View from a Farley

Assuming what Arrington says is true, super angels are colluding on a massive scale. It’s a conspiracy not to compete, and it’s targeting Y Combinator specifically. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of this.

Oh, New York.  Such a civil political landscape.

Scary.  The President is pretty mainstream; Sarah Palin is not.  I think this shows the increasing polarization of the political climate.

Phones can be distracting in school, but so is the pick-up game of football that’s happening outside the window.  There are so many positives to pushing better technology into the classroom—better organization and being able to conduct labs and other exercises that weren’t possible before among them.  They’re not right for every purpose or setting, but the demonization of phones (basically people saying that phones are ruining kids’ concentration) has been overblown.

Wait.  There are still moderates in the Republican Party?

Privacy vs. convenience—it’s the big battle of the cloud computing world. I’m still not convinced we can’t have both, it’s just that no manufacturer has a real incentive to care about privacy when most of their users are ambivalent at best.

This proposal would allow acts of Congress to be repealed with the votes of 2/3 of the state legislatures.

Proposals like these fail to grasp that most of the time, we’re one country, not 50 states. There may have been a time when having 50 sovereign, largely independent states made sense to govern such a large area. Not anymore. We fight as one country, trade as one country, and conduct foreign policy as one country.

States are looking out for their bottom lines, which is understandable, but if we gave states the veto power, we’d have nothing but a lot of unpaved roads. Those unfunded mandates are beneficial for the country as a whole, but awful for individual states. The federal government’s constituency needs to remain the people, and not the states, of the United States.

To me, Christine O’Donnell is just another in a long line of politicians with the same happy disconnect with the issues.  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  She doesn’t know what the words she’s saying mean.  And when she compares herself to mythical elf creatures (“I’m a fighter, like Eowyn”), no one else knows what she means either.

Her website’s section for “Christine O’Donnell on the issues” is nothing more than a collection of one sentence, bite-sized nuggets of nothingness.  She believes “our country was founded on…freedom,” but not for those terrorists who shouldn’t even hope for “precious Constitutional rights.”  Let’s also prevent “government meddling in the doctor/patient relationship,” as long as you’re not even thinking about getting an abortion.  And by all means, let’s support a “market-based approach to energy solutions” because there’s never been a market for energy before.  After all that, let’s flap our wings and fly to Never Never Land.

But her inability to say anything that actually means anything doesn’t seem to trouble her followers.  In fact, they seem perfect happy to support her because she’s just like them — uninformed and disdainful of people who actually are informed.  She’s the sort of person you’d want to meet at a NASCAR race, therefore she’s the sort of person you’d want to elect.