How the GOP’s anti-elitism could ruin America’s economy:

As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban “red” parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban “blue” areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with “blue” patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the “red” parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands. The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America’s creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it’s what’s really at stake in the 2004 elections.

Reminds me of what has happened in Japan, where the ruling (only) political party is controlled by economically impotent rural interests. Thanks to a failure by the parliament to re-district as the population moved to the cities, an urban vote is worth only one-third of a rural vote. The rural voters keep the LDP in power, and the LDP rewards them with subsidies, tariffs, and useless construction projects. Meanwhile, the creative centers of the country languish. A glimpse of America’s Republican future?

Don Norman on Advanced TV Standards:

Advanced TV standards seem to have ignored the world of information. The pictures are difficult to process, they carry forward old technologies, they do not provide much room for data, they do not provide for the two-way transmission of data. The standards, rather than allowing the dramatic advance in technology that has been hoped for, seem more like an anchor, holding us back from what is possible, from what is being dreamed.

I wonder if things have gotten any better since this was written in 1995. I fear that they probably haven’t.

Over at bIPlog, Mary asks why you can’t just use an MP3 as a ringtone. The answer is that you can–at least if you live in Japan and have a phone that works with KDDI’s chaku-uta service. (Chaku-uta roughly translates to “get-song” in English. Regular old ring tones are called chaku-melo, or “get-melody.”)

Of course, this still doesn’t answer Mary’s question, “Why not just make my own, out of what I’ve already bought?” Don’t hold your breath for that one. Japanese phones are notoriously closed–if I even wanted to back up my address book, I used to have to take it to the DoCoMo store, where they would put it in a special machine that would back everything up on a floppy, in some proprietary binary format. I doubt the phone companies will be letting users “rip to phone”, considering that they’re making a pretty penny charging over a dollar for a 30-second fragment of a pop song! Makes iTunes looks like a bargain.