Obama to make VP part of the Government again

Obama has promised to make his VP part of the executive branch of the government - not an undefined fourth branch, as created by VP Cheney in avoiding punishment for his questionable if not outright illegal activities. A VP that's part of the Executive branch - as the office had previously been since the 1700's.

It's sad that I'm excited by the idea of a president that actually wants to follow the constitution, but that's where we stand.

*sigh*


http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=826159

The state of cheap laptops

The idea was this: provide for poor schools all the books they didn't have. Math, History, Language.

But it was not an easy task. How do you get hundreds of text books, weighing thousands of pounds, to the far reaches of the world? And what did you do when the information in them became outdated?

The concept was to give, instead of 5 pound books, one 3 pound laptop - low powered (with hand-crank and solar options so that it would even work in areas with no electric grid), rugged (water resistant and sand resistant), with a connection to the internet (and it's thousands, no, thanks to Google, millions of books) - and sell it for $100.

The idea from one Nicholas Negroponte from MIT was ground breaking. And with a cadre of volunteers, he delivered. Using a low-powered AMD Geode processor, a free Linux-based Operating System, and a fantastic screen that worked out in the sunlight, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO laptop was born.

Right out of the gate it sold fast, to schools in South America and Africa. Unfortunately, as orders for the XO computer started pouring in, businesses suddenly realized that Negroponte was right - there was a large untapped worldwide market for low-cost computers. And that was the projects undoing.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4472654.ece

Today, there are a number of entrants into the low-end laptop market. While Intel's post-OLPC project, the Classmate PC, was gobbling up marketshare around the world thanks to the slightly stronger hardware and the great power of Intel's marketing arm, Asus's Eee PC came out of the gates like a bull - their small, standard component laptop sold for $300 to anyone who wanted it (OLPC and Intel were selling only to schools), and the public ate them up.
http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Search.htm?term=asus%20eee&DefSort=Y&searchFilter=ALL

Acer has also entered the low-cost laptop recently, relying on Intel's Atom low-powered processor.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/atom-nano-review.ars

The result is a good competitor to the EeePC, with a bit more power for just a bit more money:
http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Detail.htm?sku=8708409

OLPC is most likely dead, though the technology may live in in other projects; Mr Negroponte's idea certainly changed the landscape of low-cost computing. Sadly for the school children of the world, the lowest-cost computing system - also the one built with harsher environments in mind - will not be a part.

The Year of Living Biblically

What happens when an agnostic follows all the rules of the Bible for one year? He finds that belief isn't a requirement for sacredness to be useful.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html

Lifestyle may effect genes, too

No, we're not talking about a return to the Lamarkian theory of evolution. By exercising, reducing stress, and changing diet, a number of men with prostate cancer have seen drastic changes in gene activation - most notably in genes that are involved in cancerous growth.

A larger study needs to be undertaken to eliminate the effects of chance on the results, but it is a very promising result! Eat your carrots, kids!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25201082

Laffer Curves and Tax cuts

McCain’s idea that reducing the tax rate increases overall government revenue due to increased business growth is based largely on the idea of the high-income Laffer curve - if you tax everyone 100%, then no one will work to make money since they don’t get to keep it. Therefore, reducing taxes will increase business, and therefore will increase tax revenue. Makes sense!

However, the same argument can be made for 0% taxation – business might be huge, but the government gets nothing unless you raise taxes.

The end result here is that just like everything else, there is at least one optimal solution somewhere in the middle of the extreme cases – most likely somewhere tending toward the lower quarter mark (~25%), where people grumble, but still go to work everyday.

Austan Goolsbee - Obama's chief economic adviser agrees (or agreed, as this paper is from 1999):

“This paper has used evidence from seven different tax changes since 1922 to examine the evidence in support of the high-income Laffer curve and the New Tax Responsiveness Literature. While that work emphasizes the potential importance of behavioral responses to marginal tax rates, the results in this paper suggest that the evidence on which those conclusions are based—evidence from the 1980s—is atypical in the historical experience. Using the same methods that NTR authors have used for the 1980s, the elasticities of taxable income calculated for other tax changes seem to be much more modest with several indistinguishable from zero. This is true in the aggregate cross-sectional tax return data as well as in panel data on executive compensation. The largest estimates of the taxable income elasticity from all of the previous historical periods is lower than the smallest estimates of the elasticity in the literature based on the 1980s. Given the importance of the behavioral response to taxation, it is my hope that this will stimulate further research on the topic using data outside of conventional tax returns in the 1980s and 1990s.

The notion that governments could raise more money by cutting rates is, indeed, a glorious idea. It would permit a Pareto improvement of the most enjoyable kind. Unfortunately for all of us, the data from the historical record suggest that it is unlikely to be true at anything like today’s marginal tax rates. It seems that, for now at least, we will have to keep paying for our tax cuts the old fashioned way. “


You can read the full paper here: http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/austan.goolsbee/research/laf.pdf

At Least Children Remember

more info here: http://www.sfsf.com.au/econews/econews_story_severin_suziki.htm

Good Idea, Bad Idea

Suppose there's a person in your office that you don't get along with. You have to work with them, however - you're not the boss in this situation, and you end up on a bunch of the same projects.

Do you
a) Avoid talking to the person no matter what.
b) Insult the person and hope they go away.
c) Tell them that they need to do everything your way, and if they don't like it, they can take a long jump off a short pier.
d) Discuss the problems you're having in an attempt to resolve the conflict or at least come to a professional understanding so that you can both get your work done.

If you picked D, then you're:
1) Not President Bush, John McCain or Hillary Clinton
2) In agreement with Barack Obama and more than 65% of the American public - including half of all Republicans.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/107617/Americans-Favor-President-Meeting-US-Enemies.aspx