Obama's second SOTU is being praised - but that same day a question was posed to the chair of his committee of economic advisors (CSPAN-3.)
One might ask whether the displaced Bushmen need jobs. After all, the diamond miners will have jobs. Did those Bushmen "lose" their jobs in being forcibly relocated? Should so many retirees in USA and Canada be in such low-paying jobs?
Consider Kenya and its coffee co-operatives. Is the aim to make Kenya number one? Is the objective "full employent in Kenya"? (The day after SOTU-2 Obama was in WI preaching "being number one" as the space-age challenge.
Per capita, America is the number one energy consumer. But we are told that the answer is more energy.
Consider DC current for our many devices. One innovation failure is that our homes are not cabled for low voltage DC. As a result, we heat our homes with transformers. Every cell phone sold, is another transformer.
In the race to #1 there is not always a clear winner. But suppose that Google does have the best, most innovative, search engine strategy. Suppose that Facebook does have the best social networking strategy (neither is obvious from the standpoint of innovation.) The question of the business model of each is simple: advertising.
When Obama remarked that corporate profits are up, he did not remark that this is consistent with low-paid low-benefit unsafe manufacturing jobs being in the throd world. It is. They are.
The US two-year tech colleges for IT are not teaching the innovations. A remarkably high percentage of their "grads" get jobs. Experienced older IT workers who have a proven track record as innovators are unemployed - a high percentage not mentioned by the sputnik-innovator-advocates.
Bill Gates was not an innovator. Period. He told egregious lies to Ricoh and IBM. Is that innovating?
Many American IT corp's have a history of suppressing innovation: Sun may have been one of the worst. Obama did not mention IBM, a true innovator of long-standing. He did not mention M.I.T. There is more to Boston that bio-tech.
The money government spends on education will be largely mis-spent except from the point of view of the re-election of Obama. But after his second-term, he is sure to turn his attention to the global.
A democratic and innovative China as #1 might ensure the long term stability and prosperity of America - that might be a win-win game. We do not know.
Germany as #1 in Europe is no more tha answer for Europe than is France as #1 - or a crime-ridden and corrupt Russia.
The USA should be be focussed on being the winner. That is too short-sighted. That is not a long-term vision.
If US life-expectancy remained lower than Norway or Sweden but world-wide life-expectancy for those over age 40 improved, would the US be the loser?
Recent science suggests that the perceived "own" group may limit the charity and altruism of most of us. Consider what a President Palin would mean in a North America with melted Arctic sea ice and a weak Canadian claim to the high arctic. Just ask yourself what the Teddy Roosevelt response would be if control of the high arctic were viewed as required to be #1 or to "win the future". But neither Canada nor Mexico nor Cuba found mention in SOTU #2.
Aside: will that 2 years of college get bright, illegal Latinos out of the low-paying jobs - such as teaching? Will the investment in IT mean another lost investment in a replacement system for the IRS?
The software skills needed for scheduling high-speed trains are not taught in most IT training colleges. Nor for scheduling buses. Nor for scheduling speeches. The number of IT grads from 4-year programs who can answer a simple question about costraints in programming is in the single digits. It is a fallacy is that innovation comes with the PhD. The words "post-doc" were not in the speech.
The neglect of electronic medical records in reducing the cost of healthcare was not mentioned. The dismal state of the software provided by the leading American innovator in healthcare pricing software is simply unknown to the public although the company was purchased by a publicly traded corporation. This is the software used by the most hospitals - and the same software used by the biggest health insurers. It was designed by an accountant. Innovative accounting has never been the answer.
The crisis in the accounting firm for Leyman Brothers passed without mention: the software used to track risk at that audit firm is on a codebase that I have had the misfortune to learn. Another failure in software innovation - by an accountant (in this case, an auditor.) The failed head of audit at Enron - a client - is now the head of audit at which great Chicago insurer? He remains their software client.
The two software suites dominating both those markets are from recognized "innovative" firms and yet neither shows any sign of having absorbed a major applied science innovation in CS more recent than 1973 in 2005 and 2009, respectively. The winners, each #1 in their niche, are part of the problem as they cater to industries notorious for not addressing their IT problems - and placing the cost on their customers premiums, industry-wide. Only an international board of inquiry of IT innovation experts reviewing actual code could demonstrate the extent of this infrastructure "challenge".
Universities are 10 to 15 years behind the innovators. Healthcare and insurance and banking (regardless of the derivatives-hype) are how mnay years behind the US universities?
Facile gab about innovation investments is not itself innovative or insightful. It is politically expedient.
Cisco advertises on the web that robotics bio-interfaces is "pure research". Advisors to the White House confound science and techniques in the same breath. No amount of such foolishness is well-advised. But a serious conversation in a public forum about IT failures and deficiencies is both over-due and unlikely. The relevant codebases are not open to public audit or confidential review.
That three of the more innovative programming languages are only recently UNICODE compatible, that RDF is only now coming to Drupal - these two simple facts will be unknown to the hip President with the BlackBerry and able to talk about String Theory and Game Theory.
The elephants in the room, low levels of personal savings and the Mortage Interest Deduction were not mentioned. That those with no savings could buy a house for no money down and use the deduction to get a better deal than renting is a fact and a fact that howls to be addressed. It has no voice.
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