There’ll be updates throughout the day

on Short and to the point.

iPhone clipboard tricks.

So you don’t have a multi-clipboard and you don’t even know if the window view you had last time in Safari will be there when you return. How do you quote from an article you’re reading, and cite it?

1) Copy each bit to a Note. This was my first idea. As well as it works, Notes has to launch each time you switch back to it. If you’re pulling out many pieces, this can take a minute.

2) Stack URIs and text in the address bar. Believe it or not you can paste a lot of text into the address bar, but it can’t deal with paragraph breaks. So if all you want is a sentence or two, or URIs from several pages, copy the text, tap the iPhone’s status bar at the top, tap the web address, put the cursor at the end of the address, paste. Then select all and copy again. Slice it up when you get to where you want to paste it all.

3) Ah but you want a couple paragraphs. You need a better pasteboard to assemble your selections. Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you a very Web 2.0 solution: “the comment box.” Yes, you can copy as many interesting things from all over one web page into the comment text box as you can think to copy, even format it, before selecting all and copying away. “Ah,” you’re maybe thinking, “the comment box is way down there, and I have no ‘end’ key to take me to the bottom of that crazylong comment thread.” np. Tap the search box or any exposed text box on the web page, then tap the “previous” or “next” buttons above the iPhone keyboard until you reach the comment box. (I recommend against clicking any “leave a comment” links because they may trigger Safari to load the page again.)

4) “Ah,” you’re probably thinking, “sometimes there’s no comment box.” Very true. It can be a little tougher to use, but you can also use any available text box on the page as a pasteboard. (There’s a Safari bug in the way.)

5) “I want to copy multiple multiple-paragraphs and a bunch of other stuff and there are no exposed input boxes and even though Notes works I want something else.” Ah. Maybe what you want is a pasteboard in easy reach inside Safari. If you’re writing on WordPress.com, you can go to http://m.wordpress.com/?action=post, giving you the nice option of saving things in a Draft (or adding links to your list). Here’s another gizmo though.

http://alohaflower.home.mindspring.com/ipasteboard.html

Bookmark that, grab the file and put it somewhere, whatever. I have no idea how to make it write a cookie that keeps what you pasted until you delete it, but that would be nice, huh. I wish I could reduce the number of taps. It’s, what, 3 more per item than using Notes.

IMPORTANT to remember that neither web pasteboard in #5 is persistent. Safari can (and does) wipe out what you entered in the text box whenever it wants, by refreshing the page next time you return. So flipping pages in Safari is only reliable if you’re copying out information from a single page.

HOWEVER.

All of this is ridiculous.

And I know exactly what Apple and other mobile OS designers should do here.

EXACTLY.

Right now the interface for the single clipboard is very simple. You select where you want to paste and up pops the “Select/Select All/Paste” bubble.

It would be almost no effort to add one of those little “drop down menu” arrows to the Paste button. If user presses Paste, they get LIFO. If user presses and holds Paste, they get a nice thumbnail menu of the last 8(?) things Copied or Cut. It’s a common interface concept. It’s right there in your “back” button if you’re reading this with a desktop web browser.

(I’ve lost or destroyed the address of the very clever Japanese Palm OS programmer who made the super-awesome clipboard gizmo that’s sort of inspiring this. In that model, Paste always brought up a contextual menu with the last 7 items Copied and there was something else on the menu, too. Might’ve been “clear this menu.” I’m not sure.)

Short and to the point. •

When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.

Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can’t be built on replacements. Don’t expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don’t rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years — featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere — simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track — a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can’t “recover” because it can’t go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

Economies, I think. As much as the moment demands unity of act and finance, and as much as buying-greening-selling could be the new “flip,” the retrofit experience could also be hyperlocal mining for negawatts. Too much so and it’s too labor costly, too little and you don’t get down to the roots of the waste.

Zip. Yes, even Reich says this is a teaser. He also likes to use that “70% is consumer spending” too much. If it were lower, or we were greener, more like the other industrial powers, there’d still be a giant pile of cleanup ahead.

Related to this — and connecting how money moves around to conspicuous consumption and the credit bubble inspiring people to live like kings begging to be overthrown — “L’Economie, c’est moi” — well well, we’re finally talking about getting on the case of conspicusumers, inviting (to my “thinking”) the world debate to change from “Mexican Standoff” to “Showdown at the Supply-Side Corral” — where it should have been and pretty much was, on one side of the multi-fence. Pretty much.

But not nearly enough. The researchers who painted this picture of our decapitated future threw diesel generators at the poor like diesel was something you could grow in your basement, and set targets for the rich world like there was a lot of time. Really for this to be a new economic paradigm, you need some people to be OK, right? There has to be a reason to change, something good about us that needs preserving.

We aren’t unified by our heartless smarts. That will be our downfall here. We have a need now to be very cruel to our assumptions and dreams.

(•) While I’m assembling more of an answer to commenter #1—

Outside a bad case of ultra-conservative moral and metaphysical horrors, I can see little wrong with an economy that’s 70, 80 or even 90% consumer spending. There’s a lot of job shit done that shouldn’t be. 70% is bad only because so much of the spending is attributable to malevolent social engineering, necessitated by same or dedicated to servicing the externalities of same. The harmful economic impact could be reduced dramatically by single payer healthcare and anti-usury laws. The environmental impact of consumerism could be reduced by a citizen’s basic income and eliminating entire categories of employment. There are too many people going to work, at jobs that shouldn’t exist, performing services that make bad problems worse. They spend a fortune, and we spend one too, on improving their ability to get to workplaces best described Negative Externalities, Inc. We’re killing the planet and its people to keep banksters gloating and telemarketers busy interrupting dinner. How much does it cost the economy and the environment to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan?

I don’t know if The Now can be cruel enough to get that questioned. I suspect it would have to be very cruel indeed, and that would make questions irrelevant.

—why not enjoy an hour’s slide-talk on these very issues?

You can go the original post for comments and conversation from speaker and the PDF of the slides.

Rembrandt asked me to give a ‘grand finale’ presentation of a weekend conference on depletion, offering up a framework for how to view the supply/demand intersection. Many in audience were my friends/colleagues so there were quite a few inside jokes. I was also trying to squeeze a heck of alot into 60 minutes. There are several errata after a first listen:

1. Earth is 4.5 billion years old (sounded like I said trillion)
2. Brains began with simple organisms, I said ’single cell’.
3. 50% of obese children will grow up to be obese, (not 50% are obese)
4. Avg height difference between men and women in human cultures is range of 4-7 inches, not 7 inches.
5. Wages rose for 15 decades (not centuries…though that too is possible but data is only for certain countries)

The general thrust of lateral thinking…generalist vs specialist is what I was aiming at – i.e. it is a mistake to a)focus on one limiting resource and b)ignore who we are as evolved organisms and all that entails. Out of all topics I discussed, I would only consider myself an ‘expert’ on finance (which means I’m an expert on none…;-)

If you watched it, I hope you enjoyed/learned something. I was happy, given my severe lack of sleep, that I fit it all into 1 hour. There are no easy answers to these issues, and maybe no hard ones either – it is my hope that others at higher levels in business/government/academia can bring these concepts closer together…

I don’t know why video shares of slides end up so much worse than the resolution of ordinary video but they seem to, always. Also, ugh, I have some work to do on the body text margins of this layout, ugh.

Let’s try

this design. It seems appealing, except that it changes the grand poobah title from the verse of the month, to “Search this Blog.” Ah! I know the answer.

Troubled horizon.

Count the different cracks in US WASP-boy supremacy you can find in 1968’s The Love Bug and Pretty Poison.

(Not to me to have accepted it but Dean Jones and Co. basically apologized for Love Bug’s “Mr. Wu” caricature with a single exchange at the end of Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo in 1977. Jones’s character, Jim Douglas, in the victory circle, tries to give thanks to everyone in as many languages as he sees represented in the group. He finishes by thanking an East Asian photographer in Japanese and bowing. After a beat, the blank-faced journalist responds “Right. See you around, Douglas.” in SoCal-native English.)

IF BY RUDYARD KIPLING

THEN GOSUB 60

maybe you had to be there

anyway according to somebody it’s among the most famous english-language poems but i never saw it. maybe the limitation is in the size of the “english-language poems” population. or maybe we use different amounts of starch in our laundry, me and the tons of people who read it.

swear to you, first exposure i know for sure of, was these tennis players, ahead of playing themselves to death. but please, now dennis hopper, who will never read any poem of mine or my loved ones aloud, if i have any say.

personally i like advice poems and such. maybe my liking them comes from forgetting the advice as fast as it comes to me. i would love to apply these lessons, however stodgy however dated however narrow their intended audience, but my path is that of animal behavior or infantile happy surprises.

is “decay” a road? did i climax at birth? propped up by society, no, wound up by society and now the gears and cogs are quietly unreeling the spring’s last push.

you have to trust some combination of society and self. it’s useful to look at tory propaganda sometimes to ask myself, it doesn’t look like anybody can help me, can i get out? is there a nice suit i could wear, grab on the near side of the human pyramid and head for “the top,” and there, do, something, i don’t know what.

do i really believe people are — if not foolish, then full of shit — and if so when did i start? before or after i got frightened of fighting in the center ring? must be before. i never wanted to be in the present at all, on human terms, and the sense of separateness from wildlife was just as strong. what was different, and more enjoyable, about the animals and plants was their confidence.

people looked like machines powered by 100% renewable nervous energy. lots of sociopaths think people are like, i guess, “noisy” or “needy” or “liars” or something. i didn’t feel put out, or left out, except when i brought them to my attention. mostly i felt, you know, dead, because as i saw it only the dead weren’t in it for the auditions. they are… dead.

typecast, you could say.

oh. we are calling these words authentic, are we.

by authority of our ability to sound true.

no that’s not really it. i’m guessing there’s something i could find that would distract me and pay my bills without ruining the hard-won balance between love and hate by requiring me to give, you know, social aid. hey, look, i understand that cohabitation requires everyone to be said to exist, it’s a legal construct that really does make a difference in people’s lives. and because of how selectively we’ve set up our criteria, i look like a fucking moron to claim otherwise, without joining a mystic order.

i mean i don’t exactly think we’re a dream. our dream, “its” dream. that would be a lot of work, making up a complicated story about gods and fantasies and real true experience in another better galaxy and so on. i just say, “not here,” and eat lunch.

‘Will the Global Warming Bill Cool the Global Economy?’

I’m taking a small step. I have created a category of posts called “em” which stands for “environmental milestone.” This category will have two or three posts a year, I think. Once a year seems likely to miss subtle shifts.

As you know, the word milestone changed meaning in daily use, to something like “a significant historical event, indicating progress toward a goal,” maybe, but I’m using it in the original sense of precisely marking a road.

Every period I will pick one survey article or essay — big scale stuff — that shows current thinking among bizpeople about their role in shaping the future of life on this planet. This one’s a good start, I think, even though it’s pretty much only about carbon pollution fees. That’s an important aspect of current thinking, right?

Hmm, so when will be the next one. I think I will do something fun, I will roll a die, four months later, “1″ being “now,” so we will have a 4–9 month interval.

My main question is how long they/we will stay the reactive, antagonistic narcissists visible in this brown-green first snapshot:

Will the Global Warming Bill Cool the Global Economy?

Quote of the [whatever].

Journalism ought to be judged not on the profits it makes for stockholders but on the service it provides to democracy.

From FAIR’s intro to their inky exploration of money and good reporting.

3rd place:

The June data showed the economy shedding 465,000 jobs — but even more striking was the fact that hours worked fell by 0.8%. This rate of decline in hours worked is the same as in the period of economic free fall from October to April. It’s good that employers cut back hours per worker, rather than lay people off, but it still means that the demand for labour is plummeting. If hours per worker did not change, this would be equivalent to a loss of more than 900,000 jobs in June.

Do you see the hundreds and hundreds of gigawatts of new clean energy supply in North America as

half full or half empty?

Those moments where the reputable press makes mercy killing look justified.

Not going to beat on this. But if you and your editor together can’t find the wool-brained slop of these statements—

[1] Some analysts see [auto] sales staying in a trough for years, as newly frugal consumers learn to do without leased Audi Q7s, and turn to the used-car market, or (gasp!) keep driving their old cars instead.

[2] In the 1970s, Japanese automakers invaded the US and Western Europe with efficient small cars, tapping a market the locals did not know existed.

—you should put an asterisk on the What the future of the auto industry will look like headline,

* Hopefully your guess is better than ours.

(•) I guess I should give “the answers” or something.

[1] The number of people leasing luxury SUVs was small, but this was hyperbole. The second statement, that people would “turn” to the used-car market, ignores the fact that most people do buy used cars, and that existing used cars in the US will be very unpleasant with high-priced gas. The third is cause to abandon hope: bicycles and shared rides, including transit, are beyond the authors’ imagining.

[2] Hmmmm. “In the 1970s, Japanese automakers invaded the US and Western Europe with efficient small cars, tapping a market the locals did not know existed.” Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I wonder if there’s a way to explain how incredibly wrong the authors are here, to make it really clear…

“The VW Bug.” The most popular car design of all time. If that beloved 1938 piece of auto erotica alone doesn’t make you wince at the authors’ memory, or Google skills, consider this: in the 1979 Japanese flick The Castle of Cagliostro, the hero drives a Fiat 500—

—first built in 1957 and in the top 50 best-selling cars ever.*

Other “nonexistent” non-Japanese top non-boat cars include:

Ford Escort (1967)
Renault 5 (1972)
Renault 4 (1961)
Mini (1959)
Fiat 126 (1972)
Ford Taunus (1952)
Citroen 2CV (1949) (yes it is also in the movie!)
Fiat 127 (1971)

In rough** order of sales. All were competing with the Beetle. I could also include the trend-setter (front-drive, hatchback) of this thirdth-century — the VW Golf — but some dumbfuck US-yokel hoocoodanoder might say that the Beetle’s 1974 replacement was obviously a desperate Japan-beater, “end of story.”

___
* Maybe you looked at that list and said to yourself, “What’s the Ford Crown Victoria doing on a list of top-selling cars? I don’t know anyone who owns one.” That’s because you don’t know a cop or a taxi driver. (Look closer and you’ll see US manufacturers dominating light-duty commercial vehicles — pickups, vans, boatish fleet cars. This might suggest, to a wise investigator, why the housing crash KO’d increasingly niche-y “Detroit.”)

** The Ford Taunus was more like a car brand, including small models (which started in 1952).

Always crashing the same car.

I reconjiggered my reads again, in hope of reducing guilt, and found a casual think piece about machinery in context. Nearly every time I read Nate Hagens I have that weird tingly “We were just talking about that!” this time in how “special-interest democracy” was maybe born from free fuel enabling copious rounds of “oh why not, there’s plenty for everyone” throughout the planning processes. (I was the only one who thought this could be true. Notice that I keep letting dastards off the hook. I have to: if they’re really evil, suicide is on the table for me.)

On the other hand, says the tired head, this is another part of another conversation out there. Blogging can’t replace paid reportage, like individual conservation can’t replace systemic change. What are we getting from this?