It will be ready on time, Lord Vader
Well, that’s debatable. At last however, me and my dear darling has managed to finish building 10143, a.k.a. the Lego Death Star II. Thanks for the fantastic gift, ordningsfrun and family!
Some thoughts on the failure of John McCain
I knew it! Just as surely as water is wet I will be disappointed at the presidential campaigns in the last weeks before the general election. However, I’m more disappointed at McCain than I expected to be. It feels like things went downhill from the Palin nomination and took a turn for the worse in his response to the financial crisis. My impression of McCain from the 2000 primaries and onwards is that he would be a republican for thinking voters that wasn’t stuck in an unholy alliance with the christian right. Someone that with experience that had taken fights with lobbyists, earmarks and someone that had not always chosen the path of least resistance. To me that image was reinforced in the republican primary this spring, when he won against Mitt “Double Guantanamo” Romney and Mike “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards” Huckabee I interpreted that as a mandate to run a campaign not on fear of terrorist attacks or the promise of a christianist theocracy.
And yet we are here. McCain choose a running mate in Sarah Palin that is just too much. She refuse to have any press conferences, she obviously has a problem with abusing power as has been shown in the state trooper firing investigation and the little we know about her policy stances she is as far out on the right wing side as any of the people that actually lost the republican primary. McCain apparently chose Palin without any serious research. That’s a bit scary.
What is more scary, I think is that he managed to look everything but presidential when the recent economical crisis showed it’s ugly face. He claimed to suspend his campaign (which he didn’t) to get the republicans in congress to support the bail-out bill (which he failed at) only to go on with some really bad suggestions on how to solve the crisis. He managed to miss completely to point out that he had opposed the political decisions that started the suprime mortgage lending which is arguably the biggest single reason we’re in this mess. From what I’ve heard Obama’s positions on government mandates telling Fannie and Freddie to lend to people with poor credit ratings is not something to be proud of.
When things began to look bad in the polls, McCain did what may has done before. He went 100% negative in his ad buying, using all of his TV ad budget to attack Obama, and he didn’t do it very well at that. I think that most people see through trying to the attempts to tie Obama to the 70s terrorist Ayers. Even if it works it distracts McCain from getting out his main message. He can not not expect to win only because Obama seems scary, he needs to get his own message out as well.
So now almost everything points towards Obama as the next president. Let’s just hope that he isn’t against free trade as he pretends to be in his campaign. If he is, then this recession might very well turn into an ugly depression.
For a more insightful text on the failure of the McCain campaign in the longer perspective, I must recommend Ezra Klein’s excellent article McCain’s Anger problem.
Filed under Politics | Comment (0)Getting out of the closet
When is it appropriate to talk about your sexual orientation and gender identification? A difficult question, one that I struggled with a bit a few years back when I had just admitted to myself that I was bisexual, yet I was living in a heteronormative relationship and there were almost no one that knew that about me.
My bisexuality is an important part of me, and something that I want people around me to know about me. When people I spent time with didn’t know about that I felt a bit like I walked around with a secret, a secret that grew bigger and bigger by the day. Something that brought a feeling of distance in many relationships.
Life took a turn and I found myself sitting in a sofa on national TV (14min, Swedish) talking about my sexual orientation, and suddenly it was difficult to be more out than that (well, being in a four page interview (Swedish) in Sweden’s largest newspaper did also help), but others might not have that luxury. That’s one of the reasons of the National Coming Out Day this saturday. The coming out day is a great opportunity to tell people that you don’t normally talk about your sexual identity or gender identity who you are. If you are a Facebook user you can use your status message to tell the world that you are gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgendered, a straight ally or anything else that you would like the world to know about. Welcome out of the closet, whoever you are.
Filed under LGBT | Comment (0)I got my name in the paper!
When I was ten years old someone at Budbäraren, the weekly publication of the christian congregation that I was a member of at the time, did a human interest story on me. I remember the interview clearly, we talked about my interests and she took my picture when I played the violin, took a ride with my skateboard and played in the park. The feeling of seeing my name in print when the article was finally out was nothing short of amazing. Exactly the kind of attention I love.
Today I got a similar feeling, when my business partner Johan was interviewed in Financial Times about our company, Voxbiblia. And he even mentioned my name, next to the title “talented programmer”. It feels almost like I’m ten again. Not quite, but close.
Filed under Voxbiblia | Comment (0)How I came to be interested in economics
For too long I lived my life believing that economics was boring. The small pieces of economy news I got from TV and papers was rich in numbers and descriptions of specific events but thin on information about the larger picture. That changed when one day July, coincidentally the first day that the iPhone was on sale here in Sweden. I was in line outside a store for a few hours in the morning and while I was waiting I was listening to podcasts of the radio show This American Life. One specific episode caught my attention, and that was a one hour program dedicated to trying to explain the subprime mortgage crisis called The Giant Pool of Money. I found the story incredibly fascinating and when I had listened to the end I wanted more. So I looked around, primarily for podcasts with economy news, explanations and commentary and I found lots of interesting stuff. I followed NPR Economy News and learned a bit here and there, and then, when the real crisis hit in mid September I was hooked.
I found the Planet Money podcast from NPR that has been producing almost daily episodes. The length suits the bike ride down to the office almost perfectly. In addition to that I’ve been listening to Bloomberg on the economy which has had some really interesting stuff. Both programs mainly interviews different kinds of experts and ask them questions about current events in the financial and political system. That, combined with some blogposts and online newspaper articles has opened my eyes to a whole new world of knowledge. The world economy is such a complex machinery, with interactions that no one can fully understand but at the same time something that affects us all in many ways every day.
One thing that struck me when thinking about this is how much more difficult it would be to acquire the same amount of knowledge 15 years ago. I can now learn complicated stuff about how intra-bank lending works or doesn’t work and hear expert opinions about the levels of interest rates for free, without the need to have a higher education in economics or subscribe to any publications.
I think that this new easy access to massive amounts of knowledge and explanations of complex systems is something of a radical change in the pace of the development of the human race. Thinks might look depressing right now, when many people are talking about a world recession, but in the long run I think that the fact that the barriers to access to knowledge has lowered so much in just the last years will make life on this planet much better in years to come. That thought makes me happy.
Filed under Economy | Comments (2)