What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
How to fix the US economy in a week*
* if the president had dictator-like powers and could bypass congress.
Monday: Morning coffee. Get ready for a crazy week. Declare economic state of emergency, or whatever other excuse will let a president do whatever he deems necessary for a week.
Start with taxes. Abolish progressive taxes. Set fixed-rate income tax at 35% on any income above $30,000. (10% goes to states.)
Tuesday: Declare immediate retreat from all wars and “police actions” in the Middle East. Cut defense spending by 80%.
Reinstate NASA space program, and reallocate ample funding. Pledge $500B to the construction of a high-speed rail network to cover the entire continental US. Work to be completed over 5 years by the private sector, with no union labor.
Wednesday: Abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to be phased out by the end of the year. Announce new legislation to 1) force private insurers to offer a basic health plan with minimum benefits at a fixed rate, and 2) make health insurance mandatory.
Announce immigration reform. Lower requirements and processing times of work visas, and instate new entrepreneurship visa program. Announce a one-time amnesty on illegal immigration, and announce legislation with severe consequences for future infractions.
Thursday: Abolish oil subsidies, let oil spike to $8/gallon. Order cities over 100,000 inhabitants to develop high-quality public transportation networks. Slash all street parking, and impose a parking tax to discourage car commute.
Pledge $500B in state-owned nuclear and alternative energy developments.
Friday: Announce plan to subsidize employment in creative industries. Subsidize people working as artisans, journalists, artists in order to put to good use people who have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology.
Drastically cut corporate income tax to 13%, in order incentivize corporations to remain headquartered in the US and keep employing US citizens.
Sigh. Enjoy the cool breeze on the White House balcony, sip on a glass of single malt scotch, and get ready to take a much-deserved weekend rest.
There are two ways to strike out: looking and swinging. Striking out looking is the absolute worst feeling. It means you just watched a perfectly good ball fly by and did nothing about it. Striking out swinging is a little better because at least you made an effort to swing the bat, but you just didn’t make contact.
Fouling out is still hard to swallow, but it means something different. It means you stood up to the plate, swung the bat as hard as you could, and made contact with the ball. But, in the end, you’re still out.
This startup was my first at-bat in the major leagues. I stood up to the plate, tried as hard as I could, made contact a few times, but was never able to put the ball in play. Now my at-bat is over. The good thing is, there is more than one at-bat per game, but it might just be a while before I step up to the plate again.
Jobs are obsolete
Douglas Rushkoff:
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
[…]
What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
(Source: CNN)
One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the city anticipated its own growth. It built elevated rail systems to neighborhoods that didn’t exist. A grid that went into the Bronx when the city barely made it to 14th St. A huge city park in the middle of nowhere. Tech guys have to think like that. So few do. Seriously.
People who do this think this way should win awards. It goes beyond design. It isn’t a matter of how rich you are. It’s how boldly you think, and then execute to that vision. And also how flexible you are, when you learn things about your framework that you didn’t envision (so it goes beyond vision as well). And you not only let other people play, but build that in from the start.
And so, as someone who does a lot of writing throughout my day, having a text editor that supports and stylizes my Markdown syntax is like gold. Macchiato is such an app. It’s not the only one of its kind, but it is one of the best.
This is the fantastic suit I stayed in on my first trip to Las Vegas.
What Happened to Obama?
Drew Westen for the New York Times:
Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
Drew’s opinion piece is fantastic, and does a perfect job at describing my feeling about Obama’s presidency—only much more eloquently.
Patrick Rhone reviews Macchiato:
Recently, Ive been taking a tour of various text editors and writing environments in an effort to, well, give them all a fair chance. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m so tied to TextEdit that I far too often give most everything else only a drive-by chance before running back to the comfort and security of what I already know. That said, while I love TextEdit, it does have some areas where it falls short. One of those is syntax highlighting. I love and have long used Markdown syntax for markup and wished TextEdit did a better job of helping me with that.
Macchiato
This past June, I attended my very first WWDC. The conference, the people and the parties were all amazing, and it was definitely a highlight. Inspired by the spirit of the conference, and all the new technologies presented, I set out to conquer my laziness and build and ship a new app.
I’m a huge fan of Markdown. So much so that I write nearly everything in it. From emails and notes, to documentation and blog posts. Unfortunately, writing Markdown meant one of two things for me: either launching TextEdit and switching it to plain text mode, or launching TextMate and writing in a code editor. Neither were really suited to the task.
To remedy this, I built Macchiato. I made full use of Lion’s new technologies. In fact, Macchiato only works on Lion. You’ve got full-screen mode, auto-save and versioning. The internals of the app uses NSRegularExpression, sandboxing, Automatic Reference Counting, and several other Lion-only APIs.
Macchiato is about being the very best at doing one thing: writing in Markdown. I’ve tried to keep an emphasis on usability, design and typography. I wanted to make it a joy to use, and for me it did the trick. I use it every day.
Check out Macchiato!
