Many Americans will probably expect this to be a discussion of Baseball (RBI=Runs Batted In), and perhaps a complaint about the idiocy of the Baseball Commissioner's stopping of the All-Star Game, apparently in the mistaken notion that this would be OK with the baseball-loving public.

But it's not. Okay with the Public, that is. And this isn't about Baseball, anyway.

It's mid-summer doldrums time and so instead it is a piece about Really Bad Ideas which seem to be circulating with great frequency of late.

I should early point out, I suppose, that not all of the summer's ideas are bad. For example, Eberhard Lutz is devoting some intellectual time and energy to what seems, so far at least, to be a tantalizing evolution.

And then there's a finally a review of some of the Cluetrain ThoughtJunk that manages to suggest that monkeys on typewriters would have produced better stuff than that published in pathetic pieces like Winberger's Small Pieces... So there's some good stuff out there.

The bad ideas, however, abound. Some of this will probably to be expanded on in a Piled Higher and Deeper essay when time allows are at least:

1. Winer's notion that journalists are somehow supposed to be investigators, moral judges, and something other than just people---not unlike drug salesmen---doing what is often an uninspiring job attempting to make a passable living, hardly great candidates for having our personal interests at the center of their heart (What a Surprise!);
2. Searls' saga of ongoing hardware and software problems with his Apple, which he has griped about in what must be on the order of a dozen items so far this year, all the while testifying how `wonderful' and `easy to use' his Apples are;
3. Lileks rants have gotten worse and worse. He has moved from being a great favorite to a more neutral appraisal, and now---particularly when he wanders off on one of his odd pseudo-American diatribes, often surprisingly ill informed---his stuff is really poor. Maybe it's living in my hometown that's eventually getting to him. I never thought of lutefisk or lefse as mind-impairing---perhaps it is excessive aquavit. His pictures and matchbooks and postcards are still swell, however;
4. The much touted iMac design that I found to have all of the advantages of a laptop except portability and convenience, but was supposed to be so wonderful anyway, and that now sits unsold clogging the aisles at many a local computer store;
5. Apple Stores, a discredited idea about how to sell computers that mostly failed with a dull thud a decade or so ago, being recycled into expensive locations apparently on the odd idea that if you pay really high rents this will surely lead to profitability;
6. Seitz, apparently applauding Winer's incredibly dubious claim that the `software industry is the core of the Western Economy' doesn't seem to get, yet, that the well deserved collapse of the .COM world is, in fact, testimony to the unimportance of software---and computers in general---to real life. Seitz, apparently quoting Winer, comments that A Hollywood movie gets much more funding than a breakthrough software idea. and seems surprised and angered by this fact. To me, it just looks like a `good decision'. Movies have contributed a lot more `value' to my life than software has.
7. The Cluetrain still seems to run on nothing but hot air, but perhaps some of the good news of the summer is that it is at least beginning to show signs of slipping off its rickety thought tracks
8. The silly season of new technology seems to never end. Six Degrees is coming out, as is Tekadence, Apple's iCal ... and all, AFAICS, technology desperately in search of a problem---and not finding one;
9. Blogs and blogging, seem to have their importance more strongly self-declared at the same time that some long established bloggers seem to be departing the field. This would square with the notion that we have passed the high water mark of the influence blogs;
10. Resistance to MicroSoft seems to be growing. AFAICS the hugely expensive and much touted launch of XP has produced hardly a ripple of discussion. And corporate resistance to MicroSoft's new charging policies seems to be growing just at a time that the usefulness of lots of corporate computer power falls into question;
11. Apple continues to peddle its image as an innovator when most of it's ideas are often already passe. For example, I've had a Sony Vaio with a flat-panel screen in a configuration much more attractive than the iMac that cost me less and has been around for a year or so before the iMac hit the streets. Typical Apple innovation
12. Hardware sales collapse in the face of a seemingly growing awareness that few of us need much more power, and that no matter how cheap it is, until they pay you there is little value to be obtained in improving things that are under utilized anyway;
13. Apple's bizarre advertising campaign seems to be accomplishing what is so often the effect of their campaigns (i.e. those campaigns that have led them triumphantly from 5% of the market to about 5% of the market), namely making ill-educated Apple customers feel good about being ill-educated (maybe this is following the lead of our President who seems to feel so good about his lack of education). I mean I think it has been many years (half a decade?) since I have seen a `Blue Screen of Death'. And my NT system has been running for the last 600 hours---since powering on after coming back from a trip---without any significant hitch. Where do they find these clueless people who are so happy in their ignorance that they are proud to make a virtue out of stupidity be in their ads?
14. For some reason, Winer continues to be fascinated with the question of what you call journalism. Generally his silly questions are advanced with an air of profoundity that I find I can only stand if I replace the word weblog with something else, for example ham sandwich Then you get OK, let's deconstruct a myth. Someone says that ham sandwiches aren't journalism. OK, suppose a journalist has a ham sandwich. When that journalist writes something on the ham sandwich, therefore, it must not be journalism. Suppose the journalist writes exactly the same words on her ham sandwich that she writes in a column in the newspaper she writes for. In one place it's journalism and in the other it's not? Hmmm. OK, try this one out. Are ham sandwiches medicine? Suppose a doctor is writing a ham sandwich and the doctor writes something she learned in medical school. Then the same doctor writes the same text in a medical textbook. I guess it's not medicine when its written in a ham sandwich? You see how silly these arguments are, how easy they are to deconstruct. If there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a ham sandwich. It's just a format. Nothing more. It's really not a mystery in 2002. But it's hard to disagree with his clinching closer It also goes without saying that if an idiot writes a weblog, then you get idiocy in a weblog. as he has just proven it beyond doubt in a flash of undeniable self-revelation.
15. Hopefully this is Suddenly, Last Summer for the notion that computers are any panacea in education. The data that suggests that computers aren't helping, and may even be hurting, is beginning to accumulate. Of course this causes some to insist that it must be because we haven't done enough rather than that we have done too much will still get an airing. But, hopefully, it will get short shrift as well.
16. In a similiar vein, the notion that it might be a good idea to drag high school kids through one of the array processing languages in the hope of teaching them some math resurfaced for a brief gasp of air. This idea seems to bubble up every six months or so, this time on the J Forum, but blessedly seems to sink back into oblivion before anyone invests much energy in it. That appears to have happened again.
17. The productivity of computers seems to still be accepted as a Cardinal Act of Faith, but like the questions that swirl around some of our religions, this tenet seems to be being given increasing scrutiny, and looks more and more dubious each day.

We could go on. There's at least corporate integrity and politician's competence. Two of the great oxymora of the age.

But that's for later, when we're in a good mood...

... Link