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The New York Times just interviewed Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Parker commented on putting every episode online for free:
To be honest, we don’t care about the money. We both have all the money we need. It’s really just about the survival of the show. First hearing about, O.K., we’re going to be putting everything on the Internet for free, I was like, Really? Wow, O.K. [laughs] That’s the world we live in. I’m actually surprised at how smooth the transition is going.
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Chris Clark thinks page flips are better than scrolling on the iPad:
Dragging through thousands of words of prose isn’t skimming, isn’t navigation… it’s laborious. You’re paginating by hand.
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Matt Thompson on the need for context in news:
It turns out that in order for information about things like the public option and budget reconciliation to be useful to you, you need a certain amount of systemic knowledge to be able to parse it. You need an intellectual framework for understanding health care reform before the episodic headlines relating to health care reform make any sense.
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Right now, the most common way the news industry attempts to impart systemic knowledge is by wedging it into our episodic reports. We’ll give you tons of stories on Congresspeople sneezing something that sounds like “reconciliation” and every time, a little ways in, we’ll say something like, “Reconciliation is a procedural tactic originally designed to speed adoption of budget resolutions through Congress.”
Absolutely right. He’s speaking about this at SXSW. If you’re lucky enough to be there, sounds like you should check out his panel.
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Marco Arment writes that realism shouldn’t be overdone in UIs:
DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.
It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.
And Neven Mrgan argues that limitations caused by realistic UIs may be worth the benefits:
After you’ve read your twelfth ebook, you don’t need the candy anymore. Ideally, the candy isn’t so distracting that you hate it, and what was once cute (swiping to flip the page!) turns into sheer utility (tapping to turn the page, which I have to believe will also be possible in iBooks.)
But that flip matters because it gets you going. And it gets going everyone who sees you reading your twelfth book in iBooks. How will you demo it to them? Will you tap or will you slowly turn the page? If your booklist was also available as a boring (and useful) black-and-white table, would that be the screen you’d show your friends?
Both posts are fantastic.
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Greg Mankiw on the health care reform bill being “deficit neutral”:
Even if you believe that the spending cuts and tax increases in the bill make it deficit-neutral, the legislation will still make solving the problem of the fiscal imbalance harder, because it will use up some of the easier ways to close the shortfall.
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Chief Justice Roberts on the State of the Union:
I have no problems with that [criticism of the Supreme Court]. On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum.
The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.
The President, and Congress, used the event to ridicule the Supreme Court before the nation, in a setting where the Supreme Court can do nothing but sit there, expressionless. Justice Alito couldn’t help but shake his head and mouth “not true,” and was heavily criticized for it by the left for being political.
What President Obama, and this Congress, did politicized what shouldn’t be, whether you agree with the ruling or not. The State of the Union is something unique in our government, where the three branches meet for one night. Using it as a pulpit to ridicule another branch in front of the country, a setting whose tradition demand they not respond, is disgusting. It takes a solemn event that pays respect to our system of government, our nation, and uses it for partisan advantage.
That’s what Roberts is objecting to, and he has every right to.
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The Panic Status Board. Just go and look.
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The IRS is complaining that it’s too easy for companies to hide things in their tax returns, because the filings are so long and complex:
In such length and complexity, opportunities lurk for any company that is willing to take aggressive tax positions. They might be virtually sure to lose if the Internal Revenue Service understood how something on Page 1,235 had interacted with something on Page 2,947 and challenged the result, but there is at least a reasonable chance the I.R.S. auditor would not figure it out.
“Today,” complained the I.R.S. commissioner, Douglas H. Shulman, in a recent speech, “we spend up to 25 percent of our time in a large corporate audit searching for issues rather than having a straightforward discussion with the taxpayer about the issues.”
So there’s an easy solution, right? Just eliminate the web of deductions, exclusions, exemptions, exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, so tax filings are easy for companies to compose and for the IRS to review. Easy.
Well, that’s not what the IRS is seeking:
To save that time, and to learn about things that are being missed, the I.R.S. is trying to require companies to give the agency a road map not only of the games that are being played, but of the maximum possible tax hit that companies would take if the I.R.S. chose to challenge them.
So, rather than solve this problem by making the system simpler, the IRS is seeking more power, and more filings from companies.
Perfect example of the problem of giving even an inch to government. They’ll use that inch to gain as much more as they can, and they’ll never let up.
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There is something intrinsically “right” about seeing the iPad as a technological successor to, or version of, these physical objects. We’re immediately ready to accept the one as a substitute or enhancement for the other. This is a powerful, and novel, position for the iPad software developer.
It wasn’t true with the iPhone or iPod Touch; the devices are too physically small. The “Notes” app on the iPhone will forever be a simulation of a legal pad; the similar app on the iPad is a legal pad (to your user). It’s an incredibly important distinction in terms of how it influences our design.
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Fortune has a quite good profile of Paul Ryan and his Roadmap for America’s Future plan.
Ryan is one of the few politicians in Washington (or anywhere else) I have any respect for. Unlike most of them, he isn’t slick. He’s honest, and genuinely wants to solve this country’s problems. The same can’t be said of nearly every other Congressman.
He’s the only one with a real plan to solve the biggest crisis facing this country: growing entitlement spending that we can’t afford, and as a result mounting budget-deficits and national debt. No one else, including the president, even acknowledges it. He does, and has a plan to solve it.
We need more people like Ryan in Washington — people who know that serving in Congress is not a career, but rather a responsibility to their country. A responsibility to act honestly, and to solve this nation’s problems.
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