Sep 13 2003
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Budget forecast drops by same amount as all tax collected between American Independence and 1983.

Posted by | business | No Comments

The difference between the Bush’s first budget plan, for the next 10 years and today’s: $8,000,000,000,000. NYTimes: “The long-term budget forecast has declined as much in the last two years as the total revenue collected by the United States government from 1789 to 1983.” The reason for some of this shortfall is ‘investment’ to stimulate the economy, but tax cuts and sometimes questionably misdirected hostility are not the same as investing in, say, secondary education. I’m a pragmatist and however unfair, this does work, but to a degree. This would be a choice of someone who prefers short term stimulants to longer term health – cocaine versus cardiovascular fitness (and ‘would be’ might actually read ‘was’, if you believed the rumors). In the business world, this is the equivalent of corporate investment in longer term revenue by raising executive salaries and actually encouraging competition from other companies, instead of new…

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Sep 12 2003
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Irish Genealogy

Posted by | online genealogy | No Comments

Over at Irish Origins we have recently added a database of all the property valuations for the middle of the 19th century. The reason these are important is that the census records were destroyed, making the property records only way to do comprehensive search accross Ireland for as far back as most Irish American’s decendants.

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Sep 12 2003
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Turning the big brother equation around

Posted by | technology | No Comments

“Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.” For the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in video surveillance, as the required hardware became cheap. Surveillance that has been heavily resisted in the US is commonplace in Europe. The ubiquity of camera phones changes the surveillance equation around. So now everyone gets paranoid – but they shouldn’t. If everyone carries camera phones, then perhap you decentralize and democratize ‘surveillance’. The risk is that you replace a fear of big brother with vigilante paranoia that police neighborhood watch schemes can produce. This all may sound far fetched, but clearly 1 billion people carrying around a camera and the…

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Sep 09 2003
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CDs are a bigger threat to the music industry than MP3s.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Is a SWAT team going to burst through the windows of your house one night and drag you off into the moonlight because they can’t find the CD original of some tracks on your iPod since you threw out the disk when it got scratched? Unlikely. Here’s why I believe that CD’s could pose a bigger threat to the music industry than web-based file sharing. The music industry has three tactics to put people off trading online: polluting networks with false tracks; telling parents that file trading exposes children to porn; suing individuals. This will put people off. Authorized online distribution of digital music files, Apple music store style, will enable copy protection within the files. Hardware devices such as iPods will continue to use protection measures at the hardware level. CDs and CD players don’t have this kind of protection, because CD standards were defined before ubiquitous file trading,…

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Sep 08 2003
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Ass fact-checked to hell and back

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

Jeff Jarvis on why consolidated media depends on professionals to uphold the truth whereas decentralized media powered by enough amateurs leads to the truth automatically. There is something reassuring about the democracy of many to many publishing. If you are a capitalist then this is a what you could call a marketplace, if you are socialist then this is power to the people and if you are a libertarian then this is, well, libertarian.

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Sep 08 2003
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Measuring Democracy – Global Ally of Democracy index

Posted by | politics | No Comments

The Democracy Index measures how democratic individual US states are based upon variables such as seats-to-votes ratios. Is there such a measure anywhere for countries? This could be tallied with foreign trade, international aid receipts or donations and local subsidies to quantitatively measure an ‘ally’ (i.e. how much a country puts its money where its mouth is) and create a ‘Global Ally of Democracy’ index. If a country is both highly democratic and favors aid and trade to other countries which are also highly democratic without imposing tariffs or subsidizing domestic production then it would score highly as a Global Ally of Democracy.

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Sep 08 2003
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RSS backlash?

Posted by | technology | No Comments

“I can imagine the day when RSS-powered email clients are included in the software image on your machine. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the likes of Microsoft and IBM Lotus are not far away from including RSS newsreaders in their email clients. It’s a must-have feature.” InfoWorld TechWatch: Inside baseball: the RSS backlash

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Sep 05 2003
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God, Stalinism and the Tooth Fairy

Posted by | religion | No Comments

As an atheist who believes that religion, on balance, creates more evil than good, I was interested in ‘The Brights’. A Bright is defined as someone whose “worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements”, and the word is designed to sound more positive than atheist. I signed up, but now I am having second thoughts. Being an atheist who rejects supernatural religious belief does not answer the fact that the principal crimes of the twentieth century, Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge and Nazism, were secular. What they all have in common with religion is a code based upon belief – ideology. A ‘ brights’ naturalist worldview would reject God and the Tooth Fairy. An anti-ideological, ‘adaptivist’, worldview would reject religious doctrine and Stalinism. I still think a naturalist wordview is also healthy, but I can live with the Tooth Fairy.

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Sep 04 2003
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Fluff article on Science and Religion

Posted by | religion | No Comments

Today’s Guardian runs an apologist piece on science and religion. Why is it that people pick a few scientists who are religious and draw the conclusion that this is the norm and that because some scientists are religious this helps the case for religion? 1. Most scientists are not religious. Those that are not “constitute 60% of American scientists, and a stunning 93% of those scientists good enough to be elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences“. 2. This Guardian article argues that the religiousness of scientists adds credibility to religious belief. Therefore, if you buy the article’s premise and look at the facts, the proven lack of religious belief amongst the majority of scientists actually reduces its credibility. 3. An alternative premise is that scientists who are religious don’t help the case for religion one way or another. People are irrational beings with an innate susceptibility to superstition….

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Sep 03 2003
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Carrots for French sticks

Posted by | politics | No Comments

Martin Walker suggests that coalition hand-outs over the rebuilding of Iraq will be worthless since it now looks like it will cost more to rebuild than near term oil revenue. Instead, he argues that France will need something else, and that the US will agree to keep quiet over French agricultural subsidies at the upcoming WTO summit in Washington.

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