Hillary Begins The Ascent

So, Hillary is running for president. That wasn't much of a surprise; the Leafs fired all their coaches the same day, and even that seemed slightly less inevitable.  What's weird is that because she's the presumptive winner of the Democratic nomination, there's a feeling that this whole side of the story is already over.  But that's not how it's supposed to work; this is an American election - it's supposed to be a constant story for two whole years.  Now we've got nothing to talk about for the next year-and-a-half.

By the way, some people have complained that referring to Hillary Clinton by her first name is sexist.  The argument is that we wouldn't do that for a man.  I'm not so sure: As a friend once pointed out, it's the pinnacle of success to be so famous that people just call you by your first name; it means you're right up there with Jesus.  True, most of the people with that combination of fame and unique-first-name to get the one-name treatment are women (hello, Oprah!) And famous men with unusual first names don't get it (I don't recall anyone discussing Obama as just "Barrack.")

But the fact is, there really doesn't seem to be any damage done by calling her by her first name. It's especially an odd complaint when you consider that the most sexist aspect of her name is the fact that she stopped using her maiden name (Rodham) when she decided to run for public office.

I know, people will be pointing out that she looked like a lock for the nomination in 2008, but then Obama came from out of nowhere to pass her by.  But there doesn't seem to be anyone like that here. Some people are pointing to Elizabeth Warren as a popular politician that people would rally around.  But the fact is that she has said she won't run.  And further, as much as I, too, like her, her cerebral and slightly nerdy charm won't win her much mainstream success.  She's someone who is well-suited to win over liberals, but few others.  Or, to put it another way, she isn't this election's Obama, she's this election's Howard Dean.

But what really makes me think that Hillary Clinton's victory in the primaries is inevitable is that American liberals have begun selling her to their fringe. She's a more centrist candidate with ties to business and a relatively conservative Democratic president, so she's just the sort of person who would cause the American left to find themselves a Nader to make a big statement, especially if they are going to get eighteen months to think about it.  Certainly, moderate or practical liberals sensed this backlash coming: I found lots of tweets on the weekend making the case that a Republican president would probably repeal Obamacare, invade Iran, and stack the Supreme Court, so this isn't a good time to back a third-party candidate.

Of course, that's going to be a difficult sell.  America's left-of-the-left never has taken responsibility for the consequences of the Nader vote, so I'm thinking it's going to take all the time until the election to win them over this time.  Considering the Republicans' difficulty winning the mainstream in recent presidential elections, the most important part of the election might just be Democrats convincing each other to vote.

GM Makes Hypocrisy, Not Cars

Recently, ads for Chevy Trucks have been built around focus groups comparing a picture of a guy and his truck, with a picture of an identical guy and a small car. (It's a Prius, though that's never mentioned.)



It's one of those screw-subtlety ads that I'm assuming appeal to some people, even if they make many others squirm.  I mean, you can poke fun with stereotypes of different drivers, but this one just lays on the insults unrepentantly.

You've got children running down the car driver. They seem a little unsure as they speak.  It's probably just because of the cameras, but I also suspect it's because they're essentially being asked to go against all the anti-bullying education they've been going through at school.  Then you have the women saying how much more attractive the guy with the truck is.  Think that through, ladies: You'd really chose the truck driver over the guy who clearly feels no need to compensate for anything?

I'm assuming that the marketing philosophy about commercials like this is that they are so tightly targeted.  That is, people like me will think that the folks in the ad are stupid, unpleasant people, but I'm not in their target market, so it doesn't matter.

Normally I'd just ignore an ad campaign like this, and write it off as a price of watching television content with a large male audience.  But then I see this other campaign that Chevrolet is running that also features real people giving their opinions in focus groups.



In this case, the point is that the participants always assume other brands are first to give innovative features, rather than Chevy.  It seems to be part of a GM tradition of confronting their brands' bad reputations head on, after "This Isn't Your Father's Oldsmobile" and "You Don't Know Buick."

But wait a minute: with one campaign, Chevy is asking us to believe in stereotypes of people, then in the other, they're asking us not to invoke stereotypes of car brands.  They don't mind making fun of a large part of their market, but then play the victim when they're the ones trying to lose a reputation.

Well GM, you can't have it both ways.  I'm not going to open my mind to you, if you're telling everyone to have a closed mind to me.  I'm going to remind everyone of your continuing ignition scandal.  I'll point out that you just slashed the length of your warranties, and Car and Driver thinks it's because you're having engine quality problems.  And oh look, you're having problems selling Volts.  Now why would people in the market for small efficient cars suddenly not want to buy from you?

No, Seriously Car 54, I Can't Find You

The Ford Crown Victoria was a large sedan of the type they don't really make anymore. It's fairly famous in these parts because it was built in St. Thomas. It probably would have been cancelled in the eighties, except for the fact that it was frequently used for police cars.

Police, at least in North America, tend to like their cars big. I never really understood why. Of course, comfort and room is important if you spend a big part of your day in a car, but in small cars the space is mostly taken out of the back seat, and anyone sitting there is not going to be comfortable anyway.

So for years, if you saw a Crown Victoria on the road, you knew it had to be one of two things: a police car, or an unmarked police car. Okay, there was a third possibility: it could be a senior citizen refusing to give in and get a smaller car; either way, you knew you were slowing down.

But now that's all changing. The Crown Victoria has been retired, and each of the Big Three car makers are selling police cars based on normal-sized cars that the average person might actually drive.

I hadn't realized how much I had come to depend on being able to spot police cars a mile away. A few days ago, I slowed down when I saw a Dodge Charger (now a common police car) parked at the side of the road.  But it turned out to be a used car for sale, and happened to be white. No, I didn't buy the car - who would want a car that makes everyone around you slow down?

Bogus Technology, Dude

A lot of people have been talking about this article in the New York Times by then-technology writer, Erik Sandberg-Diment. That's in spite of the fact it's from 1985. What's notable is that it is about laptops, or at least the overgrown calculators that passed for laptops in the eighties.  The article has been widely ridiculed for getting it about as wrong as possible.

As an aside, I wonder why people are only now seeing it. Presumably it's been sitting there on the NYT web site for years, just waiting for someone to find it. Maybe there's someone with a hobby of reading the Times thirty years later for fun.

The website Boing Boing made the point that the lesson of this article is less about obtuse journalism, and more about how companies try to push a technology before it's ready for the public. I think they've got a point. Consider what a "laptop" was in 1985: it wasn't just a portable desktop. These machines were underpowered even by the standards of the time. They made do with tiny, monochrome screens that only had room for a half-dozen lines.  In retrospect, the only reason those machines look useful is that we look at them knowing what they would evolve into.  Really, they were trying to produce future technology with what was available at the time: in other words, they were low-level steampunk.

It also reminds us that predictions have to be taken with a little context. One thing that stood out to me in the article was that he kept focusing on those laptops as failing due to their software. That's quite nonsensical today: we're used to laptops having the same software available as a desktop. But in those days, they were limited to custom-made, perhaps built-in, software, made to deal with the less-powerful processors and limited screens. If he could see what we consider a laptop today, he might change his tune. I'm guessing anyway; I couldn't find a comment from Sandberg-Diment himself.  As far as I can tell, he left technology journalism to go back to his first love, painting. 

Anyway, the point is, our world is well beyond the scope of a 1985 newspaper article.  Back in the twentieth century people thought of "the future" as starting in 2000, so we're not just living in his future, we're living beyond it. Who knows what people in the eighties would have imagined 2015 to look like. Oh, wait, we don't have to wonder, they made a whole movie about it.

I bring this up as someone who has made negative predictions about a few technologies myself. I've been bearish on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and drones. So I feel I should emphasize that I'm not saying these things will never happen, just that they'll take longer than people - particularly the media - think they'll take. I have no doubt that they're all possible, and barring disaster they'll all happen eventually.

But another point on considering misguided predictions from the past, is that it's never clear when to finally pass judgement. A second part of the article that stood out to me was his ridiculing the idea of lugging a laptop home from work, when you could just carry a few floppy disks. And of course, today we could replace those floppies with a thumb drive that's more portable and durable. So that's a good question, why do we lug our laptops/tablets/phones around?

The simple answer is that in a world where computers do so many things, the data and applications specific to us are more than we can fit on a thumb drive. But I wonder how long the current situation will last. More and more devices are connected, and more of our data is on the cloud. All we need are some breakthroughs in security, encryption and identification, and we would have a world where people feel comfortable accessing their personal data from whatever devices are available, not necessarily their own personal devices. To put it another way, we expect artificial lighting to be available wherever we go, but that doesn't mean we carry flashlights everywhere. It could be that people in the future will look back at laptops as a strange aberration in the history of computers, and see this New York Times article as very prescient.

Freudian Sip

Hmmm.... If you were going to name wine after a famous psychologist, I'm not sure Carl Jung is the one you'd go with.  You'd think that Mr. id himself, Freud, would be the name that would sell alcohol.  Though really, Freud would make more sense for hard liquor or maybe beer.  Or perhaps Freud Lite Beer would sell; it's the id of beer, the superego of reduced alcohol, and the ego of less calories.  I leave you to make up your own parody of "Tastes Great, Less Filling."

I should point out that this is no-alcohol wine. So perhaps the name is appropriate.  It encourages you to wonder what mental processes led you to buy expensive grape juice.

Droning On

When Amazon first revealed their plans to use drones for deliveries, I pooh-poohed the concept as impractical. I figured there was no way it would make financial sense to use a delivery method that has so little capacity and such a short range, so the whole thing must be a publicity stunt.

Well, if it is a publicity stunt, they're really good at bluffing, since they are continuing to test their drones, now at a secret location in B.C.  I don't know, maybe it makes sense for them to have a delivery system that only works within densely-populated centres.

But there's another aspect of the story that I noticed: the fact that they're testing in Canada, because it takes weeks to get regulatory approval, while in the U.S. it would take months.  (Of course, I could hardly not notice that aspect of the story, since Canadian news outlets proudly made that the focus of their coverage.)  Is it just me, or does that happen a lot.

Obviously, Canada and its government agencies are hardly paragons of efficiency, but it does seem like the red tape is significantly thicker South of the border.  This goes against the usual perception of their more minimalist government, compared to our more activist state.  I wonder why that would be.  It could be that government agencies there feel the need to work harder to justify their existence.  Or maybe America's sheer size leads to bigger, less flexible institutions.  Hopefully someone will find a way to quantify government bureaucracy so we can find a way to be smug about it.  I'm getting tired of bragging about health care.

Fire In The As-Yet-Unnamed New Capital Of Egypt

A few weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced plans to build a new city to serve as it's capital. That's ambitious, but not unusual, since a number of countries have planned, purpose-built capitals. Brasilia, Brazil is perhaps the most famous, since it was only built in the 50's. But history buffs may know that both Washington, D.C. and Canberra, Australia were originally planned to be capitals. There's also New Delhi, India and Islamabad, Pakistan, though they were both extensions of existing cities. And the new country of South Sudan proposed using its new oil wealth to rebuild its capital, Juba, in the shape of a giraffe.

It's easy to see why a country (particularly a new or growing one) might want a new capital: you can avoid the rivalry between existing cities and regions when choosing who gets to be capital. And since the capital is a sort of global face of the country, it's impressive if you have a nice shiny new one. Though it does reflect poorly on your country if you look at your existing cities, then decide you'd rather just start from scratch.

And that's the big downside of a planned capital: it costs a fortune. They're talking about $45 billion for the new Egyptian capital. And their economy isn't doing too well. No one wants to invest in a country that pauses every couple of years to change dictators. And the usually-lucrative tourism industry has been hurt because no one feels comfortable visiting the country where the religious party seems like the voice of reason. So people are taking a believe-it-when-we-see-it attitude.

But this issue does raise an interesting question: it’s hard enough to design a city from scratch, but if it’s going to be a national capital, how would that affect the design? You’d want it to be impressive and awe-inspiring, and you’d have to leave plenty of room for government offices and international embassies. You’d also want lots of nice, friendly places for photo-ops. But I don’t think the planners could put in all that work without yielding to the temptation to make sarcastic little touches, like having all the bureaucrats’ buildings be featureless grey cubes. It would also be nice if you could arrange it so that the poorest neighbourhood is between the nicest neighbourhood and the government offices, forcing the politicians to have an educational commute everyday.