IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times:
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t. So disappointed in my party.
Reposted here from this Reddit thread originally written by Redditor RevThwack.
Boehner
Millions are looking for work, have been for some time, and the spending binge going on in Washington is a big part of the reason why. CBO reports say that in the fourth quarter of 2010 there were somewhere between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people who were then employed who would not have been had the stimulus not been enacted. Boehner Before I served in Congress, I ran a small business in Ohio. I was amazed at how different Washington DC operated than every business in America. You were with that company for a total of 13 years. You have been in politics since 5 years after starting at that company. You have been in politics for 29 years with 21 years of that being your term in congress. Stop trying to pretend you're still a business man. Boehner Where most American businesses make the hard choices to pay their bills and live within their means, in Washington more spending and more debt is business as usual. The Joint Committee on Taxation stated that the Bush Tax Cuts costs combined cost us over $2 trillion between 2001-2017. Bush raised national debt by $4.08 trillion thru tax cuts and spending. You were in the house the whole time Bush was president, and voted down party lines 95.95% of the time during those years. More spending and debt is something that you have supported over the years. Boehner on the heels of the largest spending binge in American history. Well, on pure dollar ammounts, yes. As a precentage of GDP, the last few years are much less than the spending binge that happened for World War 2. Boehner Here's what we got for that spending binge: a massive health care bill that most Americans never asked for Actually, most Americans did back health care reform. It was one of the hot topics that helped Obama get elected. Beyond that, the CBO also reports that although there would be a $940 billion price tag over a 10 year period, it would actually reduce the deficit by $138 billion. Boehner A 'stimulus' bill that was more effective in producing material for late-night comedians than it was in producing jobs Once again, 1.5 to 3.5 million jobs accredited to the stimulus bill by the CBO. I'd say that was a larger effect than the effect it had on late-night comedians. Boehner a national debt that has gotten so out of hand it has sparked a crisis without precedent in my lifetime or yours. A case could easily be made that due to increases in the debt ceiling being common place, that the crisis isn't due to us approaching the limit, but instead due to the inability of the House to pass a bill that has even modest bipartisan support. Boehner And over the last six months, we’ve done our best to convince the president to partner with us to do something dramatic to change the fiscal trajectory of our country. Actually, over the last six months the House has done it's best to convince the president to give into its demands of huge cuts to entitlement programs, pushing the entire burden of these cuts onto the backs of the lower and middle class. Boehner Last week, the House passed such a plan, and with bipartisan support 5 Democrats voted for it, 188 did not. 2.6% is not enough to be considered bipartisan support by any stretch of the imagination. Bohener Unfortunately, the president would not take yes for an answer. Had the "yes" been "yes, we will pass a bill that fairly affects all Americans", then he would have accepted it. He and the gang of six both said yes to such an answer, you are the one who said no. Boehner Even when we thought we might be close on an agreement, the president’s demands changed. That was because his demands kept getting closer to your demands as he accepted compromises on things such as entitlements. That is what politics is about. Your demands on the other hand have remained steadfast... that is what blackmail is all about. Boehner The president has often said we need a 'balanced' approach -- which in Washington means: we spend more. . .you pay more. No, by "balanced" he means that the burden doesn't fall just on the backs of the middle and lower class, but that the wealthy take some of the hit as well. Boehner Having run a small business, I know those tax increases will destroy jobs. If cutting out tax loopholes (which is what the gang of six plan proposes) destroys jobs, then why didn't it do that when Reagan closed tax loopholes and raised payroll taxes himself in 1982? Boehner The sad truth is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today. Considering that the president is backing a plan that would cut the deficit by more than the raise that is being asked, it's not a blank check. In fact, He's not asking for a check at all, but instead the ability to keep the government operating. The check writing would come at the time that the yearly budget is crafted. Boehner If the President signs it, the ‘crisis’ atmosphere he has created will simply disappear. It is the responsibility of congress to craft and pass bills, the only responsibility of the president is to either sign or veto those bills. Obama has acted as a mediator between the two political sides, and has gotten the Democrats to agree to things they do not like. This crisis situation is not due to his actions, but due to partisan bickering in congress. Boehner The solution to this crisis is not complicated: if you’re spending more money than you’re taking in, you need to spend less of it Or take in more, or do a combination of the two. TL/DR: You should be ashamed of your speech and all the lies contained inside it Boehner. I posted it in it's entirety here because I wanted the most people to read it. If you have a Reddit account, please go give him credit by voting up this thread.
On Tuesday, twenty minutes before Apple's financial results conference call, the Wall Street Journal published a story concerning Steve Jobs' succession at Apple. John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, comments on this at length:
Everyone wants this to be an interesting story, but it’s not. There is no intrigue. If Jobs steps down in the foreseeable future his replacement will almost certainly be Tim Cook. Utter credibility on Wall Street, and much respect within Apple. He’s already run the company while Jobs has been on leave. The knock against him is that he’s an operations and finance guy, not a product design guy. Ideally Apple would find someone just like Steve Jobs, but there exists no such person. There will not be a next Steve Jobs. There will be a next CEO. Gruber lists in the piece several suggestions he solicited over Twitter yesterday. One of the people he named was Jack Dorsey, founder of Square and the brains behind Twitter, whom appears to be running the show at Twitter these days. I think Jack Dorsey has definite potential, and perhaps the only "outsider" from Apple that would be worthy. However, he's awfully young and inexperienced. And it would mean passing over a lot of very talented and respected SVPs at Apple to do so. In the end, I think John is right.
My good friend Wayne Dixon has posted his combined OS X Lion & Lion Server review. Server contains a few neat features I was not aware of, as I've always just used the retail version. Definitely worth checking out.
This morning, shortly after Lion hit the App Store for the general public, I posted a link to several notable reviews of Lion where you can read all about the nit-picky details that have changed or been added/removed. I won't attempt to write a comprehensive review of my own, simply because people like John Siracusa will do a much better job at it than I will. One notable new feature of the operating system that I would like to point out though, is the new recovery partition that Lion makes when it installs itself. Apple has posted an entire knowledge base article detailing how this process works:
OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs. A lot of people noted that the new Mac Minis released this morning no longer contain optical drives built-in. Jim Dalrymple actually managed a brief interview with Brian Croll, Apple's vice president of OS X product marketing who told Jim: A new Mac mini was also released with faster processors, and surprisingly to some people, no optical drive. Apple said the popularity of the Mac App Store helped with that decision. “We found that the majority of customers don’t use the optical drive on a regular basis,” said Moody. “Things are changing. The primary use for the optical drive was to install software, but the Mac App Store provides a more efficient method for doing that.” Clearly Apple is not afraid to eliminate components that customers don't regularly use in order to take advantage of the extra space to add new hardware on the inside. They first did this with the MacBook Air, and now the Mini. As John Gruber says: Optical drives are the new floppy drives.
An almost unbelievable account posted on a blog called BirdAbroad:
Being the curious types that we are, we struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple. I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company – when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere. Go read the entire post. The lengths they went to copy 90% of the details of an Apple store is amazing, however, any regular, perceptive, Apple Store customer can spot the parts they got wrong if you look at a few of the photos hard enough.
John Siracusa has released his OS X 10.7 Lion Review. In case you aren't aware, John Siracusa is the king of Apple OS reviews. The PDF of his review is 105 pages long and has a table of contents for pete's sake. A Kindle Edition is available for $4.99 to get the article all on one page.
Other notable Lion reviews that are out:
1. Shawn Blanc's review, "OS X Lion".
2. Benjamin Brooks, The Brooks Review, "Time for the Big Cat".
3. Jason Snell, Editor in Chief at Macworld Magazine, "Apple Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)".
4. Wayne Dixon, a friend of mine, reviews both Lion and Lion Server in a combined review.
5. Not really a complete review per say, but a brief commentary, Matthew Guay wrote on tech inch, "First Thoughts on Mac OS X Lion".
In addition to Lion being released, Apple released new MacBook Airs, new Mac Minis, and a new Thunderbolt Cinema display.
I've been using Lion since early May, due to the fact that I'm an Apple developer and I've had access to the developer previews since earlier this year. Developer Preview 3 and 4 were stable enough for me to run as my main machine, with the GM Seed (retail version) having been released 2 weeks ago, it was just icing on the cake. My system has been very stable, with perhaps the only app to semi-regularly crash being Chrome, which was the norm for me on Snow Leopard as well.
I highly recommend Lion. Mission Control, Launchpad, Versions, the recovery partition, the new About This Mac panel, I could go on and on. This is a good upgrade. Get it.
Today Apple reported their third quarter financial results. M.G Siegler at Techcrunch has a nice writeup of the key points from the conference call with reporters. Macworld has a lot of pretty charts and graphs too.