Addictions and other thoughts

George Bush's comments about our “addiction to oil” seems to be getting a lot of buzz now. Scott Adams, in his blog, said “Let me begin by saying there are lots of good reasons for conserving energy. It saves money, it’s good for the planet, and that’s good enough for me. I drive a small car.”

The way I look at it, if you buy into the whole “people wreck the environment” philosophy, then the best thing for the environment would be the extinction of the human race. I don’t know anybody advocating that (I could be wrong, they could be out there). Frankly, I’m a “people firster”: We should conserve the forest because it’s nice to look at, not because a certain sub-species of owl has so over-specialized itself that it can’t live without it.

That being said, I like Adams’ comments about reducing oil consumption. It would have zero affect on terrorism. Our president has wanted to increase development of alternative fuels for a long time (surprise, surprise), and tying it to terrorism is just his latest attempt at gaining some traction there (remember when the feds were running anti-drug commercials, tying illicit drug use to terrorism?). And, for those naive enough to be surprised that George Bush is pro-alternative energy, keep in mind that we don’t really have “oil companies” anymore; we have “energy companies”. If we do find a commercially viable energy alternative, it’ll be the same guys who are now selling us our oil that’ll sell that too. And we’ll thank them for it (metaphorically speaking, of course).

And, for those who think in terms of “war for oil”, keep in mind that the U.S. didn’t care one whit about the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq (remember that bit of historical fact), until the Kuwaitis were able to get their appeal to Congress televised. The U.S. was perfectly happy to buy their Kuwaiti oil from Iraq, up until the media decided to make it a humanitarian issue.

 

2/21/2006 10:59:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics | world affairs

We're through with the nonsense

Okay, we’re through with the nonsense, and the 24 American Idol finalists are chosen. Next week, the real show starts.

NBC has done me a great favor by showing the Winter Olympics. This time around I have no interest in them (though I did cheer when Michelle Kwan left. I was greatly offended by the way the Olympic Committee snuck her into the lineup). As a result, American Idol has had almost no competition for my watching interest.

And, we can now get to some (semi) serious singing. There are at least a couple of dogs in this year’s finalist list (Brenna, Kevin). I don’t expect them to make it through the first half of the real competition.

Of course, I’m losing interest in Idol. After all, where are Reuben Studdard and Fantasia? They seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth. Kelly Clarkson is (finally) doing well, but I expect that has more to do with her dumping her original (AI selected) management team than anything else. I think she’s a fabulous singer (my fave from the first season), but the early music they had her doing was beyond forgettable. And, it seems that Clay Aiken has done much better than Reuben Studdard by coming in second instead winning the “prize”.

All that being said, AI is still (unfortunately) the best musical entertainment on TV these days.

2/16/2006 10:07:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV

This just in...

Big news. The President not told of the shooting by the Vice President for hours! It makes me wonder, just what does the media expect the President to be told about instantly?

Is the news so slow right now that this qualifies? sheesh.

2/14/2006 8:49:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV | politics

Will wonders never cease

And now for something completely different.

John Bolton, the controversial U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize!

I feel like Alice.

For those of you who don’t follow this kind of stuff, last year the Democrats in the Senate successfully blocked Bolton’s appointment to the UN. It was only by the President performing a last minute appointment, when the Senate wasn’t in session, that allowed him to (temporarily) take the position. In fact, he’ll be up for re-approval sometime this year. I wonder how the Democrats will deal with him as a Nobel Peace prize nominee…

 

2/8/2006 2:20:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs | politics

End of an era (again)

This just in: Borland is leaving the integrated development market (Computerworld). They will be selling off their Delphi and JBuilder products (the only real ones left) and concentrating on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management).  This really is the end of an era. Many of us cut our developmental baby teeth on Borland products. In the past they were technology leaders in areas like Pascal and C++. In fact, before Borland came out with Turbo C++ in the late ‘80s, it was accepted that it was “impossible” to do object-oriented Windows development, because of Windows’ weird programming model (remember the WinProc, lParams and wParams?). Borland did it.

But, they stumbled during the ‘90s, concentrating first on database systems and then on web development. At one point, they even renamed the company to Inprise. After that, at the Software Development Conference, Richard Hale Shaw insisted on referring to the Inprise crew as Borland. Sure enough, in a few years, they were Borland once again. But the company had become only a shadow of what they once were.

In the intervening years, there’d been a huge “brain drain” at Borland, and they never were able to regain any real traction in the software development area. I was at the rollout of Delphi in 1995, back in the pre-Inprise days. Now, the guy responsible for Delphi (and Turbo Pascal before that) works for Microsoft (Anders Hjelsberg), and (in fact) gave us the C# programming language.

I expect that Delphi (and maybe JBuilder along with it) will be bought by a foreign outfit, maybe European (where Delphi continues to do well). JBuilder is basically a dead product, since Eclipse has taken over the Java IDE space, and is in fact way better than any of the commercial tools out there.

As for Borland, dead corp. walking. They’re just going to fade away. What a shame.

 

2/8/2006 2:03:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  development

The whitening of America

What follows is just my impression, no links & no references. Your mileage may vary…

There seems to be a trend in America now that is “whitening” people. As a frame of reference, keep in mind that, generally, when an American refers to a person as “white”, what this is synonymous with (though they may be unaware of this fact) is “white anglo-saxon protestant”. That’s because most non-ethnic Americans can’t tell the difference. Back in the dark days of the early 20th century, when white supremacists were pushing their brand of racial intolerance as “science”, all the various ethnic groups were categorized in order of advancement, with white anglo-saxon protestants being on top, and black sub-saharan africans being on the bottom. All the other various ethnic groups stretched between the two, so that your typical supremacist of the time knew just how superior to feel about them.

Today, this is considered “racist”. Okay, it is racist, but (in my opinion) the current attitude is also racist.

Today the attitude seems to be that African Americans are “black” (which is not bad) and everybody else is “white” (which can be bad). Note that this is an American attitude, not a black or white American attitude, though its generally held by the non-ethnic Americans. Those of use with ethnic identity tend to not see the world in this way, instead seeing the multitude of cultures out there and understanding that they’re all different.

Now, I don’t know what to do about this, except to make sure that whatever children you have are raised in a “properly” ethnic community, where people know their roots, and don’t see a problem with that. I think that way too many people in America are trying to act “white” or “black” (whichever piece of America they identify with).

2/3/2006 4:06:01 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

A rock and a hard place

It seems that Israel is caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, Israel dearly wants the Palestinians to have their own country. For the most part, this is not due to any altruistic feelings. The Jewish leadership in Israel have come to the realization that the Palestinian (muslim) population is growing faster than the Israeli (Jewish) population. They only have two (rational) choices: “allow” the Palestinians to set up their own government, or eventually turn over the government of Israel to the Palestinians (as happened in South Africa with the end of apartheid). Since there’s no way that their turning over the government, they have to allow the Palestinians to set up their own government and therefore stay out of Israeli politics.

On the other hand, Hamas is now running the Palestinian authority, and the Israeli government doesn’t deal with Hamas (except to fire missiles at their leaders).

So, Israel is now stuck. At this point, almost all of the cards are in Hamas’ hand. What a country.

2/2/2006 10:08:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs

The next great fuel?

digg pointed me to an article in CNN Money today on replacing gasoline with ethanol. It was an interesting read. For the record, I think we need a real replacement for oil as soon as possible. It was oil that drove the technological boom of the 20th century, and until we come up with a fuel source that tops it in what I call “energy density”, we’re never going to make the kind of jump we did before.

That being said, it seems that ethanol is poised to replace gasoline as an automobile fuel. This could be quite interesting, at least for the short term.

 

1/30/2006 11:04:41 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Wal-Mart and Academia

Via Instapundit (I do like that Instapundit ), James Joyner has an interesting article comparing Wal-Mart and academia. Part of the article noted that a new Wal-Mart store in the Chicago area attracted 25,000 applications for 325 openings. That’s 25 thousand. An interesting sideline to this bit is that, apparently, the Chicago city council recently turned down Wal-Mart’s request to build a store in the city limits due to public pressure. Instead, Wal-Mart built the store just outside the city limits, and the only real difference is the loss of tax revenues to the city of Chicago.

Back to the main point of all of this. The anti-Wal-Mart folks seem to fall into two groups: the union organizers (who dislike any non-union enterprises, especially successful ones) and high paid folks to think that “those people” (the ones who work at Wal-Mart and possibly shop at Wal-Mart) are being taken advantage of.

Now, I understand the issue of small companies being driven out of business by Wal-Marts moving in to an area. However, this is nothing new. Way back when (in Hawaii, we refer to this as our “small kid days”), we had meat markets, and fish markets, and produce markets. You literally shopped around to get everything that a family needed for daily living. Then along came the Super Markets (notice the name). They basically killed all of those specialty shops, mainly because they could leverage cost and offer the same goods at a lower price than the smaller stores. I don’t see anyone protesting against Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger’s (Fred Meyer up here in the Northwest).

So, why this ill feeling toward Wal-Mart? The trend is no different than the Super Market trend of the 1950’s, and as James Joyner says, no different than what people face in academia too.

 

 

1/27/2006 5:47:53 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general