OmniGroup sponsored TightWind for the entire month of December, and I want to thank them again for it. They’re a great group of people making really, really good software that I use daily. They’re some of the people I had in mind when I wrote The Creator’s Culture.

We’re hoping you decided to check out the trial of OmniFocus after our sponsorship earlier this month. Here’s a quick 5-step jumpstart.

1. Capture everything. Take 15 minutes to move things out of your head and in to OmniFocus. Anything from long-term goals (earn pilots license) to quick errands (card for mother).
2. Define next actions. “Earn pilots license” deserves its own project. Move it to your library and decide what to do next.
3. Organize actions with contexts. “Research area flight schools” might be assigned to a Mac context for googling, “card for mother” to Walgreen’s.
4. Now we do stuff. If you’re at the office, focus on work projects to get stuff done!
5. Review mode. Take time to consider each active project. Does it need some work?

Find out more about OmniFocus here, and don’t hesitate to ask questions.

As you’ve heard, Kim Jong-il died this weekend, and there’s nothing wrong with being happy that the world is without one less tyrannical dictator who’s set his country back decades. Nothing wrong at all.

His death doesn’t mean, however, that North Korea’s condition will improve, or that their relations with the rest of the world will improve, either. There’s no reason to think their economy will suddenly be able to feed their people, or their government will dismantle their nuclear program and end hostilities with South Korea and stop threatening Japan.

In fact, there’s more risk now than there’s been since 1994, when Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, passed away. North Korea’s government is not only a totalitarian state, but it is a dictatorship with no defined process for transferring power from one leader to the next. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il created a cult of personality for themselves to maintain their power, and so when they die, the country inherently becomes less stable. The government is very brittle in that way—one crack can demolish the entire structure.

This is compounded by North Korea’s constant feeling that South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. view them as inferior, and thus they have to prove how powerful they are both as a sense of pride and for their survival. This is dangerous enough when North Korea’s power structure is stable, and manifests itself as missile and nuclear tests and acts of aggression against South Korea, but it’s even more dangerous now. North Korea’s next leader, or the military, may find it necessary to show their strength by conducting more tests or threatening the South.

Worse, too, is Kim Jong-il’s son and apparent designated successor, Kim Jong-un, is a twenty-something year old four-star general with no military experience. Tension is almost guaranteed, between Kim Jong-un and the military, and possibly his family as well. In the worst case, a power struggle could ensue, and North Korea’s government could collapse.

There’s no telling what that would lead to, and that’s why this is so dangerous: there’s so many things that could go wrong. The world may be better off with Kim Jong-il gone, but in the short-term, it’s also a more dangerous world.

Mark Pennington:

The leftist alternative, by contrast, does not propose to dismantle the apparatus of government power but to make sure that ‘the right people’ are in charge of it and the ‘right interventions’ are in place. Yet, it is precisely because voters find it so difficult to tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ interventions and between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ politicians that affords the opportunity for rent seekers and crony capitalists to create ‘structured inequality’.

President Obama will sign a bill into law which will allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely. Let that sink in: the military will be able to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely. No trial, much less one in a civilian court. Just a nice, secluded U.S. military cell guarded by U.S. soldiers.

Support came from both Democrats and Republicans. Senator Lindsey Graham said:

“It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” he said. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

The White House initially opposed the bill, but not because Obama objected to detaining Americans—but rather because the bill did not provide enough executive power. Glenn Greenwald writes:

The White House’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, insisted the White House, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.

In fact, Obama insisted that the bill include a provision allowing American citizens to be detained. Greenwald continues:

The proof of that — the definitive, conclusive proof — is that Sen. Carl Levin has several times disclosed that it was the White House which demanded removal of a provision in his original draft that would have exempted U.S. citizens from military detention (see the clip of Levin explaining this in the video below). In other words, this was an example of the White House demanding greater detention powers in the bill by insisting on the removal of one of its few constraints (the prohibition on military detention for Americans captured on U.S. soil).

Of course, this isn’t exactly new; Jose Padilla was declared an enemy combatant by President Bush and transferred to military custody in 2002, where he was held for three and a half years. But what this does do, is it codifies it into law. After President Obama signs it, detention of American citizens by the U.S. military, on U.S. soil, will be legal.

Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. I’ll avoid the partisan needling, because there’s really nothing gained by anyone here. Democrats and Republicans have worked together better than they have in years to put flame to the Bill of Rights.

Thanks again to OmniGroup for sponsoring TightWind this week. I use OmniGraffle every day.

The great thing about it is how incredibly flexible it is—it’s absolutely great for diagramming, but what I really use it for are wireframes. OmniGraffle is this odd combination of simple and powerful, a combination you don’t find in much software, and it makes it a very, very good tool for mocking up website designs or user interfaces.

OmniGraffle is the easiest and most elegant way to create website wireframes, process flows, organization hierarchies, and, frankly, almost anything.

Rely on OmniGraffle to create beautifully simple documents to share with anyone. Even through an ?TV.

Created for both Mac and iPad, OmniGraffle’s smart shapes, stencils and contextual styling elements gracefully guide you from rough outline to pixel perfection.

For ages 5 to 105, and available here.

Horace Dediu:

Likewise, the iPod came seemingly out of nowhere but by watching the original launch you see it as part of a “media hub” strategy that envisions the Mac as a personal server. The very products which ended up disrupting the Mac/PC began as extensions of their victims.

You can trace the DNA of almost all of Apple’s products to previous products. If Apple did not have these foundations, the slow-motion revolutions would not have happened. Rather than a deliberate big bang, Apple’s disruptions are the result of a discovery process. A test, iterate and improve loop. This is why they seem obvious after the launch but also why they seem to be such an anti-climax.

Occupy protestors have decided to shut down ports to shut down capitalism:

The protesters, who targeted ports from San Diego to Anchorage, said they wanted to highlight the plight of average Americans who have suffered from home foreclosures and soaring unemployment while the largest U.S. banks have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. “We are the 99 percent,” their slogan, refers to economist Joseph Stiglitz’s research that found the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth.

“This isn’t about the truckers,” Charles Rachlis, 55, of El Cerrito, California, said in an interview at the Oakland protest. “We have to shut down the wheels of capitalism at the port. This scares the bejesus out of Wall Street.”

Let’s set aside that shutting down the ports, which—if successful—threatens many jobs of the “average Americans” they claim they want to highlight the plight of, and also that shutting down ports to show the plight of regular people is a non-sequitur.

Let’s look at what they’re really trying to do. They aren’t trying to show that the middle class and poor have been terribly hurt by the recession and need help. They aren’t trying to show that income inequality is harmful and so we should try to raise the incomes of the poor and middle class. No—they’re trying to hurt “Wall Street,” or rather, hurt businesses and the capitalist system. They want to punish them.

Maybe you agree that capitalism should be eliminated. Fine. We can have that conversation. But we at least need to acknowledge what shutting down the ports is really about. And it has nothing to do with merely raising the tax rate for the highest income tax bracket from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Marco loves Studio Neat’s Cosmonaut stylus for iPad.

I’m intrigued by it and I’d love to try it out. I’m still looking for the perfect stylus for sketching on iPad, and this looks like it might be really good. Like Marco points out, the problem is that because they’re all closer to pens, you naturally want to rest your hand on the screen—which doesn’t work out so well. A second, slightly smaller, issue is that the foam tips (along with the capacitive touch screen) provide an inconsistent point recognition, so you don’t always know where your stylus will draw on screen when it touches down.

The Cosmonaut looks to solve both issues. The first because the Cosmonaut is more like a dry-erase marker, so you’re less likely to want to lay your hand down on the screen, and the second for the same reason—you’re treating it like a marker, which inherently doesn’t have very fine control.

Edward Luce:

In the words of David Autor, a leading labour economist at Harvard University, the labour force is suffering from a growing “missing middle”.

In short, the middle-skilled jobs that once formed the ballast of the world’s wealthiest middle class are disappearing. They are being supplanted by relatively low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs that cannot be replaced either by new technology or by offshoring – such as home nursing and landscape gardening. Jobs are also being created for the highly skilled, notably in science, engineering and management.

Austan Goolsbee:

Certainly the countries of Southern Europe must rein in excess. In the long run, however, even the deepest of cuts won’t suffice. Southern Europe needs to grow or it will never control its debt levels. But with the euro zone keeping Southern Europe uncompetitive, the region’s growth prospects will remain dismal.

Northern Europe has fueled its growth through exports. It has run huge trade imbalances, the most extreme of which with these same Southern European countries now in peril. Productivity rose dramatically compared to the South, but the currency did not.

Europe’s problem isn’t just debt. The problem is Northern and Southern European nations are very different economically. Germany’s workers are highly productive and their economy relies on exports as a result, while Southern nations are not productive and thus cannot use exports to grow their economy. If they were not a part of the euro, they could devalue their currency to make their exports less expensive (and more competitive), but they aren’t, so they can’t. Their only way is to increase productivity.

George Will on Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

That’s about as good a summation of who Gingrich is you’ll ever see. There’s nothing conservative about Gingrich’s faith that he has the answer and plan for everything.

Today, HP announced they are releasing webOS as open source. Meg Whitman’s memo to employees suggests HP will continue to openly develop it, too:

Since we announced the discontinuation of our webOS devices last August, the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected software. We looked at all the options in the market today and we see a clear need for a platform that is both open and has a single integrated stack.

I suppose it’s better than killing it outright, but there’s no chance of competing with Android by releasing it for anyone to use at this point. That ship has sailed.

John Gruber:

What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be. It all makes sense if you think of the label under the “#” tab as reading “Dickbar” instead of “Discover”.

In addition, the value I saw in Twitter was as more of a utility—something other people built on top of in unique ways, one of which happened to be really good native clients, like Tweetie. Clearly, Twitter doesn’t view themselves that way, and that’s okay. I only hope that the Twitter I started using in 2008, which introduced me to a bunch of absolutely wonderful people through a brilliantly simple idea and interface, will still exist in the next few years.

After a Bloomberg story on the Federal Reserve’s involvement in stemming the 2008 financial crisis, the web and media were suddenly flooded with erroneous, angry talk about the Fed loaning $7.7 trillion to banks.

Problem is, that’s false. Suzy Khimm writes:

Problem is, the Fed never actually doled out $7.7 trillion to banks: Much of that $7.7 trillion figure doesn’t reflect loans made, but loan guarantees — the amount the Fed would be responsible for in case of default — and loan limits. Certainly, the Fed positioned itself to take on considerable risk if need be, but the central bank was not handing out $7.7 trillion in cold, hard cash to banks. Politicians and the news media alike have erroneously conflated the two, using “loan guarantees” and “loans” interchangeably. The Fed would have given out $7.7 trillion to banks only in the unlikely scenario that the banks asked for the maximum possible loans and that every one of them subsequently defaulted.

David Frum on Obama’s speech in Kansas:

Yet here is President Obama proposing to replay that bitter Blair-Brown experience. The unblinking diagnosis of the ills of the U.S. economy in the first half of his Kansas speech builds to a conclusion that amounts to: Let’s accept that our future prosperity will be very narrowly based, and instead use some of the proceeds of that narrow prosperity to create government jobs as consolation prizes for those who lose out in private markets. The president flew all the way to Kansas to propose that?

And Ross Douthat furthers:

But fundamentally, his pivot to the 2012 campaign has also been a pivot to a defense of business-as-usual, in which the rich pay, the government grows, and the millions of Americans who don’t belong to public sector unions, work for favored industries, or draw on Social Security and Medicare are left waiting for the government’s ever-more-expensive investments to trickle down to them.