Monday, October 25, 2010

“GOP lieutenant governor candidate hopeful Calley credits his father for shaping his philosophy - Lansing State Journal” plus 2 more

“GOP lieutenant governor candidate hopeful Calley credits his father for shaping his philosophy - Lansing State Journal” plus 2 more

GOP lieutenant governor candidate hopeful Calley credits his father for shaping his philosophy - Lansing State Journal

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 12:59 AM PDT

ANN ARBOR - Brian Calley was just 11 years old when outgoing President Ronald Reagan gave his final official address from the Oval Office.

Calley remembers lying on the floor at his home, watching the historic speech in January 1989. It provided early motivation for a fast-paced political career that, at the relatively young age of 33, has Calley on the Republican ticket seeking to become Michigan's next lieutenant governor.

"It made quite an impression," Calley says of the Reagan farewell address made 21 years ago. "From there on out, I had a high level of interest in politics."

As a middle-schooler, Calley wrote a letter to former President Gerald Ford, asking about how he got started in public service. Ford sent back a personalized response, along with an autographed photo that hangs in Calley's office today.

By the time he reached high school, Calley was knocking on doors for candidates.

The resident of Danby Township, near Portland, was elected to the Ionia County Board of Commissioners at age 25 and to the Michigan House at 29. Now he's one of the Republican Party's rising young stars, selected by gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder to be his running mate in November.

Snyder comes from outside the Lansing establishment. Calley has been at the Capitol for less than four years, but he's quickly built a reputation as a thoughtful policy guru who is more likely to discuss bill details than fire off political soundbites.

If Snyder defeats Democrat Virg Bernero in November, Calley would be a go-to guy for pushing policy changes through a new Legislature - especially for bills related to tax issues and economic development.

Republicans and Democrats alike often file by Calley's desk on the House floor to find out his position on tax policy bills before casting their own votes. Even if they don't agree with him, they want to know where he stands and why.

"He is regarded as being wise beyond his years," says Rep. Ken Kurtz, R-Coldwater.

Republicans are the minority in the House, yet a half-dozen bills sponsored by Calley have been signed into law during his four-year career. Two dealt with property taxes.

Calley credits his father with helping shape his philosophy.

"The things that you consider to be taboo in polite conversation are exactly the sorts of things my family debated all growing up - religion and politics and that sort of thing," he said. "The kids in my family were always challenged to take note of what's happening in the world around them."

Church was mandatory and it's still a big part of Calley's life.

Calley was 19 when he married his high school sweetheart, Julie. They have three children.

Calley's mild-mannered, positive approach was honed through a decade spent in the banking industry, specializing in small businesses loans.

"I've found that with a positive attitude, you can really find solutions to difficult problems," Calley said.

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Economists Debate The Philosophy Behind British Budget Cuts - NPR News

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 11:23 AM PDT

The front pages of some British national
LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images/AFP

The front pages of some British national newspapers are pictured in London, on October 21, 2010, following the governments spending review cuts announced Wednesday.

As people pore through the British budget cuts announced yesterday, some analysis critical of the move is making the rounds. First, who is being hit, well, the Telegraph ran some figures and says it's the middle class:

Households with an income of more than £48,000 will each lose about five per cent of their annual earnings by paying thousands of pounds extra in tax while losing benefits and access to public services, Treasury figures indicate.

And it's that kind of hit that has some analysts worried that these kinds of cuts will prolong the economic downturn, not help it. Writing in the Guardian, Joseph Stiglitz, says the moves by the British Government ignore economic reality.

There is a shortage of aggregate demand – the demand for goods and services that generates jobs. Cutbacks in government spending will mean lower output and higher unemployment, unless something else fills the gap. Monetary policy won't. Short-term interest rates can't go any lower, and quantitative easing is not likely to substantially reduce the long-term interest rates government pays – and is even less likely to lead to substantial increases either in consumption or investment.

The New York Times reports on this as a battle between supporters and antagonists of John Maynard Keynes, and the whole idea of Keynesian economics. To incredibly simplify, that the right response in a downturn is government stimulus. But some in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, reports the Times, have a different view.

"Keynsians are regarded here as heterodox, not orthodox," said Andrew Lilico, an economist at the London-based research institute Policy Exchange, which has close intellectual ties to the Conservative Party. "And it goes back to one thing: we have this internal fear of losing control of our deficits and having foreigners telling us what to do. There is also a sense that deficits of this scale are morally lax."

Brad de Long, an economist at UC Berkeley, and a prolific blogger, is quoted in the Times as mourning the dismissal of Keynes. But he says it's not just Keynesian thinking the British government is ignoring, but that of legendary conservative economist Milton Friedman. de Long quotes Friedman at length, here's one paragraph where he describes his reaction to those economists who preach tighter government spending during a downturn, what Friedman called "the London (really Austrian) view."

The intellectual climate at Chicago had been wholly different. My teachers... blamed the monetary and fiscal authorities for permitting banks to fail.... [T]hey issued repeated pronunciamentos calling for governmental action to stem the deflation... "large and continuous deficit budgets to combat the mass unemployment and deflation of the times... Federal Reserve banks systematically pursue open-market operations with the double aim of facilitating necessary government financing and increasing the liquidity of the banking structure."

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Jobs argues for Soviet command philosophy - The Inquirer

Posted: 19 Oct 2010 09:02 AM PDT

Open systems don't always win

Tue Oct 19 2010, 16:58

REALITY DISTORTION appears to be one possible outcome of great success because for Apple CEO Steve Jobs the sales of his Iphone 4 and Ipad have led to open source not being open and most video on the web transforming into the HTML5 format, in his mind.

An enthusiastic Jobs delivered Apple's third quarter 2010 earnings call with an attack on competitors of his big Iphone tablet and a redefinition of what most of the IT world defines as open, with respect to open source software. After CFO Peter Oppenheimer talked about record $20 billion revenue for the third quarter with $11.4 billion from Iphones and Ipads and their accessories combined, Jobs took over and waded into Apple's competitors.

In a telling comment that would probably send a shiver down many a nerd's spine, Jobs said without flinching, "We see tremendous value in having Apple rather than the user being the system integrator." Integrated is the key word for Jobs because for him Android is not an open operating system and saying that it is, is "a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches".

For Jobs Android is not open software because it has many versions out in the market, making it "very fragmented", and this is a situation made worse with operators adding proprietary interfaces to it. For Apple's founder this leads to many app stores and many Android apps that won't work on Android phones. He mentioned four Android app stores Google's, Vodafone's, Verizon's and Amazon. Actually Jobs forgot to mention the app stores Archos and Toshiba have set up for their tablets.

Yet most people would imagine that a free and open source OS that has many versions on many handsets just means that it's popular. Each mobile network operator can choose the best version for its customers and many mobile users with unlocked handsets can change to whatever version they like.

Jobs gleefully mentioned that Android 2.2 'Froyo' was no good for tablets and it's true, as Google has said so. But when the tablet specific Android OS comes out, like for the phone handsets it's not a stretch of the imagination to realise that those existing tablet products will also be able to upgrade.

For Jobs these different versions for different products and the need to upgrade all leads to an unacceptable reduction in apps because his Itunes store has 300,000 and they all operate on the monolithic Iphone and Ipad operating system that is IOS. But will the fanboi who wants to spend their annual income on most of its 300,000 apps please step forward?

And of course Jobs must be right that people need a selection that would take many years to scroll through because, as he tells us, Apple has been activating 275,000 devices a day on average "for last 30 days". An average that saw activations peak at 300,000 on some days, said Jobs.

But in a revealing moment Jobs did use the word open in relation to Android saying, "Open systems don't always win", then he gave the example of Microsoft abandoning what Jobs called its play-for-sure music strategy. We're not even sure that Jobs actually knows what open source software is, based on what he talked about.

In another magical moment, the Apple founder said "I try to not predict, I try to just report," when asked about what share of his future business will be tablets or phones or something else. Yet minutes earlier he had said of his rivals' tablets, "We think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival, their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, abandoning their customers and developers."

Jobs reason for thinking 7-inch tablets are too small is because "we think 7-inch is too small for the software people want to use". Answers on a postcard please to the question, what functions do people want to use on tablets that they don't already use on phones?

In what could become seen as a strange admission Jobs said that the Ipad was outselling Macs and that the tablet format would have an impact on notebooks. One wonders, how many Mac sales will be replaced by Ipad sales? In the third quarter Ipod sales were down by 11 per cent year on year. Is it already an Ipad victim? Will Apple's notebooks be next?

But to top it all off, Jobs made a startling statement about video on the Internet. He said "Most of the video now available on the web is in HTML5." So there you have it, according to Steve Jobs, whose world view seems increasingly like that of a James Bond super villain - his video format already reigns supreme.

So never forget that "open systems don't always win". No doubt many octogenarian former members of the Soviet Union's politburo were telling themselves the same thing about Western societies, right up until November 1989. µ

 

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