Behind the rhetoric, some fascinating numbers coming out of Washington this week.
As part of the deal, the 2012 Congressional budget will be reduced by $22 billion. Of course, the 2012 baseline budget is $3,639 billion. Which makes the budget cuts 0.61% of the budget–perhaps less–and basically meaningless besides as a data point for stump speeches. (The article linked above suggests that the entire deal could be fiscally meaningless, although it’s politically huge.)
Tea Party representatives took a hard-line stance against taxes, but among voters, 53 percent of Tea Party members supported a combination of tax increases and spending cuts for this deal. And a whopping 66% of voters encouraged the Tea Party representatives in Congress to work toward compromise last month.
Ultimately, the pragmatic center carried the day, with 95 Democrats and 174 Republicans voting in favor of the bill, and 95 Democrats and 66 Republicans voting against. Forging middle ground is almost quaint in 2011 Washington (even if it is heavily tilted toward the Republican ideal).
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The amazing thing is: We all can do this. Now, normal people like you and me can’t write as well as Paul Ford. It’s alright, he can’t sing as well as you, so we’ll call it even. But! What we can do, all of us, is put it out there. Write what we know, and what we live, and what we love, and put it under our own names where nobody owns it but us, unless we say otherwise. I’ve made a whole list of people who’ve done just that, at the bottom of this page, if you need inspiration.
Anil summarizes what makes blogs great, and why this page has endured for nearly 13 years, more or less uninterrupted. Some of my archives hold up better than others, but there they are, chronicling my self-published life as it courses through the digital era. (I agree with Anil on this, too: Paul Ford’s writing is really something else.)
And whatever you do, they say, don’t stop writing.
Shit.
Interesting, in some phantasmal way, that I posted the above text just about ten years ago. Maybe I was due for a lull.
Anyway, between the very busy day job at Canopy and the very busy life job of being a new dad to a second son, something had to give for a spell, and that something turned out to be the online presence. All of them, actually–my tweeting fell off a cliff and the boys’ photoblogs haven’t been updated since May. (The one thing that did keep pace was @nathan_says, which you should totally be reading if you find little kids amusing.)
I am overdue to rekindle this blog, starting with a migration to WordPress later this summer. I’ll be back in the groove soon. Watch this space. (Patiently, though.)
Ai and Canopy at IRCE, on the Ai blog.
We are gearing up with excitement for this year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Expo. Canopy CEO (and erstwhile Ai director of strategy, and, well, yours truly) David Wertheimer will be giving his live website critiques for the fourth time, and Ai and Canopy have a large and gorgeous expo floor booth in the works.
This gives Amy and me exactly 32 days to brace her for a week of single-motherhood with a 10-week-old. (I also traveled when Nate was 11 weeks old and cried like a baby–me, not him–when I left for the airport.)
Meet Eli.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
From my post on aiaio:
The majority of respondents, 58%, don’t use the mobile Internet at all. And two-fifths of that group doesn’t even have a web-enabled mobile device.
In my everyday life, for each instance I have of “aha! let me look that up on my phone,” I get half as many eye rolls about the fact that my phone came out of my pocket. My ability to access information in an instant can be trumped by an inclination toward, well, not taking out the phone.
Mobile etiquette is a funny thing; I personally err on the side of polite more than progressive, apologizing if my phone comes out mid-conversation. I wonder how much of that is going to drive mobile adoption the next few years, and when or whether it will move from accepted to expected across all social and age classes, as text messaging has.
Steve Jobs’ reality distortion takes its toll on truth, on Fortune Tech.
I hate when hyperbole overshadows fact. (It’s one of the reasons I have never gotten deeply into following politics.) This article posits to fact-check Steve Jobs’ iPad 2 keynote, but Seth Weintraub’s corrections are surrounded in so much arm-waving frustration that they undermine the root arguments behind them. They also overstate the corrections.
To wit: Jobs included a bullet point that said the iPad has greater than 90% market share. Weintraub wrote in response, “‘>90% market share’. OMG Math,” then asserted, “Apple would have needed to sell 3.2 million more to reach 90% of 2010’s tablet market share.” Which, in itself, isn’t accurate either. If the market is essentially the 14.8 million-sold-in iPad and the 2 million-sold-in Galaxy Tab, then Apple’s sales in 2010 weren’t 90% of the market, they were actually (wait for it) 88.1%. OMG Math.
Then, in trying to compare apples to apples on component pricing, Weintraub starts with, “The XOOM’s are simply better.” He then chooses to pick at various items on the iPad’s spec sheet which don’t match up to the Xoom’s, and says Apple doesn’t measure up. But in doing so, he’s playing the same game in reverse: focusing on factors where his preferred device is stronger (RAM, storage, speakers) and ignoring the ones where his is not (processor, size, cameras). It’s a winless argument.
Thinly veiled disdain is good for speaking to a base of like-minded individuals. But it won’t win any broader discussions.
How many people remember that Randy Jackson, now famous for his role as an “American Idol” judge, was a bass player with a long history in the industry as a session musician? I remember him well as Journey’s bassist on “Raised on Radio.” Check out the still-great video for “Girl Can’t Help It” for Randy Jackson circa 1986, complete with ’80s flattop and neon leather jacket.
I knew Fergie’s Super Bowl halftime show costume looked familiar.