Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Archive for October, 2007

Will Google Free the Phone?

Google is about to become your phone company. Indeed, if current technology pans out, Google won’t charge you much if anything for your phone, which may serve nicely as your computer and your TV. As of tonight Google stock trades at $700/share making it the fifth most valuable company in the United States. Google is [...]

Obama: We Hoped That You Were Ready

Today’s New York Times headlines say it all: "Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton" followed by a series of facts. First, Obama planted the story — or as the Times put it, the front page story happened because of "an interview on Friday that was initiated by his campaign to signal the change of [...]

The Big Picture

God’s eye view of Southern California, courtesy of the European Space Agency. It does not begin to tell the story of the anxiety, confusion, frustration, and loss that more than a half million people evacuees feel tonight. My Mom evacuated the Witch Canyon fire and my brother evacuated Slide, some 60 miles away. Her house [...]

The Ten Best Insights from the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit

"The future is here, it’s just not yet evenly distributed" - William Gibson "So too, the past" – Jam Side Down The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco is a chaotic, frenzied, demanding conference event that offers one of the best peeks over the technology horizon anywhere. As with the technologies they review, not everything about [...]

Why are Dems in Congress Helping Bush Recover?

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but George Bush, with the lowest approval ratings of any President in modern times, has been beating the Democrats, who swept both houses of Congress. Bush may be a fool, but his Chief of Staff Josh Bolton, among others, is not. Democrats took over Congress on [...]

Boycott the Beijing Olympics?

Christopher Hitchens: "Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto..  Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if [...]

Rethinking the War on Drugs

Few people realize that the United States imprisons more of our own people than any other country. We have more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. In 2005, we put 737 people in jail for every 100,000 residents. In Russia the number was [...]