When I wrote about Palin shortly after McCain chose her, I said she did not have enough time to gain fan loyalty in order to have a significant positive effect on McCain’s votes. I think I was right on that, despite her obviously having gotten a big bump in popularity, simply by being a novel sort of candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised, after seeing her disastrous interview with Katie Couric on CBS news, if she […]
American and probably world financial institutions continued to reel today as an outcome of the credit collapse that began with the sub-prime mortgage mess. Because primary and secondary mortgages and other forms of personal and institutional debt were completely essential for whatever economic strength the old economy has shown since 2001, it seems probable to me that the latest failures are just a harbinger of worse money-economy times to come. However this plays out in […]
The Hyperlinked Society, the book I’ve referred to before, is a book which shares the common faults of printed versions of conferences. Though the very word “conference” suggests the possibility of a rich dialogue among participants, the printed version tends to suggest no attention paid to each other. Here, for instance, there are two chapters on maps and the Web — the second much better than the first — each covering much the same topics, […]
In the book, “The Hyperlinked Society,” which I read at Michel Bauwens’ urging, there is an article by Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times extolling that publication’s all-out push to integrate with the Web. To some degree they have done a good job, but one thing they do terribly badly is exactly their use of hyperlinks. I do not know the mechanism, — it could be ten-year -old children of the webmaster, underpaid workers in […]
Dear Readers, For too long, comments have not worked on this site. That happened because of my lack of technical knowledge and too much comment spam coming in. I think I’ve fixed those problems. So please comment now. (I will still moderate comments.) Best, Michael
Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at the 2008 Democratic Convention, asked whether her supporters backed her just as a person or because of the issues she embraced, implying that of course they should answer: “the latter.” But we know that is not in truth the case. All candidates “flip-flop” to some degree on issues that might be important to their voters, and since no one can foresee exactly what will face successful candidates during the term […]
“Links are good. I believe that.” So begins David Weinberger’s argument [p. 181] on the morality he sees embedded in the hyperlinked structure of the Web. His is one of the more interesting contributions to a book based on a conference entitled “The Hyperlinked Society:Questioning Connections in the Digital Age”, edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui. (Michel Bauwens suggested the book as something I might be interested in commenting on. So I read it […]
Why should we elect Obama? One obvious reason is the mess the American Economy (as traditionally defined) is in right now. Does this mean that Obama and his economic advisors will come up with good plans for reviving the economy and preventing a further slide? I suspect they would do better than McCain and his crew, but also that they will not be very well equipped themselves to understand the real problems. They come from […]
Crash-free No Longer In a recent post, I discussed the current problems re sub-prime mortgages and the credit crunch in connection with ignorance in high finance and in general. The complex entities that are investment banks, which were supposedly highly knowledgeable as organizations, actually were quite in the dark, quite ignorant in fact, when it came to the mortgage problems. I argued that someone has to be knowledgeable and interested for a problem to be […]
The high excitement among Democrats in the US about the Clinton-Obama race; the expectations on all sides of change in Cuba following Fidel Castro’s retirement; the sudden resignation of Governor Spitzer in New York and the change in the political climate there that is expected to follow. What do these have in common? I want to point to the fact that the identity of the one, single, top leader still seems to have enormous influence […]