Since I'm over in London, I pick up on local news, which has been full of fallout from various austerity programs designed to roll back pensions, housing subsidies, etc. Firefighters, Tube workers, and BBC journalists are all threatening strikes. There's also been a lot of coverage of the widespread strikes/shutdowns in France.

At the same time, executive pay is up 55%!

Incomes Data Services, who conducted the research, said bonuses paid to directors of FTSE 100 companies increased by 34%, while basic pay rose by 3.6%. The amount of money waiting to be disgorged from long-term incentive schemes soared by 73%, to a total of £259m, and share option gains leapt by 90%.

The FTSE 100 rose by less than a fifth over the same period.

Steve Tatton of IDS said the report suggested that companies returned to "business as usual" once the recession ended.

This is an economics article, so it's important to note that the phrase "once the recession ended" refers to the technical end to contracting GDP. As we've increasingly seen by most other measures, the real impact of the "Great Recession" is likely to persist. Incomes for normal people remain depressed (or are falling) and unemployment is high. It is a "jobless recovery," and cold comfort indeed to anyone feeling the pain right now.

So, it's clear that Apple is starting to feel the heat from Android:

Steve Jobs doesn't usually make a guest appearance on Apple's post-earnings conference calls with analysts, but this time he made an exception, attacking Google for marketing its operating system as 'open' versus Apple's 'closed' iOS.

Jobs' points here are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty weak. While Android isn't a utopian greenfield of openness, they are actually Open Source, and haven't pulled any crap like trying to dictate development tools. Steve's objection that vendors like Motorolla put some of their own secret sauce on top and "the user's left to figure it out" is also bogus. My Droid and my friend's HTC Incredible have subtle differences, but it's the same UI set. Moreover, users don't flit between these things. It's not confusing for them because they only have one phone, dude.

While I'm sympathetic to Jobs' point about the virtues of an integrated platform (e.g. there are some Android apps that have issues with the touchscreen keyboard on my Droid), I think he drastically overestimates his ability to anticipate what people want. The downfall of Apple is generally their ego. When they are wrong, it hurts them a lot, and they're slow to recover. In a fast-moving world, the open approach has a lot of advantages so long as you can keep the quality up.

I for one look forward to the Apple iPhone vs Android battle of the mobile Operating Systems. It's going to produce a lot more/better innovation than Windows vs MacOS. Neither company is currently dominant, and both are smart and creative and innovative. Should be good to watch what happens.

It's about to get ugly.

Because of a recent Supreme Court decision, Corporate interests are now able to spend freely and without transparency running political advertisements. They're going with it.

At the same time, weirdo billionaires have been bankrolling the "tea party".

Obama is not doing so well, and congressional Democrats are polling very poorly. The economy sucks, and nobody cares about campaign promises (kept or broken) when they don't have jobs. The fact that this is in large part due to malpractice from banks is a forbidden subject among the Elite.

I think it's looking pretty grim for politics this election. The reactionary tide is running strong, and absent some game-changing shift (certainly possible, but not likely to come from the main players at this late date) we're set for more Bread and Circus while inequality continues to widen. Terrible way to run a country.

Ego trip alert!

I don't know that there's anyone other than my mom who would watch me talk on the internet for 55 minutes, but just in case here you go. This is my keynote from the 2010 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit:

Also, props to the fine folks from Carlson Media for doing the taping and picking a really flattering key-frame image. And of course many thanks to the wonderful organizers, and the people of Vancouver "Don't Call It The Coove" BC:

Infographic credit: @awesome (aka Stephanie Vacher).