So let’s just assume that there are other intelligent life forms in the galaxy that are capable of interstellar space travel and are interested in contacting other intelligent life forms for whatever reason. This isn’t a safe assumption for a whole lot of reasons, but let’s roll with it to set up a best case scenario.

So given that, lets look at some of the problems:

Space is incomprehensibly large.

I mean that quite literately. Our brains really haven’t evolved to conceptualize very big numbers, or very large distances. So we can’t help but feel like a trip to visit us would be a long journey, but something relatable to other long journeys we have taken. Maybe it’s like being on a train for a whole bunch of years.

Unfortunately space is so vast that it doesn’t really work out like that. Traveling even to star systems that are relatively astronomically close, even traveling at the speed of light would take many human lifetimes. Venture out much further and there’s a good chance that the species you’re planning on visiting will have died out, or been destroyed by a cosmic event by the time you arrive.

Say that we’re lucky enough to have an intelligent life form in the middle of our own galaxy. Great news! At the speed of light it will take them 50,000 years to get here. For a little perspective, modern humans have only been around for 200,00 years. We almost went extinct 70,000 years ago. We developed agriculture only 10,000 years ago. We’ve been using radio waves for only around 90 years.

If our friends don’t live in our galaxy, then perhaps they are in our nearest major galaxy of Andromeda, a mere 2.5 million light years away. If our friends had decided to visit us 2.5 million years ago, they would have made that decision based on information from 5 million years ago. That means they would be choosing to come to visit Australopithecus or basically, bipedal apes.

But 2.5 million years ago, the only information coming off the planet earth was in the form of radiant waves of energy, the most common of which is light. Visible and infrared. What an alien race could tell about a planet from 2.5 million light years distant is pretty limited due to attenuation.

We haven’t been around all that long

So lets go back to radio. We started using it around 90 years ago, sending out ordered information content out into the universe. This surely is something that would pique the interest of an alien species. The problem is, it’s only traveled 90 light years. Since we’re near the edge of our galaxy, our radio waves have only traveled 1/1000th of the total distance into our own galaxy.

The observable universe is 93 billion light years across, but has only been around 14 or so billion years. A life form could have been intelligent for 5 billion years already, but not have received any light from our galaxy, let alone our planet. At least not light from who we are now, or where we are now. When looking over long distances, you’re really looking very very far back in time. When things are far enough away, you’re not looking across to where they are, you’re actually looking back at the beginning of the universe.

Where would they start?

How would they know where to look? At a very conservative estimate there are ten million billion planets in the universe. Even a civilization with access to vast amounts of power and very advanced technology could only reach out to planets that were relatively close.

Using the extremely flawed drake equation, there are a whole lot of advanced civilizations out there. Unfortunately, the number of planets theoretically capable of supporting them is a much much greater number.

Why would they want to?

I won’t dive too much into far out futurism, but there are also very real problems with the set of underlying assumptions that drive speculation about alien contact or visitation. It’s not at all a safe assumption that a spacefaring race would be interested in contacting other sentient life or interacting with them in any way.

Stupid physical realities!

So you have two very fundamental problems with any theorizing about alien visitation to earth.

1. The universe is very very large
2. The speed of light is as fast as anything can travel.

The combination of these 2 facts screws up a whole lot of things for traveling large distances in space, but leaves us with some pretty hard constraints around alien visitation.

1. They would have to be very close (astronomically speaking)
2. They would have to exist in the same time as us (this is sort of part of #1)
3. They would have to capable of speed of light travel
4. They would have to have access to a tremendous amount of power
5. They would have to have some reason to want to contact us

The bottom line

Given the number of stars, planets, and basic elements available in the universe, it’s statistically very very likely there are other advanced civilizations out there. And there are probably quite a few of them.

But given those 5 constraints, it’s very very unlikely they have visited us.

Now hold your horses

There are some caveats. If a civilization is capable of faster than light travel, that pretty much blows this whole thing out of the water. They may be able to bend space-time, or create wormholes. But the energy demands of these kinds of things are insanely large.

A one meter wormhole would take one years worth of energy from 10 billion stars to fuel. Bending space-time to create a warp drive to travel 10 times the speed of light would require energy equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe.

So we don’t have much of an escape here.

It’s a magical world

Unfortunately there is exactly zero hard evidence of alien visitation. There are plenty of anecdotes, plenty of stories, but no real proof.

While it is possible that aliens could have visited, the odds of it having happened are vanishingly small, and it would have come at a tremendous cost, even for a very advanced race.

It’s unlikely they would borne this cost to probe the asses of hillbillies, or to fuck with our heads by zipping their spaceships around at night.

I was really conflicted on this. There are a lot of factors that go into making a decision about a tax that will take a billion dollars a year out of our state economy. Especially in a time that our economy is in a shambles, and we’ve dealt our tourism sector a crippling blow with the passage of SB1070.

A Broken State

Arizona has wide spread, deeply rooted, systemic issues that this tax does nothing to fix. And it some ways it serves as a relief valve for politicians to continue to do nothing. They have another 3 years to ride out the bad economy in hopes that they won’t have to make the truly awful choices that face them.

In fact, until recently, the state legislature was working on tax cuts in the form of H2250 that would reduce corporate taxes, repeal the property tax, and lower income taxes. Seriously. In the face of a 3 billion dollar budget shortfall, our legislature wanted to cut taxes, and Jan Brewer was the only voice of sanity, promising to veto it, leading to its death in the senate. She thought it would look bad to cut corporate taxes while at the same time raising sales taxes.

Our legislature continues to labor under the republican fantasy that lower taxes lead to more tax revenue in the long run even though they’ve been shown not to over and over again. Tax cuts lead to greater deficits.

So there’s a very real concern that taking pressure off the state budget will encourage our republican legislature to reduce taxes for corporations and the wealthy and land us right back where we were before the sales tax increase.

Arizona’s Regressive Tax Policy

Arizona aggressively pushes its taxes onto the poor and has the 4th most regressive tax policy in the US. Unfortunately prop 100 is an extension of this tax policy.

In Arizona the poorest 20% pay 12.5% of their incomes in state taxes. The middle 60% pay 8.5%, and the top 1% pay only 5.6%.

Taxes hit the poor hard in Arizona [PDF Link] (click image for larger view)

As you can see in the image above, sales and property taxes hit the poor much harder than the wealthy, and prop 100 is only going to push up the burden on the poor, while having little if any impact on the rich.

You’ll notice in light blue the percentage of corporate income tax paid across the board is almost nothing. In 2009 Arizona collected $7.3 Billion in sales and use taxes, $1.9 billion in individual income taxes, $836 million in property taxes and just under $600 million in corporate income taxes. That corporate number should stand out, as H2250 would have reduced it by 1/3 or so, reducing an already very low corporate tax collection to almost nothing, despite the fact that it would provide little economic benefit. As a side note, the Arizona Department of Revenue’s year end reports are complete shit, and their numbers don’t match up with the Census Bureau’s (might be a FY thing, but they’re still shit). I trust the Census.

So Arizona really had 4 possible tax choices to pick from when trying to meet the deficit. Property, sales, income and corporate income.

Arizonans really really really hate taxes. But they especially hate property taxes. They have repeatedly put roadblocks in place to prevent the state from raising property taxes, so it’s both an impractical solution and a politically suicidal one.

Sales taxes already make up the majority of taxes collected by a wide margin, and they are highly regressive. But it’s much easier in this state to pass taxes that largely affect the poor. This is why Jan Brewer decided to take this route.

So you’re left with personal and corporate income taxes. Our state income tax is fairly progressive, so it would have made sense to increase personal income taxes instead of sales taxes if we were interested in providing an equal burden across classes. Of course, this would never fly because Prop 100 is largely about protecting k-12 schools, and it’s reasonably safe to say that a good chunk of the rich in AZ either don’t have kids in school, or their kids are in private school. Also, to reach a goal of providing $1b the state income tax would have to increase by 50%, which sounds a LOT worse than “a one penny tax”.

We could also have raised corporate tax rates, which would have had almost no impact on the poor at all (some from increased prices, but probably not as much as 1%, really depends on how much they sell in state). But our legislature is convinced that lower taxes means more jobs and the solution to our 9% unemployment is to cut taxes on corporations, not raise them.

Shitty Choices

So we can raise taxes, or we can cut services. Republicans in the state of course jump at the opportunity to carve more money out of the budget for education and refused to pass any legislation that raised taxes as they know it would be very unpopular. For some reason they believe that cutting school funding will less unpopular.

So Arizona voters were given a sort of lousy choice. Choose between levying a highly regressive 15% sales tax increase on Arizona’s citizens, or decimate our schools.

I personally would have taken an income tax increase to try and keep the collateral damage from hitting the poor too hard. But that’s unfortunately not a political reality. And our state lawmakers are simply too lazy or too dumb to come up with other solutions.

So I voted yes under considerable protest. I believe there were other viable solutions to avoid cuts in education, but I knew our legislators wouldn’t pursue them. And I didn’t mind tax increases, but we ended up with the worst possible kind.

But I also think we’ve bought our lousy legislature a lot of time to avoid making larger, structural changes to the state budget that it badly needs. Either government has to get smaller, or taxes have to increase. The good old days aren’t coming back any time soon, and we’re going to have live with the reality of that.

So I wandered down that Saturday afternoon to give one a shot. I wanted to see 3 things: video playback, book reading, and stereo bluetooth. These would be the determining factors for me. Why? Because if the iPad could do these things well, they would replace two other pieces of hardware: the kindle and my MSI Wind netbook.

I originally bought the netbook as a couch surfing machine and possible controller for a panoramic photography head that I was working on. I installed OS X on it, and it was mostly fine. Except the touchpad is awful. Just completely awful. And it more or less ruins working with the machine. So instead it has taken up duty as a video playback machine for when I’m working out. It does this competently through VLC. But I recently started using stereo bluetooth headphones, and the combination of VLC, Mac OS X, and Bluetooth Stereo lead to a lot of pain. I constantly had to turn bluetooth on and off, quit and restart VLC, tell Mac OS X to use it as an audio device, etc. This usually added a good 5 minutes onto the beginning of my workout, and very quickly got old.

So I was very interested in how the iPad would handle this. The answer is very very well. Much better than OS X, and exactly what you would expect. Once the headset is paired, click the play button and the headset pairs up and switched audio over to it. Turn off the headset and audio falls back to the built in speaker. Once it was set up, I haven’t had one problem with not pairing, or poor audio. It really just works. So that was a very big plus.

In the Store I pulled up iBooks and read through a few pages. While the text is not as clear as the kindle, it’s definitely not bad. The IPS display is very high quality and allows for a wide range of viewing angles, and at least in the short term I didn’t find myself straining to read.

So with the 3 things met, I decided to buy one, along with the case and if it didn’t work out I figured I could unload it on craigslist.

So here goes the real review:

The Device

Much like the recent unibody Macbooks, the iPad is almost a work of art. It’s sturdy and solid and feels like it could take a fall or two without much trouble. It doesn’t flex in your hand, or squeeze in when you pick it up.

The screen is bright and beautiful, but it has two fairly major problems: glare and smudges. The glass of the iPad screen is very glossy and given that it’s almost always held at an angle opposite the ceiling or sky, you end up seeing a lot of glare. While I have used a glossy laptop screen and not had too much trouble with it, it’s something I’m almost constantly aware of while using the iPad and it makes me want to turn off lights indoors to get rid of it.

The glass also gets very smudgy very quickly. This has often been the first thing people notice about the iPad when I show it to them. While you mostly don’t notice it when the screen is on, it looks pretty nasty when it’s off.

The combination of glare and smudges is something I consider relatively serious as it requires pretty consistent cleaning, and a lot of juggling to avoid glare in any place with overhead lighting.

I’ve got an anti-glare screen protector on order, which is also supposed to prevent smudginess. I’ll keep you updated.

The iPad weighs in at about 1.5 pounds, which makes it significantly lighter than a netbook, but a good bit heavier than a kindle. Overall I consider it a lightweight device, but it’s not something that you can hold with one hand away from your body for extended periods of time like you can with a kindle. With tablet devices, you will want to do this more often than you would expect.

This leads me to my main issue with the iPad: There is almost no comfortable way to hold this thing over a period of hours if you’re not at a desk. When you’re sitting on a couch, and have it in your lap, you have to angle it up with one hand at all times, while your neck is craned down to look at it. So your neck gets sore quickly. Watch the iPad ad, and count the number of people with their knees pulled up to support the iPad at a comfortable angle. The Apple case doesn’t give enough lift or stability to place the iPad in the traditional laptop position and angle which would be the most comfortable. So I find myself holding one position for a while, then switching to another, then another to avoid fatigue of use. And it’s a whole other ballgame when you want to type with 2 hands on the screen.

Presumably this is something that could be fixed relatively easily with a stand or case, but it’s worth noting that without some stand or case, using the iPad for a while becomes very tiresome. This is not something you really experience with a kindle, due to it’s light weight and smaller form factor.

The built in speaker is plenty loud for most situations, and much louder than the one in my iphone.

As I posted previously, the only connector on the device is the iPod connector. This is not a terrible thing, but it’s not great either. I can think of no credible reason not to include mini usb. The only real reason I can think of is Apple’s desire to control what kinds of things can be connected to the iPad and therefore collect a royalty for the connector’s use. It’s just lame to have to spend $30 to hook up a camera to the iPad. If it had usb, you could hook up an xbox or playstation game controller for games. You could hook up a price gun. You could hook up a cool little doxie. It makes sense to restrict this kind of stuff on the iphone. It makes much less sense on the iPad

It also makes little sense to not have included an isight. The iPad seems plenty powerful to do video chat, and I can’t help but think this was probably a last minute omission. I’m going to go ahead and speculate that the next revision will have one.

I have some of the wireless problems people have been reporting. While I can connect fine at home, I do get random drops. As I write this on my Macbook Pro in the carwash waiting room, I have full signal. My iPad doesn’t even see the network. Apple has said this can be fixed via firmware, so we’ll see how long it takes. This is a major issue however because without a working network connection, the iPad becomes a very limited device.

Battery life does indeed deliver the promised 10+ hours which genuinely shocked me as Apple has a history of greatly exaggerating battery life. Click the sleep button and it will consume almost no power despite still getting push updates. It’s really impressive.

I’m genuinely baffled about why Apple chose to include only 256MB of memory. 1GB couldn’t have added more than a few dollars to the cost of the machine. The iPad has the same amount of memory as the iPhone 3Gs, and as Gruber pointed out, it leads to issues even before allowing limited multitasking in iPhone 4.0.

The Experience

I’ve been using the iPad as a replacement for the laptop around the house, and for the most part it’s been going well. It’s been hard to communicate to people what using an iPad is like, because in many ways, it’s so unlike other computing experiences. There really is something magical about the touch interface which was partially realized in the iphone, but becomes a very real and tangible thing on the iPad. As other’s have said, the iPad isn’t a big iphone, the iPhone is a smaller and much more limited iPad.

That being said, the magic is hard to bottle, and very few companies are really getting it right. Apple has obviously spent a lot of time working through how the touch interface should function on larger devices and it shows in all of their apps. Mail just feels right. Maps is almost spooky great on the large screen.

But when we start moving into the land of the App store, it’s very hit and miss. The iPad really falls into a new uncanny valley. They aren’t iPhone apps, but they aren’t desktop apps either. So a lot of iPad apps are barely repurposed desktop apps, or barely scaled up iPhone apps. Netflix is a good example of a half-assed iPad app. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it’s there, but it’s not a pleasure to use. It looks like they more or less wrapped an HTML view of their web page into the app. Links and buttons are tiny and hard to hit. Managing your instant queue should be simple, but it’s not. I’m watching season 1 of “30 rock” in my instant queue, and when ending an episode, I can’t hit the next button in the video player and get to the next thing in my queue. Instead I get dropped out to the season page, have to scroll down and hit the tiny play button next to the next episode. By contrast, the Netflix console apps for the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 seem designed for their respective platforms. They fit their paradigms. I know it sounds like picking nits, but these are the things that make the iPad seem like a “so what”. Poorly designed apps make the iPad seem like a incapable laptop. What makes the iPad great depends very heavily on the ability of developers to design apps that take advantage of it’s particular design.

Even apps that seem to get the overall aesthetic right, still fall over in functionality. I use, and for the most part like newsrack for reading RSS feeds. But it feels clunky and unintuitive. I find myself struggling to get to the group of feeds that I want, having to try one thing, then another until I finally get it. I expect to get pull down menus where there aren’t any. How do I mark everything in this particular feed as read? I don’t know, and I can’t figure it out in less than 20 seconds or so. Again, not awful, but it screws up the magic.

A lot of other apps ride the wrong side of the desktop/iphone line by limiting what I can do. Including some from apple. Why can’t I crop photos on the photos app or do minor adjustments to the image? Why can’t I edit rich text in Evernote? Why can’t I filter by more than one tag in Things? There are a lot of little places where I feel like I “should” be able to do something, but I can’t. It feels like a lot of these are carried over from iPhone limitations.

I expect now that the actual device is released, lots of apps are going to get better really fast, so I think this will be a temporary problem, but expect some frustrations as developers try to discover the sweet spot for applications on this device. Capturing the magic is really hard and it will undoubtedly take time.

The BBC app is really great. The NPR app is okay, but not as well designed.

Evernote is a mess. It’s beautifully designed, but crashes constantly. So, BTW does Netflix.

Gmail works great on the iPad, even if I choose to use the built in mail app. Unfortunately Google Docs only gives you a crippled iPhone version that can do no editing except in spreadsheets.

I could use pages and numbers, but then I have the sucktastic experience of file syncing. No thanks. The iPad really calls for files that live in the cloud. Evernote has the right model here. This is one of the things that makes using “Things” painful for me. Manual syncing sucks.

As I briefly mentioned above, Gruber mentioned that the limited iPad memory leads to page reloads while using tabs in mobile safari. I see this very frequently using just 2 tabs, and it’s very annoying. Part of the reason I use tabs is so I can instantly get back to a page.

And speaking of tabs: there’s no reason to keep the iphone metaphor for tabs on the iPad. Want to close a tab and switch back to another? Click to pull up tabspose. Animation. Click to close tab. Animation. Click to re-open original tab even though it’s the only remaining one open. Animation. What takes exactly one click on a desktop browser takes 3 on mobile safari simply because we don’t have real tabs. And we don’t have real tabs because we’re carrying over an interface metaphor based on an iPhone screen. It’s not a screen space issue because you could simply replace the bookmark bar. This gets really obnoxious really fast for heavy browsing.

And speaking of the bookmarks bar: why can’t I drag to create bookmarklets? Why do I have to resort to syncing bookmarks from Safari? Makes sense on the iPhone. Doesn’t make sense here.

Overall:

It’s a keeper. When the iPad hits its sweet spot, it really can be a better experience than a desktop machine or a laptop or an iPhone. There are a lot of rough spots getting the experience right, but I have confidence these will be worn down fairly soon. There are some frustrating limitations to the device that seem arbitrary, but nothing that kills its utility for me.

If you’re willing to put up with some early adopter woes, get one now. But I wouldn’t blame you for riding it out until at least after the iPhone OS 4 launch for the iPad this fall.

A few years ago the US dedicated 1.3 Billion dollars to fighting the drug war in Mexico and since then, cartel violence has gone through the roof with 5000 deaths in 2008, 6,500 deaths in 2009, and already 2000 this year so far.

Mexico is tragically fucked up, and deeply corrupt. Our support for Calderon seems to have only made things worse, and the military is leading terror campaigns throughout the country in an effort to scare the cartels (which is failing badly).

Clinton more or less admits that the situation is almost hopeless, but we’re going to burn more money anyway to act like we’re doing something because people are dying in border towns. No one in the US wants to acknowledge that the major reason Mexico is so fucked up is because of overwhelming demand for cocaine and pot in the US.

We’re more or less paying off Mexico for bearing the awful burden that prohibition ultimately creates through feeding black markets. By preventing US sources of drugs, you end up importing them from other countries, and exporting a vast majority of the crime and violence to these countries in return.

President Obama has asked congress for $5.6 Billion to reduce domestic demand.

And so we continue this fucking ridiculous drug war. We keep raiding California pot dispensaries, keep incarcerating people for ridiculous amounts of time for small time possession. Awesome.

We have various reasons for justifying the drug war: crime rates, escalation into other criminal behavior, health implications, family well-being, etc. And all of those things are good concerns. They also the outcomes of a very small minority of drug use and drug users. There is a mountain of data around this, and I don’t want to go into a specific analysis of statistics, because that’s largely not what drives decision making around drug policy. It’s been clear for some time that drug policy is almost completely irrational and crafted in spite of the facts. In fact it’s almost impossible to maintain a position of prohibition supported by evidence.

But we bear a tremendous cost for prohibition, and we impose enormous costs on others as well. We have an increasingly militarized police force, over-zealous and over-empowered interstate border security, overflowing and expensive prisons, insane criminal penalties leading to the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, drastically reduced privacy, etc, etc, etc. But we are happy to bear these costs and continually up the ante to appear like we’re doing something about drugs.

Why?

And why do we continue to tolerate the use of Alcohol and Tobacco, both of which clearly and unambiguously kill tons of people every day and impose all of the same impacts to public well-being, if not more.

I’ve thought a whole lot about this, and talked to a lot of people about it, and I still have no clear answer. But one thing is very clear: we don’t hate drugs. In fact, we love drugs as demonstrated by our enormous pharmaceutical industry.

What we hate is people getting high.

There’s something deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and in the American mythos as a whole. It may even be some weird collision of American social norms and inherited animal social behavior. Something about our desire for fairness.

There’s an interesting experiment that behavioral economists have done: Give one person 10 dollars, and ask them to split that amount with another participant. If the other participant accepts the split, you both get to keep the money. If they reject it, nobody gets anything. Traditional economics makes the answer very clear – offer the other participant one dollar. Rationally speaking, you both come away from the experience with more money than when you walked in, even if the split isn’t equal.

Turns out that people hate it when other people do that. Offer them the $1 and they will reject it leaving you with nothing. Why? Because, being the social animals that we are, we are driven by a need for fairness. You’ve done nothing to earn that money, you are both equally entitled, thus you should offer half. If you don’t offer half (or something very close to it), people will reject the offer to punish you.

What’s important to note here is that if people don’t feel like they are getting a fair deal, they are willing to hurt themselves to hurt you.

And I think something like that is at work in how we approach drug use.

I think a lot of us perceive drug users as not doing their fair share. When a lot of folks think about the stereotypes that pervade our culture around drug use, we think about opium dens, or about lazy pot smokers, or about snorting coke in the bathroom of some expensive restaurant. There’s a common thread to how we perceive most kinds of drug use: happiness, satiety, excitement, bliss. We understand intellectually that these aspects are short lived and drive addiction. But we know that in that moment, any drug user can escape into a place that is better than where we are.

And I think at some level, for some people, this deeply violates their innate sense of fairness. Deeply rooted in our brains (largely through dopamine regulation) is a connection between action and reward. And most of us have learned that action equals work and it takes a whole lot of work to earn rewards. But if you look at the rewards we seek, as a result of this work, they are often exactly what drugs deliver. There’s a reason for that, which is that the chemicals released in the brain are very similar in both cases. Unfortunately the chemical situation delivered by work is a pale comparison to what drugs deliver.

When it comes right down to it, life is a brutal, painful and miserable experience. Thankfully our brains tend to tone all this down to a sort of long, grey banality with interspersed bursts of joy, happiness, excitement, etc. Most of us are constantly working just to make sure the grey banality doesn’t slip into pain and misery. And even those who actively pursue joy and happiness find it fleeting as our brains really tend to favor the grey banality. Novelty wears off, and we settle back to center.

So the thought of being somehow released from this constant work, seems like a tremendous cheat. Anyone who gets unlimited happiness subject only to the money in their pockets (or what they can grow in their yards), can’t possibly be working as hard as I am, yet they are getting better rewards. So we want to take away that cheat, or we want to punish you for using it, even if it hurts us in the process.

So why do we allow alcohol? It’s a complicated question which has a lot to do with money and politics, but to tie it into my thesis, it would have to not violate our sense of fairness, which I think is in fact the case.

Alcohol along with a handful of prescribed medications like xanax are largely looked upon as crutch drugs. Things that allow us to tolerate the grey. They rarely pull us up out of the grey, and when they do, they are sternly looked down upon. We don’t have the jealous fairness reflex to substances considered crutches.

But interestingly enough, you can see this action in drugs that formerly weren’t considered crutches. Blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, diet pills, all were looked down upon when we felt certain they weren’t actually necessary. Everyone knew you just had to exercise and eat right. These medications were letting people not work.

And drugs that let people not do the work of pulling themselves out of the grey, drugs that catapult you into happiness, joy, satisfaction, or excitement must be crushed. Cocaine, pot, opioids, hallucinogens, all of them have to be suppressed and their users punished.

It’s long since time that we stopped punishing people for not doing the work. Long since time that we stopped hurting ourselves and others in the process. We simply can’t afford to keep burning dollars, and sacrificing lives to satisfy a primate sense of fairness.

There’s been a lot of groping around for reasons why we hit the wall, with many people seeking desperately to find reasons other than drunk driving on the part of the bankers.

The fallback position of many conservatives has been their default one: Blame it on brown people!

There have been widespread conservative attacks on the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislation passed in 1977 and reformed under Bill Clinton to allow access to credit for low income households so that they could buy homes.

The conservative logic has been: The government forced banks to lend money to people who couldn’t pay it back. Of course there was going to be a crises.

Which is complete hosreshit. This has been largely discredited by anyone actually wanting to look at real numbers. Anyone bothering to look up default rates on subprime mortgages vs. prime could easily give lie to these cynical accusations. But I wanted to throw out a little more data for anyone who cared.

I linked to this story almost 2 years ago

And more recently:

ARMs drove the crisis, not subprimes. Turns out that people with good credit who arrange to have no equity in their homes are at higher risk to default.

A recent harvard study(PDF Link) also found that Alt A ARM loans were the biggest contributor to the failure of these bank owned CDOs. Alt As used to be about low credit scores, but during the boom, became synonymous with low documentation or no documentation loans, or liar loans as some people called them. These were used to buy bigger houses than people could afford, or by housing flippers to make short term profits with minimum payments.

Of course, this is only one part of the crash but I’d do my best to dispell the bullshit about what kinds of lending made mortgage backed assets toxic.

Have you noticed that they sound crappy and tinny?

There’s a reason!

Turns out that the default minimum quality in OS X is pretty low. I guess the OS and the bluetooth device negotiate this, and if the device doesn’t provide anything (because it’s say a cheap bluetooth adaptor you got from china), it defaults to the minimum. The minimum is a bad thing mkay?

So let’s change it.

If you have the developer tools installed, you can use Bluetooth Explorer to change the minimum bit pool by going into the special options item in the utilities menu. But there’s an easier way.

Simply open up the terminal and paste this in there:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 58

Once that’s done, restart your machine

58 might be a little high, and from what I’ve read, people have had success from 40 up. But 58 is working great for me.

Now get back to enjoying your tunes in a wireless fashion.

The Hardware:

The Kindle is very light and very thin. It’s hard to get a sense of it’s size without holding it, but it’s very comfortable to hold and operate with one hand. The buttons are very well laid out, and the keyboard, while tiny, serves its function well enough.

The screen is reflective only, meaning no backlight, so no reading in the dark. I view this as good thing personally as backlit screens tend to create eye-strain. It has relatively high pixel density and looks very good, if wanting for a bit of contrast.

The battery lasts a very very long time. Like really. long. Which is a major major winner. My battery lasted 3 weeks on its last charge.

The Books:

There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll break it down into a handful of major topics: Pricing, Quality, Availability, and DRM.

• Pricing: Most books can be had for $9.99 or less, which falls right beneath my pain point for books. I have no problem paying this for books even if I tend to think it’s a little high. Why do I think it’s high? Largely because I can buy a paperback book almost invariably for exactly the same price, and I know that 80% of the cost of a paperback book is consumed in its manufacture and transport. Amazon is currently in a pissing war with Macmillan over pricing, which I won’t get into here. But understand that it actually has nothing to do with prices of individual books, but in who has control over pricing to consumers. Personally I think Amazon is in the right, but it’s not something I want to go into any detail about. I will say however that $15 for an ebook is past my pain point, and it will make me think twice before buying. more on that later.

• Quality: This has been a big issue for me, and one that really drives my opinions on pricing more than most other things. As I said in my ruminations over the iPad, of the 15 books I’ve bought for the kindle (more than I’ve read, more on that later) around 30% have multiple spelling errors or major layout problems. This is to say nothing of the non-fiction books that don’t have linked tables of contents, or linked footnotes, two of the major benefits of having e-books. I’m currently reading a book called Flawless Consulting, which as you can see costs $33 for the ebook. I bought it for the convenience, and ability to notate that the kindle offers despite already owning a hardcopy.
  The kindle edition is awful. Almost all the inset notations in the text are converted to images rather than text, which means you can’t highlight them, notate them, and they’re scanned in a low resolution so you can barely read them. Many of those inset notations scans also run into the body text, so you switch from an image to text mid-sentence. This makes the book completely unreadable on the iPhone and is extremely aggravating on the Kindle. This sort of thing is completely unacceptable, especially if you’re charging close to the asking price of the printed book. I would expect the same amount of proofing done on e-books that goes into prints, but that is clearly not happening. Publishers are being extremely lazy about ebooks, and being dragged kicking and screaming into the game. Amazon needs to be doing quality checks on its ebooks before allowing them to go on sale if publishers aren’t going to do it. This is easily the worst part of e-books at the moment.

• Availability: This was a big factor in making the decision to buy a Kindle or a Nook. I searched though my current Amazon wishlist to see how many books were available to each device. I’d say Amazon had something like 70% and B&N had something like 40-50%, and every B&N book was $2-3 more expensive.

• DRM: I hate DRM. I don’t own any DRM’d music. DRM removes your ability to lend your e-books, transfer them to another device, sell them, or buy them used. It’s a major encumbrance and potentially a major additional expense that simply doesn’t exist for print books. So why buy a product with DRM? Largely because, like music, I don’t think it’s going to last. Like the music industry, I think once we’re a few years down the road, the publishers are going to figure out that all DRM can be trivially cracked, and there’s just no putting that genie back in the bottle. As it stands, Kindle DRM can be stripped right now, and the files can be backed up to my computer and read with whatever I want. So I’m not terribly concerned about the negative effects of DRM on me. I don’t know if I need to take a major moral stand against a technology and mentality so completely compromised and so inevitably doomed. Had mp3s not fallen, I might have made a different choice, and I may very well end up eating my words, but as I see it now, DRM has a limited life whether I’m paying for products using it or not. The publishers will eventually see the same thing the record companies did: that the world doesn’t end when you send out unprotected files. Make your books cheap and really easy to buy, and people will buy them. There’s a reason Apple is one of the world’s biggest music sellers right now.

The Experience:

How the kindle will change your habits will depend very heavily on what your relationship with books is currently. It’s change my habits in some pretty significant ways.

• Reading: I read much more now. I used to read about 1 book a month or so, and now I’ve done about 5 books in 2 months. I always have either my iPhone or my Kindle with me, so I can read any time I have dead-space in my day. I hate carrying around books, so this has given me a lot more time to read, even if it’s more scattered.

• Buying: This is something that Publishers should pay a lot of attention to, because pricing matters. Before when I heard of an interesting book from a friend, or heard about one on the radio, I would hop on Amazon when I got to a computer and throw it on the wishlist along with a little explanation of where I heard about it. I don’t do that anymore. At least not for most books. Now I pretty much just buy them. A big part of that is the $9.99 or lower price. Another part is that the book is there instantly, and there for me whenever I decide I want to start reading it. Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time professionally trying to measure and influence customer behavior, this is a really big shift and a really big deal. I’m sure Amazon gets it, because I’m sure they track it. I don’t think the big publishers get it. The flip side of this is that I’m actually more reluctant to buy print editions of books now, and will generally hit the “i want to read this on my kindle” link on amazon instead. They then go into the wishlist bucket like before, but now I’m just waiting to see when the kindle version arrives.

• General Use: The Kindle is really intuitive for the most part and it just gets out of your way. While I wouldn’t mind having a clock at the top of the screen while reading, and I’d like to be able to customize screen savers without hacking it, those are not big deals. You can impulse buy books right from the kindle and have them ready to read in a few seconds. In fact while typing this, I was trying out the search function and bought a book. It cost $8. I’ll take it.

The Verdict:

I like mine a lot and I would recommend one to pretty much everyone who reads more than a couple of books a year. It’s changed the way I read books in a pretty big way. The kindle as a device is right in so many ways, it’s hard to see something like the iPad really competing with it as a reader, if for no other reason than form factor and battery life.

Publishers really need to get on the ball with ebook quality though, especially if they expect to continue charging at or near the same price as printed books. Quality control is really bad, and in some books it really makes them hard to read.

Big iPhone: This was a really good decision on Apple’s part. It would have been a major mistake to put the full version of Mac OS X on this machine. It needs an OS that is rooted in the touch interface from top to bottom.

Apple has shown with keynote and pages that you can build full fledged applications to work on the iPad with more or less all the functionality of a desktop app, so we’re not constrained to “mini-apps” like on the iPhone.

Unfortunately Apple remains the sole gatekeeper of which apps will make it onto the store, and therefore which apps will make it on to your iPad. Gone is even the pretense of needing to do this as a measure to protect cell phone networks. Apple doesn’t need to be the gatekeeper, it just wants to be. They think it offers a better experience, and it many cases that’s probably true. Unfortunately you still end up with situations like the Google Voice app, where Apple can simply kill dead anything they don’t like. That still sucks a big one.

As for steve saying that the iphone provides a better web browsing and e-mail experience than a laptop, I’ll believe it when I see it. Any web browser that doesn’t have options to block ads is not a better experience. Also, if a browser doesn’t have flash, it’s not a better experience. There are full websites built with flash. I don’t mind not seeing them on my iPhone. But it would be a big problem with my main couch surfing machine.

Hardware: It looks like Apple was taking aim at the netbook segment, as its screen size and resolution are almost identical to most netbooks. It’s bigger than the kindle, but smaller than the kindle DX. Without holding one, it’s hard to get a sense of how it would feel. I really like the kindle, but it’s clearly not meant to be a web browsing device.

Like the iPhone, it’s an incredibly closed piece of hardware. No USB ports, no access to the file system, all connections going through the dock connector, no memory expansion slots, etc.

The screen sounds nice, but the a ppi of 132 seems too low for reading books without eyestrain.

No webcam? Seriously? You don’t think this thing would be great for video ichats? What the hell?

I don’t believe for one second that this thing will get 10 hours of battery life. Apple is notorious for stretching the truth on this one, and I’d be shocked if it made it through a work day.

eBook Reader: I bought a kindle around christmas and my review is still forthcoming so take the following with a grain of salt.

Backlit displays are hard on your eyes. They create a large contrast in light levels between the screen and your surroundings, which is why most display calibration software recommends turning brightness way down, or why LCDs on your laptops are unreadable in bright sunlight.

Unfortunately this ends up reducing contrast on the display itself, making the darks and the lights closer to one another. This is also hard on the eyes.

That, along with the battery savings is why amazon chose e-ink. You need front lighting so you’re guaranteed the same light levels as the surroundings, and the contrast of the screen itself is fixed. It’s more like a book. If you start to get eye-strain, you simply put more light on it.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, the pixel density seems too low. This also creates eye strain.

And while it’s cute and all, it’s just stupid to waste 200 pixels or whatever to render the unturned pages on the side of a book. I know Apple probably feels it’s got pixels to burn, but it makes the text seem lopsided, and I’d rather just have text span the whole space.

While it’s great that Apple is using the ePub format, and that makes it great for publishers who want to reach a lot of devices, it’s still undoubtedly using DRM, so who gives a shit what format you choose if I can’t move my books over to another device?

Letting publishers set whatever prices they want is fucking stupid if you ask me, and going to result in slower sales. There will have to be significant differences between a kindle offering and an iPad offering if you’re going to charge 2-5 dollars more per book on average. And you know what publishers are going to do to demand that higher price? Absolutely fucking nothing. Sure authors can add video if they want, but they won’t. Why?

Because publishers still hate e-books. They’re being dragged kicking and screaming into the market, and they’re just barely playing the game. One of my complaints about the Kindle is that out of the 15 or so books I’ve bought, probably 30% have significant layout or spelling errors, where the text was obviously typeset for a book, and probably not finally proof-read. This isn’t on old books either. While publishers are massively benefiting from dramatically lower costs of production, and cutting out the middle men book stores, they still charge very close to the cost of a printed book, and obviously do less work. I rarely see more than one or two spelling mistakes in printed books, and I can’t think of the last time I saw a layout error.

If publishers can’t even be bothered to proof e-books (a product on which they make significantly higher margins, and also get other massive benefits like killing lending and reselling), what possible justification can they have for demanding 90% of the price of a printed product? Apple simply letting them name their price is a bad idea, and will largely be used by publishers to put pressure on Amazon to raise prices. Presumably Apple expects publishers to put more work into the iPad versions of books to justify the price difference with Amazon. If they honestly believe that, they’re delusional.

Also presumably like the kindle, there will be no lending or sharing. Who knows if you can annotate, bookmark, use a dictionary, clip text, load free books from other sources, etc that you can currently do with the Kindle.

Personally I think e-ink has a real chance of replacing printed books. I don’t know if LCDs will get to that place any time soon without better lighting techniques and better resolution.

And it turns out that when that whole housing bubble burst, we were kind of in a bad place. See, when the money is rolling in, who cares about hedging risk right? New construction was booming and we were living fat off of taxes on new property sales, and property taxes on existing homes that continued to escalate in value. Little thought went into who exactly would live in all these new houses, and who would work in these new commercial buildings. It’s not like we have a diverse corporate infrastructure here in Arizona. Not like we have a surplus of high paying white collar jobs. We had construction jobs.

Well as I’m sure you are aware, that house of cards collapsed and our tax base went into free-fall and our legislature went into denial. Controlled by republicans, they simply refuse to raise taxes, and just don’t want to cut any of the benefits they promised their buddies in the business community. And of course the democrats don’t want to cut spending on social services or education.

So Jan Brewer, proving herself extremely ineffective in rallying her own party, controlling her subordinates, or engaging folks from across the aisle has issued a battle cry in her 2010 state of the state address. And it’s a fucking mess. It’s clear that Gov. Brewer doesn’t have the political clout to make things happen in Arizona, and her address largely comes off as a whining screed blaming everyone else for the problems of the state, rambling incoherently about public policy philosophy and morality, and insisting that she’s got the right people to fix things if only everyone would stop fighting her.

I’m going to pull choice bits from the address and make fun of them. Enjoy:

Honesty, versus lies. Right, versus wrong. Those are the choices Arizona faces. The essence of the challenge laid at our feet.

In a homage to George Bush the First, I was waiting to see the good verses evil line. Jan pushes hard from the beginning for her brand of moral absolutism. Governing isn’t really all that complicated, and if you don’t agree with me and my policy decisions, then you’re probably corrupt or more interested in politics than in helping people. We’re off to a strong start.

They carried out their perilous work with consummate skill and calm. And then before disengaging — came upon yet another device. The discovery came too late. With his last breath on this earth, this courageous man shouted a warning to his two fellow guardsmen. He saved their lives. He gave his own.

While my speech will barely mention the military, it’s always a good thing to associate yourself with bravery, patriotism and heroism. See, I’m just like this hero guy. The fact this guy gave his life for his country makes the stuff I’m about to say seem more relevant, urgent and meaningful.

Last spring, you will recall that I offered you a five-point approach to resolving this fiscal crisis and restoring our economic vitality. In my year on the job I have grown wiser — and time has grown shorter. And I know times are tough. So today, let me open these proceedings by offering you a deal — a 40% cutback…I’m going to boil my 5 points — down to 3.

I’ve tried to push this agenda for almost a year, and I haven’t gotten anywhere. What if I cut it back to just 3 things. Would you do it then? Pretty please?

The economy has still not recovered, our revenues are still depressed and there is no avoiding this hardship. More state jobs are going to be shed and services are going to be further curtailed or lost. Let me be clear, in the history of this state no other Governor has cut state government more than I have.

I’m not going to bother to actually look up the data on this in inflation adjusted dollars, because the statement itself is just ridiculous. Government exists to provide services to its constituents. Want to cut government? It’s not really that hard. What’s hard is improving efficiency and eliminating waste. Sometimes that requires short term infusions of capital to improve automation, or execute process redesign. You know, the hard work of actual governing. Just cutting budgets and telling state institutions to suck it up no matter what is not effective governance. Jan seems to be unaware of this distinction.

Government must live within its means. I did not create this situation — but I intend to resolve it — and continue telling the people the truth about it.

It’s not my fault. Really. And it’s not my fault that I essentially haven’t done anything for a year to resolve the problem. You’re all just in denial about our problems. I am the only one who knows our hardship. My heart is heavy with this burden. BTW: Napolitano really did this to us. It’s all her fault. Also, for some reason she won’t get the government to pay for our immigration problem. She’s a bad person.

And let me make one point very clear. I have great respect for everyone in this chamber, and your contributions to our state.

You are all fuckwads who have done nothing but fiddle while rome burns. (which BTW I agree with)

But there is no one here, and no one elsewhere, who has fought any longer or harder than I have for lower taxes, job growth and economic freedom in Arizona. So, spare us the profiles in courage; it’s time for a little less profile and a little more courage.

My entire speech so far has been me painting my own profile in courage. But you guys should really lay off that.

But if we do not act decisively, we will look to the west to California and see our future — government over-grown — people over-taxed — borders over-run — employers over a barrel — and freedom … simply over.

See how badly those democrats have fucked up california? Well sure their governor is a republican like me, but he’s really a closet liberal. – Employers over a barrel? Yeah it’s awful, all that capital flight from california. Oh what’s that? California still has a tremendous tax base funded in part by some of the most successful and largest companies in the world? And why haven’t they moved to Arizona again? Oh because California continues to create and attract the smartest people in the world? riiiiiiight.

And what the fuck does she mean that freedom is simply gone in California? Did LA become Stalingrad when I wasn’t looking? Has she tried crossing the border from California into Arizona recently? You know, those places that the supreme court has ruled are “constitution free zones”? Those places far into Arizona land where federal agents can stop and search you without probable cause to conduct a “routine search”?

Or has she perhaps read up about Sheriff Joe’s immigration sweeps where if you’re a certain shade of brown you will be pulled over and forced to show your papers?

Our federal government has reached new levels of arrogance, foolishness and disregard for the Constitution. The biggest external threat to our budget comes from the federal government — oppressive health care mandates, job-killing environmental restrictions, and continual refusal to pay for costs associated with illegal immigration.

It’s hard to rebut the constitution part, partially because I have no fucking idea what she’s talking about. But this is just pure party-line bullshit. I guess arrogance and foolishness are the chief characteristics you need to actually function as an effective politician. Say what you want about Obama, but he’s getting shit done in the face of significant opposition. What are you doing again? Oh right, nothing.

When you begin by spreading the wealth around — you end up destroying it.

You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. More equitable distribution of wealth across classes has been shown time and time again to lead to better social outcomes and more political stability. It doesn’t fucking destroy anything. It just means rich people don’t get richer. The redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the super rich is a major part of why our economy is so fucked up right now. And you have no idea what I’m talking about because you were a fucking chiropractor (quack) and realtor before starting your political life. How’s that macro-economics reading list going? I thought so.

The President and the Congress tell us they are going to help by reducing costs. In reality, what they are doing is eliminating freedom for our citizens, dictating the policies they must buy for their families, and forcing our employers and the state to pick up the tab.

Not just the president, but the GAO and respectable party neutral organizations have acknowledged that the bill currently being reconciled will reduce health care costs considerably. Want to really reduce costs and improve the quality of healthcare? Go to a single payer system and put doctors on salaries. Its been shown over and over again that doing this increases quality of care and lowers costs. It’s fine if you want to live in a free-market fantasy where private business is the ideal solution to all problems, that’s fine, but don’t criticize the people who actually know what they’re talking about.

The federal government is also failing to control our southern border and refusing to pay for its failure. The cost of incarcerating these criminal aliens is not Arizona’s responsibility. It is Washington’s legal and moral obligation.

What? Why? While it’s absolutely a shared government responsibility to keep national borders safe from attack, why is it not a state responsibility to police its own borders? So you’re all about state’s rights and independence when it comes to mandated health care, but you’re all about government intervention on illegal immigration?

So, the ruinous cost of healthcare isn’t a widespread national concern that requires government intervention. It’s a state by state concern and should be left for private industry to fix on it’s own, i.e. you shouldn’t have to fix it. And porous borders on 3 states are a massive national concern that should be enforced and paid for by the government, i.e. you shouldn’t have to fix it. Got it.

Washington also likes to pretend that Government creates jobs. But, we know better. No government ever created a dollar of wealth or a dime of capital. Only the free market can do that.

You should have a grasp of economics, but we know better. Government policies including the fed rate, regulation, trade agreements, monopoly and patent protectionism, law enforcement and taxation generate or annihilate wealth, and either inspire capital investment or flight. They also enforce, extend or reduce class distinctions. There is no genuine free market in the US, nor should there be. There’s no such thing as a level playing field, and there’s always information asymmetry that well placed players can use to dominate markets.

It might be one thing if you were Ron Paul, and actually had read up on the austrian economics school (which is completely wrong headed, but is at least concerned and relatively informed). Or were a die-hard Greenspan/Randite, but you’re not. You’re just spouting the same mantra that flew our economy straight into the ground. Where where you for the last 2 years? Even Greenspan has recanted that shit.

In many ways, it’s the “free market” that has caused major systematic vulnerabilities in our economy. Specifically neo-liberal free trade agreements with countries that essentially allow for slave labor, wide-spread pollution, zero workplace safety, and manipulate their currencies to keep exchange rates favorable. They also charge marginal taxes that do nothing to offset the massive costs of the externalities that these companies impose on their host countries. They can do this because even those small taxes can make a small group very very rich, and that small group doesn’t give a shit about what the skies will look like when their grandkids are having kids. This is what is encouraging capital flight and suppressing wages, and driving unemployment in the US.

As long as I am your Governor, the sign out front will always read ARIZONA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

Since I don’t understand any of the above, and don’t have any education on long term public policy philosophy, I don’t understand how to produce anything but a burned out industrial husk of a state with no real culture, education, business or population diversity. So hell, the only thing I can do is promise massive tax incentives to artificially lower operating costs for businesses in opposition to my previous free-market fantasy statement. I don’t understand that this kind of government intervention into the market is ironically the opposite of my stated objectives. I know our budget is fucked, but I don’t understand how decimating the business tax base will impact the state’s revenues. My business consultants assure me that this will bring in additional jobs and businesses so we’ll have more income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes, but I’ve never read any studies that prove this almost never happens and that states almost never recoup the lost tax revenue. I also don’t know that most of these companies always promise full time work, and always deliver part time, low paid positions that end up suppressing labor costs, encouraging labor mobility to other states, and pushing healthcare costs onto state and federal governments because they don’t provide benefits.

Just a few days ago, I helped secure an agreement from Tower Automotive to come to Arizona and invest more than $50 million, and create nearly 200 quality jobs.

I won’t detail the promised tax breaks, or reduced property prices or taxes we’ll award to these businesses to start up. Largely because they would make a stupid 50 million dollar capital investment look small. The fact that I crow about the possibility of 200 new jobs, and imply that’s a major win for my administration shows just how pathetic and desperate I really am. I mean, that would be pretty weak for a mayor. I’m a freakin governor.

We need to do more to un-shackle our job creators.

We need to roll back business and capital gains taxes, reduce enforcement on the taxes that we still decide to charge, offer sweetheart deals on state owned land and state offered services, provide infrastructure support at taxpayer expense, reduce enforcement of labor laws, you know the kinds of things that really inspire business investment and build strong communities.

Second, I will be allocating a significant portion of remaining federal stimulus funds directly to bring new jobs to Arizona.

Remember that bullshit about free markets I was spouting earlier? This is not another contradiction. This is not a government intervention into free markets that favors some businesses over others and gives them significant advantages over their competitors both locally and in other states. Remember that bullshit about federal arrogance and foolishness? Well giving us money for this was not the stuff I was talking about.

Third, under the leadership of Jerry Colangelo and Commerce Director Don Cardon … I have created the Governor’s Commerce Advisory Council. Working with other Arizona business leaders, they will transform the Department of Commerce into an engine for job creation.

So you know that guy who owns the suns, the mercury and ran the coyotes into bankruptcy? The guy who pays no property taxes on his stadiums in borderline illegal land lease deals? Oh and that guy who oversaw the housing bubble in Arizona as director of the department of housing? The guy who brokers these massive tax rebates and subsidies now as commerce director?

These two guys are going to fix business in Arizona. Largely by giving away the farm in special interest deals to their personal buddies from which they will undoubtedly take a cut. But hey, at least I don’t have to do it.

And — while I’m talking about jobs let me say we should do everything we can to see that Arizona is named a training site for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Remember earlier when I said that the government doesn’t create wealth or capital, well I still mean that, but I guess it does create jobs and feed families. And this would represent a massive influx into state coffers. But government is still bad.

I’d like to recognize the work to-date by the regents and Presidents of our universities and community colleges…in response to my call for a new higher- education model that promotes greater access, quality and affordability.

I won’t mention the unilateral budget cuts that lead to job cuts across all of our universities with no consideration to actual spending needs. They can suck it up.

Isn’t it astonishing that in Arizona today, Bill Gates or Craig Barrett would not be considered qualified to teach students about computer science? We must stop our gate keeping and open the doors to all qualified and skilled citizens who want to teach our children.

So we have a shortage of skilled teachers? Really? Might that have anything to do with teacher’s salaries? I’m sure Bill Gates would love to come in and teach computer science for a college professor’s salary. Really. What we’re really saying here is:

We must crush teachers unions and the tenure system at universities because they are socialist and bad. I have no appreciation for the skills necessary for effective child or adult education, and think I could come in and control a classroom with zero preparation. I believe that success in a particular field is entirely determined by skill and resolve and has nothing to do with luck. It has not occurred to me that Bill Gates’ success was largely determined by his sociopathic need to win above all other things, including technical skill. I will ignore the fact that despite literally a mountain of Ph.Ds at his beck and call, he cannot produce a product that doesn’t suck in almost every way, and succeeds almost entirely due to early, barely above board, and often below board bribery to institutions and manufacturers.

But we must give parents the ability to make the best choices for their children. Starting with where they go to school. We lead the nation in school choice. In Arizona –a parent’s right to choose the best school must endure — whether that’s a district, private, charter or home school.

Our public schools fucking suck. We are consistently ranked among the bottom 3 in the nation. But that’s because of the dirty mexicans. White parents don’t want their kids going to school with dirty mexicans who can’t even speak english, so it’s important that we encourage gentrification and white flight to the suburbs and exburbs. If everyone had to go to a school in their own district, that means we’d actually have to deal with the problems in our shitty public schools rather than offer parents an easy out.

Also, our state is dominated by old people who hate taxes, and especially hate paying for the education of little mexican kids. So our elementary education system will remain underfunded and under-resourced. But that’s okay because rich people don’t have to use them, and poor people don’t vote. That’s a win/win in my book.

We must also arm parents with the information they need to help monitor their children’s academic progress. We will make sure they have up-to-date data that is available on-line –at any time. Sorry, kids, no more losing your report card!

The reason your kids are dumb is that you’re not making the effort of giving them the education we don’t really care to provide. You should really be doing our job, despite the fact that our economy is in shambles and you have to work 3 part time jobs just to make ends meet and maybe see your kids 2 hours a day. Doing this at least lets us place the blame on your shoulders by claiming that we’ve been telling you your kids are dumb on a regular basis and you did nothing about it.

And we should know well before third grade those students who are falling behind and get them the help they need. I look forward to working with Senator John Huppenthal and Representative Rich Crandall and other members to enact these reforms.

Who’s going to pay for that extra help? Fuck if I know. Johnny and Richy will figure that out.

First, I’m establishing the Commission on Privatization and Efficiency or “COPE”. COPE will identify state services and agencies whose functions can be eliminated, consolidated, streamlined or outsourced to achieve greater operational efficiency in meeting the needs of our citizens.

I fucking hate my job. It’s hard keeping track of all this government shit. Why can’t we just pay our buddies to do this for us at crazy rates? Of course they’ll offer inferior or no service, but it’ll probably cost us less over-all. At least for a couple of years until rate increases start happening every year and we’re held hostage by the small group of businesses that we fed like hungry ticks while starving out other local companies and decimating our in house expertise, leaving us with no choices and no options to recover when we’re fucked. Did I mention that private business does everything better than any government agency could do? I mean like everything. Never mind that private business has an incentive system that is systematically and diametrically opposed to the public good. I don’t understand that the whims of investors and their ongoing need for ever growing profits might not actually increase efficiency, but in fact lead to taxpayers getting ripped off. I haven’t read up about any other states doing this kind of thing, like say the wholesale deregulation and privatization of california’s energy infrastructure. I think that went peachy.

While we agree we must provide essential services for those with no place else to turn…we must only offer those benefits necessary and ensure that we have a program free of abuse or waste.

We must decrease visits to high cost settings like emergency rooms — and encourage those receiving state service to take personal responsibility for their own health, as all Arizonans should.

If you’re sick, it’s your fault. Eat less twinkies fatty. We shouldn’t pay for it. You should. Don’t have the money to pay for it? Die. Thanks.

Third, budget cuts within state government have resulted in reduced or limited funding for services for our most vulnerable — the elderly, disabled and low- income residents. Therefore, I’m establishing Arizona Serves. With the assistance of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Arizona Serves will connect faith-based and non-profit organizations to help meet those needs.

On second thought, if you are sick and poor, maybe this is an opportunity to funnel public and federal funds into churches and non-profits that my buddies run. Hey. This might just work. Maybe I’ll net a fat directorship out of one of them if I lose the election. That would be sweet. God knows I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.

I won’t go in to her awful concluding comments. Ugh. Yet another shitty Arizona governor.