There's not much point in blaming the "Corporate Media", or television when we're living in the midst of an information explosion that gives us all equal access to the tools of publishing and information gathering. But I think what we're discovering is that information is not so empowering after all. Along with the imaginary construct of the monolithic MSM, we could just as easily blame the internet, which by its very nature and the culture of immediacy-worship it engenders, regards all information as equally valid - whether it's a gallery of knitted iPod cozies or images of torture at Abu Ghraib. The most critical and important stories on Digg scroll off the front page just as quickly as posts about some new Firefox feature and are reduced to meaningless cultural background noise. How can people respond in any other way but with the auto-immune response of total indifference?

I don't know what the solution is, but I'd recommend that people filter information as much as they can - control your information input like you'd watch calories or carbs.

We're temporarily protected from the housing/credit collapse up here in Vancouver BC by the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics. Whether the games will actually generate a single penny of revenue for British Columbia remains to be seen of course, but we're still in the midst of real estate speculation and condo-flipping frenzy.

I knew we were in serious trouble when they started showing no-money-down mortgage ads in the local theaters that were clearly aimed at a 20-something hipster demographic - a segment of the workforce that has trouble making RENT on a consistent basis. Our crash will come and we're basically watching a global preview unfold in front of our eyes.

It's not like Apple has a monopoly on cell phones, or music services, or anything else for that matter. No one loves new gadgets more than me, but the frenzy that surrounded the release of the iPhone was a little distasteful, to say the least. It was disturbing to see how people shrugged off privacy and DRM concerns because they simply HAD to have the toy du jour. If consumers can't be bothered to weigh the sex appeal of the latest Apple product against the value of their rights AS consumers, they have no one to blame if they find those rights being abused.

Even then, they can vote against Apple by choosing another product. All Apple's doing is acting on the assumption that people are so emotionally (and even, to some extent, spiritually)invested in the brand that they'll put up with anything. And for the most part, they're absolutely correct.

As someone who holds out great hope that the solutions to many of our planetary dilemnas is more technology, not less, I find Dyson to be an embarassment. He's the quintessential representative of a school of thought that fuses technological totalism with an absolutely breathtaking contempt for the idea that the natural world has a right to exist as it is. People like him scare the living daylights out of me.

About 25 years ago I sat down and worked out the math of what owning a car would actually cost me in time, based on what I expected my hourly wage to be by the time I was 30. I added up all the hours of driving that I would really do over my lifetime (beyond just getting from A to B) how much I'd probably pay in parking, tickets, fines, repairs, insurance etc. To my surprise, I found that driving would end up costing about 50% of my expected annual salary for the rest of my life. I haven't owned a car since, and I've never regretted it.

We're no longer living in the world where America's fortunes steer the entire planet. America, Canada, the UK, Germany and France can all have crap years - even crap decades all at the same time, and it won't even slow the rest of the world down. People will go broke, lose their homes, maybe even a few banks will go down. Unemployment will rise.

It'll be terrible for those affected, and unfortunately it won't be possible to say that they all "had it coming" or that they're all paying the price for living beyond their means. In any case, it won't be the end of the world. America really isn't the keystone of the global economy anymore.

The gist of the article seems to be, "If we all just relax and keep doing what we're doing and stop being such negative normans, the problem will practically solve itself"

Can I get paid to be a Salon writer?

is the axiom that the POTENTIAL loss of SOME American lives justifies the ACTUAL loss of any number of foriegn (in this case, Iraqi) lives. That's a position that can never produce a positive result, or anything that could ever be described as a "victory".

The science fiction genre is in such a tiresomely introspective muddle these days it doesn't even know what to call itself. There's Transhumanist literature, "sprawl" fiction, space opera, and a thousand other splinter subsets whose seperate adherents all consider themselves the "true" keepers of the flame. Some welcome fantasy and fabulism into the fold, others prefer a literary aparthied that keeps "Hard" scifi and fantasy ghettoized. These tedious arguments remind me of the way modernists and futurists bickered about ideological purity in the early 20th century.

Personally, I'm not even sure scifi CAN be considered a distinct genre unto itself anymore, and I'm definitely in the camp that says make the tent as big as possible and welcome everyone inside.