Dvorak Comments on the Dumbing Down of America

The Dumbing Down of America

I'd like to believe in the general intelligence of human kind. But, as a "tech" person (READ: geek), I certainly see a lot of this. Basically, his point is that people ask stupid questions which they could simply ask of Google to save them the trouble. I agree that people are too quick to ask questions frequently, but I believe an enormous amount of this comes from a certained "learned helplessness". Until VERY recently, computers were so difficult to use that attempting to do anything would result in nothing but pain and frustration. Even now, technology is spectacularly difficult to use, though it is getting better. Until we make technology as simple as a telephone or a television, expect people to continue to trust others to do the hard work for them. Especially if the primary source of that research involves the web.

ClearRx Pill Bottle

ClearRx Pill Bottle

You know when you've found a good invention? When someone comes along and says "That's so simple, anyone could have done it. But I'm still going to throw out whatever I use today and use that one." Example A:

Why DO bottles today have the name of the medication so small anyway?

Nordic Affluence, or lack thereof

Nordic Affluence

INTERESTING study. Basically, this shows that European economies have tracked very poorly against US economy growth rates. The only thing that might be the out for the Scandinavians is that I'm not sure how government funded programs factored into their disposable incomes. If their disposable incomes WERE half as much, but they did not have to pay for school at any level, medical treatment at any level and so on, their ability to buy or do different things per disposable dollar might be much higher than represented here.

One thing that irritates me about the original article is the following paragraph:

In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
I know that reporters are just trying to paint the background, but reporting like this is so subject to the whim of the author. If Oslo is really that destitute, then you can certainly put out some data indicating how what you describe above is the norm and not just your view from your apartment.

My New Commuter Vehicle

Get ready for the AirScooter

Oh baby. The real problem here is exactly what I said before. It's not traffic; though there will be plenty of mishaps to start, people don't exactly go the wrong way down a one way street today. What the real problem is is security. Today, you have a nice high razor wire fence keeping prisoners from society, or people off military bases, or criminals off the roofs of buildings. With this, we're going to have to develop cheap SAMs in order to keep our critical facilities secure.

The New Gay Mafia

Ah Defamer. Show me the way.

All Hail the New Gay Mafia

This simply could not have been more well timed! I was just chatting with my girlfriend about how much I wanted to bring back the word "gay" meaning 'Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry'. And now I have an entire mafia to help me do it. Huzzah!

Gayly,
D

BREAKING NEWS: STILL NO POPE

No pope after first vote by cardinals

(Sung to the charge song) Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope... Pope, Pope, Pope, Pope.. Pope! Pope!

Man, this is why I hate the 24-hour news cycle. Everything is a crisis. I wandered by a TV today and saw four talking heads screeching about how hard it was to pick a Pope and so on. I remember making this comment to someone about ten years ago... At the time I was really into watching CNBC. It's an interesting channel, but during the day, every second something is going on and you have to be aware constantly! Dow up. Dow Down. Dow flat. Trading heavy. Industrials off. Energy stocks rallying. Big box retailers spiraling. Home builders on fire. Now the ad-wizards have just extended that to all news. Pope alive. Pope dead. Schiavo alive. Schiavo dead. Michael Jackson... still a pervert. Should you allow burning of judges who ban the ten commandments. But this does not end when the market closes. There's no breather! The talking head channels are addictive though... they play right into the limbic system. We love conflict and we love to watch it.

This is why RSS is so nice... everything is event driven. If some area of the news has no updates, you see nothing. Well, no news stories anyway. You still see comments and op-ed out the yin-yang.

MP3 wristwatch

Evergreen's EG-MPW256CII MP3 wristwatch via Engadget

Ok, I get it, you can take MP3 players anywhere. This one, which is certainly not the first, has a nice look to it. My question is when are people getting all this time to listen to music? Other than the car, or walking between buildings, it's not like I have some unlimited amount of time to listen to music where I'm not sitting in front of a computer anyway. Which leads me to my other point. I know I already talked a little about video blogging and, while podcasting is a great idea for time shifting radio and other formats which are already audio, I have to reiterate my earlier comment that podcasting does not work great for content which is already in a more usable format. RSS is great because I can parse through MANY different stories at once and read only the PARTS of them in which I'm interested. Podcasting/video blogging/etc which plays right into the utility of all these portable media players seems like a less efficient way to access just the information of value. I have to sit there for 25 minutes of an hour long show just to get the 2 minutes that are interesting.

The Echo Chamber

Instapundit.com readers go nuts

Yep, no question about it, this columnist was wrong. Really wrong. But in response to this, I count no less than six updates, ten links and a handful of blog entries all written on this. I'm always surprised that people dedicate so much time to focusing on opinion columns and Op-Ed pieces. Anyone with twenty minutes and a computer can hammer out one of a column; it's really not worth your time once someone has been proven wrong. A lot of the rancor today appears to be in response to the supposed affect that voicing a person's opinion in a public media outlet. There's such a huge difference between a story on page A22 and one two pages later on the Op-Ed page. Yet people who do not like a media outlet, for whatever reason, allow their criticism to bleed over from the items clearly identified as opinion to the outlet as a whole. I just do not think it's worth anyone's time (excluding my time to comment on the commentors... now THAT'S valuable).