The next message

[Happy birthday to oakleaf_mirror!]

Hmm. Really, the message the Obama camp needs to play up next is "What are they afraid of?". McCain's left himself terrbly vulnerable, IMO: between refusing to let Palin do more than a tiny number of interviews and then finding a convenient excuse to postpone the debate, he's susceptible to a (quite possibly true) charge of political cowardice. It's uncomfortably Bushian: this sort of rigorous avoidance of anything that might not go perfectly according to message is a technique honed by the current Administration.

It's not Obama's style to say anything quite so overt in person: he prefers to stay polite. But I'll be surprised if they don't find a way to inject that meme into the political discussion. McCain's whole image is built around soldierly courage; this means that his weak spot is charges that he's mostly full of bluster. There's some real truth to that (ranging from his foreign policy to his campaign style, he has shown a love of showy risk but fairly poor calm resolve), and his current move is especially susceptible to it.

The other message, that needs to be hammered home today, is "A good President needs to be able to do multiple things at once". While it's admirable and correct to focus mostly on the business at hand, he really *should* be able to deal with one debate while that's going on. The world is not so simple as to allow you to put all but one crisis on the back burner. (Indeed, the tendency to ignore inconvenient messes is one of the Bush Administration's worse traits: they generally let many problems fester while they focus on one at a time...)

The next message

[Happy birthday to oakleaf_mirror!]

Hmm. Really, the message the Obama camp needs to play up next is "What are they afraid of?". McCain's left himself terrbly vulnerable, IMO: between refusing to let Palin do more than a tiny number of interviews and then finding a convenient excuse to postpone the debate, he's susceptible to a (quite possibly true) charge of political cowardice. It's uncomfortably Bushian: this sort of rigorous avoidance of anything that might not go perfectly according to message is a technique honed by the current Administration.

It's not Obama's style to say anything quite so overt in person: he prefers to stay polite. But I'll be surprised if they don't find a way to inject that meme into the political discussion. McCain's whole image is built around soldierly courage; this means that his weak spot is charges that he's mostly full of bluster. There's some real truth to that (ranging from his foreign policy to his campaign style, he has shown a love of showy risk but fairly poor calm resolve), and his current move is especially susceptible to it.

The other message, that needs to be hammered home today, is "A good President needs to be able to do multiple things at once". While it's admirable and correct to focus mostly on the business at hand, he really *should* be able to deal with one debate while that's going on. The world is not so simple as to allow you to put all but one crisis on the back burner. (Indeed, the tendency to ignore inconvenient messes is one of the Bush Administration's worse traits: they generally let many problems fester while they focus on one at a time...)

For those who think that crowd-sourcing is the way to find the best solutions to problems...

... I offer up the observation that we are currently in the middle of a really *excellent* counter-example. I mean, much though everyone would like to blame the Nasty Evil Bankers, the reality is that the meltdown is happening mostly because we, as a herd, allowed ourselves to believe that the situation couldn't possibly be *that* bad. (Yes, a few very smart economists saw the credit crunch coming, but by and large that observation did *not* float to the top.)

So while crowd-sourcing may be a fine way to find good answers on matters of opinion, I think we've got a fine example here that it can truly suck on matters of fact, especially in complicated situations. And yes -- this does imply a need for some well-designed regulation over markets, at least to tame the feedback loops...

For those who think that crowd-sourcing is the way to find the best solutions to problems...

... I offer up the observation that we are currently in the middle of a really *excellent* counter-example. I mean, much though everyone would like to blame the Nasty Evil Bankers, the reality is that the meltdown is happening mostly because we, as a herd, allowed ourselves to believe that the situation couldn't possibly be *that* bad. (Yes, a few very smart economists saw the credit crunch coming, but by and large that observation did *not* float to the top.)

So while crowd-sourcing may be a fine way to find good answers on matters of opinion, I think we've got a fine example here that it can truly suck on matters of fact, especially in complicated situations. And yes -- this does imply a need for some well-designed regulation over markets, at least to tame the feedback loops...

There are moments when I *truly* hate Java

Okay, I've kind of accepted that String equality doesn't work the way I expect it to. But Integers?!?!?

I just lost over an hour trying to figure out why (effectively) this:

Integer creatorId = [the person who is trying to start a conversation]
Integer ownerId = [fetch the person who actually owns the flist you're trying to post to]
if (creatorId != ownerId) throw Exception(...);

was throwing when exceptions trying to post to my own flist.

Yes, yes -- it's all terribly consistent in how it deals with reference vs. value objects. But that consistency leads to an astonishing number of utterly idiotic and pointless bugs. C# may be less theoretically clean and elegant, but it tends to do what I intended when I wrote the damned code, *especially* in the way it treats values vs. references. It is very, very rare for me to want to compare boxed value objects by reference, so Java's insistence on using the obvious comparison operators that way is a real PITA.

Once again, Java's ivory-tower purity is irritating the heck out of me. Aaron just described it to me as "the anti-Perl", and that's quite fair -- but I prefer a middle ground that doesn't carry things to *either* extreme...

There are moments when I *truly* hate Java

Okay, I've kind of accepted that String equality doesn't work the way I expect it to. But Integers?!?!?

I just lost over an hour trying to figure out why (effectively) this:

Integer creatorId = [the person who is trying to start a conversation]
Integer ownerId = [fetch the person who actually owns the flist you're trying to post to]
if (creatorId != ownerId) throw Exception(...);

was throwing when exceptions trying to post to my own flist.

Yes, yes -- it's all terribly consistent in how it deals with reference vs. value objects. But that consistency leads to an astonishing number of utterly idiotic and pointless bugs. C# may be less theoretically clean and elegant, but it tends to do what I intended when I wrote the damned code, *especially* in the way it treats values vs. references. It is very, very rare for me to want to compare boxed value objects by reference, so Java's insistence on using the obvious comparison operators that way is a real PITA.

Once again, Java's ivory-tower purity is irritating the heck out of me. Aaron just described it to me as "the anti-Perl", and that's quite fair -- but I prefer a middle ground that doesn't carry things to *either* extreme...