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Kindle, chi and the iMac

For all of you who have been anxiously awaiting news, here’s a photo of my Kindle Fire HD 7″ in its Persimmon leather case (“So you won’t go off and leave it in a hotel or coffee shop …”) It is really well integrated into the Amazon ecosystem: If you look closely you can see Sir Humphrey, the Minister, and Bernard. I haven’t tried editing documents, yet, but it’s very easy to upload and read PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.

kindleThe chi part. You can upload 250 songs from most anywhere — your iTunes library, for example — plus unlimited songs that you bought from Amazon, for free. Pretty good, huh? Then I get this email from Amazon:

“You may have noticed that songs from 8 CDs you have purchased from Amazon were added to your Cloud Player library. This means that high-quality MP3 versions of these songs are available for you to play or download from Cloud Player for FREE. You can find your songs in the “Purchased” playlist.” Continue reading →

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Did we just surrender?

The United States cannot fight a war against radical Islamism and win …

There are those who will tell you that if you can’t sit in on meetings of our national security apparatus, the best alternative is to read George Friedman. So his most recent column in Stratfor, Avoiding Wars that Never End, might be taken as a trial balloon for a less intrusive policy for dealing with the treat posed by radical Islam. Friedman proposes returning to the strategy that proved successful in the two great wars of the twentieth century:

The United States cannot fight a war against radical Islamism and win … But the United States has the option of following U.S. strategy in the two world wars. The United States was patient, accepted risks and shifted the burden to others, and when it acted, it acted out of necessity, with clearly defined goals matched by capabilities. Waiting until there is no choice but to go to war is not isolationism. Allowing others to carry the primary risk is not disengagement. Waging wars that are finite is not irresponsible.

Continue reading →

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Apres moi, le deluge

George Friedman, Founder and CEO of Stratfor, is always worth reading for the same reason that, say, James Kilpatrick was: You might not have agreed with much that he wrote, but there were usually a few nuggets amidst the infuriation, and he wrote so amazingly well. In fact, in his later years, his columns on writing were all I remember.

Friedman has an important column today in Stratfor, The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power. He opens with:

I received a great deal of feedback, with Europeans agreeing that this is the core problem and Americans arguing that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government’s official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

And proceeds to argue most eloquently that the United States faces exactly that. This was also something Boyd worried about. For examples, here’s part of his discussion of the prerequisites for an insurrection:

Insurrection/revolution becomes ripe when many perceive an illegitimate inequality—that is, when the people see themselves as being exploited and oppressed for the undeserved enrichment and betterment of an elite few. (Patterns, 94)

Continue reading →

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OODA sighting

I assume most of you have seen Tom Friedman’s oped in the NYT today, “More risk-taking, less poll-taking.”

He opens with:

THE U.S. military trains its fighter pilots on a principle called the “OODA Loop.” It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your OODA Loop is faster and more accurate than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other pilot’s OODA Loop is better, he’ll shoot you down. Right now, our national OODA Loop is broken.

Although we could quibble with his use of the term (for how Boyd actually used it, see “Boyd’s OODA Loop” on the Articles page), his claim that our “national OODA loop is broken” has some validity.

Recall that in Boyd’s framework, action flows from orientation. Individuals have orientations, but when we’re talking about countries or other groups, we need a surrogate for orientation. What Boyd suggested was something called a “common outlook” or “similar implicit orientation,” which he describes on pages 74 and 79 of Patterns and pp. 18-23 of Organic Design.

What Friedman appears to be arguing, and in this I think he’s right, is that we have nothing like the common implicit orientation that we need to implement solutions to our problems, and that the President’s focus now should be on creating one.

I haven’t seen the movie, but didn’t Lincoln say something about a house divided?

 

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The unexpected

Apple has charged the credit card for my wife’s new Mac, so I thought I’d see what’s going on.  Here’s the message from Apple’s Order Status page at 6 am EST Sunday morning:

We’re sorry, but our Order Status services are extremely busy right now. Please try again later.

All I can figure is that jubilant Packers fans are still up ordering new Macs.

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Eight years of cheng and chi

Congratulations to Amazon, again: For the 8th straight year, they’ve led the Holiday E-retail Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Forsee. Amid all the usual blather about the range of products they sell and how well their website works, the fundamental point got overlooked. Amazon’s competitors have had eight years (let that sink in for a second) to expand their range of products and fix any problems with their web sites, and still Amazon rules. And eight years for a scrappy new competitor to emerge. Continue reading →

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Awaiting my new Kindle

The first non-Apple device I’ve bought in more than 5 years.

With the Kindle Fire HD (7″), though, I’m going to diversify my ecosystem. Partly this is because I’m getting tired of reading about Apple filing yet one more lawsuit in an effort to limit consumer choice or trying yet again to fix prices. And partly it’s because for what I need, the Fire looks like a better device.

We already have 2 iPhones and an iPad, but I also have a lot of existing Kindle content (from a gift of an original Kindle years ago) and an Amazon Prime account. The Fire’s form factor seems ideal: If I need more computing power, I can carry my MacBook (yes, I’ll be replacing our two Macs next year with two more Macs). Otherwise the Kindle should be more portable than a laptop but better for Web surfing and movie watching than the iPhones.

I’ll let you know.