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This article in Money invites you to “Put today’s economic peril in perspective.” What a good idea:

Before you panic over today’s headlines, and how far stocks could fall, consider the relative health of today’s economy.

In the early 1970s, economic output was falling. But today, despite the sluggishness, GDP is still inching ahead.

In the early 1980s, unemployment hit 10.8%. Today, the rate is 5.5%, or about half that.

Inflation topped 12% in the 1970s and 14% in the early 1980s. Today, it’s at 4%.

What the article does not mention, of course, is that since the 1970s the official government numbers have become steadily less honest; just as SAT scores were manipulated to appear better, so too have GDP, unemployment, and inflation. What would that perspective be if we used the same methodologies, compared apples to apples?

Economist John Williams does precisely that, at shadowstats.com. It is particularly interesting to contrast the above with his recalculations:

In the early 1970s, economic output was falling. But today, despite the sluggishness, GDP is still inching ahead.

In the early 1980s, unemployment hit 10.8%. Today, the rate is 5.5%, or about half that.

Here, even the official Bureau of Labor Statistics will admit the awful truth when you look at U-6 — that’s the number that includes not just the “officially unemployed,” but also people who have stopped trying, or work part-time because they can’t find full-time work.

Inflation topped 12% in the 1970s and 14% in the early 1980s. Today, it’s at 4%.

You don’t have to be an economist to know which of those numbers ring more true.

[Update: Harper's did a similar story a couple months ago, excerpted here.]

For the last three months I’ve been borrowing Deb’s Cybook, and I’ve had the opportunity this month to play with a Kindle. I think I’ve finally had enough experience to compare the two.

First, I will be unambiguous: this kind of device is a permanent part of my life. Exactly like John, I thought I’d ultimately be unwilling to part with the physical book experience. I miss (a little bit) the sound and feel of turning pages, but on the whole I discovered exactly what he did: it’s not so much that I love books, rather I love to read.

I do not miss having to hold a five-pound book when I’m laying in bed.

Second, I’m finding that I read more. When I finish a book, there are always a few dozen waiting for me, wherever I am. I can read more than one at a time, so there’s never the problem of not being in the mood for whichever I have on hand.

When it comes to travel, it’s a no-brainer — 5×7″ and 6 oz. holds my entire library. No more avoiding The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich just because I don’t want to haul 1,200 pages around.

I do not miss having three books crammed into my laptop bag, giving me scoliosis.

Finally, I have the unique… challenge? of living in Australia, where books were way more expensive to begin with, but are extra special stupid until they catch up to the reality of the weak US dollar. Not to mention that I don’t want to accumulate a physical library that I must someday dispose of, or crate across the ocean.

With that behind us, a brief comparison of the two devices awaits.

They have identical 8″ e-Ink displays. They both offer variable font sizes (though Kindle’s smallest is not quite small enough for Vlad’s tastes), and support pretty much the same file formats. Both take the same amount of time to turn a page, which is mostly a function of the display.

Cybook pros and cons:

• + charges from USB. This is big.

• + marginally smaller, thinner, and lighter than Kindle

• + easy to add TrueType fonts, though I’m told there may be a hack for Kindle

• + excellent battery life — I get 3-4 weeks of heavy usage per charge

• I dislike the colour of the brown leather cover, but I tolerate it because I dislike scratches even more. One-handed operation is more difficult (but not impossible) without it.

• no wireless book delivery, but USB works fine

• no keyboard (or: no space lost to the keyboard); your outlook on life dictates whether this is a pro or con

• - it lacks the Kindle’s explicit stand-by mode. You can disable automatic shutoff at the cost of some battery life, but I’m not sure how much. [Update: the battery only lasts about a day if it's always on, so that's a non-starter.]

• - from a cold start, it takes 20 seconds to boot, which is about twice as long as Kindle. This is only mildly annoying in practice.

• - very occasionally it drops a keypress (yes, even with the new firmware)

• - it has a generally pretty clunky UI:

  • there are no left-handed buttons
  • there’s no way to see which page # you’re on, so jumping around in the book is hard
  • the Library interface is just a flat list, so it gets progressively worse as you have more books in it
  • it requires way too many button presses to use bookmarks
  • very poor use of the few hardware buttons, which can’t be remapped. Three of the six buttons are dedicated to the music player, functionality I don’t even think it should have.

• - Bookeen violates the GPL on at least one piece of software

On the Kindle side of the ledger:

• + direct wireless delivery of books (in the US)

• + a “standby” mode that makes it basically instant-on, but offers only about a week of battery life

• + some very nice user interface elements, including the alien-technology scrollbar

• + a full keyboard, which allows full text search of your library

• + built-in dictionary and (in the US) Wikipedia search via wireless

• + big, easy-to-press buttons for left- and right-handed use

• some complain that those buttons are in fact too easy-to-press, though that does not seem to be universal

• you can take notes, if that’s your thing

• if you crave DRM, you can buy from the Kindle store

• - no USB charging. There’s an adapter, but it’s yet another cable to pack.

• - no built-in sans-serif font (maybe that only bothers me)

I could recommend the Cybook if it weren’t for the licensing issue. There seems to be no doubt that the device runs Linux (and presumably other GPL-licensed software). According to other customers, Bookeen’s response is that a non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer precludes the release of code. In that case, they shouldn’t be selling it.

Most of its other negatives could be resolved by a solid firmware update, so there is some small hope for the future.

The Kindle looks perfectly serviceable, though I lump the Kindle store in with the iTunes music store. On the one hand, Amazon are aggressively pushing down the price of books, particularly eBooks (which many publishers price higher than the paper edition). On the other hand, it’s another DRM-based business model that I’d rather not support. Fortunately, Kindle (Mobipocket) books are trivial to decrypt if you believe in exercising any of your fair-use rights.

Some people really want the functionality offered by the keyboard — direct purchase from the Kindle Store; note-taking; full-text searching — and others prefer the smallest possible device. I want the search, but I find myself rarely missing it in practice.

I think the next generation of these devices will resolve a lot of my complaints, but they are already at the point that, if you enjoy reading, I recommend you buy one today. It is one of very few devices that has truly improved my life.

Read this outstanding editorial from Salon about Obama’s flip-flop into supporting the horrendous FISA “compromise” to legalize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping and provide telecomm immunity.

This after he pledged not only to vote against the bill, but “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Which is a shame, because it’s another instance of Obama’s position on an issue being both anti-liberty and indistinguishable from that of George Bush or John McCain. And the sudden rush of his supporters to justify his decision is sad, even if predictable:

…because the Only Thing That Matters is that Barack Obama be put in the Oval Office, and we must do anything and everything — including remain silent when he embraces a full-scale assault on the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law — because every goal is now subordinate to electing Barack Obama our new Leader.

Some hope that enough phone calls will get him to return to his commitment, and maybe they’re right.

It’s obviously more about polling than principle.

I have always had mixed feelings about the terrible way that Apple treats their iPhone customers. Full-price locked devices; an exclusive agreement with an awful carrier that requires a multi-year contract; a completely closed platform. On the other hand, it was the most pleasant-to-use mobile phone I’ve ever owned, the devices became trivially unlockable, and thus AT&T avoidable.

By buying the hardware but avoiding AT&T (and the juicy subscriber revenue that gets passed along to Apple), I reasoned, I can reward them for making a good device, but punish them for the attempted lock-in. I could sleep at night.

And since I no longer live in a country with third-world mobile phone infrastructure — the United States — I have been eagerly and vocally anticipating the launch of the 3G iPhone since December.

Until, that is, the actual launch.

Last week’s keynote was, sadly, the most content-free Apple presentation I’ve ever seen:

• they mentioned the new operating system update only in passing, which leads me to believe that it will be forgettably incremental.

  Of course, they’ll still charge me the same incremental $80…

• they spent a disproportionate amount of time announcing enterprise calendar/mail syncing that catches up with what Microsoft and RIM had ten years ago — and Apple has the balls to charge $100pa for it.

  A survey of my friends indicates that 100% of them would like that functionality, but that 0% of them think it’s good value, or plan to pay.

  Especially Blackberry users, accustomed to getting this for free (or at any rate, silently built into the cost of their mobile plan)

• they spent almost an hour going through a seemingly endless litany of snoozer third-party applications en route to the iPhone. Two people in the audience were rushed to UCSF Medical Center with critical, boredom-related injuries.

  Like the Simpsons episodes that feature 30-second audio loops, this was transparent code for “we have absolutely nothing to announce, not even an iMac refresh, so we’re filling time with this garbage. Please short our stock.”

• instead of giving developers what they asked for — the ability to run background apps on the iPhone — they gave them another Apple lock-in, a service that stores and forwards data packets.

All of it underscored by the fact that Steve was off-stage most of the time, and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be the public face of that detritus either. There are also rumours about his cancer, but he was there; even if true, I don’t really think that was the issue.

If it weren’t for the announcement of the 3G iPhone, available in something like 70 countries, it would have been a total flop. There would have been riots at the Moscone Center.

But even that announcement comes with hidden poisonous spikes, already oozing thick venom. They’ve scrapped their old revenue-sharing plan with AT&T (though not the exclusivity) in favour of the traditional subsidized-phone model with which carriers are familiar — almost certainly the key to the new worldwide distribution.

In doing so, they’ve apparently decided not to sell unsubsidized phones at all. You won’t be able to buy an iPhone online. They won’t let you walk out of an Apple or AT&T store until you’ve activated iPhone — ie, signed a contract, and agreed to their ridiculous Terms, which you’d violate by unlocking your phone or installing unsupported third-party software. Things people actually want to do with their expensive hardware.

One analyst estimates that as many as thirty percent of first-gen iPhones were unlocked just to avoid using AT&T. Countless more were jailbroken to install third-party software.

So it was a year of retrenched Apple lock-in from start to finish, from the data “service”, to new iPhone distribution terms, the closed developer tools, and “only if Apple approves” iPhone software platform.

It’s such a disaster that I probably won’t get a 3G iPhone after all, despite my longing. We’ll see what the terms are like in Australia, where Optus and Vodafone are selling it. But I think I’m finished supporting this deplorable business model, just as I no longer buy music from the money vacuum.

My butt hurts, and I am mildly sunburned, but the West Indies know how to host a Test match.

The first two days went at a torrid pace, on a real bowler’s pitch, with Australia starting their second innings not long after tea on day two.

Katich made a brilliant 157, but dropped two sitters

Nobody, including myself, gave the West Indies a chance, particularly after Australia declared at lunch on day four, setting a total of 475 to chase in the final innings.

West Indies captain Chris Gayle, praying to God for 475 runs

They did surprisingly well — setting a new fourth-innings runs record for Kensington Oval — but nevertheless fell 87 short, for a fairly convincing Australian victory.

Except for day five, when prices were slashed, schoolchildren let in free, and the West Indies looked to have a tiny sliver of a hope of an outside chance of victory, the ground was cavernous and largely empty.

It was before lunch on this fifth day that the entire island lost power, which I discovered only because the radio commentary had ceased. The oval was restored (presumably via local generators) within about ten minutes; our villa was still dark and warm when we returned four hours later.

It’s hard to compete with the Perth Test against India in January, but it was certainly among the most exciting Tests I’ve ever witnessed. I’m sad it’s over.

(Complete photoset)

From the May 29 Toronto Star “Today in Pictures,” including this 100% not-made-up actual caption:

Frat Boys Meet

U.S. President George W. Bush and graduate Theodore Shiveley … bump chests at the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.

<shaver> that is a top-line resume item for that guy
<shaver> Objective: to again do anything as cool as chest-bumping POTUS at my graduation

[Props to beltzner]

I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time — I know — and while I think 1984 is a more accurate chronicle of modern life, Fahrenheit 451 was equally (but unexpectedly) terrifying. One’s mind does not need to execute a triple-lutz or complex pirouette maneuver in order to draw a line between the state of modern civil and academic liberties and Bradbury’s … fiction?

Coincidentally — or not; news like this seems to break about daily from that side of the pond — our brothers-in-arms at Emergent Chaos cheerfully document the UK’s further slide into self-parody as chronicled in “Hats banned from Yorkshire pubs over CCTV fears“. I couldn’t agree more. A hat is basically a burqa, and we all know what that means.

shaver recommended a masterstroke roughly approximating this recipe for ginger limeade.

We grated rather than sliced the ginger, replaced the still water with sparkling, and, critically, completed the grog by adding two cups of white rum — another cup may have been warranted, but we ran ourselves out of white rum at this point and decided that this was a natural signal to slow down.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which this beverage was a success. It is a challenge for which I am unprepared, indeed unwilling.

While I was back visiting Boston two weeks ago, Jacob treated me to the PBS mini-series Carrier that he’d been saving for me on his TiVo. Carrier put a team of documentary filmmakers aboard the USS Nimitz during a primarily middle-eastern deployment, and it is extremely compelling television.

Parts of the series are definitely too much like a seafaring soap opera for my tastes — I would much rather have a few more episodes of Discipline Hour with Master Chief, than someone whining about knocking up some girl and joining the Navy. But on balance it is truly excellent.

While some sailors are happy to support the war even if they have no idea why, a surprising number are totally frank, on camera, about their distinct lack of support (this back in 2005). You are free to think your own thoughts about how that does or does not square with their being in the volunteer armed services.

I’ll be honest, though, I’m here for the fighter jets, and the finest twenty minutes of the entire ten-hour series are to be found in episode seven, chapters four and five. There you can see them practicing operations on a violently pitching deck, in conditions so bad that the commanding officer eventually halted the exercises — but they still had to land the planes that were in the air.

You can view all of the episodes online, in full, so run, do not walk. Dirty foreigners will need to use a US proxy.