Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 20 Editor's Choice: 4
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OS X Crashes all the Time
[Read the article: Another iPhone feature -- it crashes!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yeah, I don't know where the Mac never crashes idea can possibly be coming from. I've had a PowerMac running OS X for five years and it crashes plenty. And I'm not even using it as my primary computer. On the other hand, until recently, I had a Vaio laptop with Windows 2000, which I dumped whatever software I felt like on it. and it never once crashed on me during five years. I'm not saying Windows is great. But my experience has never been that OS X is any better than Windows as far as crashing goes (Windows 98 was another story, but ever since then Windows is easily as stable as OS X). Right now I'm using a ThinkPad with Ubuntu and I have to say Ubuntu crashes more than Windows too.
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The Problem is Way Bigger Than This
[Read the article: The most dangerous metaphor]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Honestly, Moore's law I think is more aptly considred as a metaphor for our whole economny. Late modern capitalism is predicated on the continual growth of the economy. Without growth, the economy fails. Obviously there are finite limits to how much an economy can grow.
Our economy is limited by the size of the earth, the amount of resources, the limits of productivity that can extracted from a single individual (or computer chip). Eventually this econimic system will fail and it will be a big disaster. This is why the idea of sustainability goes far beyond simply a way of protecting the environment. Sustainability posits a fundamentally different sort of economy. We need to get this right or sooner or later we're just going to use up all our resources and die.
That aside, I think it would be good, at least for a while, to have a momentary pause in the inexorable movement of Moore's Law. It would force the software side of things to get radically streamlined. Right now, because of ever increasing processor speeds, people can be sloppy with bloated software, which consumes the extra processor speed faster than it can be developed. The way programs are written needs to be changed.
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PETA's Strategy is Effective
[Read the article: Alicia Silverstone's naked PETA ad]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think it's a misunderstanding of PETA's strategy to critique if for being polarizing and alienating. PETA knows it has the effect. But their strategy is to be as shocking as possible to get the issue of animal rights into public disourse and then let the more middle of the road organizations move the regulatory and legislative agendas forward.
In a New Yorker article a few years ago, representatives of PETA admitted as much. When asked why they don't go to Congress and try to lobby for some of their issues, they responded something to the effect of: Are you kidding? We'd be the kiss of death. They think we're crazy. We leave that up to the Humane Society and other more acceptable organizations.
So PETA gets that they are part of a broader strategy involving other organizations than themselves. At the same time, frankly, I think it's pretty clear that they have being very effective at putting the animal rights issue on the agenda. People weren't even talking in general public discourse about animal rights before PETA. Now it's basically accepted as a real political issue. That is a huge accomplishment and it has been PETAs extreme tactics that have accomplished this.
Their strategy really was pioneered by other organizations such as ACT UP, which accomplished the same goal for political organization around AIDS and HIV. So I think PETA deserves credit for being considerably more sophisticated about political strategy and how public discourse works. The irony is that while people dismiss PETA as being a bunch of crazy people, they actually are participating in the sensationalism that helps move PETA's agenda forward.
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Voting for Kucinich is Strategically the Most Effective Vote
[Read the article: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, historically it can be shown that it is the extremes of the party that drive and determine the political debate and have far more influence on actual policy than the candidates who win. So voting for Kucinich is not crazy, but rather one of the most relevant things you can do.
This is one of the basic misunderstandings of most voters about the strategic significance of their vote. Issues like environmentalism, social security, medicare, pensions, workers compensation, all started as third party issues and in the case of the latter four as the issues of a perennial socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, in the early part of the 20th century. (FDR eventually stole his platform and enacted all his ideas.)
The third party positions or extremes within one of the major parties introduce ideas which the mainstream candidates eventually appropriate and which then become policy. The major candidates rarely have any ideas that are their own.
This is how the religious right, a small minority in the Republican party, came to be so powerful. They voted for the extreme and were willing to see Republicans lose elections. Eventually the Republican party moved to the right and took the Democratic party with it.
In the long run, voting for Kucinich has the most strategic potential power. The more people support his points of view, even if he loses, the more other candidates will adopt his ideas and the more they have the potential to become actual policy. Democrats always make the mistake of looking at the short run, thinking of how they can win now, and the long run result is the disjunction between Democratic values and Democratic candidates that Traister describes. (And the Democratic candidates often still don't win.)
The policies that get adopted as law have little to do with who actually wins elections. Politics is not about who wins, but voters (especially Democrats) don't get this.
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How about a comparison with Clinton?
[Read the article: The economics of Barack Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nice post. Can you do a comparison along these lines with Hillary's economic approach?