Cords suck. They snag, they fray, they tangle, they slack, they break. They take up space in your pocket, your bag, your shelf. Some are too short, some are too long.
Wireless headsets are mediocre at best, it is true. They have a whole bunch of their own problems and many on this thread feel those problems are worse than cord problems. But this is exactly the point. I'm sick of slow advances in wireless and so is Apple. Its time to kick the wireless headset market into high gear and get lots of models from lots of competitors getting iterated multiple times a year and getting cheaper all the time.
How do we do that? Simple. Eliminate the 3.5mm jack.
I believe Network Neutrality legislation will do more harm than good. Quality of service and IP transit costs are governed by complex market forces today. It is easy for individuals and organizations connecting to Internet edge networks (most of us) to take these forces for granted and get swept up in language about fairness and capitalism and equality. In reality, as you move to the core of the Internet, there already is no such thing as network neutrality and to try and 'preserve it' is meaningless. ISPs, Tier 1s, and major content providers already enter into peering arrangements, both paid and unpaid, that improve end user experience and help drive down IP transit costs. Depending on the ISP you use, you obtain the benefits of their peering arrangements, which are as strong as the number of eyeballs they have and their negotiating skills. Some ISPs have better peering than others and so in reality there is no such thing as a 'neutral ISP'. The concept of an ISP 'holding their users hostage' as they try to obtain concessions from content providers is not unique to Comcast. Everyone in the space is playing the same game of leveraging the strength of their numbers and their negotiation and personal networks to get any advantage they can. The decisions about 'who should peer with who' are and should continue to be governed by organizations freely entering into paid or unpaid agreements with one-another. As soon as the emotional/idealistic notion of 'neutrality' is stipulated, then the technical reality of peering and the unplanned forces governing the core of the Internet will begin to centralize and calcify. What will be unfortunate is when this slows or even reverses the dramatic deflation in IP transit costs we have seen over the last 15 years, going from well over $1200 per megabit to under $1 in some regions. I highly recommend 'The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook' by William B. Norton.
If employer believes candidate A will do more work for less pay than candidate B, then hiring candidate A is a perfectly legitimate hiring decision and is hardly age "discrimination" just because candidate A is younger. If employer believes candidate A will do LESS work and require MORE pay than candidate B, but STILL hires candidate A because he is younger and the employer does not like old people, THAT is age discrimination.
There's much discussion of coverage and speed. Where I live, near Chicago, Verizon can't be beat. But the bigger thing for me is that their Customer Service is very good. I could not believe when I got my iPhone 5 a couple of days ago and had trouble activating it, I called Verizon and was speaking with a good english speaker in less than a minute. This was with millions of people getting the iPhone 5 (probably a good portion of them on Verizon.) My wife just had to call their tech support because her 4S wasn't getting on 3G. Again, she was speaking to someone within less than a minute who was knowledgable. Ironically, as I write this, it turns out the 3G network is down. But Verizon outages like this are very rare and in this day in age of complete crap support and idiot agents, I'd almost rather have a day of outage every year supported by decent people than only an hour supported by morons.
I studied Philosophy but have been in IT for 10 years plus all the years I was in college working side jobs and projects. I do a lot of tech interviews -- I am a consultant in a very rapidly growing cloud services field. I specifically look for people who have learned from their own side projects and hands-on experience. Find me on LinkedIn by going to my Slashdot profile page and checking my Journal.
Working in Professional Services for another major enterprise application, I could really see this being the fault of either party. I think many in Professional Services (myself included) take a pragmatic approach to implementation. The focus is on getting something going that meets 90 or 95% of the requirements with a healthy dose of skepticism that anything beyond that is worth the cost. At some point, the customer has to pull the trigger, adopt and adapt. In the course of doing so, they will discover shortcomings and advantages that weren't envisioned initially, and the effort and cost of pursuing perfection initially can be saved for follow-up effort once all that real-world feedback is collected.
I have found some University customers tend much more towards wanting the "ideal" solution on Day 1 and as a Professional Services provider, going that last 5 or 10% of the way to perfection can be an extremely frustrating, money-losing endeavor.
At the same time, none of the above can be encoded in a contract that would ever get signed, so all you can do as a Professional Services provider is choose your customers wisely and know when to require time & materials contracts.
I would go even a step further - It shouldn't matter who holds the ticket at all. As long as it is valid, the holder should be able to board without ID. It is interesting the score on my original post fluctuates between 1 and 2. Some bump it down some bump it up. It would sadden me if someone took a comment illustrating true freedom and disregard it as flaimbait. I'm hoping it was just the condescending tone of my post - which I somewhat regret - than the content.
You should go to an airport, be dropped off at a curb, walk through the door, walk down a hallway, walk out another door onto a tarmac, walk up a staircase, have your ticket or electronic boarding pass that you paid cash for scanned and get on the airplane. Total time: 5 minutes. Spare me the comments about "that's not the world we live in." That's crap. Read history. The world has always been a dangerous place. That's what life is: dangerous and fragile. The only question is whether you and your children will live as free people or as cowering fools.
I think this story is revealing about Facebook's security architecture. One would have hoped that security policies are defined within the application at a very low level and that all requests for information -- be it photos, posts, whatever -- must pass through that low-level security layer. What this story reveals is that the security architecture of Facebook is such that each developer of each separate function (in this case, the report-a-nude-photo function) is responsible for re-implementing security checks.
There is a flipping element in Credit Bubbles. NASDAQ stocks were flipped in the 90s. Condos and houses were flipped in the 2000s. How does one flip an education? By getting a job where the hiring manager blindly extends offers to a person just because they have a piece of paper. The student buys into the piece of paper using government-supplied money and then the employer takes on the costs of paying it off without really getting their money's worth.
To clarify my comment on Apple deserving the Patent. I am generally against all patents. What I was trying to say is that given the patent system we have I do not see this particular patent as an abusive or "troll" kind of patent at all.
The iPhone was a huge achievement in industrial design, miniaturized UI (including the slide lock), supply chain, distribution, and negotiations with a major carrier. I do not think any other company than Apple could have pulled off the iPhone in 2007 and successfully shipped millions of them. It's amazing how quickly Apple's achievements are taken for granted. They are so successful in simplifying technology that the simplification quickly turns into "obvious" for people. But before Apple did it, none of this was obvious. I distinctly remember that when Steve Jobs said that the pointing device for the iPhone would be the finger, it was a novel idea and I was full of doubt whether it could really be pulled off. I distinctly remember thinking that the slid lock was a unique, elegant solution to a problem, and yes, I think it deserves patent protection if no one else had it before or at the same time Apple had it. I mean "This is how you turn it on" was part of their commercials. Those commercials wouldn't have worked unless "how you turn it on" truly was a novel and unique idea.
We live in a world of mediocrity. We get by on billions of mediocre people churning out mediocre work.
Even really great people, really brilliant people, churn out mediocre work from time to time. I know I have churned out more than my share of mediocre work.
At the same time, most of us actually have the discriminating ability to look at a piece of work and say, "that is really mediocre." Probably 10 or 20 times a day, I come accross some piece of work - mine or others' - that is mediocre. It's clear that the person who made it was in a rush or didn't care or simply wasn't smart or talented enough to deliver something truly great.
Though we may be able to spot mediocre work, most of us just are not in a position of credibility to do anything about it.
Steve Jobs saw mediocrity the way we do, the difference is he had earned his credibility and could send things back to the drawing board any time he wanted. How did he earn his credibility? He was smart, hard-working, and happened to partner with a rare person who consistenlty churned out great work: Steve Wozniak. Those early ingredients set Jobs down a path where he could tell someone what they were making was not good and that they could do better and those people listened to him and ofen were inspired by that "encouragement."
I believe that was one of Steve's many great gifts.
The strung-together sequence of news services, AFP, Motreal Gazette, Slashdot, the technology used to deliver the Pope's message to us Slashdot readers, is causing confusion about what he actually meant and said in reality and the fiction of what everyone assumes he meant or wants him to have said.
Don't forget another effect of the stimulus: making used cars more expensive. This comes about because anyone who would have sold their beater, or any dealer that would have re-sold it, for less than $4500 in the used car market, is now having it destroyed instead. This will make it real fun for any low-income or teenage drivers who happen to be in the market for a sub-$4500 used car in the near future.
Sorry, I must continue this off-topic thread. There have been panics throughout history, even when 10:1 was considered highly-leveraged. The Second Bank of the United States, eventually abolished by Jackson, fell victim in the Panic of 1819, with leverage of just 9:1. (See Rothbard's History of Money & Banking in the US)
Your point is well-taken, but given the history of panics under varied reserve requirements, there may be something to the concept that any fractional reserve banking at all is a problem.
Rothbard advocates Free Banking in The Mystery of Banking, a free-market system of banks with no regulation at all. In such a system, fractional reserve lending would actually be allowed, but it would not be legally protected by the state nor guaranteed by it. He predicts that under such a system, banks would tend towards full reserves because of the constant redemption of their notes by competing banks (among other reasons.)
23 Sep, 2008 NEW YORK: Software giant Microsoft has been assigned the highest investment grade of 'AAA' by global credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, making it the first American non-financial corporate debt issuer to receive this rating in a decade.
09.22.08 - Moody's Investors Service said it assigned an 'AAA' senior unsecured debt rating to Microsoft Corp. reflecting the company's position as the world's largest software company with a strong and defensible market position throughout its diverse core offerings. The rating outlook is stable.
Consider this move in the context of the financial system meltdown, with US Treasury bonds at 40 & 50-year lows.
The *officially stated* purpose of this action is boosting MS share values. But they are almost completely going to deplete their entire cash reserve to buy back shares. From now on, they'll use debt -- bonds -- to finance expansion and development.
They're bond rating is "AAA", which only 5 or 6 other companies and the government have.
What's interesting is that with lending seized-up around the world, we know that money creation is basically halted. So, I wonder if there wasn't a little pressure on Microsoft to convert to a debt-financed operation & flood the market with new, high-quality debt, thus creating new money.
I don't know what ACK spoofing is. Does that create fake acknowledgments locally so that a TCP client doesn't hang around waiting for real acknowledgments on every packet before sending the next?
Thanks for this post. I was about to make the exact same point but thought I'd skim through to see if anyone else did. Its always nice to be cynical about something like this and at first think... oh man, they're saying its kiddie porn but its really about the music and movies and the bandwidth and its a censorship slippery slope blah blah blah. Then, a different cynicism takes over... no this is about a politician trying to look good and some ISPs trying to get kiddie porn crusaders off their backs... so they do something that creates the illusion of solving a problem without actually doing anything at all. Business as usual.
Typically, isolationism refers to a combined military and economic policy whereby military non-interventionism is combined with economic protectionism. In other words, an isolationist doesn't just believe the US would be better off not meddling in foreign wars and political matters, they also believe there is no need to have economic ties with other nations, or at least that they are more trouble than they are worth, and so advocate prohibiting imports and exports or at least very high tariffs in the interests of creating a sort of self-sufficient, isolated, nation. Non-interventionism, on the other hand, seeks only to eliminate military adventurism abroad while acknowledging the need for and in fact encouraging open, unfettered, trade with any and all other nations.
What I really like about your post is that you point out how unimportant individual issues are compared to the philosophies behind them. As a conservative looking for a candidate I agree with you, the liberal democrat, completely. I'd even go so far as to say that the constant regurgitating of the same old items "hot-button" issues, even things as broad and vague as "the economy", "healthcare", and "the war" serve only to distract us from the more important philosophical changes happening in Washington.
Where I disagree with you completely is in your identification of the primary philosophical divide. Public vs. Private isn't nearly as important as Centralized vs. De-centralized. That is the core philosophical battle in this country. (Of course, a philisophical "purist" would probably say that the divide is even more to the core than that: between the materialist (the mind is the brain) and the dualists (the mind is separate from the brain.)) Even IF I were to agree that the divide is Public vs. Private, I would encourage you to check into the massive privatization efforts that took place under Clinton and previous administrations. If you think our troops were pealing their own potatoes under Clinton or providing diplomatic security services, think again. People think they've unraveled this dark secret about Cheney's conflict of interest because he ran Haliburton through the Clinton years. Well, who do you think was cutting the checks to Haliburton?
No, the issue is Centralization vs. Decentralization. On that front, I really don't see much difference between our current candidates or Bush vs. Gore for that matter. In fact, the "Centralists", if you will, have had their way for at least a century, possibly more. THE reason I supported Ron Paul so strongly is because he was a strong Decentralist. For starters, he understood the paradox of what is *supposed* to be a decentralized economy (as compared to, say, Soviet Russia) that is being manipulated by a central bank. Secondly, he talked openly about the problem of our constant War-making being one of too many powerful players from private industry and the government (i.e. the Military-Industrial Complex) having to much power concentrated in Washington. You can talk all you want about whether Iraq was the right place to go to war or not or whether we should have gone to war in Darfur (a very fashionable suggestion among the interventionists these days) but in the end there will always be war as long as so much power is centralized in the hands of so few executives, both private and public.
When discussing national politics, centralized often gets equated to public, and decentralized to private, but I think there are plenty of examples to the contrary. You can have decentralized public services. You can have universal healthcare in Illinois or Massachusetts or Cook County, for example. You can even have decentralized federal departments. I think the FAA does a good job manning traffic control towers, for example. And you can certainly have centralized private organizations. Look at most of our fortune 500 companies and how they choose to structure their organizations.
But there is a whole world of decentralization out there; of independent ISPs (God, I LOVE Interlync), of independent retailers, heck the entire blogging phenomenon is one of decentralizing the dissemination of information. And not even "big" always equates to "centralized." Besides the aforementioned FAA, you have companies like Best Buy, that try tirelessly to share information and best practices not from the center out, but at the fringes (their CEO gave an excellent interview on CEO Exchange / PBS about this.) In fact, I think companies that are really excelling in these tough economic conditions are the ones that are starting to understand decentralization and harness its power. These companies tend to have flatter hierarchies, like Apple, where you'd think that everything centers around Steve Jobs, but then he says he works *directly* with about 100 people of all diffe
Slashdot Mirror
Cords suck. They snag, they fray, they tangle, they slack, they break. They take up space in your pocket, your bag, your shelf. Some are too short, some are too long. Wireless headsets are mediocre at best, it is true. They have a whole bunch of their own problems and many on this thread feel those problems are worse than cord problems. But this is exactly the point. I'm sick of slow advances in wireless and so is Apple. Its time to kick the wireless headset market into high gear and get lots of models from lots of competitors getting iterated multiple times a year and getting cheaper all the time. How do we do that? Simple. Eliminate the 3.5mm jack.
Yes, this technology is called Fiber-to-the-Press-Release
I believe Network Neutrality legislation will do more harm than good. Quality of service and IP transit costs are governed by complex market forces today. It is easy for individuals and organizations connecting to Internet edge networks (most of us) to take these forces for granted and get swept up in language about fairness and capitalism and equality. In reality, as you move to the core of the Internet, there already is no such thing as network neutrality and to try and 'preserve it' is meaningless. ISPs, Tier 1s, and major content providers already enter into peering arrangements, both paid and unpaid, that improve end user experience and help drive down IP transit costs. Depending on the ISP you use, you obtain the benefits of their peering arrangements, which are as strong as the number of eyeballs they have and their negotiating skills. Some ISPs have better peering than others and so in reality there is no such thing as a 'neutral ISP'. The concept of an ISP 'holding their users hostage' as they try to obtain concessions from content providers is not unique to Comcast. Everyone in the space is playing the same game of leveraging the strength of their numbers and their negotiation and personal networks to get any advantage they can. The decisions about 'who should peer with who' are and should continue to be governed by organizations freely entering into paid or unpaid agreements with one-another. As soon as the emotional/idealistic notion of 'neutrality' is stipulated, then the technical reality of peering and the unplanned forces governing the core of the Internet will begin to centralize and calcify. What will be unfortunate is when this slows or even reverses the dramatic deflation in IP transit costs we have seen over the last 15 years, going from well over $1200 per megabit to under $1 in some regions. I highly recommend 'The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook' by William B. Norton.
What was the supply and demand for IT labor like 10 years ago? What is it like now? Therein lies the answer.
If employer believes candidate A will do more work for less pay than candidate B, then hiring candidate A is a perfectly legitimate hiring decision and is hardly age "discrimination" just because candidate A is younger. If employer believes candidate A will do LESS work and require MORE pay than candidate B, but STILL hires candidate A because he is younger and the employer does not like old people, THAT is age discrimination.
There's much discussion of coverage and speed. Where I live, near Chicago, Verizon can't be beat. But the bigger thing for me is that their Customer Service is very good. I could not believe when I got my iPhone 5 a couple of days ago and had trouble activating it, I called Verizon and was speaking with a good english speaker in less than a minute. This was with millions of people getting the iPhone 5 (probably a good portion of them on Verizon.) My wife just had to call their tech support because her 4S wasn't getting on 3G. Again, she was speaking to someone within less than a minute who was knowledgable. Ironically, as I write this, it turns out the 3G network is down. But Verizon outages like this are very rare and in this day in age of complete crap support and idiot agents, I'd almost rather have a day of outage every year supported by decent people than only an hour supported by morons.
I studied Philosophy but have been in IT for 10 years plus all the years I was in college working side jobs and projects. I do a lot of tech interviews -- I am a consultant in a very rapidly growing cloud services field. I specifically look for people who have learned from their own side projects and hands-on experience. Find me on LinkedIn by going to my Slashdot profile page and checking my Journal.
Working in Professional Services for another major enterprise application, I could really see this being the fault of either party. I think many in Professional Services (myself included) take a pragmatic approach to implementation. The focus is on getting something going that meets 90 or 95% of the requirements with a healthy dose of skepticism that anything beyond that is worth the cost. At some point, the customer has to pull the trigger, adopt and adapt. In the course of doing so, they will discover shortcomings and advantages that weren't envisioned initially, and the effort and cost of pursuing perfection initially can be saved for follow-up effort once all that real-world feedback is collected. I have found some University customers tend much more towards wanting the "ideal" solution on Day 1 and as a Professional Services provider, going that last 5 or 10% of the way to perfection can be an extremely frustrating, money-losing endeavor. At the same time, none of the above can be encoded in a contract that would ever get signed, so all you can do as a Professional Services provider is choose your customers wisely and know when to require time & materials contracts.
I would go even a step further - It shouldn't matter who holds the ticket at all. As long as it is valid, the holder should be able to board without ID. It is interesting the score on my original post fluctuates between 1 and 2. Some bump it down some bump it up. It would sadden me if someone took a comment illustrating true freedom and disregard it as flaimbait. I'm hoping it was just the condescending tone of my post - which I somewhat regret - than the content.
You should go to an airport, be dropped off at a curb, walk through the door, walk down a hallway, walk out another door onto a tarmac, walk up a staircase, have your ticket or electronic boarding pass that you paid cash for scanned and get on the airplane. Total time: 5 minutes. Spare me the comments about "that's not the world we live in." That's crap. Read history. The world has always been a dangerous place. That's what life is: dangerous and fragile. The only question is whether you and your children will live as free people or as cowering fools.
I think this story is revealing about Facebook's security architecture. One would have hoped that security policies are defined within the application at a very low level and that all requests for information -- be it photos, posts, whatever -- must pass through that low-level security layer. What this story reveals is that the security architecture of Facebook is such that each developer of each separate function (in this case, the report-a-nude-photo function) is responsible for re-implementing security checks.
There is a flipping element in Credit Bubbles. NASDAQ stocks were flipped in the 90s. Condos and houses were flipped in the 2000s. How does one flip an education? By getting a job where the hiring manager blindly extends offers to a person just because they have a piece of paper. The student buys into the piece of paper using government-supplied money and then the employer takes on the costs of paying it off without really getting their money's worth.
To clarify my comment on Apple deserving the Patent. I am generally against all patents. What I was trying to say is that given the patent system we have I do not see this particular patent as an abusive or "troll" kind of patent at all.
The iPhone was a huge achievement in industrial design, miniaturized UI (including the slide lock), supply chain, distribution, and negotiations with a major carrier. I do not think any other company than Apple could have pulled off the iPhone in 2007 and successfully shipped millions of them. It's amazing how quickly Apple's achievements are taken for granted. They are so successful in simplifying technology that the simplification quickly turns into "obvious" for people. But before Apple did it, none of this was obvious. I distinctly remember that when Steve Jobs said that the pointing device for the iPhone would be the finger, it was a novel idea and I was full of doubt whether it could really be pulled off. I distinctly remember thinking that the slid lock was a unique, elegant solution to a problem, and yes, I think it deserves patent protection if no one else had it before or at the same time Apple had it. I mean "This is how you turn it on" was part of their commercials. Those commercials wouldn't have worked unless "how you turn it on" truly was a novel and unique idea.
We live in a world of mediocrity. We get by on billions of mediocre people churning out mediocre work.
Even really great people, really brilliant people, churn out mediocre work from time to time. I know I have churned out more than my share of mediocre work.
At the same time, most of us actually have the discriminating ability to look at a piece of work and say, "that is really mediocre." Probably 10 or 20 times a day, I come accross some piece of work - mine or others' - that is mediocre. It's clear that the person who made it was in a rush or didn't care or simply wasn't smart or talented enough to deliver something truly great.
Though we may be able to spot mediocre work, most of us just are not in a position of credibility to do anything about it.
Steve Jobs saw mediocrity the way we do, the difference is he had earned his credibility and could send things back to the drawing board any time he wanted. How did he earn his credibility? He was smart, hard-working, and happened to partner with a rare person who consistenlty churned out great work: Steve Wozniak. Those early ingredients set Jobs down a path where he could tell someone what they were making was not good and that they could do better and those people listened to him and ofen were inspired by that "encouragement."
I believe that was one of Steve's many great gifts.
The strung-together sequence of news services, AFP, Motreal Gazette, Slashdot, the technology used to deliver the Pope's message to us Slashdot readers, is causing confusion about what he actually meant and said in reality and the fiction of what everyone assumes he meant or wants him to have said.
Don't forget another effect of the stimulus: making used cars more expensive. This comes about because anyone who would have sold their beater, or any dealer that would have re-sold it, for less than $4500 in the used car market, is now having it destroyed instead. This will make it real fun for any low-income or teenage drivers who happen to be in the market for a sub-$4500 used car in the near future.
Sorry, I must continue this off-topic thread. There have been panics throughout history, even when 10:1 was considered highly-leveraged. The Second Bank of the United States, eventually abolished by Jackson, fell victim in the Panic of 1819, with leverage of just 9:1. (See Rothbard's History of Money & Banking in the US)
Your point is well-taken, but given the history of panics under varied reserve requirements, there may be something to the concept that any fractional reserve banking at all is a problem.
Rothbard advocates Free Banking in The Mystery of Banking, a free-market system of banks with no regulation at all. In such a system, fractional reserve lending would actually be allowed, but it would not be legally protected by the state nor guaranteed by it. He predicts that under such a system, banks would tend towards full reserves because of the constant redemption of their notes by competing banks (among other reasons.)
Microsoft was given AAA rating when they announced the issuance of $6 billion in bonds.
From the Economic Times:
23 Sep, 2008 NEW YORK: Software giant Microsoft has been assigned the highest investment grade of 'AAA' by global credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, making it the first American non-financial corporate debt issuer to receive this rating in a decade.
Also from Forbes:
09.22.08 - Moody's Investors Service said it assigned an 'AAA' senior unsecured debt rating to Microsoft Corp. reflecting the company's position as the world's largest software company with a strong and defensible market position throughout its diverse core offerings. The rating outlook is stable.
Consider this move in the context of the financial system meltdown, with US Treasury bonds at 40 & 50-year lows.
The *officially stated* purpose of this action is boosting MS share values. But they are almost completely going to deplete their entire cash reserve to buy back shares. From now on, they'll use debt -- bonds -- to finance expansion and development.
They're bond rating is "AAA", which only 5 or 6 other companies and the government have.
What's interesting is that with lending seized-up around the world, we know that money creation is basically halted. So, I wonder if there wasn't a little pressure on Microsoft to convert to a debt-financed operation & flood the market with new, high-quality debt, thus creating new money.
I don't know what ACK spoofing is. Does that create fake acknowledgments locally so that a TCP client doesn't hang around waiting for real acknowledgments on every packet before sending the next?
...such complaints by the surveilled would be connected tenuously to terrorism.
Thanks for this post. I was about to make the exact same point but thought I'd skim through to see if anyone else did. Its always nice to be cynical about something like this and at first think... oh man, they're saying its kiddie porn but its really about the music and movies and the bandwidth and its a censorship slippery slope blah blah blah. Then, a different cynicism takes over... no this is about a politician trying to look good and some ISPs trying to get kiddie porn crusaders off their backs... so they do something that creates the illusion of solving a problem without actually doing anything at all. Business as usual.
Typically, isolationism refers to a combined military and economic policy whereby military non-interventionism is combined with economic protectionism. In other words, an isolationist doesn't just believe the US would be better off not meddling in foreign wars and political matters, they also believe there is no need to have economic ties with other nations, or at least that they are more trouble than they are worth, and so advocate prohibiting imports and exports or at least very high tariffs in the interests of creating a sort of self-sufficient, isolated, nation. Non-interventionism, on the other hand, seeks only to eliminate military adventurism abroad while acknowledging the need for and in fact encouraging open, unfettered, trade with any and all other nations.
What I really like about your post is that you point out how unimportant individual issues are compared to the philosophies behind them. As a conservative looking for a candidate I agree with you, the liberal democrat, completely. I'd even go so far as to say that the constant regurgitating of the same old items "hot-button" issues, even things as broad and vague as "the economy", "healthcare", and "the war" serve only to distract us from the more important philosophical changes happening in Washington.
Where I disagree with you completely is in your identification of the primary philosophical divide. Public vs. Private isn't nearly as important as Centralized vs. De-centralized. That is the core philosophical battle in this country. (Of course, a philisophical "purist" would probably say that the divide is even more to the core than that: between the materialist (the mind is the brain) and the dualists (the mind is separate from the brain.)) Even IF I were to agree that the divide is Public vs. Private, I would encourage you to check into the massive privatization efforts that took place under Clinton and previous administrations. If you think our troops were pealing their own potatoes under Clinton or providing diplomatic security services, think again. People think they've unraveled this dark secret about Cheney's conflict of interest because he ran Haliburton through the Clinton years. Well, who do you think was cutting the checks to Haliburton?
No, the issue is Centralization vs. Decentralization. On that front, I really don't see much difference between our current candidates or Bush vs. Gore for that matter. In fact, the "Centralists", if you will, have had their way for at least a century, possibly more. THE reason I supported Ron Paul so strongly is because he was a strong Decentralist. For starters, he understood the paradox of what is *supposed* to be a decentralized economy (as compared to, say, Soviet Russia) that is being manipulated by a central bank. Secondly, he talked openly about the problem of our constant War-making being one of too many powerful players from private industry and the government (i.e. the Military-Industrial Complex) having to much power concentrated in Washington. You can talk all you want about whether Iraq was the right place to go to war or not or whether we should have gone to war in Darfur (a very fashionable suggestion among the interventionists these days) but in the end there will always be war as long as so much power is centralized in the hands of so few executives, both private and public.
When discussing national politics, centralized often gets equated to public, and decentralized to private, but I think there are plenty of examples to the contrary. You can have decentralized public services. You can have universal healthcare in Illinois or Massachusetts or Cook County, for example. You can even have decentralized federal departments. I think the FAA does a good job manning traffic control towers, for example. And you can certainly have centralized private organizations. Look at most of our fortune 500 companies and how they choose to structure their organizations.
But there is a whole world of decentralization out there; of independent ISPs (God, I LOVE Interlync), of independent retailers, heck the entire blogging phenomenon is one of decentralizing the dissemination of information. And not even "big" always equates to "centralized." Besides the aforementioned FAA, you have companies like Best Buy, that try tirelessly to share information and best practices not from the center out, but at the fringes (their CEO gave an excellent interview on CEO Exchange / PBS about this.) In fact, I think companies that are really excelling in these tough economic conditions are the ones that are starting to understand decentralization and harness its power. These companies tend to have flatter hierarchies, like Apple, where you'd think that everything centers around Steve Jobs, but then he says he works *directly* with about 100 people of all diffe