Craig Barrett, Intel chairman:

At a time when the rest of the world is increasing its emphasis on math and science education and increasing their budgets for basic engineering and physical science research, the US Congress is telling the world these areas are not important to our future.

Perhaps this would all be a moot discussion if we could continue to import the best and brightest minds from around the world to start and staff our next generation of high tech startups. But Washington can't even get that strategy straight.

The United States stands at a pivotal point in our history. Competition is heating up around the world with millions of industrious, highly educated workers who are willing to compete at salaries far below those paid here. The only way we can hope to compete is with brains and ideas that set us above the competition - and that only comes from investments in education and R&D. Practically everyone who has traveled outside the United States in the last decade has seen this dynamic at work. The only place where it is apparently still a deep, dark secret is in Washington, DC.

What are they thinking? When will they wake up? It may already be too late.

Flagging economy needs science investments

The Census Bureau reports that the homeownership rate declined to 67.8% in Q4, from 68.2% in Q3 2007. This is a huge drag on the U.S. housing market.

... there are about 1.65 million excess housing units in the U.S. that need to be worked off over the next few years. These excess units will keep pressure on housing starts and prices for some time.

From the archive:

Is It Better to Buy or Rent?

By the Realtors’ way of thinking, it’s always a good time to buy. ... But in a stark reversal, it’s now clear that people who chose renting over buying in the last two years made the right move. In much of the country, including large parts of the Northeast, California, Florida and the Southwest, recent home buyers have faced higher monthly costs than renters and have lost money on their investment in the meantime. It’s almost as if they have thrown money away, an insult once reserved for renters.

Homeownership Rate: Cliff Diving

The state government is staring at a billion-dollar shortfall in its $11 billion budget. Forecasters expect a region that grew 7 percent in 2006 to contract this year. Retail sales, which rose 16 percent in 2006, are dropping. Dennis Hoffman, an economics professor at Arizona State University, said he had never seen such a sharp turnabout in 25 years studying the local economy.

To many residents of the Phoenix area, which has long been one of the nation's sunniest economies, the solutions being offered by Washington may be too little, too late.

"We're in so deep that it doesn't seem like anything will help," said Rebekah Ao, 33, a pregnant homemaker who lives in a new four-bedroom home in Avondale with her husband, Otto, a truck driver. The Aos, with $50,000 in income, owe a total of $607,000 on mortgages for two houses they bought since they moved to the Phoenix area about two years ago.

Many business people and economists here do not expect things to pick up until the area works through its inventory of about 37,000 unsold homes, which could take three or four years.

Housing Crisis Casts a Cloud Over Sun Belt

When you use a system often, you tend to fall into set usage patterns. Sometimes, you do not start the habit of doing things in the best possible way. Sometimes, you even pick up bad practices that lead to clutter and clumsiness. One of the best ways to correct such inadequacies is to conscientiously pick up good habits that counteract them. This article suggests 10 UNIX command-line habits worth picking up -- good habits that help you break many common usage foibles and make you more productive at the command line in the process. Each habit is described in more detail following the list of good habits.

More here.

UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

A Super Tuesday excerpt for you:

While most of the Fathers did assume that partisan oppositions would form from time to time, they did not expect that valuable permanent structures would arise from them ...

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

... Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.

The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States

"Catalin Avramescu presents an interesting view on what urbanism reveals about a society."

What I realized was that the respect towards the line is something beyond traffic regulations. Seeing a foreigner's unaffected, natural observation of the few centimeters on the line from the asphalt, I realized we are dealing with a fundamental difference between cultures. In the Occident almost everything is organized "on the line."

... All of these are just exterior signs. More important is the order that is generated spontaneously, in the absence of the lines, arrows, markings.

... Nowadays we live in a social web that seems to be unraveling. We creep through holes in fences to get to government buildings, cars park on the pavement, businesses no longer adhere to regular opening times, the controls in lifts are blocked, signs with missing letters are a common sight. All around us, a micro-anarchy spreads. This is the point at which the reform of our society must begin--the primitive origin of the chaos. Our country is suffering from a lack of lines.

Have you seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?

... a masterpiece ... devastating ... gripping ... a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing ... remarkably engrossing and thoughtful ... beautifully rendered ... what you see will floor you ... ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed ... stunning, at times harrowing ... brilliantly discomfiting ...

"4 Months" earned my Gold Star for January.

A Country in Lines: The Shortest Distance for Romania

ubernoir wrote:

in light of recent discussions about party politics this piece particularly struck me

The theory advanced in this article is based on earlier work by Neil Howe and William Strauss, published in 1991 as Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069.

Here's the book jacket on the paperback:

Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading.

William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium.

Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.

They did not win over the folks at Publishers Weekly:

Ex-Capitol Hill aides Strauss and Howe analyze American history according to a convoluted theory of generational cycles, concocting a chronicle that often seems as woolly as a newspaper horoscope.

The authors of this Washington Post article have a new book of their own coming out next month, entitled Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, which carries an endorsement from Howe and Strauss:

Millennial Makeover builds a strong case for how today's rising generation is poised to become a political powerhouse, re-energizing civic spirit and transforming both the substance and process of American politics. With new technologies, attitudes, and agendas, this generation could define the twenty-first century just as fundamentally as the G.I. Generation defined the twentieth century. Winograd and Hais build a strong, historically rooted case for how this could unfold.

The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials

I recommended this earlier in a different thread but wanted to come back to it with some choice excerpts.

The distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

Improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.”

In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China.

Chávez’s challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural.

Globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization.

Maintaining America’s empire can only get costlier in both blood and treasure. It isn’t worth it, and history promises the effort will fail. It already has.

We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them — always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed to do.

And a few factoids of note:

Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country.

There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers.

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

MemeStreams: It's just like having real friends!

I think back to the fall of 2005, when Bill Gates visited The New York Times, and an editor asked him if Microsoft “would do to Google what you did to Netscape?”

“Nah,” laughed Mr. Gates, “we’ll do something different.”

This ain’t it.

Exactly.

See also:

The Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive.

A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is