- How Would You Know if The Economy Was Working? | TPMCafe
My friend Bill McKibben is blogging at TPM this week about his new book, “Deep Economy.” Much wisdom about our addiction to economic growth and alternative measurements of collective happiness. - Who’s got the tag? Database truth versus file truth, part 3 | Jon Udell
Great post about photo tagging a la OS X and Vista: “people don’t really want choice, they want things to Just Work, and they’d like technology to divine what Just Work means to them, which it can’t.” - WriteRoom | Hog Bay Software
Distraction-free word processing (for Mac). No buttons! No menus! No window bars! It’s, um, just like WordPerfect, almost…
PREVIOUS: Who lost Iraq?
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Links for April 24th
PREVIOUS: Journalists’ “see no evil” stats
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Who lost Iraq?
The controversy over Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s statement that the war in Iraq is “lost” is an exercise in capital Kabuki.
Everyone in Washington knows that Reid was speaking the truth. The war in Iraq is indeed lost. The war the politicians are fighting now is over who takes the blame for the loss.
By rights it should be President Bush. He started the war. He got everything he asked for from a compliant Republican Congress. He did it his way, and he failed, colossally. The Iraq adventure has damaged U.S. standing, U.S. interests, U.S. allies and the U.S.’s struggle with Al-Qaeda. It has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a global train wreck, today, now, whatever happens in the budget battle on Capitol Hill.
Politicians have been reluctant to state, forthrightly, how futile the situation has become; they worry about being framed as undermining morale in the field — just as Reid is now being charged. But the endgame of the Bush administration is forcing some bluntness on the Beltway.
Everything that Bush and his people do between now and 2008 needs to be understood through the lens of their “run out the clock” strategy. The attorney purge scandal, for instance, happened as part of an effort to polish up the resumes of “loyal Bushies” before lame-duckness sets in.
In response to the clear verdict of the 2006 election rejecting the war Bush chose to escalate the conflict instead, with one goal in mind: keep total defeat at bay, prevent a humiliating-retreat fiasco for two more years, then hand the hot potato off to his successor. Let the helicopters lift off from the Green Zone roofs any time after Jan. 20, 2009, just not on my watch, Bush wants to be able to say — no matter how many more soldiers and civilians have to die so he can say it.
That’s why Reid is saying the war is already lost. And why it’s important that he’s saying it today, with nearly two years still left of the Bush presidency. The Bush White House never takes responsibility for anything; the bad stuff was always someone else’ fault. (Remember the ludicrous argument that the Bush team started during its first administration about who was to blame for the recession that mired the country for Bush’s first few years: “It had already begun when we took office!” was the administration dodge.) If we’re honest that the war is already lost, and that everything we do henceforth is about cleaning up the mess, it’s that much harder for Bush and Cheney to turn around and somehow lay blame for the war’s disastrous conclusion at the feet of the Democrats who are trying to wind it down.
That’s the importance of Reid’s statement about the war: It’s about responsibility. President Bush started the war; President Bush lost the war. And he did both in a cloud of lies. Everything else is a footnote.
PREVIOUS: Links for April 23rd
NEXT: Who lost Iraq?
Journalists’ “see no evil” stats
A J-school prof at Cal told me that most reporters have absolutely no idea which of their stories people read or don’t read. They’re flying blind. I bet TV news people are too.
But wait, it’s even worse than it appears. Not only do most reporters have no idea which stories are read, many if not most don’t want to know.
The traditional view in journalism is that such knowledge is corrupting. If you know what’s popular and what isn’t, you will be driven by such knowledge to degrade your product. So the proverbial “Chinese wall” that’s supposed to segregate editorial decision-making from business influence has generally kept readership data out of the newsroom.
At a crude level, journalists fear that, the more granular the information about readership and popularity, the faster the suits will crank up celebrity gossip and defund serious coverage. The falllacy here is that, sorry, the suits already know everything they need to know about the relative popularity of different kinds of content — it’s just the editorial people who are (often) in the dark.
And then there is a more sophisticated level: the idea that writers and editors themselves, unpressured by crude strongarming by the business side but simply motivated by their own human need for attention, will find their judgment subtly but inexorably shaped by detailed usage stats.
The second concern is, I think, at least partly real, but I don’t lose sleep over it. From day one at Salon, when we were a half-dozen people in sublet space who could barely access our servers, we circulated traffic data to our editors; it simply blew our minds that we could. Over the years we took some heat for the practice, but I still think it makes sense. Ignorance is never a very good state for a journalist. Why choose blindness? Knowing where readers click doesn’t have to dictate your decisions — unless your decisions are poorly reasoned to begin with. In the soup out of which good coverage bubbles, traffic data should be one ingredient of many.
The real defense against what used to be called “page-view pandering” is strong, smart editors and writers with their own moral compasses. If you have them, then they deserve access to as much information as exists. If you don’t have them, then you’ve got bigger problems, and restricting access to your traffic stats won’t save you.
PREVIOUS: David Halberstam, RIP
Links for April 23rd
- rc3.org: How programming is like golf
“No matter how easy it is to get close to the hole, you have to make those seemingly easy putts in order to finish, and the small bits at the end can wind up costing you just as much as the big chunks of progress did early in the project.” Or: First you do the first 80 percent, then you do the second 80 percent… - Papers’ Web Hopes Dim a Bit – WSJ.com
“Roughly 70% to 80% of [newspapers'] online revenue is tied to a classified ad sold in the print edition.” If true, yikes: classified is going online anyway…
PREVIOUS: Apple and Brooks’s Law
NEXT: Links for April 23rd
David Halberstam, RIP
The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)
I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.
In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.
UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:
William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.
“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”
PREVIOUS: Links for April 20th
NEXT: David Halberstam, RIP
Apple and Brooks’s Law
Apple recently announced that it had to delay the release of the next version of Mac OS X, Leopard, by a few months — too many developers had to be tossed into the effort to get the new iPhone out the door by its June release. Commenting on the delay, Paul Kedrosky wrote, “Guess what? People apparently just rediscovered that writing software is hard.”
In researching Dreaming in Code, I spent years compiling examples of people making that rediscovery. I’m less obsessive about it these days, but stories like this one still cause a little alarm to ring in my brain. They tend to come in clumps: Recently, there was the Blackberry blackout, caused by a buggy software upgrade; or the Mars Global Surveyor, given up for lost in January, which, the LA Times recently reported, was doomed by a cascading failure started by a single bad command.
Kedrosky suggests the possibility of a Brooks’s Law-style problem on Apple’s hands, if the company has tried to speed up a late iPhone software schedule by redeploying legions of OS X developers onto the project. If that’s the case, then we’d likely see even further slippage from the iPhone project, which would then cause further delays for Leopard.
This is the sort of thing that always seemed to happen at Apple in the early and mid-’90s, and has rarely happened in Steve Jobs Era II. I write “rarely,” not “never,” because I recall this saga of “a Mythical Man Month disaster” on the Aperture team. If the tale is accurate, Apple threw 130 developers at a till-then-20-person team, with predictable painful results. We’ll maintain a Brooks’ Law Watch on Apple as the news continues to unfold.
UPDATE: Welcome, Daring Fireball and Reddit readers! And to respond to one consistent criticism: Sure, iPhone isn’t late yet, but Apple is explicitly saying it needed to add more developers to the project to meet its original deadline. If that all works out dandy, then the Brooks’s Law alarm will turn out to have been unwarranted. Most likely, given Apple’s discipline, the company will ship iPhone, with its software, when it says it will. What we won’t and can’t know is whether, and if so how much, the shipping product has been scaled back. And sure, of course this is all conjecture. Conjecture is what we have, given Apple’s locked-down secrecy.
PREVIOUS: Michael Wesch’s “Machine” video
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Links for April 20th
- Wii and DS Turn Also-Ran Nintendo Into Winner in Videogames Business – WSJ.com: Guess I was wrong about the Wii, which I derided for its absurd name!
- BBC NEWS | Business | Blackberry reveals failure cause: Surprise — it was a failed, or “insufficiently tested,” software upgrade, that brought down the Blackberries.
- Your Daily Awesome: Ira Glass on Storytelling: Four videos in which the This American Life host talks about his craft
