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POPSMr. Murdoch Goes To War This would be music to the ears of any newsroom, so hope mingled with the professional dread in Murdoch’s audience that afternoon. He may be awful, but he is rich and awful, smart and awful, powerful and awful, and while he may well be crazy to still believe in the future of print, he is determined and crazy. Murdoch might be the last person The Journal would have chosen as its savior, but newspapers may well be down to last hopes. What does he see that others do not? What is his vision for one of America’s most venerated dailies? Can he really grow The Journal in such a hostile economic climate? And if he succeeds, might The Wall Street Journal as we know it, and as millions of readers have loved it, cease to exist?
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POPSBritain Slips from Fully "Free" Economic Countries Just why would you believe that the government would be able to spend all this money better than its individual citizens? Well, they have "free" health care, and "free" pensions and lost of "free" stuff that they get by shoveling 45% of their entire economy into the maw of bureaucrats. And then they wonder why they aren't happy?
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POPSHarvard's decision on financial aid puts other colleges in a tough spot
Harvard has pledged that no family making under about $180K will have to pay more than 10% of its income in tuition. This makes other college administrators very nervous, since they can't come close to duplicating that deal, especially without raising tuition for other students. One tuition-payer's advocate says it's a step in the right direction because it "puts pressure" on other institutions to start cutting costs, such as in areas of faculty salaries and "internet services," and adds that schools should operate more like businesses. Sorry for the rant, but that's a crock of shit. Only in America, where everything is supposed to be a saleable commodity, and where education is treated as a consumer product, do people go around saying this kind of crap. Why on earth is "operating like a business" a sensible ideal for a college to aspire to? It's not a fucking business, it's an institution of learning. It's not like a Wal-Mart or a travel agency, okay?
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POPSWindows XP Service Pack 3: Try It If You Dare Recently, Microsoft downplayed the significance of Windows XP SP3. In a white paper posted to its Web site, the company praised Windows Vista at XP's expense, reminding users that Vista boasted beefed-up security, for instance. The spokeswoman also chimed in. "Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP," she said. That may be so, but according to a Florida performance testing software developer, XP SP3 is not only 10% faster than XP SP2, but more than twice as fast as Vista SP1, claims that Microsoft disparaged within days. XP SP3, in fact, is the newest version of Vista's biggest rival , according to Forrester Research. U.S. and European businesses will delay Vista deployment, Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray said a month ago......
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POPSObama's Worn Out Economic Ideas There is much current political interest in so-called "predatory lending" -- the charging of high interest rates for loans to poor people or to people with low credit ratings. Nothing will be easier politically than passing laws to limit interest rates or make it harder for lenders to recover their money -- and nothing will cause credit to dry up faster to low-income people, forcing some of them to have to turn to illegal loan sharks, who have their own methods of collecting. The underlying reality that politicians do not want to face is that here, too, prices convey a reality that is not subject to political control. That reality is that it is far riskier to lend to some people than to others. That is why the price of a loan -- the interest rate -- is far higher to some people than to others. Far from making extra profits on riskier loans, many lenders have lost millions of dollars on such loans and some have gone bankrupt.
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POPSThe V-8 engine is spluttering Mr. Ford, the 50-year-old great-grandson of the company’s founder, Henry Ford, said the passing of the V-8 era is somewhat bittersweet for baby boomers like him. (NYC)
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POPSGreen Communism
Owning a car opens up possibilities to a person that is beyond their reach otherwise, it opens up a freedom that many millions do not currently enjoy. The ability to find work at further distances from their homes than ever gives them more choices to find lucrative employment opportunities, the ability to find markets and entertainments are also greatly expanded. All this greatly expands individual freedom. If many millions more of the people of India (and around the world) find themselves able to afford this new car, it will incredibly improve their standard of living. It will also force the government to redirect their own efforts to internal improvements to accommodate this rise in cars that will add even more to raising the standard of living in once poor countries. Green communists do not care about people and these two stories add to the ever growing proof that enviro-communists have gravitated to environmentalism as a replacement for an overt espousal of communist ideals.
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POPSAnti-Missle Tests To Start for Commercial Jets What's shocking is that its taken so long. There have been attempted attacks - especially on El Al flights (see Kenya), and it seems like this would be a high profile terror target - shooting down a planeload of Americans.
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POPSGreed, Need, and Money "When Jack Welch became General Electric's CEO in 1981, the company was worth about $14 billion. Through hiring and firing, buying and selling decisions, Welch turned the company around and when he retired 20 years later, GE was worth nearly $500 billion. What's a CEO worth for such an achievement? If Welch was paid a measly one-half of a percent of GE's increase in value, his total compensation would have come to nearly $2.5 billion, instead of the few hundred million that he actually received."
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POPSGoogle still kicking Yahoo and Microsoft's ass! The part I actually find most surprising is that over 40% of the U.S. search market doesn't use Google. But considering how hard Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to catch them, it's amazing that they haven't been able to make any progress.
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POPSField Testing Third World Computers This is a very interesting experiment in access and education. The most interesting part is that the children are expected to fix the computers themselves! Actually, I learned a lot of stuff this way - by tinkering - but is it realistically applicable to all the kids? If it works, it will work brilliantly. It is certainly a new way of networking information. Maybe clipmarks should get in on something like this...
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POPSHuckabee and the Fair Tax I find this to be the real PLUS for Mike Huckabee. If you don't know about the Fair Tax and want to learn more, read the book the Fair Tax by Boortz and Linder.
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POPSInternet Explorer Confirmed (IE8) While this comes as a surprise to nobody, I just want to challenge Microsoft to build a browser that I want to switch *back* to. IE7 was not it, and I know they can do it.
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POPSEco-Dogma::Every Child Should Be Unwanted At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Reverend Al Gore told the assembled faithful: "My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Really? The American Thinker's website ran the numbers. In the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here's what happened: Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%. Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%. Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%. Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%. It's hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world's elites. If you're one of that dwindling band of westerners who'll be celebrating the birth of a child, "homeless" or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.
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POPSI'm afraid I agree with Pat Buchanan We are entering the age of corporate totalitarianism. American companies are now global companies and American sovereignty is secondary to the wishes of the global capitalist. I'm as big a capitalist as anyone, but tyranny can come from any faction. The mainstream of America is being ripped by forces at both ends - Cultural Marxists on one end and corporate totalitarianism on the other.
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