This shan't be the norm for this blog, but I'm going to post up an opinion column from the Wall Street Journal. I had to type this fella in, so apologies for any typos.

Capital By David Wessel
Better Answer to Tough Question on Jobs
In the final Bush-Kerry debate, moderator Bob Schieffer asked, "What do you say to someone ... who has lost his job to someone overseas who's being paid a fraction of what that job paid here?"

President Bush promised "policies to continue to grow our economy and create jobs of the 21st century," and then talked about improving public schools. Sen. John Kerry pledged "a fair trade playing field" and a tax code that doesn't have "workers subsidizing the loss of their own job." Neither looked into the camera and connected with that worker as Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton might have.

A better answer would have gone like this:
"All over America, there are people who played by the rules yet are losing their jobs --some because workers elsewhere do the same work for less, others because computers do things that once only humans did.

"It is small comfort to tell them, though it's true, that we're richer today than our grandparents imagined because we haven't walled ourselves from the rest of the world nor sought to restrain the advance of technology. It is small comfort, though true, that today's puzzle isn't that we're losing jobs--we're always losing jobs--but that for reasons even experts can't explain we aren't creating enough new ones.

"Those of us who benefit from low cost imports--or who have well-paid export jobs that wouldn't exist if we didn't allow imports and outsourcing--must not ask those who lose jobs to go it alone. But Bill Clinton had it right 10 years ago: 'The resentment of people who keep working harder and falling further behind, and feel like they've played by the rules and have gotten the shaft, will play out in different and unpredictable ways. But our responsibility is to do what is right for those people over the long run. And the only way to do that is to open other markets to American products and services even as we open our markets to them.'"

What does this mean in practice?

Candidates need to confront those who offer slogans, not solutions. Protectionists would block imports of factory goods or outsourcing of service jobs, ignoring the likelihood that interfering with the forces of trade and technology will prevent the creation of more jobs than it will save. Free traders with secure jobs proclaim that the only way to get the benefits from open markets is to tolerate the pain of people they'll never meet. Gene Sperling, a former Clinton adviser, offers this pithy putdown: "Protectionists have nothing to say to the future. Free traders have nothing to say to the present."

If trade and technology make us richer, then we can afford to help pay for health insurance and protect pensions [of those] forced to bear the cost. The hodge-podge of tax credits and "adjustment assistance" for workers who can link their job loss to imports isn't working; it needs an overhaul. And there is merit in what wonks call "wage insurance" that temporarily makes up some, though not all, of the gap between the wages of a lost job and those of a new one.

This will be expensive, and needs to be designed to avoid turning healthy workers into taxpayer-supported couch potatoes. But the alternatives are costly too--able-bodied but unskilled workers finagling their way onto disability rolls, families falling out of middle class, cheering audiences for misguided politicians who shout that the only way for Americans to prosper is to keep Indians and Chinese in poverty.

Such programs are derided as "Band-Aids," and they are. The U.S. government also has to get the big things right. That means pushing China and others to stop bending trade rules or manipulating currencies and pressing Europe and Japan to get their people spending so the U.S. isn't always the consumer of last resort. It means setting U.S. taxes so they cover government spending at least in good times, rewriting perverse tax laws that encourage companies to invest elsewhere and managing the unquenchable American thirst for health care without giving employers new incentives not to hire.

And, finally, comes education. Americans will earn more than foreign workers only if they're more productive, and they can be more productive only with ever-better education and skills. Education can be oversold: A college degree isn't a guarantee against losing a job to trade or technology.

But education remains, as Mr. Sperling puts it, "the best insurance policy for succeeding in the existing and future economy." That means streamlining the creaky system for getting vulnerable workers the skills still in demand in the U.S. and doing better at fixing public schools so the next generation of Americans can compete with what surely will be better-educated workers elsewhere in the world.

I'm not jumping up and down cheering for every last word of that column, but there's a lot of good stuff in there that people don't seem too interested in talking about--and furthermore, there's stuff in there that I find myself agreeing with, though I'd never realized before that I would.

For the moment, I'm going to let my thoughts distill and collect. I'll serve up my commentary sometime late tomorrow.

When I was still in school, I was a procrastinator of the first degree. I'm no longer in school, but some things--some things never change. The best part about putting things off is, of course, that you get to have fun now instead of later, not to mention that all the work which you would otherwise have to start now can be started... later. But there are a couple of downsides. The obvious one, that you have less time to get the work done in, normally isn't all that bad. You panic a little, you sleep a little less, but mostly you just trim the quality of the project. Condering I tend to lean towards perfectionism given a completely open timeline, the quality trimming isn't altogether that bad. But the other downside is that the impending crunch of work starts hanging over your head and ... nagging, I guess is really the best word. It's tempting to use cliches like, "storm clouds gathering overhead" but an analogy based on nagging seems more appropriate, in that it's not the impending deluge and doom that are so bothersome, it's the inability to have any fun without thinking, "I should really be working on..." It's like having your mother in your head. She's moved in there, settled down, and isn't going to go anywhere until the deluge of work actually starts. In the intervening time you have to drag her along with you everywhere you go... to the beach, the party, and yes--even the porn store. "Shouldn't you really be working on..."

So as one could probably guess by now, I'm avoiding doing something. I need to make a decision, a big huge colossal incredibly important decision that'll affect the rest of my life. So naturally I'm waiting 'till the last minute. I need to choose a topic, a professor, a degree, or a college. Any one of which would get me started, and narrow down my choices enough to make things managable. As is, I'm lost and overwhelmed by the choices and by the magnitude of the choice. I know I want to go to grad school, but I don't know yet what I want to do. So I'm delaying. And delaying some more.

And some more.

Hi Mom. Yea, I know. I really should be working on...

A while back I wiped out pretty much every important file I had on my computer, which is to say that I wiped two files--my MS Money save file and my Lifelog. More recently I ran across a quote something along the lines of "Data backup is important because it protects you not only from the small but not inconsequential risk of a hard drive failure, but because it also protects you from the rather larger risk that, eventually, no matter how many 'Are you sure?' dialog boxes you have to click through to do it, you're confidently going to destroy all your own files." I winced and almost cried when I read that.

It started out by me trying to fix the Network Connections control panel in Windows XP. Couldn't get the wireless card to work without shaking out the bugs and stomping them. So I tried using the "Repair installation" option from the Win XP install CD. No dice. So, being rather less technically savy than I'd like to believe, I went straight to the more drastic measure of reinstalling Windows in it's entirety. Without backing anything up first. It fixed the network problem, but now I couldn't access anything in my old "Documents and Settings" folder -- basically everything personal and important, the kind of stuff you can't just reinstall. I fought against this for a couple days, trying to find a way to get at the files, all the while doubting that they were even really there. Finally became convinced that they were either already wiped and the old Docs and Settings folder was just a mirage, or just as bad, that the files were there but completely unretrievable. Since my file system was a bit of a mess at this point, with orphan files hanging out everywhere and programs that wouldn't boot since they weren't in the registry, I decided to clean everything up, reformat C: and reinstall. So I confidently clicked through some more "Are you sure?" dialog boxes and erased any last hope of retrieving the lost files.

Clean install, everything's working spiffy. Happily loading tons of music & games back onto my computer, but mourning the loss of my Lifelog and annoyed at the hassle of reconstructing my financial accounts. Sadistic curiosity... still looking for ways I could have rescued the files. A glum face, and an aching feeling of loss deep inside--finally found a solution that would have worked. It was clear, it would have worked with XP Home, and it was too late.

So that's the story of why, after several sporadic years of keeping a Lifelog, I'm now starting completely anew. More determined this time, perhaps, but stung by the loss of a bit of personal history none the less.

I figure that if it's going to have to be new, this lifelog might as well be "new and improved." So this time around I'm scheduling at least one hour a week to write in it, plus I'll be taking advantage of such catch-phrases as "new media formats" and "improved distribution mechanisms" and "backup" to ensure that this project stays "fresh and relevant in today's fast-paced world." In other words, I'm going to try doing an occasional video log as an adjunct to the text log, I'm considering firing up the Blogger.com account again so that anyone who's interested can read it, and am absolutely positively going to make regular backups this time around... eventually.