Letter to the Editor regarding The Economist 28 February 2009

Sir - Your article “Round and round it goes” surfaced a troubling bias at your newspaper. The article asserts that, “[in Mumbai] recycling is a profitable persuit for all involved, whereas in San Francisco it costs most residents money.” You justify this assertion by stating that, “Indian rag-pickers require no wages, equipment, or electricity,” and contrast this with the living wage paid to workers in the San Francisco Materials Recovery Facility. It seems you are holding up the Mumbai recycling model as an economic ideal, conveniently omitting the fact that it is based on extreme poverty and the patently non-Western practise of wage slavery. This bias makes me wonder what the early editions of your newspaper had to say about the economic effects of Britain’s Slave Trade Act 1843. I sincerely hope your newspaper did not argue in favor of slavery due to its economic benefits for all involved.

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Obama should get his own blog

My big boss at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, was the first Fortune 500 CEO to wholly embrace blogging, both for his own blog, and for all Sun employees.  Jonathan's blog is key to Sun's public interface.  Given the presumably huge gulf between what it's like to be on the inside at the White House and the public's view of actions and their motivations, it makes lots of sense for Barack Hussein Obama to start a blog of his own once he takes office.  This is especially true in light of his promise of running a transparent administration.  I'll explore one use case.

I just read this interesting article in the New York Times: Campaign Pledge on Ethics Could Become Obstacle to Filling White House Jobs.  The point of the article is that Obama's going to have a hard time sticking to the letter of the law of his campaign ethics pledge if he wants to have the largest possible talent pool for his administration.  The article seems to infer that the lobbying culture of Washington is so entrenched that all of the competent and desirable folks would be ineligible.  If Obama had a blog, he could make his own, individual case for any individuals whose inclusion might, at first glance, seem to stretch the ethics pledge, but with closer inspection and nuance would be acceptable.

There are many other blogging benefits, but is it even possible that he'd be allowed to do it even if he wanted to?

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Right Wing Assault Continues

I'm sick of it, all right? Ever since Bush took office, there have been a constant stream of action alerts for me to call Congress to prevent them for doing something that is bad for the Republic. I could give a litany of such things, but here are a few, just off the top of my head.

• drilling in Alaska
  


• abandon Kyoto
  


• Ridiculous tax cut for the rich (myself included)
  


• the war in Iraq
  


• renouncing obligations to International Criminal Court
  


• repealing the ergonomics law
  


• destroying constitutonally protected checks and
  balances to expand the power of the legislative branch.
  

Now this latest one, a move to put the last nail in the coffin of that organ of relatively public interest information long despised by the radical right, Public Broadcasting, really has me down. Here is yet another thing that anyone who wants to preserve the quality of the Republic, such as it is, needs to act upon, and call Congress. Why the assult? What's the goal of all these changes? What is the ideal world to which Rove and company are driving? Could someone please tell me?

Getting personal

While I had one of the first 400 home pages on the WWW ever (see this link for an email dated Wed, 7 Sep 1994 that references my (now-long removed) page), I've only recently gotten into blogging proper. To date, I've used my java.net blog for content related to the Java Web Tier, and my sun.com blog, for miscellaneous technical content. And that was fine enough.

Even though Jonathan Schwartz championed the creation of Sun employee blogs, and stated that they could be used for any content at all, within reasonable guidelines, I wouldn't feel comfortable posting political, religious, or otherwise potentially controversial views there. So, I'm creating a blogger.com blog here to contain posts that don't fit anywhere else.