Newt as a Republican Symptom

Tom Edsall, in his opinion piece Newt Gingrich and the Future of the Right in the New York Times, echos my Newt take:

But the country is going through a profound restructuring in moral and economic thinking and the danger for Republicans is that their current coalition might become obsolete. If the party doesn’t adapt, the alternative is that its power centers — the Christian right, anti-immigration forces, and proponents of policies that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less well-off — will refuse to adjust, in which case the party risks going the way of the Studebaker.

It's not just the growth in hispanic voters that threatens the viability of the Republican coalition, the entire country is shifting away from them.

Suicide is part of their culture

The perfect intersection of blogger boiz, o-bot and reality distortion

Exactly what Anglachel was writing about.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/164196027333750785

The Best Defense

There have been a flurry of wild claims that Google is Evil lately, mostly around social search and Google's new privacy policy. A bunch of TechCrunch alums at their new site Pandodaily are particularly incensed, posting dozens of sensational posts in the past week with titles like I Guess We Have Google’s Answer: Search Results Are No Longer Sacred (a classic in the "when did you stop beating your wife" genre), Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren’t Google’s Real Problems, Relevancy Is (good old anecdata), and that old yellow journalist's trick SPYW Update: Is Google Back-Pedaling Ahead of Company All-Hands?. Most of these pieces take decent reporting by people like Danny Sullivan and twist it beyond recognition.

Meanwhile Apple released it's fiscal 1Q2012 numbers (covering 4Q2011), showing obscene profits, and the New York Times front-paged a huge story on the abusive conditions in the factories that generate Apple's profits, showing how Apple has been complicit in the abuse. Somehow the Apple news only merited a few mentions in Pandodaily's ticker.

Muddying the waters is a classic technique of crisis PR, usually accomplished by pitching sympathetic reporters. Setting up a whole news site for the purpose is audacious. We'll see how this works out for Apple.

Obama Mitt Newt

I'm emerging from pessimism about Obama's chances. There is a decent chance that our economy won't be significantly worse by election day than it is now, and a small chance that unemployment will be marginally better. His Osawatomie, Kansas speech shows him beginning to grapple with the real issues for people, and could mark a new, Democratic trajectory for his campaign. European trouble makes Obama look good, and then there is the Republican field.

At this stage the Republican candidate will be either Romney or Gingrich (hard to believe). Romney, who was doing a decent job staying above the fray, is being weakened by the primary and a long slog against Gingrich will really damage him. Between being tarred by the Republican field's inanity and depressing his own base, Romney may hand the game to Obama. Gingrich is the perfect dope for Obama's favorite game, rope a dope. Going by primary state poll numbers Gingrich may win it.

An ascendant Newt may indicate my long anticipated collapse of the Republican party as a serious contender in national politics. They may be facing a period in the desert, like the 80s Democrats.

The origins of the financial crisis

What is the contribution of the financial sector?

via Krugman. A deeper view of what the financial sector's profitability was built on.

History repeats itself

 When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.

The fault is not in Steve Jobs, but in ourselves.

Siri, Why Are You So Underwhelming? 

AI is hard, replacing a human assistant is harder. For decades progress in AI stalled as researchers explored the dead end of building systems that mimicked how we describe our thought processes. Recent advances have come from Google style big data projects, but human interactions, systems that could pass the Turing test, are still out of reach.

Siri is another in a long line of attempts at a robotic assistant. These systems all suffer the same failures we are familiar from telephone voice prompt menu trees, they work adequately within a small domain but fail rapidly as you move outside that domain. It is faster and easier to use mechanical interfaces to computer systems, like a web site to book travel, than voice interfaces.

Jordan Cook at Techcrunch concludes his post with:

That’s the thing about the disappointment Siri brings with her — in the end it’s my fault. She’s a direct step into the future, and any one step into the future leads to a thousand more.

It's hard to imagine any company but Apple convincing a journalist to blame himself for their broken software. Something about Apple attracts the gullible. Some day we will build decent voice assistants, but not until we are much closer to AI. In the meantime these attempts are just gimmicks.