There's Always Been Anger

I agree with Atrios that the kids are alright, but I don't think the anger he mentions here is new.  I think that it is just more easily dispersed via the internet.  The vitriol you read in most comments sections today was always there, but pre-internet it was someone reading the paper and yelling at the wind (and maybe his wife and kids...and yes, it was probably a "he" then just as now).

The internet is a remarkable force in our lives, and primarily (overwhelmingly?) for good, but it is a tool, and one that can be and is used for ill at times.

900 Million?

I don't doubt that there are that many user id's in circulation, but, hell, I've got two accounts (one that I can no longer access because Facebook has (or at least had) no functional retrieval mechanism for lost/forgotten passwords.

Policy vs. Politics

I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as Atrios on this one. I think he, and lots of other professional or at least very involved members of "THE LEFT" have a pretty good handle on the politics of their preferred policies, but I don't think most do.

In general, I think that most people believe that their preferred policies are popular. And even those who are most certainly wrong can find/create polls that will support their belief on any particular issue--just think about US deficit/debt for a microsecond.

On the other hand there are also lots of ideas championed by people who know their pet idea is horribly unpopular, but are very confident that it is the best idea (the gas tax is a great example of this).

I have to admit that I've lost sight of what the pundits are there for. It seems that they should be there to explain policies and actions to people who don't understand, but that in practice all they do is use their position to tell people what they believe and that others should too! This isn't really all that different from what the army of bloggers does. To the extent that there are people who [seem to] get both the policy and the politics and who then try to convey that to others, I'd guess that fractions of political bloggers and pundits are about the same, but by sheer numbers, bloggers win.

...also, too, the more successful bloggers, like Atrios, are generally the better ones out there, so I guess the addendum is: compared to blogs that actually get read, pundits suck.

Mall Vacancy Rate Dropps a Bit

Of course, it's still very high. I wonder, though, if this is something that, after a bit of recovery (if the economy undertakes a real recovery) is going to get worse going forward.

Lots of retail is shifting to online. There are still things that people really prefer to go to a store to purchase: groceries and clothing come to mind. And there are service oriented retail spaces that will continue to be in demand, like restaurants and dry cleaners. For a lot of stores however, online just makes more sense. Electronics, cooking utensils, toys, tools and more are all easier to find and almost always cheaper online.

There is a very neat game store walking distance from me, they are likely to get only a very small fraction of my not very large amount of business. Even in the older/second-hand game market where a place like that used to be able to thrive, Ebay and 3rd party Amazon vendors are crowding out.

Even the box stores are going to have difficulties. There will always be a place for a Wal Mart or Target (though probably fewer than we have), but I don't see how a Best Buy can survive long term. They would probably have a better future in smaller retail spaces, where they would have a few things on hand along with a computer connected to their online inventory. Basically serve as a Radio Shack plus a location for large items to be picked up for the many people who can't have a 46" tv mailed to their house.

Full of Crap

Think what you will about pornography, but the porn church founder interviewed for this piece clearly doesn't have the first clue. My evidence:

He states, “You used to have to work hard to find it. Now you have to work hard to avoid it,” when talking about the internet back in its early days. Bullshit. The early internet was almost entirely: porn and joke pages.

That's about it. In fact, aside from the naked chicks every thing on the early internet was text: jokes, gaming info, hacking q&a's, et cetera. Even the other non-porn/non-text pages were dominated by sites dedicated to some celebrity...most of them of the attractive female variety. So either you were looking for naked women, or staring at Cindy Crawford in a bikini or reading the joke about the engineer, the physicist, and the mathematician.

Thank Goodness I Am Not An Aspiring Writer

I love to write. This blog, more than anything else, is testament to that, and it is hardly the only writing I do. It is among the less thoughtful and more abbreviated (sometimes) writing, and so aside from email it is the most frequent.

This writing is my venting, my cathartic release. While it is keyed such that I don't mind anyone reading it, it is not posted with the notion that anyone will. I'm not trying to catch a break or pick up followers or do anything else other than box in my thoughts. To give them structure and see whether they make as much sense to me as the feelings that stirred them. Often they do, sometimes they don't. I am often amused by going back and rereading something only to find that I disagree with myself at the time. More often I find that what I have written is not really a fair representation of the whole of my thoughts, but a small portion siphoned off that was jumping around actively for some particular reason.

This is preamble to my saying that this little op-ed is an interesting read. It is not entirely related.