20090101 Bigger Than Bush By PAUL KRUGMAN (January 1, 2009)

permalink: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02krugman.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.

The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

***note***

Alberto Gonzales:

前司法部長岡薩雷斯.

他是布什總統最親密的顧問，更一手策劃美國嚴苛的反恐法律

他更主張關押在關達那摩灣美軍基地的恐怖嫌犯，不享有日內瓦公約規定的權利。

(http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/7/8/27/n1815428.htm)

Rush Limbaugh: 保守派名嘴

Chuck Schumer: NY參議員

conspiracy:

(http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/22/limbaugh-democrats-indy/)

G.O.P.: Grand Old Party 共和黨是美國歷史悠久的大黨…(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.O.P.)

party of racial backlash:

種族：自從1964年以來，共和黨在非裔美国人中受到的支持度相當少，在近年來的全國性選舉上只獲得不到15%的黑人選票（1984到2004）。

(http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%B1%E5%92%8C%E9%BB%A8_(%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B))

Heritage Foundation:

傳統基金會（Heritage Foundation），被視為美國親保守派的重要智囊組織

(http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E4%BC%A0%E7%BB%9F%E5%9F%BA%E9%87%91%E4%BC%9A&variant=zh-hant)

Ronald Reagan: 列根, 第40任總統 (1981-1989) 他始終強調他對於聯邦政府在處理問題上的能力抱持著懷疑態度，尤其是在經濟問題方面。他的解決方式是撤回政府的干涉並減少稅率和撤銷管制，以此讓自由市場機制能自動修正所面臨的問題。他在就職典禮那天說道：「政府並不是解決問題的方法，政府本身才是問題所在。」

(http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BD%97%E7%BA%B3%E5%BE%B7%C2%B7%E9%87%8C%E6%A0%B9)

Southern strategy:

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a Republican method of carrying Southern states and conservative Democratic voters in the latter decades of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st century by exploiting racism among white voters.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)

Voting Rights Act:

即是比黑人投票

Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965)

cuttin tax:

我估…減稅即是govt要減開支, 減服務, 所以窮人(black ppl)就受到較大的影響…

Negro:

this is actually an ethnic slur referring to black people.

Reconstruction:

refers to the period during and after the Civil War, between 1863 and 1877..

civil war = 南北戰爭.

南方諸州 = 奴隸制合法

(http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B%E5%85%A7%E6%88%B0#.E5.8D.97.E6.96.B9.E8.AB.B8.E5.B7.9E)

所以, southern states = racist..?

cul-de-sac:

dead-end street

***thought***

呢篇野真係睇死我啦…知識貧乏的結果….
我估佢想講的是
bush是的失敗係在於republicans40年前的決定

為了得到南方的支持
就反對Voting Rights Act
實行d對黑人不利的政策
做成’反政府’的立場 (因為政府比d福利出去–>幫黑人)
於是用人只要忠心, 不理能力, 忽視管理質素

如此這般, 就變成今日咁既田地喇…

40年前的因, 好漫長啊….
但當初點解要南方的支持呢?  因為有錢….?  好難明….

20081229 Editorial War Over Gaza (December 29, 2008)

permalink: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30tue1.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory. Still we fear that Israel’s response — devastating airstrikes that represent the largest military operation in Gaza since 1967 — is unlikely to weaken the militant Palestinian group substantially or move things any closer to what all Israelis and all Palestinians need: a durable peace agreement and a two-state solution.

Israel must make every effort to limit civilian casualties. Hamas’s leaders, especially those safely ensconced in Damascus(敘利亞首都), are unconcerned about their people’s suffering — and masters at capitalizing on it.

Before the conflict spins out of control, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries will have to find ways to cajole or more likely threaten Hamas (or its patrons in Syria and Iran) to accept a new cease-fire.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should be pressing Cairo and Riyadh to use all of their influence with Hamas, and they should be pressing Israel to exercise restraint.

By Monday, some 350 Palestinians — mostly Hamas security forces — were reported killed. A Hamas security compound was among dozens of structures pummeled in the attacks, and the group’s leaders were supposedly driven into hiding. The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, promised a “war to the bitter end.”

We hope he does not mean a ground war. That, or any prolonged military action, would be disastrous for Israel and lead to wider regional instability. Mr. Barak and Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, both candidates to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in elections set for February, must not be drawn any further into a competition with the front-runner, Benjamin Netanyahu, over who is the biggest hawk.

There can be no justification for Hamas’s attacks or its virulent rejectionism. But others must also take responsibility for the current mess. Hamas never fully observed the cease-fire that went into effect on June 19 and Israel never really lived up to its commitment to ease its punishing embargo on Gaza. When the cease-fire ran out, no one, including the Bush administration, made a serious effort to get it extended.

Meanwhile, the peace process Mr. Bush launched with such fanfare in Annapolis last year is moribund. There is plenty of blame to go around for that, too. Mr. Olmert’s government failed to halt settlements and give the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas — Hamas’s sworn enemy — the support he needed. Mr. Bush refused to press Mr. Olmert to do what was needed but politically unpalatable. Arab leaders never did enough to boost Mr. Abbas, or to persuade or pressure Hamas to cut its ties with Iran and join peace efforts.

Ms. Rice once hoped to make a Middle East peace her legacy. It is too late for that. But she should do her job. That means getting on a plane for Cairo and Riyadh — now — to enlist their help in brokering a new cease-fire. Then it will be up to President-elect Barack Obama to quickly pick up the pieces and fashion a Middle East peace strategy that may actually bring peace.

都幾廢話喎…

不過得閒補充下中東問題的知識先…完全唔知佢地做乜打來打去…

20081228 Editorial The Gas Tax (December 26, 2008)

President-elect Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress seem to have a clear vision of the auto industry they think the country needs. It must be financially self-sufficient. It also must be capable of producing highly fuel-efficient, next-generation vehicles that can help the nation cope with climate change and finite supplies of oil.

Yet for all the conditions attached to it, the multibillion-dollar aid package for Detroit’s carmakers approved by the White House (with Mr. Obama’s support) fails to address one crucial question: Who will buy all the fuel-efficient cars that Detroit carmakers are supposed to make?

The danger is that too few will, especially if gasoline prices remain low. Therefore, it might be time for the president-elect and Congress to think seriously about imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up after the economy recovers from recession.

Americans did not buy enormous gas guzzlers just because Detroit marketed them relentlessly. They bought them because they wanted big cars — and because gas was cheap. If gas stays cheap, Americans would be less inclined to squeeze their families into a lithe fuel-efficient alternative.

Furthermore, even if the government managed to convert General Motors, Chrysler and Ford to the cause of energy efficiency, cheap gas could open the door for a competitor — Toyota, perhaps? — to take over the lucrative market for gas-chuggers, leaving Detroit’s automakers eating dust once again.

Americans have flirted with fuel-efficient cars before only to jilt them when gas prices fell. In the late 1970s, for instance, they spurned light trucks as gas prices doubled. But as gas prices declined between 1981 and 2005, the market share of sport-utility vehicles, pickups, vans and the like jumped from 16 percent to 61 percent of vehicle sales in the United States.

The recent infatuation with the Toyota Prius and other fuel-efficient cars could well come to a similar end. It took a gallon of gas at $4.10 to push the share of light trucks down to 45 percent in July. But as gasoline plummeted back to $1.60 a gallon, their share inched back up to 49 percent of auto sales in November.

There are several ways to tax gas. One would be to devise a variable consumption tax in such a way that a gallon of unleaded gasoline at the pump would never go below a floor of $4 or $5 (in 2008 dollars), fluctuating to accommodate changing oil prices and other costs. Robert Lawrence, an economist at Harvard, proposes a variable tariff on imported oil to achieve the same effect and also to stimulate the development of domestic energy sources.

In both cases, the fuel taxes could be offset with tax credits to protect vulnerable segments of the population.

While oil prices are all but sure to rise again as the world emerges from recession, further tempering consumption with a gas tax would both slow the rise in the price of crude and steer more revenue from energy consumption to the United States budget, rather than that of oil-exporting countries.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.

This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

哦…一石二鳥!  仲賺多d稅添!

但苦了小市民啊

但美國車, 應該轉一轉市場策略囉 – 點睇d美國車都好唔吸引!

20081227 Editorial A Few Big Ideas (December 30, 2008)

permalink: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/opinion/31wed1.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Over the past several months, we’ve discussed the many, severe challenges confronting America’s military services and recommended a set of urgent fixes to relieve the stresses on the men and women fighting overseas and keep the country safe. It is also worth exploring more long-term ideas. Here are three that have particularly impressed us, that we hope will help stimulate a wider debate.

Mr. Gates Champions Diplomacy: Cabinet secretaries rarely go to bat for other departments, especially when their own budgets could be at risk. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pressed the case for more robust diplomacy and more spending on the State Department and foreign aid. “But not every outrage, every act of aggression or every crisis can or should elicit a military response,” he wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Wherever possible, he said, military action “should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom terrorists recruit.” That sounds pretty levelheaded to us.

It also is a big change from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who fought to control every aspect of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and pretty much everything else. Many of his generals were a lot smarter, pleading for more help from State Department experts on reconstruction, politics and foreign aid. Too often the State Department lacked enough people with the right skills to do those jobs.

America must ensure that its military remains strong. But the State Department also must develop more capacity for conflict prevention and for postconflict reconstruction. We’re glad to see that Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of state, seems determined to bolster the agency’s role. We hope that she can depend on Mr. Gates for continued support, no matter how tough the budget fights may get.

So What About Transformation? We know that was the buzzword of Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. So it’s not surprising that all the talk of high-tech war, and owning the battlefield, has lost a lot of its luster. “Shock and awe” did not deliver the promised swift, antiseptic victory in Iraq. A smaller, more mobile ground force proved — disastrously — to be far too small for fighting insurgents or rebuilding a shattered Iraq.

We know that. But continued technological transformation is still essential to the future success of the armed forces. The point is to learn from these past mistakes and get it right.

The Pentagon needs to make smarter uses of technology and not forget about other necessary elements and skills of 21st-century warfare — like adequate postwar planning, sufficient numbers of troops on the ground and better training in dealing with civilian populations. A skilled translator or a civil-affairs specialist could help win hearts and minds while a poorly aimed smart bomb that destroys the wrong house would lose them.

Superior technology has been America’s great comparative advantage on battlefields around the world for generations. It must continue to be so.

The Army’s troubled Future Combat System — a network of ground vehicles, pilotless aircraft and launching systems intended to provide individual soldiers with a real-time satellite view of the entire battlefield — exemplifies the great potential value and some of the potential pitfalls of highly advanced technology.

Conceived before 9/11, it is not primarily a counterinsurgency weapon. But it would give American ground forces enormous advantages in any future battles against a conventionally organized enemy force. Such contingencies are too likely not to prepare for.

But since the Future Combat System is built around so many new and previously untested elements, it has encountered major cost overruns and serious delays. Parts of the program have been cut back. And critics are now asking if its development costs might not be better spent on personnel and other more pressing needs. The Army clearly needs to get a better grip on the system’s costs and progress. But it is the kind of technology that promises to make American ground forces safer and more effective on 21st-century battlefields.

Jointness: Another concept that the Pentagon has spent more time talking about than applying is “jointness.” Translated, it means getting the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to transcend interservice rivalries and practice fighting together, developing and using common equipment and sharing bases.

Jointness is a terrific idea, which can save a lot of money and make troops more effective on the battlefield. Other militaries, Israel’s for example, practice jointness across the board. The Pentagon mostly confines it to special projects. The most ambitious of these is the F-35 joint strike fighter, developed to serve both Air Force and Navy needs. It is scheduled to come into production in 2012. Unfortunately, the Air Force and Navy also developed their own expensive next-generation fighter aircraft while waiting for the F-35 to become available.

The case for jointness goes far beyond procurement. As William A. Owens, a retired Navy admiral, wrote in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times, the defense budget is padded with redundant spending for communications, intelligence, medical and administrative expenses that the services could easily consolidate. He also pointed out that combining currently separate Army, Navy and Air Force bases into “megabases” could save tens of billions of dollars and actually add to military effectiveness.

It is a big idea that many in the services will resist. But at a time when the country is facing grave threats — and when the military is under such grave stress — all of the nation’s leaders must be open to big ideas.

唔係撒軍咩?  仲搞咁多野….

20081226 The Evil Behind the Smiles By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF (December 31, 2008)

permalink: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.

But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.

After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.

“My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable.

Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.

“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.

Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.

After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.

I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.

“I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.”

“Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.”

Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!”

Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.

Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I’ll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina’s own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn’t.

I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.

d有錢的西方人走去貧窮地方獵奇…

真係好多陰暗面呢…

所以果套變態電影HOSTEL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostel_(film)) 個主題幾好呀~

警惕下d咸蟲!!

20081225 Future Bits: Google’s Machiavellianism By Saul Hansell (December 24, 2008)

source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/future-bits-googles-machiavellianism/

This post is the second in a short series looking at the defining moments in the technology world in 2008 and posing some crucial questions for 2009.

Defining Moment of 2008: Google’s offer to help Yahoo fend off Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid.
(Credit: STF/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

Google’s response to Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo may represent one of the most brilliant acts of corporate Machiavellianism in recent history. Two days after the hostile offer was announced, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote a post on Google’s blog opposing the deal and aligning itself with Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and chief executive, who wanted to keep the company independent.

Google’s support helped embolden Mr. Yang and encouraged him to play hard-to-get with Microsoft until the software giant withdrew its offer. Google then agreed to help bolster Yahoo’s profits by selling some search advertising for it — a deal that was ultimately scuttled in the face of scrutiny by the Justice Department.

The upshot of all this is that Google continues to gain share in the search market and Internet audience, and all its competitors remain in disarray. Yahoo has lost two tiers of top management. Microsoft just hired one former Yahoo executive to develop yet another Internet strategy. And AOL, which has been negotiating possible combinations with both Microsoft and Yahoo, remains in play, reportedly unloved by Time Warner, its corporate parent.

While Microsoft’s dream of mounting a true challenge to Google’s search dominance is elusive, the market for display advertising remains divided and up for grabs. But it is display advertising that has been hardest hit by the recession.

Defining Question for 2009: Can Google get its act together in display advertising before its rivals do?

Keeping the competition divided has bought Google more time, but it hasn’t won the battle. It is still trying to integrate DoubleClick, the advertising technology firm it bought, and it has yet to explain to the market the advantage of the combination.

A major unanswered question for Google is how it will use data about Internet users to further its advertising ambitions. All of its rivals are building profiles of users’ behavior online in the hopes that they can charge higher prices to advertisers looking for particular sorts of prospects. Google has been developing plans to use some of the considerable data it collects, but it has not yet committed to moving forward with them.

Another challenge for Google is managing its free-wheeling, free-spending culture in leaner economic times. There are certainly signs that the company is trying to cut back on perks and contractors, but it is not clear yet how much the company will change — for better or worse. It is also tweaking its site to increase revenue from pages that didn’t have many ads.

Google still has lots of advantages, including a powerful brand with consumers and a huge cash flow.

What it can’t count on, however, is that its competitors will remain ineffective and bumbling forever (although it’s been a long time since AOL and Microsoft’s Internet unit have been anything but).

There is simply too much opportunity on the Internet, and too many players who want a rival to Google, for the display advertising market, at least, to be so fragmented. If Yahoo, Google and Microsoft don’t get it together, then Facebook and MySpace are waiting in the wings with a lot of users and data about them that ultimately may be used to build a successful advertising business.

Frankly, the most powerful opponent Google might face would be a combination of a portal and search engine with one of the big social networks. A year from now, if the players were MySpace-Yahoo and MSN-Facebook, Google might be sweating a little more.

How will Google respond? It certainly has shown an interest in influencing the arrangement of its rivals. But this year, no matter how much it studies Machiavelli, it may need to actually buy a company to keep it out of the hand of a competitor.

20081224 Future Bits: The Revenge of Software By Saul Hansell (December 23, 2008)

source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/future-bits-the-revenge-of-software/

This post begins a short series looking at the defining moments in the technology world in 2008 and poses some crucial questions for 2009.

Defining Moment of 2008: Apple’s introduction of the App Store

Take that, Mark Benioff. Software is back. The chief executive of Salesforce.com has built his company around the icon of the word “software” with a red slash through it. And now that the concept of cloud computing is really taking off, leave it to Steven A. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, to think different.

For the first year, Apple suggested that the best way to write applications for the iPhone was through Web pages viewed in its browser. But when it opened the platform up to software — albeit small applications that often get a lot of information and processing power over the Internet — it set free a waterfall of creativity.

Indeed, the App Store on the iPhone has created a market for software we haven’t seen since the early days of the personal computer. Independent programmers can create modestly sized applications that find a market. For now, they don’t have to compete with software behemoths. Indeed, it’s better than ever for programmers because the Apple gives anyone a way to distribute and profit from writing software. (Take that Google and the view that all software will be free.)

Defining Question for 2009: What other platform will dominate mobile devices?

It’s hard to imagine that Apple’s OS X will be the only operating system for mobile devices. Apple, being Apple, doesn’t license its software to others. And in any case, Apple is starting small in a market that sells 1 billion handsets a year.

That makes an an open spot in the market for the software platform, that is the equivalent of Microsoft Windows, to be used by a handset maker that wants to concentrate on hardware and not software. Until recently, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was the default choice for such hardware makers. But now Google’s Android is coming on strong, and there are reports of many Android devices on tap for 2009.

The winner here does not have to be an operating system as such. Environments like Adobe Systems’ Flash and Sun Microsystems’ Java are also hoping to become a standard that allows developers to write applications that will run on many types of phones. And with the evolution of the Web standards, it is too soon to count the browser out as a powerful equalizing force.

Of course, the proprietary model has other adherents in addition to Apple. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry still has a vibrant ecosystem and the leading share in the United States.

Palm has lost ground, but it will introduce a new operating system and phones that use it at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Yet as Palm keeps taking cash infusions from its venture capital investors, it has an uphill battle convincing carriers, customers and developers that its new platform is safe to rely on.

By this time next year, the race will still only be in its first legs, but early leaders should be apparent. Perhaps the most interesting question is how many platforms will ultimately survive. In most other technology markets market forces concentrate activity in a very few platforms. Developers want to write for the most potential customers, and users want the most choices in software.

Yet with cellphones, this concentration might not happen quickly. The market market is far bigger than any other technological battleground. And many consumers may see phone applications more as icing on the cake than a core reason to pick a phone. But that’s not going to stop most everyone in the wireless industry from trying to position themselves as the chief rival to Apple and the App Store.

20081223 Drop in Gas Prices Offers a Bit of Relief for Consumers By JACK HEALY

SOURCE http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/economy/25econ.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Tumbling gasoline prices gave consumers more purchasing power last month, and led to a rise in real spending, even as personal income slips and Americans worry about their jobs in a rapidly weakening economy .

The Commerce Department reported on Wednesday that consumer spending, when adjusted for inflation, rose 0.6 percent in November, its largest gains in two years. The increase followed a 0.5 percent decline in October.

While the unadjusted rate of consumer spending declined 0.6 percent last month, following a 1 percent drop in October, economists suggested that the relative increase in spending was a rare piece of good news for the faltering economy.

“The declines in gasoline prices have been extremely large, larger than anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclay’s Capital. “That’s providing a lot of spending power to households.”

Gasoline prices have plunged to $1.66 a gallon from their July peak of $4.11 as Americans drove less, construction projects were halted and the global appetite for oil waned in the economic slowdown. Filling up a 15-gallon tank now costs about $25, compared with $60 this summer.

“It’s a very substantial amount of money that’s been freed up,” said Abiel Reinhart, North American economist at JPMorgan Chase. “That’s a definite positive for consumers. It’s probably the only positive at this point.”

Financial markets in New York took the mixed news in stride on a shortened trading day before Christmas. At 10:30 a.m., the Dow Jones industrial average was 27 points higher while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up a fraction of 1 percent.

American retailers are bracing for a bruising holiday season as Americans bargain-hunt and trim their budgets. Many have slashed their earnings outlooks and are offering deep discounts and “doorbuster” sales simply to entice shoppers into their stores.

Households continue to save more money as many Americans adjust to stagnant wages and reduced working hours and brace for the possibility of layoffs. The Commerce Department reported that personal savings increased 1 percent in November compared with 0.7 percent in October.

Personal incomes dropped by 0.2 percent last month after increasing 0.1 percent in October.

Meanwhile, weekly jobless claims continued to hit new highs, reflecting a bleak picture for American workers. Unemployment has risen 6.7 percent this year and employers cut 533,000 jobs in November.

The Labor Department reported on Wednesday that the number of people filing for unemployment insurance for the first time rose to 586,000 in the week ending on Dec. 20, up from a revised 556,000 a week earlier.

“The labor markets remain weak, that’s the clear message,” Mr. Maki said.

America’s manufacturing sector marked another weak month, with new orders to factories for durable goods falling 1 percent to $186.9 billion, the Commerce Department reported. While it was the fourth consecutive month of declines, the drop was actually smaller than Wall Street’s expectations of a 3-percent decline.

Helping to drive down that November number was a 37.7 percent drop in demand for commercial aircraft. Industrial production has declined 5.5 percent so far this year as automotive assembly lines shut down and home construction grinds to a near standstill.

The country’s production of cars, machinery, furniture, appliances and a range of other goods has all tumbled this year, according to Federal Reserve data.

Many officials expect the economic downturn, already the longest since the Depression, to continue through 2009, and say that unemployment could reach 8 percent to 10 percent.

The Commerce Department reported on Tuesday that the economy shrank by 0.5 percent from July to September, and economists say the economy is now contracting at a rate of 4 to 6 percent.

跌到$68.3啦~

但跌得好慢呢

但失業的話, 減幾多油價都冇用…

20081221 China to the Rescue? Not! By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

SOURCE http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21friedman.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
I had no idea that many of those oil paintings that hang in hotel rooms and starter homes across America are actually produced by just one Chinese village, Dafen, north of Hong Kong. And I had no idea that Dafen’s artist colony — the world’s leading center for mass-produced artwork and knockoffs of masterpieces — had been devastated by the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble. I should have, though.(dafen在哪兒?)  (當然啦, 美國樓市咁大鑊..)

“American property owners and hotels were usually the biggest consumers of Dafen’s works,” Zhou Xiaohong, deputy head of the Art Industry Association of Dafen, told Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post. “The more houses built in the United States, the more walls that needed our paintings. Now our business has frozen following the crash of the Western property market.”

Dafen is just one of a million Chinese and American enterprises that constitute the most important economic engine in the world today — what historian Niall Ferguson calls “Chimerica,” the de facto partnership between Chinese savers and producers and U.S. spenders and borrowers. That 30-year-old partnership is about to undergo a radical restructuring as a result of the current economic crisis, and the global economy will be highly impacted by the outcome.  (Additional reading: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
youtube 有得聽佢講下)

After all, it was China’s willingness to hold the dollars and Treasury bills it had earned from exporting to America that helped keep U.S. interest rates low, giving Americans the money they needed to keep buying shoes, flat-screen TVs and paintings from China, as well as homes in America. Americans then borrowed against those homes to consume even more — one reason we enjoyed rising wealth without rising incomes. (人民幣唔升值–>有利出口.  但係US唔係想人民幣升值, 減低貿易逆差嗎?)

This division of labor not only nourished our respective economies, but also shaped our politics. It enabled China’s ruling Communist Party to say to its people: “We will guarantee you ever-higher standards of living and in return you will stay out of politics and let us rule.” So China’s leaders could enjoy double-digit growth without political reform. And it enabled successive U.S. administrations, particularly the current one, to tell Americans: “You can have guns and butter — subprime mortgages with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years, ever-higher consumption and two wars, without tax increases!”(人民有錢就唔會理什麼民主呀自由呀選舉呀…)

It all worked — until it didn’t.

With unemployment now soaring across the U.S., said Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, Americans — “the most over-extended consumer in world history” — can no longer buy so many Chinese exports. We need to save more, invest more, consume less and throw out most of our credit cards to bail ourselves out of this crisis.

But as that happens, we need China to take our discarded credit cards and distribute them to its own people so they can buy more of what China produces and more imports from the rest of the world. That’s the only way Beijing can sustain the minimum 8 percent growth it needs to maintain the political bargain between China’s leaders and led — not to mention pick up some of the slack in the global economy from America’s slowdown.

However, if I’ve learned one thing here, it’s just how hard doing that will be. China’s whole system and culture nourish saving, not spending, and changing that will require a huge “cultural and structural” shift, said Fred Hu, chairman for Greater China for Goldman Sachs.

In China, for instance, to buy a home you have to put at least 20 percent down, and the average is 40 percent. If you try to walk away from the mortgage, the bank will come after your personal assets. Moreover, China can’t just shift production from the U.S. market to its own consumers. Not many Chinese villagers want to buy $400 tennis shoes or Christmas tree ornaments.

Also, China has no real Social Security, health insurance or unemployment insurance. Without that social safety net, it’s hard to see how Chinese don’t end up saving most of their stimulus. “You open up the newspaper every day and you hear about this factory shutting down or that supplier going belly up,” said Willie Fung, whose company, Top Form International, is the world’s leading bra maker. “You can never be too careful in this financial climate.”

As such, “the world should not have a false hope that China can cushion the global downturn,” by stimulating its domestic demand in a big way, said Frank Gong, head of China research for JPMorgan Chase. “The best thing China can do is keep its own economy stable.” (咁中國就會減低出口…經濟增長slow down, 好多人失業… 同其他地方冇分別呀!  仲有中國硬食左美國果d零利息債卷, 真係撘埋同一條船呀..)

It’s good advice. China is not going to rescue us or the world economy. We’re going to have to get out of this crisis the old-fashioned way: by digging inside ourselves and getting back to basics — improving U.S. productivity, saving more, studying harder and inventing more stuff to export. The days of phony prosperity — I borrow cheap money from China to build a house and then borrow on that house to buy cheap paintings from China to decorate my walls and everybody is a winner — are over.  (咁個個都慳錢. 邊個幫襯買美國野呢…?)

20081220 Life Without Bubbles By PAUL KRUGMAN (Published: December 22, 2008)

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/opinion/22krugman.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Whatever the new administration does, we’re in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell. After that, things should get better, as President Obama’s stimulus plan — O.K., I’m told that the politically correct term is now “economic recovery plan” — begins to gain traction. Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010.

But what comes after that? Right now everyone is talking about, say, two years of economic stimulus — which makes sense as a planning horizon. Too much of the economic commentary I’ve been reading seems to assume, however, that that’s really all we’ll need — that once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual.

In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that.

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.

To be more specific: the severe housing slump we’re experiencing now will end eventually, but the immense Bush-era housing boom won’t be repeated. Consumers will eventually regain some of their confidence, but they won’t spend the way they did in 2005-2007, when many people were using their houses as ATMs, and the savings rate dropped nearly to zero.

So what will support the economy if cautious consumers and humbled homebuilders aren’t up to the job?

A few months ago a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.” Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment.

But this boom would have to be enormous, raising business investment to a historically unprecedented percentage of G.D.P., to fill the hole left by the consumer and housing pullback. While that could happen, it doesn’t seem like something to count on.

A more plausible route to sustained recovery would be a drastic reduction in the U.S. trade deficit, which soared at the same time the housing bubble was inflating. By selling more to other countries and spending more of our own income on U.S.-produced goods, we could get to full employment without a boom in either consumption or investment spending.

But it will probably be a long time before the trade deficit comes down enough to make up for the bursting of the housing bubble. For one thing, export growth, after several good years, has stalled, partly because nervous international investors, rushing into assets they still consider safe, have driven the dollar up against other currencies — making U.S. production much less cost-competitive.

Furthermore, even if the dollar falls again, where will the capacity for a surge in exports and import-competing production come from? Despite rising trade in services, most world trade is still in goods, especially manufactured goods — and the U.S. manufacturing sector, after years of neglect in favor of real estate and the financial industry, has a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway, the rest of the world may not be ready to handle a drastically smaller U.S. trade deficit. As my colleague Tom Friedman recently pointed out, much of China’s economy in particular is built around exporting to America, and will have a hard time switching to other occupations.

In short, getting to the point where our economy can thrive without fiscal support may be a difficult, drawn-out process. And as I said, I hope the Obama team understands that.

Right now, with the economy in free fall and everyone terrified of Great Depression 2.0, opponents of a strong federal response are having a hard time finding support. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, has been reduced to using his Web site to seek “credentialed American economists” willing to add their names to a list of “stimulus spending skeptics.”

But once the economy has perked up a bit, there will be a lot of pressure on the new administration to pull back, to throw away the economy’s crutches. And if the administration gives in to that pressure too soon, the result could be a repeat of the mistake F.D.R. made in 1937 — the year he slashed spending, raised taxes and helped plunge the United States into a serious recession.

The point is that it may take a lot longer than many people think before the U.S. economy is ready to live without bubbles. And until then, the economy is going to need a lot of government help.