Author Archives: Steve Mays
“We suck enough to make anyone a contender”
Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on Michele Bachmann is brilliant. And scary. And for those of us totally puzzled by the success of people like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, an explanation that makes some sense (to me):
“All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.”
Here are few more excerpts from the article:
“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”
“Bachmann lies because she can’t help it, because it’s a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.”
“Imagine Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics.”
“There are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously.”
“Pawlenty reportedly views Bachmann’s decision to jump in and spoil his long-planned assault on the presidency as the equivalent to her having crouched over and peed in his Cheerios.”
“Consumers don’t want tablets, they want iPads”
“Fifty percent of respondents preferred Apple over all other brands. There is a remarkable degree of unanimity in consumer’s preferences for the iPad over competing products. … In the US, we find that Apple has more than double the brand appeal of BlackBerry, HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung combined. These manufacturers have a very high level of brand equity and visibility in adjacent categories. It is striking that they hold so little appeal for consumers in tablets.”
WSJ’s All Things Digital
My favorite line from this post: “Apple is succeeding in the category because it reinvented it.”
Are you living “a meaningful well-lived life?”
Eudaimonia is a term the Greeks used to describe “a meaningfully well-lived life.” In this essay, Umair Haque wonders if the economy we have is providing this:
“Instead of an “energy industry,” I see a resource addiction that saps money and preserves self-destructive expectations. I see, instead of food and education “industries,” an obesity epidemic and a debt-driven education crisis. Instead of a pharmaceutical industry, I see a new set of mental and physical discontents, like rates of suspiciously normally “abnormal” mental illnesses and drugs whose lists of “side effects” are longer than the Magna Carta. Instead of a “media industry,” I see news that actually misinforms instead of enlightening — rusting the beams of democracy — and entertainment that merely titillates.”
But Mr. Haque thinks things are changing (and I hope he’s right):
“I believe the quantum leap from opulence to eudaimonia is going to be the biggest, most significant economic shift of the next decade, and perhaps beyond: of our lifetimes. We’re not just on the cusp of, but smack in the middle of nothing less than a series of revolutions, aimed squarely at the trembling status quo (financial, political, social): new values, mindsets, and behaviors, fundamentally redesigned political, social, economic, and financial institutions; nothing less than reweaving the warp and weft of not just the way we live—but why we live, work, and play.”
Scott Adams: Technology Caves
“In the past, the square footage of a home was probably the single biggest factor in determining its level of comfort and livability. Today, technology and a growing trend toward informality make the size of the home less important. You can get to the same level of livability at lower cost by putting your money into room design, sound proofing, and technology. My best guess is that a technology cave could achieve the same level of livability as a McMansion, at a quarter of the price.
I predict that someday you’ll see a technology company such as Apple or Google get into the residential technology cave business. The traditional residential construction industry will never embrace smaller homes with better technology. The change will have to come from another industry.”