Andrew Leonard is apparently living in the same fantasy bubble enshrouding the Obama Administration, albeit from several thousand miles away. For a very good explanation of why what President Obama is doing it mistaken and will cost us all dearly, I invite you to read Glenn Greenwald's posting for today - particularly to towards the end:

"Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general."

In six months or two years, the American public will not care - or even remember - that the President filled the stimulus with useless and costly tax breaks in order to win Republican support. They are going to notice that it didn't work the way it was supposed to and that we are all that much further in debt with little to show for it.

What are they likely to conclude about giving both houses and the presidency to the Democrats?

Hi,

I am not going to flame Mr. Benjamin for buying an SUV and his rationalizations are his own business.

What I am wondering is why this was worth an article. It seems like something that should have been directed to the advice column instead.

-Ulysses

1.

We should plug money in at the bottom instead of buying out banks and bad financial instruments. The "bailout" plan should address the crisis in confidence by partially or completely re-stabilizing the source of the bad loans in the first place. Push money to renters living in homes that are up for foreclosure and push money to owners directly so that the mortgages stay current.

By pushing money to the payers, you bypass the problem that the ownership of the mortgages themselves is apparently unclear. For a second thing, you put money into the hands of people who will keep it in circulation because they will spend it.

2.

I am unconvinced that it is impossible to figure out who holds the mortgages, despite all the past several years' chicanery. There are a lot of smart people who have or could be made to have excellent incentives for figuring this out. Re-negotiating the loans should be a part of any "bailout".

3.

Put no more into the top than is absolutely necessary. With money coming in at the bottom to restore confidence where confidence has collapsed, give central banks the ability to handle the rest of what is necessary to maintain credit flow.

Those are some of the elements of the "bailout" plan as it should be.

-Ulysses

I read an advance copy. It took me most of August.

If you are among those who love Mr. Stephenson's digressions best and find his bombastic prose distracting, this book is almost a love letter to you. Have at it. I think we can safely count Andrew Leonard in that camp.

If you are among those who enjoyed the characters and stories in his books - Jack Shaftoe, Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse, Roger Comstock, Enoch, Bobby Shaftoe, Lawrence or Randy Waterhouse or Hiro Protagonist - you probably won't enjoy it.

I have read everything that I am aware Mr. Stephenson has written except the "The Big U". I have enjoyed each new work better than the last and the "The Baroque Cycle" best of all.

I didn't like "Anathem" very much.

I missed having a story. There is a story, but it doesn't really begin until about halfway through the book. Up until then is mostly monks ("avout") talking to each other.

I really really missed the baudy and hyperbolic text and stories. This is the first book of his I have read that had none of this - not so much as half a paragraph. If you are inclined to to keep reading as I was in the hope of finding some fun bits of text, you may stop where you are. It isn't there.

Other notes:

1. The bonus CD is a hoot.

2. This is *not* a ripoff or even very much related to "A Canticle for Leibowitz". I can easily imagine that book as being among the inspirations for "Anathem" but that is all and, coincidentally, I read "Canticle" only eleven months ago.

-Ulysses

Hmm. I can see it now. A well-marked target receiving antenna on the ground in the center of a miles-in-diameter no-fly zone.

... and regular crews driving around picking up piles of fried dead birds everywhere nearby. Our brilliant future awaits!

As an out-of-the-closet anime fan, I have scratched my head about Korea for years. As far as I know, Korea does the gruntwork on most traditional (i.e., not-Pixar-ish) animation projects now - including American anime-lookalike productions like "Avatar: the Last Airbender" and "Boondocks".

What is curious is that Korea, again, as far as I know, has yet to produce a widely recognized anime product that is a Korean production. Korea has Roughtrade Studio, but I am not aware of a Korean equivalent to Sunrise Studio, Studio Ghibli or Gainax or a Korean Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon. Korea has the talent. They have a rich history and culture to mine for source material, as they have already done with appeal throughout Asia in the form of live action "dramas" (sort of like soap operas in the US - but with a broader audience and appeal. Anime should, by rights, belong to Korea by now. Why doesn't it?

-Ulysses

How timely! Many firms in downtown San Francisco can hardly have had a better reminder of the importance of sysadmins than they had a couple of days ago when the power went out.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/24/BAG9NR67253.DTL&tsp=1

Such vaunted names as Craigslist were down for hours.

On another note, perhaps it will not be long until all movie credits include a section for sysadmins. Pixar has done this for all of their films.