Historical comparisons for Donald Trump
Donald Trump, to put it mildly, is unusual. No analogy or comparison or him is close to being perfectly accurate. Despite, or indeed because, of that, he’s wound up being compared to quite a few other figures, from history, fiction or current events. Perhaps a quick survey would be helpful as background to other discussions.
Three of the most popular Trump comparisons are:
- Andrew Jackson, who was President of the United States from 1829-1837. This is Trump and Bannon’s preferred analogy.
- Classical fascist leaders, such as Mussolini and Hitler.
- Modern populist/authoritarian leaders, such as Putin, Erdogan, Chavez, Duterte or even Milosevic.
I’ll discuss the first two below. The third will have to wait until future posts.
Further Trump analogies that I think are worth brief mentions include:
- Silvio Berlusconi, erstwhile prime minister of Italy.
- Berlusconi/Trump analogies start with Berlusconi being a corrupt media mogul, a real estate developer, a minor performing artist, and a major sexual sleazebag.
- Berlusconi flouted conflict-of-interest concerns, bragged fancifully about his cabinet, and accused the media of being his corrupt enemy.
- Berlusconi was friendly to authoritarian leaders (Putin, Gaddafi et al.), and to the Mafia.
- To my knowledge, however, Berlusconi didn’t go nearly as far as Trump in adopting alt-right/Bannon kinds of ideologies.
- Berlusconi actually led Italy for quite a while. But few people say he led it well.
- Orwell’s fictional tyrants.
- Doublethink and the other dishonesty from 1984 are obvious matches to Trump/Bannon.
- Governments’ tendencies to rapidly turn friends to foes and vice-versa have multiple echoes in Trumpworld.
- So does the fake populism of Animal Farm.
- But Orwell’s Stalinist purges were a lot deadlier than anything Trump has so far pursued.
- Machiavelli’s hypothetical princes. I think this one fits well.
- Trump has a lot of Medici-like traits. (They were businesspeople who went into politics, and who liked to build gaudy things.)
- Renaissance princes governed city-states, in a simpler era, when people had much less knowledge or education. I can actually envision Trump as being intellectually capable of handling their jobs.
Donald Trump compared to Andrew Jackson
Let’s return to Trump’s own favorite analogy. President Andrew Jackson is probably most famous for: Read more
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 2 Comments |
DBMS2.com is broken (Update: Fixed!)
Edit: It’s fixed!
A spectacularly failed upgrade has brought down DBMS2.com. I’m going to try to reproduce the error — or hopefully not — and also work toward a fix by messing with my other blogs. Please forgive any chaos that ensues.
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
Has Yahoo Mail been hacked? Or do we just need better password security?
Linda just sent out a single copy of the following spammy email (the URL was live in the original): Read more
| Categories: Security and anti-spam | 11 Comments |
My view of intellectual property
The purpose of legal intellectual property protections, simply put, is to help make it a good decision to create something. The specific phrasing in the United States Constitution is
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
but that’s just a longer way of saying the same thing.
Why does “securing … exclusive Right[s]” to the creators of things that are patented, copyrighted, or trademarked help make it a good decision for them to create stuff? Because it averts competition from copiers, thus making the creator a monopolist in what s/he has created, allowing her to at least somewhat value-price her creation.
I.e., the core point of intellectual property rights is to prevent copying-based competition. By way of contrast, any other kind of intellectual property “right” should be viewed with great suspicion.
Examples of my views include:
- In a recent comment I pooh-poohed an expansive interpretation of the GPL, even as I supported the GPL in core cases.
- I believe that most kinds of software patents are or should be invalid, but I’m willing to make an exception for innovative user experiences.
- I believe in copyright, even though I agree with consensus that in many cases copyright-holders’ business models will evolve away from the licensing of intellectual property. For example, I’m mightily annoyed when somebody claims my words as their own. But I give mine away for free. I just want to get the reputational benefit of what I write, and also to aggregate comments on my original blog posts rather than having them go to some other site.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 6 Comments |
Pranks of the past
As April Fool’s Day approaches, it may be amusing to review pranks of the past.
- For starters, let me link to some of the posts I’ve made pointing to April Fool’s pranks in past years, including:
- (2009) A wonderful spoof of the analyst business
- (2009) Donald Farmer’s hilarious version of business intelligence
- (2009) The Guardian’s translation of its news and archives to tweets (“OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”)
- (2009) Google’s world-dominating, blog-writing AI with the personality of a pre-adolescent girl
- (2009) Expedia’s space-travel offering
- (2008) Netezza’s green box
- (2008) LOTRO’s spoof quests — like other MMO folks, the Lord Of The Rings Online guys can be really funny. (But in retrospect I’m not so sure they were spoofs so much as a new comedic option in the game introduced on a cleverly-chosen date.)
- (2007) My attempt to one-up Scoble et al., without much success.
- (2002) A classic: Google PigeonRank
- I found a couple of sites that catalog April Fool’s pranks around the world (not just techie ones). The Museum of Hoaxes offers a curated approach, so their list is pretty funny. Another site lists just about every web hoax anybody bothers to submit, so it’s quality is more mixed (and a lot of the links now don’t work).
- While thinking about this post, I recalled and posted about some software industry pranks. The MSA/M&D ones still boggle my mind, but I couldn’t think of much else to match them.
- And then, of course, there was the time this blonde joke made, as it were, the rounds.
| Categories: Fun stuff | 4 Comments |
People are very confused about privacy
According to CNet, Anthony Stancl ran an interesting scheme:
Stancle had been accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.
Stancl then reportedly threatened to post the photos or videos on the Internet if they didn’t engage in some sort of sexual activity with him. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl documented with a cell phone camera.
Stancl’s victims were teenage boys focused on sex — not exactly the world’s clearest thinkers. Even so, I find it remarkable that multiple people would:
- Send nude photographs of themselves to a stranger.
- Be so concerned about those photographs getting published online that they would submit to sexual blackmail.
- Allow the results of their sexual blackmail to be photographed.
Literally — WTF??
| Categories: Privacy, censorship, and freedom | 2 Comments |
Updating our disclosures
From time to time a blogger should make disclosures about sources of income and other potential influences. Fortunately, I’ve covered most of them in the past.
- The generalities I posted a few years ago still apply (and, I think, are a good read in any case about the realities of analyst coverage).
- The updates a year and a half ago are still very accurate, although I might name different specific clients today.
- The partial client list from half a year ago is still pretty accurate, although Microsoft and Kognitio have dropped off, Clearpace changed its name to RainStor, and non-RDBMS analytic data management/analysis contenders Cloudera and Splunk have been added.
- While I have user clients, I have nothing to disclose about them.
One new development is that for the first time since 2001, I’ve taken stock in a private company. It’s Petascan, a seed/stealth-stage outfit with some very innovative ideas about how to use Flash memory in support of analytic data processing. I’d like to do more of this, with conflicts evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, I bet I could bring a lot of value to vertically-oriented analytics start-ups, who would at worst compete with only a small fraction each of the business of the more horizontally-oriented companies I generally write about.
| Categories: About this blog, Hardware | 2 Comments |
Our services for technology vendors
Monash Research provides what we hope is great advice, to technology vendors, users, and investors alike. Working with organizations who want more insight and interaction than is available in our free blogs, we consult on a broad range of subjects – marketing and technology, strategy and tactics, large companies and small ones, all across a variety of industry sectors.
For the past several years, we’ve had an annual refresh of our vendor service offerings, always unveiled in the fall. This year has seen more change than usual, and so I’d like to share some of the highlights with you here. A revampimg of our services for users is in the works as well, and I’ll share that too with you when it is finalized.
Aspects that haven’t changed much include:
- We ask all vendor clients to join a program called the Monash Advantage.
- Monash Advantage members get effectively unmetered quick-inquiry consulting, and more in-depth advice sessions as well.
- Our speaking and writing services, which vendors like to use for lead generation and general image-buffing, are generally restricted to Monash Advantage members
- The entry-level Monash Advantage price is $10,000/year
The biggest change from prior years is that there are now three tiers of the Monash Advantage, up from one.
- The Monash Advantage Lite is for small, tightly-focused companies with severe budget constraints. We offer suggestions and help them think through their most pressing issues, a few times each year.
- The Monash Advantage Basic is for more typical technology companies. We help them with anything and everything.
- The Monash Advantage Custom is for companies that want us to serve as core strategic advisors.
The early response to this tiering has been very positive, and we have had multiple sign-ups for 2010 at each of the three levels.
Another change is that we no longer require companies to join the Monash Advantage on a strict calendar-year basis. Now, it’s calendar quarters, and for Custom members we’re completely flexible.
Finally, we’re open to doing stock deals with seed-stage companies, at least ones that don’t compete closely with our other clients. For example, I’ve just started advising one stealth start-up in a hardware area that complements analytic DBMS, and I’m having a blast. I’ll disclose the names of any companies I have private stock in, as well as offering at least a capsule of what is publicly known about what they’re pursuing.
| Categories: Monash Research highlights | 1 Comment |
OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word for WordPress blogging — a 65:1 ratio in cruft
I prepare most of my blog posts in OpenOffice. Most of the rest I write directly online in WordPress. I almost never use Microsoft Word.
The reason, simply put, is cruft.
When I copy a post from OpenOffice to WordPress, I invariably get a line at the top that looks like
<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
I delete that, which according to OpenOffice stats amounts to exactly 100 characters; I fiddle with the bullet points a bit; I add a title, categories, and a MORE separator; and I’m basically good to go.
By way of contrast, in a recent post I copied a sentence from a press release I’d recieved across Google Mail in .DOC format, forgetting to stage it into OpenOffice first. The cruft I needed to delete consisted of 6489 characters, namely: Read more
| Categories: Microsoft | 5 Comments |
Star Trek companions
Hat tip to Linda Barlow for a long list of allusions and references in the recent Star Trek movie, including the comment thread.
Meanwhile, this is as good a time as any to offer lyrics and music/video for the classic Leslie Fish filk song “Banned from Argo.”
Our proper, cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley, where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he’s none the worse for wear
Except he’s somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear
Actually, this version has better sound and image quality, but the video part doesn’t speak to me.
Also:
- A collection of Dr. McCoy clips.
- A song combining Star Trek and The Hobbit.
- A video (large download) to Julia Ecklar’s beautiful song God Lives on Terra, with Star Trek:TNG clips interspersed with views of Wrentham, MA. (I previously linked a hilarious parody of that song.)
- Another Bob Kanefsky parody song, this one based on a specific Star Trek episode. (Melody and performance by Leslie Fish.)
| Categories: Fun stuff | 2 Comments |