So long as the Democrats rule the political landscape in Congress and in the Executive branch, I’m willing to pull out my magical 8-ball to make a few predictions.

1. Obama won’t do anything for the economy. Don’t worry, we’ll hear how terrible our condition is and how we have such a long process to recovery but Obama’s policies will do very little to encourage anything remotely related to economic recovery. Economic recovery does not come from attempting to spend your way out of the doldrums. Trust me. I have a few thousand examples stacked up neatly in credit card bills that still arrive monthly. The difference is that I can’t walk away from my debt or ignore it or my credit rating suffers. Congress seems to think it has no credit rating.
2. Republicans will make a half-assed, half-hearted attempt to rally under the conservative banner only to mock it by electing more incompetant, mediocre representatives to office who are still bitter about homosexuals obtaining equal rights.
3. We’re going to gain a few civil liberties. We’re going to lose a lot more.
4. Democrats will raise taxes on the wealthy – only to realize the wealthy will only pay the same amount of tax if not less due to their incomprehensible economic policies.
5. Government will grow to new heights even leaving George W. Bush shaking his head at the size of government.
6. The war on drugs will continue to incarcerate a disproportionate number of minorities while ignoring the real costs and effects that it is leaving on our society. As long as Obama ignores the reality and complexity of the situation his presidency will degrade from historic to nothing more than the same.
7. Keynesianism will reveal its ugly head only to run into the same problems in created in the first place. You can’t spend your way out of debt. Balanced budgets don’t cut it when you have nearly 57 trillion dollars of debt piled up over the past 20 years or so.
8. A horribly neutered and irriducibly irrelevant health reform bill will make it through Congress that will be sure to make mediocre health care the standard rather than the occasional case. The only people who will be happy with it will be the insurance lobby and the medical community. A congressman will then tell us that we’re somehow better off now without ever substantiating the claim and ignoring the reality taking place right behind his back. (Think officer Brady from South Park)
9. All branches of government will continue to ignore the GAO.
10. Public schools will still be their mediocre selves.
11. Earmarks will reach a new height in dollars while the stupidity level of what Congressmen are earmarking funds for will remain the same (abyssmally high).
12. The Pentagon will pay some ludicrous sum of money for something ironic and moronic and then plead for more money to ensure they can equip our soldiers. The whole Rumsfeld painting is exempted – this was under Bush’s watch.
13. The Federal Student Loan system will teeter on the edge of failure only to be rescued by the same dolts who created it in the first place: government bureaucrats.
14. A giant corporation will collapse in a smoldering heap of failure after some stupidly arrogant crime is committed by an overpaid, well-parachuted executive. The executive will take a leap to safety on the parachute while stockholders will get bilked out of their equity. There will be plenty of fist shaking and a revision to SOX to ensure that all of those businesses who are doing honest business are punished for the crimes of a very small few.
15. Our tax system will continue to grow more complex leaving IRS employees more confused on just what money they are not entitled to.
16. The federal government will continue to pass off surplus and used military gear to local police departments who will be more than happy to deploy anti-personel armor and weapons for no-knock drug raids only to find a small amount of marijuana residue and a violently dangerous dog who was shot running away from the officers assaulting the home.
17. Police officers will continue to be held to some other standard rather than the law. The “Blue exception” to the law will prevail more often than not.
18. Paul Krugman will continue to write political pieces while completely ignoring the laws and rules of the very academic science he is known for: economics. He will violate at least 3 different economic laws or make at least 3 arguments that violate economic fallacies. To go one step further but not included in this prediction – I’ll guess he’ll violate the such staid axioms of economics like the “Broken window fallacy”, “The law of supply and demand”, and, oh, let’s say a contradiction of “opportunity costs”. The media will be quick to point out that he is a Nobel Laureate without paying attention to the fact that whatever he is commenting on directly violates one of many rules of the science of economics for which he won the Nobel.
19. A new drinking game will evolve from Obama speeches in which the rules dicate you must drink once every time Obama says “hope”; two drinks when he says “change”;  drink whole beer every time he attempts to relate to some historical situation as if today is as hard (or harder) than the past.
20. And one for the technology crew: Some new-fangled Internet service will take 10% of the population by storm. This service can do one stupid thing pretty damned well. Someone or some company will buy this other company only to realize that they have no way to monetize the damned thing and have a giant, gaping whole in their books where something like revenue or profit should be.

Now if you made it this far, you’ll realize that I think I can have most of these crossed off as accomplished in about a month or so. My larger point is that if you expect there to be some great change afoot, you’re probably more wrong than I am.

I ran across a post at one of the companies I like to keep tabs on, Cleversafe. They have an interesting product that allows you to disperse data across a network rather than just simply copying data. This gives the advantage of using far less disk space than you would use by copying data over RAID and several backups. But that isn’t my point.

There was an interesting post in their blog with some informative economic insight that you normally wouldn’t think twice about. In the post, the author notes that back in 1956, a 5MB hard disk drive cost roughly $50,000 or $10,000 per MegaByte.

With the recent announcements of 4TB hard drives on the horizon, the author reflexively does the calculations to arrive at the 1956 cost of the same disk space: $40 billion. That’s right, if you needed 4TB of storage in 1956, you would have… a $40 billion investment. Of course, that is in 1956 dollars. In today’s dollars, inflation adjusted, the grand total a 4TB size of a drive would have cost is:

$302,002,380,304

You are reading that right. If a 4TB hard drive was built in 1956 by IBM, it would have cost you roughly $302 billion in today’s dollars. So what is the lesson? It isn’t that a 4TB hard drive is really worth $302 billion dollars.

There are quite a few different lessons that can be derived from this. For many of us in technology, we tend to take progress for granted. However the technology and PC market is one where we can see how markets really work. Prices are continually driven down by innovation. Think about that – our current computers are yesterday’s “super” computers. Many “super” computers are nothing more than a chain of systems similar to what we have on the desk top now.

The real economic lesson in this story is that while a lot of people complain about the “stagnating wages” of the “middle” and “lower” classes, you can only complain insofar as you are able to ignore progress where prices are constantly driven downwards.

So I bought a Motorola Q9c from Sprint back in February. It is, without a doubt, the worst phone I’ve ever owned. Oh Motorola Q9c, how I hate thee, let me count the ways:

• Since March 2008, it’s been bricked at least 3-4 times. Thankfully a hard reset resolved the issue each time but no after losing a bunch of settings.
• Windows Mobile blows. It’s like Windows 3.11, just a bit prettier
• The camera takes decent shots. But its slow.
• The menu system sucks.
• When the battery dies completely, you need to have a Motorola charger. You can’t just hook it up via USB and let it charge.
• Too bad a third party software company makes a better software for syncing on the Mac than anything available on Windows. That’s pretty damned sad.

Now I’m stuck with the phone for the next two years and i want to get rid of it completely. I’d sell it and get a new one but I would pity the poor fool who buys it.

You have to love the French government – a modern country frozen in dark-ages mentality. However the precedent the French are attempting to set with this case is dangerous. Since eBay is largely a community of buyers and sellers, holding the mechanism responsible is just beyond the reach of the rational.

Fake goods are a plague for brands; a boon for those who could care less. However eBay never takes posession of the goods in the marketplace. It is not an escrow service for buying and selling and has no business verifying authenticity of goods on the site. While some may disagree, the responsibility lies with the person who sold the merchandise to the buyer. Imagine if we held the government up to the same standard. Any illegal activity taking place on the street would logically be the government’s fault. If drugs are illegal and sold on the street, the government would then be the sole party responsible for the sale of illegal drugs.  If someone were to die from taking a fake drug, the dealer would essentially remain free and the government would be levied with the burden of carrying the debt.

While I am, by no means, privy to any information in the case (see ‘About’ for disclaimer),  I do question the logic of the French court system. There are generally two outcomes that will arise: eBay will most likely be sued in French courts by others who are attempting to “protect” their brands, and consumers will face a backlash as the goods (real or fake) begin to disappear.

How is this good for consumers? It helps to clamp down on fake goods. How is it bad? Since eBay has no real ability to validate whether goods are legitimate, it may force the removal of legitimate luxury goods. Forget selling that Louis Vuitton hand bag you bought from the retail store on eBay. If eBay is the one holding the liability for those goods, do you really think they want to face lawsuit after lawsuit from these brands?

If there is one thing I hate about watching TV, it’s watching TV on the Internet. No bones about it, most major media outlets continue to get wrong what they can’t get right over the airwaves.

Commercials: bathroom breaks for some, pet peeve and bane to others. So why do larger media outlets think that their vision of video on the Internet is no different than that on the airwaves? This type of thinking will only lead to overall failure; failure to gain and retain viewers; failure to get marketshare; failure to provide anyone with any service that is worth spending time watching.

On the top of my pet peeve list is  those video sites that use Windows Media. Of course, I’m a Mac and Linux user so I can have some gripes with it. However To view video on the Mac, I need to download flip4mac which has its own “quirks” to say the least.

But back to advertising. I’ve gone to watch videos where the first 15 to 30 seconds of the video is an advertisement. Thanks for wasting my time and making me watch another dumb Microsoft commercial trying to sell me on the wonders of Word. A 30 second advertisement and a 2-3 minute video is a worse experience than watching live TV. Way to go… Way to leverage all the wonderful power that technology has given us by making the entire experience worse than what it was. Hopefully the post office won’t go back to using horse-drawn mail delivery.

Mass media execs have entirely missed the Internet boat. It sailed by them a long time ago. Is it really any wonder why people will spend a few hours watching videos on YouTube? Is it, aside from the dork factor of watching other people do stupid things, because the content is short, to the point, and generally entertaining without being draining?

I often wonder how many marketing execs would take a radio script and put the entire script up as print ad in a magazine or newspaper. It would generally be boring to see nothing but huge blocks of text and they would be mostly ignored. Good advertising is alluring within the media format it is designed for. Internet TV is not the same as “regular” TV (and I include cable), but that has not stopped marketing execs from applying one script to a different medium.

While I’m hardly one to pick on the business world and corporations, but for the bucks many of these institutions are paying for highly trained MBAs and/or consultants, very few of them have the wherewithal to think outside of the rectangular box (with a power cord).

A Java IDE vendor promoting their wares with:

“JCreator is written entirely in C++, which makes it fast and efficient compared to the Java based editors/IDE’s.”

Oh the irony.