End of the American Dream?

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Here’s some happy news from Walter Russell Mead:

Today some 86 million Americans live in homes that are ‘under water’ where the amount owed on the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. Since the financial crisis began in 2008, over one million consumer mortgages have gone into foreclosure. Sales of bank-owned properties are now 34.5 percent of the housing market; homes in foreclosure waiting for resale now account for a three years-supply on the sluggish housing market.

It’s a fairly bleak assessment of our current situation, but with a deeper foundation of hope in the American people: “Slowly and reluctantly, the country will have to move on. … it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to deepen the sense among many Americans that something has gone terribly wrong.” We won’t like it, but we’ll do it.

The broader question about the end of the American Dream (or Dream 2.0) is the same sort of gloomy analysis that I found in Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, which I read because of the Business Week profile (and because I wanted to try reading an e-book).

I don’t know what to think. I lived through the 70’s, when everything was rotten, but it eventually got better. I grew up reading science fiction and watching Star Trek. My first career was in computers, where everything is twice as fast as last year’s model. I can go along with the bitter-medicine thinking of Mead, but I’m not ready (yet) to swallow Cowen’s low-hanging fruit.

Arsenic-Based Life Controversy Keeps Bubbling

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That controversy about arsenic-based life that I blogged (on my other blog) back in December is still cooking. I don’t read Science so I had to learn about it in Ars Technia:

The authors have stuck to their guns, but have reiterated arguments that their critics are likely to find unconvincing. And that’s somewhat surprising; it should have been possible for them to accept at least a few of the criticisms and indicate further work was under way that would handle them.

I am curious to find out what the facts are, here. I’d be stunned to learn that DNA’s chemistry works with arsenic as well as phosphorus, or that both forms can code for the same amino acids. But stunning me is what science is all about.

Pivot Tables in Google Docs

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This is amazing. I used to use Pivot Tables on a daily basis, but the last two versions of Excel have made them inexplicable to me. These days, if I need a Pivot Table, I save the spreadsheet table as CSV data, import it into MySQL, and then do SQL queries there to produce a pivot table. But now I might have to try it in my browser instead:

Nice Piece on Using Vim

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I ran across this nice reflection on the vim editor by someone who switched 18 months ago. In my own case, it was about 18 years. I’d been an emacs user forever, and it was just killing me (carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, and who-knows-what). So I made the switch to vi (and, soon enough, vim). It took awhile to get used to modes, but the alternative is playing Twister with my ring and pinky fingers.