Glenn Fleishman comments on the Glif Kickstarter project:

The $70,000 raised so far is a small sum in the consumer product world, but two or three years ago, few of the steps that the Glif took between conception and production even existed. Atom-based production is still messy, but thanks to the efficiencies of electrons, the threshold for even considering it is a good deal lower.

It really is amazing how successful this project, and others, have been on Kickstarter. It not only provides funds for people to launch products, but also locks in an existing market so there is less initial risk.

Shawn Blanc envisions a MobileMe more integral to iOS:

Imagine if you will what a merging of Dropbox and MobileMe might look like. Something simple and completely expected, I suppose. It would be free, it would sync and share info and files, and it would let other apps use it for syncing. Imagine setting up your iPhone with your Apple ID once, and then any app that has a Mac and/or iPad counterpart would sync. Sounds like mobile bliss.

That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping for since MobileMe was released: that iDisk is fully integrated into iOS, so we never have to worry about whether a file is on out phone or computer: it’s on both, automatically.

Shawn thinks Apple should make MobileMe a free service, so it can not only be the iPhone’s web-based storage, but also what applications would use to sync their user data. That’d be a dream.

Apple should do this, and I think they will. Since competition from Android is so strong, they need to make the iOS platform as strong and easy to use as possible. Currently, syncing is a weak spot for the platform; developers have no good, simple way to build syncing into their applications. They can use Dropbox, which works well, but it’s clunky to ask users to sign up for another service; they can use MobileMe, which only a small subset of their users have; or they can roll their own, which is difficult. Apple needs to do what Shawn’s proposing.

Marco Arment is experimenting with a subscription to Instapaper. It’s opt-in and costs a dollar a month.

That’s a small price to pay for Instapaper.

Lawrence Lessig comments on The Social Network:

No doubt his handlers are panicked that the film will tarnish the brand. He should listen less to these handlers. As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world.

That’s exactly right. I saw The Social Network on Friday and I expected it to portray Mark Zuckerberg as an idea-stealing, privilege-seeking jerk.

That’s not the impression I got. While the film clearly made things up (especially in setting up a break up with another girl and desire to get into exclusive social clubs as the underlying motivation for creating Facebook), what I saw on screen wasn’t someone who blatantly stole an idea from others and profited from it, but rather someone who had a much better idea, and stronger insight for why the idea should exist, who feverishly worked and worked on it until it was a success. I not only cheered Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, but also left the theatre with a strong motivation to see a few ideas I’ve had bouncing around in my head to fruition.

I don’t like where Facebook is going, but I very much respect Zuckerberg.

Using Japan’s development as an example of what China shouldn’t do, Ethan Devine argues China must shift from exports and infrastructure to a consumer-driven economy. He points out, though, their governing model is incompatible with this kind of economy:

Yet it will likely have a hard time making such a shift. Dynamic service sectors are not generally compatible with central planning because service economies are naturally discombobulated. Technocrats can calculate where a new bridge or airport will have the greatest positive impact and then build that bridge or airport — but it is much harder to dictate from on high the creation of the next Facebook or to manifest a thriving small business sector.

It’s a great piece and I recommend reading it in full.

That is China’s main challenge over the next 10-20 years—their form of government not only isn’t ideal for a consumer-based economy, but it is fundamentally opposed to it. Currently, the Chinese economy is government-directed, with bias toward state-run companies. There is little companies can do without the support of local, regional or national government.

That’s difficult to change, but it will have to. Small entrepreneurial firms require freedom to operate and that freedom doesn’t really exist in China. It’s antithetical to the Chinese Communist Party’s main belief and philosophy: we are in control of the country and its direction. Ultimately, this switch will mean the CCP abdicating its power, and the government loosening its grip.

This doesn’t mean that, in the shorter term, the government will not be successful in creating state-run consumer markets. I think they will. But this isn’t a long-term strategy—an economy cannot be both centrally-planned and dynamic.

Glif is an iPhone 4 tripod mount that looks perfect. The creators need some startup funds, so they have a Kickstarter project to get it funded. Contributing $20 helps them get started and gets you a Glif when they’re ready.

I’m planning on contributing. I’ve been hoping for something like this.

Too little education spending isn’t the problem:

Cato has another chart showing the percent change in public school employment versus enrollment.

The President comments on extending Bush tax cuts:

Now, I’m not a math teacher. (Laughter.)  But I know a little bit about math.  They’re proposing about $4 trillion worth of tax cuts.  About $700 billion of those tax cuts are for people who typically are millionaires and billionaires, and on average would get $100,000 in tax relief — $700 billion that we don’t have, we’d have to borrow in order to provide these tax cuts.  And 98 percent of Americans wouldn’t see any benefit from it.  
 
And keep in mind that because we don’t have it, it would actually end up costing more than $700 billion, because we’d end up having — since we’re borrowing it, we’d have to pay interest on it.

Well that just sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Republicans want to extend $3.8 trillion of tax cuts (over a ten-year period), $700 billion of which results from income over $250,000. We can’t afford it, etc.

Funny thing, though: the President has proposed extending Bush’s tax cuts for income levels below $250,000. Extending those tax cuts costs—you guessed it—$3.1 trillion. So, the President is chastising Republicans for supporting the extension of $700 billion of tax cuts, all the while supporting $3.1 trillion worth over the same period.

So I suppose, Mr. President, we “can’t afford” $700 billion of tax cuts, but we can $3.1 trillion?

I guess a little class warfare and hypocrisy is fair game when you’re trying to win an election.

William Gibson:

The surprising thing about it — I almost said the insidious thing, but I’m trying to be anthropological — the surprising thing, to me, is that once we have our gramophone, or iPad, or locomotive, we become that which has the gramophone, the iPad, or the locomotive, and thereby, are instantly incapable of recognizing what just happened to us, as I believe we’re incapable of understanding what broadcast television, or the radio, or telephony did to us.

I strongly suspect that prior to those things we were something else. In that regard, our predecessors are in a sense unknowable. Imagine a world without recorded music: I always come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to imagine that, because I have become that which lives with recorded music.

Fascinating insight. If you want an immediate, but less stark, example, try going back to a dumb phone from your iPhone. When I’ve done it while between iPhones, it’s surprising how much having an always-connected device in my pocket that makes any and all information instantly and easily accessible changes how I think. After a few days, I stopped thinking about what was happening on the web; or while out somewhere, and a random question came up (“When was Mars discovered?”), I tried to rack my brain for the answer rather than reach into my pocket. Now, because there is an iPhone always in my pocket, it sort of feels like I have an invisible tether between my brain and the web.

Perhaps that’s just me, I don’t know. But in many ways, relying on a dumb phone was freeing. I couldn’t check my email, Twitter, or news while away from a computer and so I stopped thinking about it. I have a feeling this perpetual connectedness prevents some thoughts from entering my mind, because I think less and check Wikipedia more.

Gourmet Live for iPad is the first magazine actually designed for the iPad, rather than adapted to it:

You open the app and get a nice cover that fades into a set of stories, and then you tap on the stories to start reading. On some stories, when you finish reading you’ll hear a little bell ring and you’ll get a reward: access to even more content about that topic. That shows up in the form of a new “issue”, and all the issues you collect show up on a Rewards shelf that works a lot like iBooks. Pretty straightforward.

Rewards are the best part of using Gourmet Live — read a story on tailgating, and you’ll earn more stories about grilling. The goal was to acknowledge first that content is valuable, and that Gourmet readers are the kind of people who cherish collecting back issues that have meaningful stories in them. But we also wanted to capture some of that delight you get when you read an amazing story and just want to share it with people.

The experience is quite good. What a great idea.

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff estimates the net present value of the gap between government spending and revenues is $202 trillion. Yes, trillion:

How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?

Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.

This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.

The IMF estimates that closing this gap requires fourteen percent of GDP per year. For comparison, tax revenue hovers around fifteen percent of GDP each year.

I haven’t seen Kotlikoff’s calculation, so I won’t comment on it specifically, but what’s clear is our current level of spending is wholly unsustainable.

We must get control of our finances. Our future depends on it. Unfortunately, most people in Washington, D.C. couldn’t care less. They’d rather get reelected.

Eliminating Bush’s tax cuts won’t solve this, and neither will cutting discretionary spending here and there. This requires reforming our entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid), discretionary spending (defense spending primarily), healthcare (real healthcare reform, aimed at reducing costs for individuals and families) and our tax system, and serious economic development.

This is a primary reason why I opposed Obama’s healthcare “reform.” It doesn’t tackle healthcare’s real problem, cost, and tacks on another $400 billion of entitlement spending over the next decade, along with half a trillion dollars of new taxes, all while we’re staring true disaster in the face. The cynicism of this all boils my blood. Democrats used legitimate fears of our budget-deficit and debt to pass this bill, claiming that it reduces the deficit, when in fact it makes an impossibly heavy burden even heavier.

There’s no doubt that both parties not only created this mess, and thus far have refused to address it. The only person in Washington, D.C., though, with a plan on the table for doing what’s necessary to secure our future is Paul Ryan, a Congressman from Wisconsin. He wants to do all of the things listed above, none of which are politically beneficial, and he’s staked his career on it. As far as I am concerned, he’s the only honest man we have in Washington willing to do his job: push for what the country needs, not what will push forward his career.

David Caolo is running an experiment: he’s going to see whether writing incoming information on paper, or capturing it in an iPhone application, is more convenient for him. He’s going to test Due, TaskPaper, SimpleNote and OmniFocus.

Neat idea.

Commenting on our economy’s evolution away from stable manufacturing and office jobs, Seth Godin writes:

Protectionism isn’t going to fix this problem. Neither is stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to.

The transition to an industrial economy was painful, but I don’t think most people would like to go back to an agricultural economy.

David Winer thinks it not only makes sense for Facebook to make their own phone, but it’s incredibly obvious:

They have a shot at creating the mobile device my mother would love. And my mother has an iPhone, and it’s really hard to use when you look at it through her eyes. Seriously.

If you took the Facebook app for the iPhone and pulled it out through its umbilical cord and made it the operating environment instead of just an app, you’d have an awesomely simple mobile device. Just add an icon for Voice and you’re good to go.

There’s two reasons I can think of for Facebook to build their own phone: (1) because they feel threatened by the mobile platforms Apple and Google are building, and (2) to really nail the user experience and make Facebook front-and-center on users’ devices so they completely adopt Facebook. These reasons may be interconnected.

For the first reason, Facebook could see Android and iOS as a threat because on these platforms, Facebook is just another application, and mobile is what’s really important to Facebook. There’s no advantage for them over Twitter or Foursquare on these platforms, and so they could be irrelevant tomorrow. They have network effects helping them, but it’s not very reassuring—all users have to do to stop using them is delete their application, and Apple or Google could build their own social services and fully integrate them into their devices.

The second reason, then, is an extension of the first. Maybe Facebook believes they can try to force those platforms to integrate their services.

Facebook depends on users using their service for pretty much everything you and your social network are doing—discussing things between each other, what you’ve eaten, watched on TV, places you’ve went, et cetera—so they want to push users to use it as much as possible. A Facebook phone, where Facebook’s status updates and check-ins have a special status as compared to Twitter or Foursquare’s services, would certainly help.

There’s a lot of overhead involved in it. Why not just work with other companies to make Facebook the primary social service on their phones? After all, Facebook is trying to be a connective layer between devices. Perhaps Facebook thinks making their own phone is worth the cost because if it’s successful, it could encourage other phone companies to more deeply integrate Facebook into their devices. At that point, Facebook would be the main social layer we all rely on, because it’s embedded in our mobile devices, and they would win.

Finance Professor Rafghuram Rajan wrote in his book Fault Lines that the GSEs and the Fed’s low interest rates helped cause the housing bubble, so Paul Krugman “reviewed” it, trotting out his inaccurate analysis that the GSEs had little to do with it.

Rajan responsed to the review by showing why the GSEs and the Fed’s interest rates policy did contribute. Well written and well argued.