Akkam’s Razor

• Digital guru Clay Shirky’s media forecast and predictions for 2009 | Media | The Guardian - "2009 is going to be a bloodbath." Yet he foresees that a recession may produce greater industry clarity by forcing radical action, which he explains as a boss saying to staff: "'Bonfire, this is Hail Mary time!', instead of: 'This year we made as much money as last year but we're still restructuring dramatically.'"

• Forgotten Bush Scandals - The Daily Beast - Everyone remembers WMD and "Mission Accomplished." But what about the sordid Bush moments that slipped through the cracks? The Daily Beast has 20 indiscretions you may have forgotten.
• Incentive Central | Incentives and the Automotive Industry -

In advance of likely atrocious December automobile sales figures, I’d like to offer a plain and simple explanation - the increase in the number of vehicles in use has outpaced the increase in the number drivers and absolute population.

Based on rough calculations on data from NationMaste.  The ratio of Vehicles-to-population (Vehicles:Population) reflects how many vehicles are in service compared to the total population.  Drivers-to-population reflects the number of licensed drivers compared to total population.  Lastly, vehicles-to-drivers reflects the ratio of vehicles in service to the numbers of drivers.  These numbers include fleet vehicles, rental vehicles, and taxis.

Add to that the current financial predicament as well as better cars with longer service lives and you end up with an auto population that is in service for longer and longer periods.  If I had access to more recent data, I suspect you’d fine an ‘auto bubble’ that started and ended slightly before the housing bubble, empowered by incentives, rebates, and ‘pull-ahead leasing programs’ as well as easy lending post 9/11.  It’s not enough to blame management, unions, or American manufacturers.

From the Nixon-Frost Interview (via Throwing Things):

Frost: Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?
Nixon: I’m saying that when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal!
Frost: …I’m sorry?

From a recent interview with Dick Cheney (via Raw Story, emphasis mine):

SCHIEFFER: Do you believe that the president in time of war, that anything he does is legal?

CHENEY: I can’t say that anything he does is legal. I think we do and we have historic precedent of taking action that you wouldn’t take in peacetime but that you will take sometimes in war time in order to do the basic job that you sign up to when you take the oath of office which is to support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. If you hark back in our history you can look at Abraham Lincoln who suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the middle of the Civil War.

SCHIEFFER: But nobody thinks that was legal.

CHENEY: Well, no. It certainly was in the sense he wasn’t impeached.

Quite the precedent, huh?

• "Innovation" is Dead. Herald The Birth of "Transformation" as The Key Concept for 2009. - BusinessWeek - In the end, “Innovation” proved to be weak as both a tactic and strategy in the face of economic and social turmoil. It couldn’t get us safely through the troubles of 08 (indeed, financial innovation was to large degree responsible for the economic trainwreck). Most importantly, “innovation” cannot guide us into an uncertain and tumultuous future. It is too narrow to generate radical alternative options and build risk-taking frontier skills needed to remake and restructure our lives, our economies and our countries. We need a deeper, more robust concept. “Transformation” captures the key changes already underway and can help guide us into the future. It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace edifices and big organizations (students already know this, university presidents still have edifice-complexes, which is why so many of them are getting the boot).

• Pa. open-records law takes effect today | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/01/2009 - The legislation will free Pennsylvania from having one of the worst records in the nation - some believe it was the worst - in providing access to government documents. In essence, it declares that all state, county and local government records are public unless specifically exempted. It is a vast change from the state's previous Right to Know Act, written in 1957, which had a very narrow definition of what constituted a public record.
• 9 Ways to Visualize Consumer Spending | FlowingData -

• How your friends’ friends can affect your mood - life - 30 December 2008 - New Scientist - Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.

• A New Fleet of Spacecraft - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com - NASA is developing spacecraft to replace its aging shuttle fleet and return astronauts to the Moon by 2020. The first spacecraft in the Constellation program is expected to be launched in 2015, five years after the scheduled end of the shuttle program.