Occupation of Independence

As long as I'm telling the book publishers how to run their business, the DVD movie industry might as well get some advice too. I know of no industry that illustrates Thoreau's classic words, better: "...so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance... Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." First off, the "step up" from regular DVDs to Blue-Ray discs is non-value-added if all it gets the consumer is more pixels and higher resolution. A regular DVD and LCD screen are flat-out gorgeous; nothing more needs to be done; the poi

What was it, the next day after the earthquake and tsunami that Keynesian market commentators began licking their chops over how these disasters would actually help the Japanese economy, because of all the stimulus spending and quantitative easing? That was their knee-jerk reaction, despite Japan's stimulus spending since 1990, which produced two lost decades. It's funny that they didn't use the same argument about the international invasion of Libya and all the ensuing destruction and civil war. After all, if you subscribe to the broken-window-fallacy, what difference does it make whether you throw a rock through somebody's window, or use a ball instead?

The other day a friend got me thinking how far out of the mainstream we both were for never owning a dishwashing machine in our lives. But see what we'd be missing? This was deja vu for me: three fellow cyclists and I were having lunch one day, in the middle of a Saturday ride. It was humorous the way we all realized at the same time that we were sitting with a whole table-full of kooks who didn't even own a television.

This morning I remonstrated with a woman who has long practiced a book-besotted lifestyle. She even refuses to apologize for it, and as we all know, getting people to admit that they have a problem is half the battle. I fear she is irredeemable since she resists all of my efforts to improve her. (It's their job to improve us, you know.) In contrast to this sad story I'd like to report a small success in the book world. I am in the habit of downloading classic books as text files from sites online, and then editing the crap out of them. Basically that means deletion, but it wouldn't have to. There is a profound and exciting difference between editing a book and merely reading it, since the latter is mechanical tedium more than anything else. It's high time that we did something fundamental and truly revolutionary with all this information technology. I am currently finishing the second iteration of abridging Boswell's Life of Johnson . It will be difficult to br

Now that ATT and T Mobile are planning on merging, and the American market becomes dominated by two wireless telephone companies, I have to ask why the government ever bothered to break up Ma Bell back in the 1980s. It didn't have a total monopoly back then: there was GTE as well as numerous local carriers. Besides, Ma Bell was regulated as a utility. It seems like we've come full circle.