How to turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans

Such is the title of a great article in the Atlantic magazine. The article clearly articulates why the US political system is completely broken, and not even close to a "democracy". In my view, the system has devolved into a religious war - there is no room for compromise, intelligence, facts, or the good of the people. There is only room for bickering, hard stances, and 100% faith in your party.

As many of the comments point out, while the article outlines some ideas for fixing the system...it gives no guidance as to "how." Obama's social media campaign in the last election was largely one-way: he broadcast his message to people through SMS and twitter. Perhaps two-way social media is now at a point where average people can have their voices heard. That said, Google Groups or Facebook Groups don't seem to be organized enough, or mature enough, to handle the task of synthesizing the voice of large groups of individuals into something cohesive and comprehensible. I am sure that attempts at such systems exist on the Web, but none of them spring to mind to me. Hopefully there is a start-up out there with this as their goal.

Comments

Gliese 581g

So...there is probably intelligent life out there. As the old Monty Python saying goes, "I hope so, cause there certainly isn't much here on earth." Case in point. The video for Gliese581g is on MSNBC, and works fine in IE, but crashes in Chrome [ here ].

Acsoi - Land Grab Economics

"Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income" ( Acsoi ), is a measure of what a companies profits would be if they were not spending like crazy to acquire a space: in GroupOn's case, this would be retailers. To me, using Acsoi as a measure is really an admission that a company has no staying power beyond brand awareness. So, they need to grab and own as much mindshare as they can, as quickly as they can, to increase the barrier to entry for competitors. Without intellectual property to help protect them, and with the cost of switching (for a user) being effectively zero, building a global brand, and relying on brand stickiness, is the best way forward. Companies like Amazon that have been effective at this have also built in other "sticky" factors over time: recommendation engines, one-click purchasing, etc. This increases the cost for the user to switch, and allows the company to stop pouring money into marketing and acquisition costs. You also buil...

Schrodinger's Cat is still Alive...and Dead

With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would. One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis. It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at. Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life . One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule; Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work. Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging. Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book. While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak. Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against....

Todd G. Simpson

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