site. The guy pictured is the t-ball coach who offered $25 to one of his own players to bean another of his players, who was autistic, so that they autistic kid wouldn’t be able to play. SI named him to their 2005 Turkey’s of the Year list.
Rarely does a picture capture the essence of a man so well. Notice the collar on the shirt that makes it look like he’s wearing his daddy’s clothes, and the obviously-too-large suit that he is wearing to perhaps make himself at least feel like a man.
What a weenie.
