If your kids' teachers are only working from 8-2:30 on weekdays, enroll them in a private school or transfer to another district immediately! Their school sucks!
Proper teaching requires hours of daily preparation. Otherwise they are just winging it, which is a disservice to the students. Also, every minute spent in the classroom with the kids should be put to the best possible use, which means that grading papers and tests, filing paperwork, and other tasks should be done outside of classroom hours. Some teachers (read: bad teachers) will gladly just show a film and take up space, but a good school district will fire them long before they ever get a shot at tenure.
Far from getting their "summers and weekends off", teachers in most states are required to continue their higher education beyond a bachelor's degree just to keep their license valid. All of this required training is done at their own expence and on their own time. That means night school, summer classes at the university, and weekend workshops.
Then there are the parent conferneces. Teachers are expected to be on a first-name basis with the parents of every kid in their class. Without parent-teacher communication, a good education is an optimistic dream.
And God help them if they are a coach or theater instructor or band director. In addidtion to all the after-school or early morning practices, there are fund raisers to run, trips to organize & supervise, and equipment to order (and keep track of... inventory is a big deal for a school on a tight budget).
The average good teacher works at least 50-60 hours a week, not counting time spent in required training workshops and college classes (and the homework for those classes). Many of those who don't teach summer school often work some other kind of summer job to supliment their income, like landscaping or other seasonal work.
As for me, I have a degree in Music Education. If I had stayed in teaching, I would now be making about a third of what I am now, and that gap will continue to get wider for my whole career. I also would not have nearly as much free time as I do now.
I get paid for every second beyond 40 hours a week, and most of my ongoing education is done during working hours, and most of it has been at the expense of my employers.
$100k...This is about half of what it takes to buy a good house in San Francisco
It's also about three times more than it takes to live in a good house in a Midwestern suburb. (and don't tell me there are no jobs out here... unemployment in the Twin Cities is at about 1% right now)
Yes, if you want to live on a rocky cliff-face overlooking the SF bay, you had better be a millionaire, but most of the country is nothing like that. SF is a weird area in many, many ways. $100,000 there means Ramen noodles and a townhouse near a streetcar line if you are lucky. $100,000 elsewhere means a big house, big yard, big luxury car, nice boat, and a fat retirement account.
It all comes down to the choices you want to make.
Unless you're one of the few who make the big bucks, if you're not having fun it just isn't worth the effort.
Oh, come on. I know second-year tech-support monkeys who make more money than a High School teacher with 15 years of experience. (I actually was a licensed teacher, and changed careers for that very reason.)
If you are not getting paid a lot of money for what you do, you are either:
1. A chump 2. Incompentent 3. Unable to comprehend how well-off you are.
If you are making a modest salary, but are putting in long hours and are always on call, put yourself in category 1 on the above list.
Even the guy who works at Starbucks can easilly bolt for Caribou if his manager gets on his nerves. When unemployment is under 5%, it means that just about everybody who wants a job has one, and there are lots of companies out there begging for people.
Also, becoming one of the technology priests is very easy... take a temp job on a help desk phone bank and start learning the ropes. In two years your salary demands will double. Eventually, everybody who wants to be a computer geek becomes one.
Fear not. Unless you are completely useless you will be working again in no time. I've been through a layoff before myself.
The best plan of action is to take that fat severence check and enjoy the sunlight for a while, let the headhunters and other minions of satan try to find a job for you, and start looking yourself if you don't like the options they come up with.
Or you can become a consultant, which ain't a bad life, in spite of the higher health insurance costs.
Katz might feel like an important writer when he paints this picture of The Worker once again being crushed by the boot of Corporate Greed, but the truth is very different.
Tech nerds get huge money for stupid monkey work, and we get even more money for anything that requires us to think. We take that money and drop a good chunk of it into Roth IRA's and 401K's and guess what? We are part of the machine.
We are the Pinball Wizards and we are needed by the corporate world far more than they are needed by us. If you want more free time, quit your job and take one with less hours. There are far more jobs than there are qualified UNIX gurus, even more than enough jobs to go around for all those faceless MCSE's, so we are in the drivers seat at every interview we sit down at.
What Katz fails to realize is that we "drones" are far more free to choose our lifestyle than (for example,) a web journalist.
News Flash! Young Workers Under More Stress Than Retired People, Children
... American Demographics, found that adults aged 35 and younger were the most stressed people in the population.
And just exactly who do you think should be more stressed than 18-35 year old workers?
The way this story should have read is, "a report from American Demographics show that work-related stress drops dramatically as you get older. The good news to those under 35 is that there is light at the end of the tunnel."
Yes, everybody at PARC had a GUI computer, and a networked one at that, but we are talking about a primative, pre-Lisa GUI, running on a workstation that was phenomenally expensive.
Would it have evolved into a great system if the Xerox suits had got behind it? Probably. They had some of the smartest computer scientists in the world working for them.
The fact remains that the Altos died in the cradle because it took somebody from outside Xerox to see the potential that the PHB's from within could not.
In all fairness, Xerox was never really a computer company, and so it is easy to see the thinking behind the errors that management made. Stick to "core compentencies". They really only look dumb through the prism of how events unfolded after 1984.
Well, it seems that you have overstated Apple's negatives a little, and understated the positives, which may not be flame, but it not "Informative" either.
Granted, in the past they have come up with many innovations, the greatest of which was popularizing (note the word) the GUI.
They were the first to introduce an affordable computer with a usable GUI. The Xerox systems were demo-only, not-ready-for-prime-time, bare-bones setups on workstations that cost a fortune. Jobs bought the tech, hired away some of the programmers, merged them with the best and brightest from the Apple III team, and came out with... the Lisa. Then he tried again and got it right, with the Macintosh. It was a major design accomplishment. I'm not sure if it is their "greatest", though. Apple also produced the first fully-assembled personal computer, the Apple ][. That was pretty huge.
inability to update their software with modern necessities (PMT, VM that's not broken, etc).
Cooperative multitasking has its advantages, too, especially in the days before networking enterprises became so critical. I know it is blasphemy to say so in a Linux-centric forum, so I will stop there and point out that the beta of a fully pre-emptive multitasking OS is coming in about a month.
To call Apple's VM "broken" is a trolling overstatement. It works fine on my G3, although I can get a slight performance boost by turning it off.
powerbooks have had a lot of quality problems
I've owned several Powerbooks and they all rocked. The only "quality problems" I can think of was when they shipped the 5300 with a new battery design that caused electrical fires. When the problem was discovered, they switched to a different battery, and everything was hunky dorey. Oh yea, and some of the early Duo keyboards kind of sucked.
That's a pretty short list of quality problems, if you ask me. For pure quality (and ! for $), I would put the current Powerbook up against any Wintel notebook in the world. The lowly iBook also stacks up well against any sub-$1600 system on the market.
But enough nitpicking about your comments. Let me answer your question directly. "Why do I like Apple?"
I don't. They are just another tech company out to get as much of my money as they can. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and the rest of the Apple board can kiss my a??.
However, I like their computers because they are often the very best tool for the task I want to perform at any given moment. They are fast, solid, useful, and elegant. When I use one, it becomes obvious that they considered the user experience first, and then worked on creating it... unlike many other products out there that clearly started with a function, and then began to consider the task of how to allow a user to manipulate it. Their design philosophies have always impressed me, and the rest of the industry obviously feels the same way, because they are copied so often.
You are wrong about a lot of things here, but I will focus on the worst of it to keep things short.
First of all, to be libertarian does not mean to think government has no role. Read through the above posts by me and others and you will get that pounded into your head.
Secondly, the world is not analog. "Analog" (the adjective) means "closely simulating reality" (in modern contect, it is a close simulation because it allows for infinite variation instead of the uniform increments of digital representations), similar to "analogous". both of which come from the noun "analogue", which means a nearly exact simulation. Or, as Webster puts it:
Main Entry: 1analogue Variant(s): or analog/'a-n&l-"og, -"äg/ Function: noun Etymology: French analogue, from analogue analogous, from Greek analogos Date: 1826 1 : something that is analogous or similar to something else 2 : an organ similar in function to an organ of another animal or plant but different in structure and origin 3 usually analog : a chemical compound that is structurally similar to another but differs slightly in composition (as in the replacement of one atom by an atom of a different element or in the presence of a particular functional group) 4 : a food product made by combining a less expensive food (as soybeans or whitefish) with additives to give the appearance and taste of a more expensive food (as beef or crab) "
The world is reality. A photo of the world is analog. A JPEG is digital.
The Apple lawyers wrote a lot of scarry letters to rumor sites over the 17" iMac "photos" last year. The rumor sites reacted by saying "ah ha! We must be on to something for them to be so mad! It must be true! We have a scoop! We are important!"
Then the next Mac expo came and went, and it turned out that the rumor was all BS.
This is probably the same thing happening here. Apple has proven to be a master of misinformation and misdirection in order to make sure that their product announcements will be more suspense filled. It's all Barnum-like showmanship on the part of Steve Jobs. After the expo, the lawyer letters will be forgotten about again.
Of course, the fact that there is no real story here will not prevent Mac OS Rumors from playing themselves up as martyrs of the free press cause... anything to get a few more web hits.
Yea! What I really want is one of those two-player Pac Man tables they used to have at Pizza joints! That would be a nice addition to the living room.:)
I could go for that. The rare lawyer could say IAAL, and we could just assume that nobody else is. Perhaps an update to the/. faq would be a good idea if we went that route.
Witness the '80s Republican stance of "less government" while raising the national debt and trippling the size of the US government.
The Republicans did not control the budget in the 80's. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for most of the Reagan/Bush era, and only congress has the power to write spending proposals into law.
This is not to say that Reagan did not fail to live up to his rhetoric. The '86 budget deal was all his idea, and it was a major step away from small government.
My point is that you should look to the Congress if you want somebody to blame for the balooning budgets of the 80's. For every MX missile Reagan and the Pentagon wanted, Ted Kennedy appended 20 Minuteman missiles that were built in his state; and the budgets for Health and Human Servies, the Department of Education, and several other social-program oriented federal branches actually grew faster than the military, against the wishes of the Gipper. They were Tip O'Niel's budgets, not Reagan's.
Sorry if I reacted more strongly than I should have, but the common mistake of equating libertarians with government-hating anarchists sometimes becomes like a Chinese water torture... it just gently hits you in the face, again and again and again. (And when somebody modded this common misconception up as "Insightful", it was the straw that broke the camel's back.)
I wouldn't be too tough on the guy that started the thread. A lot of people who call themselves "libertarian" were initially drawn to the philosophy when something the governement did really p???ed them off. Like they say, the recent converts are always the biggest zealots.
Also, it sounded like he was just asking an honest question, where as many who responded to him were trying to characterize all libertarians as raving nutbags in the Michigan Millitia or something. It was their response that raised my hackles, not the original question.
It sounded to me more like he was asking for advice. Ultimately, we all make up our own minds, but the wise man listens to other perspectives first. He was obviously asking how libertarian dogma applies to this situation, but even if William F. Buckly himself posted an opinion here, that does not neccesarilly mean that he would blindly follow it.
It just means he wants help sorting out what he sees as a vexing dilema, and to admit the need for such advice showed far more fortitude than your post, which reminded me of the mob in "Monty Python and the Life of Brian", who all shouted back "Yes! We are all individuals! Yes! We must all learn to think for ourselves!" in perfect unison.
An American corporation is a group of Americans (and some foreign investors) doing business under one name. When you do business in America, you are subject to American law. It's that simple. No need for hyperbole about Target Corp. or RJR Nabisco being some kind of foreign power. They are not the ones with the guns.
I know it is easy to get worked up about the evils of the "corporatists" after reading a few Katz articles, but if the Ma Bell break-up and the expected fate of Microsoft tell us anything, it is that we are still a nation of laws (when the system works).
Why do people who don't seem to know the difference between libertarians and anarchists keep getting modded up as insightful around here?
A libertarian belives that individual liberty is paramount to the existance of a free state, and that government must be established to protect the rights of the individual. That includes enforcing contracts. I defy you to find one leader within the LP, or one prominent libertarian writer who thinks contracts should not be upheld.
An anarchist believes in the lack of controlling authority, where each looks after his or her own rights.
You may want to re-read your old high school civics books. Start with Burke, Adam Smith, and Voltaire.
As a libertarian (note the small "l", I am not a member of the Libertarian Party), I believe that the Federal government should be smaller than it is. We should stop the "war on drugs" which has brutalized random people without doing any real good; we should scale back our awesome military forces from countries where it does not aid our national interest and inspires terrorists to hate us; we should stop trying to dicker with the price of milk and let dairy farmers sell it for what the market says it is worth.
Should we do all this out of some mad hatred for authority? No.
The reason we want the government to scale back from so much is because it should stay on-task with the few things it should be doing:
1. Protect our lives from violence 2. Protect our rights 3. Promote the general welfare (some libertarians forget this one) 4. Uphold contracts 5. Enforce the law
I don't know all of the facts of the Toysmart case, but it looks like a pretty clear case of breach of contract. See item 4 on my list.
Interesting to hear about, perhaps, but once upon a time people knew to warn before posting plot spoilers about movies. Putting up a huge headline saying "Deckard was a replicant" is an a?????? move, because there just might be somebody out there who has not seen the movie.
Some jerk ruined Fight Club for me by doing this same sort of thing last month.
Okay, now that I have taken a moment to actually read it (read as in "read Jon Katz", not read as in "read Douglas Adams"... in other words, I got bored halfway through and skimmed it.), I can't help but notice that the whole "I get it and you don't" tone of the article.
He's basically saying that he sees the big picture, and the bones tell him that something else is coming, but he can't say what. Why sweat the details, right?
The self-importance reminded me more than a little of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Did anybody else get that impression?
Slashdot Mirror
Proper teaching requires hours of daily preparation. Otherwise they are just winging it, which is a disservice to the students. Also, every minute spent in the classroom with the kids should be put to the best possible use, which means that grading papers and tests, filing paperwork, and other tasks should be done outside of classroom hours. Some teachers (read: bad teachers) will gladly just show a film and take up space, but a good school district will fire them long before they ever get a shot at tenure.
Far from getting their "summers and weekends off", teachers in most states are required to continue their higher education beyond a bachelor's degree just to keep their license valid. All of this required training is done at their own expence and on their own time. That means night school, summer classes at the university, and weekend workshops.
Then there are the parent conferneces. Teachers are expected to be on a first-name basis with the parents of every kid in their class. Without parent-teacher communication, a good education is an optimistic dream.
And God help them if they are a coach or theater instructor or band director. In addidtion to all the after-school or early morning practices, there are fund raisers to run, trips to organize & supervise, and equipment to order (and keep track of... inventory is a big deal for a school on a tight budget).
The average good teacher works at least 50-60 hours a week, not counting time spent in required training workshops and college classes (and the homework for those classes). Many of those who don't teach summer school often work some other kind of summer job to supliment their income, like landscaping or other seasonal work.
As for me, I have a degree in Music Education. If I had stayed in teaching, I would now be making about a third of what I am now, and that gap will continue to get wider for my whole career. I also would not have nearly as much free time as I do now.
I get paid for every second beyond 40 hours a week, and most of my ongoing education is done during working hours, and most of it has been at the expense of my employers.
It's also about three times more than it takes to live in a good house in a Midwestern suburb. (and don't tell me there are no jobs out here... unemployment in the Twin Cities is at about 1% right now)
Yes, if you want to live on a rocky cliff-face overlooking the SF bay, you had better be a millionaire, but most of the country is nothing like that. SF is a weird area in many, many ways. $100,000 there means Ramen noodles and a townhouse near a streetcar line if you are lucky. $100,000 elsewhere means a big house, big yard, big luxury car, nice boat, and a fat retirement account.
It all comes down to the choices you want to make.
Oh, come on. I know second-year tech-support monkeys who make more money than a High School teacher with 15 years of experience. (I actually was a licensed teacher, and changed careers for that very reason.)
If you are not getting paid a lot of money for what you do, you are either:
1. A chump
2. Incompentent
3. Unable to comprehend how well-off you are.
If you are making a modest salary, but are putting in long hours and are always on call, put yourself in category 1 on the above list.
Tech workers
Stock brokers
Marketing researchers
Strippers
Truck drivers
Pizza delivery guys
Bicycle couriers
Even the guy who works at Starbucks can easilly bolt for Caribou if his manager gets on his nerves. When unemployment is under 5%, it means that just about everybody who wants a job has one, and there are lots of companies out there begging for people.
Also, becoming one of the technology priests is very easy... take a temp job on a help desk phone bank and start learning the ropes. In two years your salary demands will double. Eventually, everybody who wants to be a computer geek becomes one.
The best plan of action is to take that fat severence check and enjoy the sunlight for a while, let the headhunters and other minions of satan try to find a job for you, and start looking yourself if you don't like the options they come up with.
Or you can become a consultant, which ain't a bad life, in spite of the higher health insurance costs.
Katz might feel like an important writer when he paints this picture of The Worker once again being crushed by the boot of Corporate Greed, but the truth is very different.
Tech nerds get huge money for stupid monkey work, and we get even more money for anything that requires us to think. We take that money and drop a good chunk of it into Roth IRA's and 401K's and guess what? We are part of the machine.
We are the Pinball Wizards and we are needed by the corporate world far more than they are needed by us. If you want more free time, quit your job and take one with less hours. There are far more jobs than there are qualified UNIX gurus, even more than enough jobs to go around for all those faceless MCSE's, so we are in the drivers seat at every interview we sit down at.
What Katz fails to realize is that we "drones" are far more free to choose our lifestyle than (for example,) a web journalist.
And just exactly who do you think should be more stressed than 18-35 year old workers?
The way this story should have read is, "a report from American Demographics show that work-related stress drops dramatically as you get older. The good news to those under 35 is that there is light at the end of the tunnel."
Would it have evolved into a great system if the Xerox suits had got behind it? Probably. They had some of the smartest computer scientists in the world working for them.
The fact remains that the Altos died in the cradle because it took somebody from outside Xerox to see the potential that the PHB's from within could not.
In all fairness, Xerox was never really a computer company, and so it is easy to see the thinking behind the errors that management made. Stick to "core compentencies". They really only look dumb through the prism of how events unfolded after 1984.
Or you can speculate about vaguely remembered rumors of recalls. Up to you. :)
Granted, in the past they have come up with many innovations, the greatest of which was popularizing (note the word) the GUI.
They were the first to introduce an affordable computer with a usable GUI. The Xerox systems were demo-only, not-ready-for-prime-time, bare-bones setups on workstations that cost a fortune. Jobs bought the tech, hired away some of the programmers, merged them with the best and brightest from the Apple III team, and came out with... the Lisa. Then he tried again and got it right, with the Macintosh. It was a major design accomplishment. I'm not sure if it is their "greatest", though. Apple also produced the first fully-assembled personal computer, the Apple ][. That was pretty huge.
inability to update their software with modern necessities (PMT, VM that's not broken, etc).
Cooperative multitasking has its advantages, too, especially in the days before networking enterprises became so critical. I know it is blasphemy to say so in a Linux-centric forum, so I will stop there and point out that the beta of a fully pre-emptive multitasking OS is coming in about a month.
To call Apple's VM "broken" is a trolling overstatement. It works fine on my G3, although I can get a slight performance boost by turning it off.
powerbooks have had a lot of quality problems
I've owned several Powerbooks and they all rocked. The only "quality problems" I can think of was when they shipped the 5300 with a new battery design that caused electrical fires. When the problem was discovered, they switched to a different battery, and everything was hunky dorey. Oh yea, and some of the early Duo keyboards kind of sucked.
That's a pretty short list of quality problems, if you ask me. For pure quality (and ! for $), I would put the current Powerbook up against any Wintel notebook in the world. The lowly iBook also stacks up well against any sub-$1600 system on the market.
Closed hardware. Closed software. Closed minds.
Broad generalization. Incorrect Assumption. Utter nonsense.
But enough nitpicking about your comments. Let me answer your question directly. "Why do I like Apple?"
I don't. They are just another tech company out to get as much of my money as they can. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and the rest of the Apple board can kiss my a??.
However, I like their computers because they are often the very best tool for the task I want to perform at any given moment. They are fast, solid, useful, and elegant. When I use one, it becomes obvious that they considered the user experience first, and then worked on creating it... unlike many other products out there that clearly started with a function, and then began to consider the task of how to allow a user to manipulate it. Their design philosophies have always impressed me, and the rest of the industry obviously feels the same way, because they are copied so often.
First of all, to be libertarian does not mean to think government has no role. Read through the above posts by me and others and you will get that pounded into your head.
Secondly, the world is not analog. "Analog" (the adjective) means "closely simulating reality" (in modern contect, it is a close simulation because it allows for infinite variation instead of the uniform increments of digital representations), similar to "analogous". both of which come from the noun "analogue", which means a nearly exact simulation. Or, as Webster puts it:
Main Entry: 1analogue /'a-n&l-"og, -"äg/
Variant(s): or analog
Function: noun
Etymology: French analogue, from analogue analogous, from Greek analogos Date: 1826
1 : something that is analogous or similar to something else
2 : an organ similar in function to an organ of another animal or plant but different in structure and origin
3 usually analog : a chemical compound that is structurally similar to another but differs slightly in composition (as in the replacement of one atom by an atom of a different element or in the presence of a particular functional group)
4 : a food product made by combining a less expensive food (as soybeans or whitefish) with additives to give the appearance and taste of a more expensive food (as beef or crab) "
The world is reality. A photo of the world is analog. A JPEG is digital.
Then the next Mac expo came and went, and it turned out that the rumor was all BS.
This is probably the same thing happening here. Apple has proven to be a master of misinformation and misdirection in order to make sure that their product announcements will be more suspense filled. It's all Barnum-like showmanship on the part of Steve Jobs. After the expo, the lawyer letters will be forgotten about again.
Of course, the fact that there is no real story here will not prevent Mac OS Rumors from playing themselves up as martyrs of the free press cause... anything to get a few more web hits.
Yea! What I really want is one of those two-player Pac Man tables they used to have at Pizza joints! That would be a nice addition to the living room. :)
I could go for that. The rare lawyer could say IAAL, and we could just assume that nobody else is. Perhaps an update to the /. faq would be a good idea if we went that route.
The Republicans did not control the budget in the 80's. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for most of the Reagan/Bush era, and only congress has the power to write spending proposals into law.
This is not to say that Reagan did not fail to live up to his rhetoric. The '86 budget deal was all his idea, and it was a major step away from small government.
My point is that you should look to the Congress if you want somebody to blame for the balooning budgets of the 80's. For every MX missile Reagan and the Pentagon wanted, Ted Kennedy appended 20 Minuteman missiles that were built in his state; and the budgets for Health and Human Servies, the Department of Education, and several other social-program oriented federal branches actually grew faster than the military, against the wishes of the Gipper. They were Tip O'Niel's budgets, not Reagan's.
Sorry if I reacted more strongly than I should have, but the common mistake of equating libertarians with government-hating anarchists sometimes becomes like a Chinese water torture... it just gently hits you in the face, again and again and again. (And when somebody modded this common misconception up as "Insightful", it was the straw that broke the camel's back.)
Also, it sounded like he was just asking an honest question, where as many who responded to him were trying to characterize all libertarians as raving nutbags in the Michigan Millitia or something. It was their response that raised my hackles, not the original question.
It just means he wants help sorting out what he sees as a vexing dilema, and to admit the need for such advice showed far more fortitude than your post, which reminded me of the mob in "Monty Python and the Life of Brian", who all shouted back "Yes! We are all individuals! Yes! We must all learn to think for ourselves!" in perfect unison.
I know it is easy to get worked up about the evils of the "corporatists" after reading a few Katz articles, but if the Ma Bell break-up and the expected fate of Microsoft tell us anything, it is that we are still a nation of laws (when the system works).
A libertarian belives that individual liberty is paramount to the existance of a free state, and that government must be established to protect the rights of the individual. That includes enforcing contracts. I defy you to find one leader within the LP, or one prominent libertarian writer who thinks contracts should not be upheld.
An anarchist believes in the lack of controlling authority, where each looks after his or her own rights.
You may want to re-read your old high school civics books. Start with Burke, Adam Smith, and Voltaire.
Should we do all this out of some mad hatred for authority? No.
The reason we want the government to scale back from so much is because it should stay on-task with the few things it should be doing:
1. Protect our lives from violence
2. Protect our rights
3. Promote the general welfare (some libertarians forget this one)
4. Uphold contracts
5. Enforce the law
I don't know all of the facts of the Toysmart case, but it looks like a pretty clear case of breach of contract. See item 4 on my list.
This is definately a case of a company breaking an agreement, which warrents civil action at the least, and possibly criminal liability.
IANAL, IAAl (I am not a lawyer, I am a libertarian).
Some jerk ruined Fight Club for me by doing this same sort of thing last month.
9 times out of 10, this is just bad software design. "Never ascribe to malevolence..." ah, hell. You know how the quote goes.
If they were operating like the shady Java sites, then the back button would kindly open 12 windows of ads for you, to boost hit counts.
He's basically saying that he sees the big picture, and the bones tell him that something else is coming, but he can't say what. Why sweat the details, right?
The self-importance reminded me more than a little of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Did anybody else get that impression?