eBooks, bunny inspectors, and high speed rail. Salve Sclave

View 722 Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Breaking News from MSNBC

Headline:

Bin Laden Killed One Year Ago!

I have no data on why MSNBC considers that breaking news, but that was just up. I doubt it will last scrutiny from the program managers on duty in the news control center. It might be interesting to find the reasoning of those who thought it worth having a banner calling that breaking news.

The President is spiking the ball while taking victory laps accompanied by the team band. I guess that’s called running on your record. I understand that Vice President Biden voted not to go after Bin Ladin. I actually understand that: it was the open and undeniable invasion of a sovereign ally without their permission; a rather grave thing to do, reminiscent of sending in the Marines to a banana republic. I don’t know what alternatives the President was given. And it did go better than Carter’s attempt to rescue our embassy hostages, when President Carter sent too little and kept Colonel Beckwith on the telephone during the entire operation. Why we did not take Bin Laden alive for interrogation has not been explained, and probably never will be.

The President is taking his victory lap. This is breaking news.

We have been under heavy attack from fake subscriptions (multiple thousands), and some real ones got buried. I have means for sorting the real from the fake, but it has caused a bunch of problems. In particular I haven’t answered a number of comments and questions that came with the subscription. These are all subscriptions entered through the website. Anyway, my apologies to all I actually missed in the past few months. I’m dancing as fast as I can. It has wasted a bunch of time, but I think we have means to deal with these now.

There are several articles about how Obama is increasing the efficiency of government regulators. One wonders if they have made bunny inspection more efficient? And how that would work? We clearly need the bunny inspectors since Obama promised in his inauguration to make a laser like focus on the budget to eliminated needless jobs and waste in the name of Hope and Change. That was years ago, so one presumes that the lasers have been applied. Since we still have bunny inspectors – grown men and women whose job is to be certain that stage magicians who use bunny rabbits in their stage acts have a federal license to keep rabbits – one presumes that this is needed activity. The President must after all take care to see that the laws are enforced. He can’t get all of them, but this one must be important. One magician I know got out of the charge of keeping an unlicensed rabbit by feeding it to a friend’s pet snake and claiming that it wasn’t a rabbit bought for a stage act but only as snake food. The Federal Government doesn’t require a license for you to keep rabbits as snake food (or to eat or skin for bunnyskin; only for keeping as pets or for stage acts). I am glad to hear that bunny inspections will be made even more efficient. (For those new to this site, no I am not making any of this up.)

A few years ago California by initiative voted for about $9 billion in bonds to build a high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with some expectation that this would be enough money to do the job, or maybe it would take longer and cost more as all such things do, but this would be enough for a good start and surely it wouldn’t be more than – gulp – twice as much? Well, nothing so far as been done except to pay millions to lobbyists and engineers and architects and bureaucrats and grant application experts and cubicle workers, nothing has been built, and the expected cost is well above $100 billion and climbing. At one point the High Speed Railway was to be about 10 miles between a prison and a village that lost its post office years ago. There are various other proposals. None get to either San Francisco or Los Angeles. None really cope with the San Andreas Fault and other known difficulties. The State hasn’t issued the bonds yet, but they probably will be issued: the purpose of the project now is to pay workers, particularly engineers and architects and cubicle workers who will apply for grants from the Federal government. The estimates are that there will be tens of thousands of people a day who will take this high speed train from nowhere to nowhere else, and the operating costs are officially estimated at about half the operating costs of the best railway systems in the world. The whole scheme is merely a way to extract money to pay our masters.

Part of the efficiency improvements that President Obama is proud of include changing regulations so that Federal grant money for transportation can consider social factors like low cost housing rather than engineering and ridership and economic factors. This allows more money to be transferred from those who have to those have nots who need it so much. Salve Sclave.

At LAX today there are demonstrators trying to keep airport workers from going to their jobs. There are few to no airport workers in the demonstrations. Those are public employee union members bussed in from downtown. No one has yet explained why public employees deserve both civil service and union protections, and why the unions can require membership then spend money on lobbying for higher wages while the civil service protection means – well, a very long time ago at Boeing we called the BOMARC “the civil service missile. You can’t fire it and it won’t work.” And the unionized professors of the California State Colleges are taking a strike vote because they haven’t had a raise in five years. Tuition will go up. Taxes will go up. Salve Sclave.

Microsoft is investing in Nook. There will now be a Nook App for Windows. This may be interesting. Meanwhile we have

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

The shift will not be instant, and there’s still a good couple of years of life left in the e-book market before the alternatives work out the kinks of presentation, distribution and retailing.  But e-readers will be obsolete in a few years, and once they’re gone, the sole weak advantage an e-book has over its future replacements will be gone.  Any publisher banking on e-books being around 5 years from now is in for a rude surprise.

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

Which may be interesting. The eBook revolution has been wonderful for authors with a backlist. I would myself guess that the iBook and other tablets are here to stay, and iPhones and iBooks and the Windows Phone and the new Nokia stuff and tablets will just get better and better; and the eBook revolution will continue. Dedicated book readers probably will go obsolete and die away, but so what? The eBook revolution in publishing is here to stay and will get larger, not smaller. And it’s good news that Microsoft is investing in it. Amazon is wonderful , but monopolies aren’t so good.