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The White House Message to Small Business

Startup Sunday

Photo © 2010 Katherine Lewis

President Barack Obama last week unveiled a host of initiatives aimed at encouraging job growth in the sector most responsive to economic recovery, small business. In speeches and Congressional testimony about the package, the White House message to small business is loud and clear: lead the way out of recession.

"Over the past 15 years, small businesses have created roughly 65 percent of new jobs in America. These are companies formed around kitchen tables and family meetings; formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream; formed when a worker decides it's time she became her own boss," Obama said in remarks to Maryland small business owners on Friday. "It's worth remembering every once in a while, a small business becomes a big business, and then changes the world."

The package aims to encourage hiring with a $5,000 tax credit for each new employee, to free up capital through $17.5 billion in additional small business loan guarantees, to increase those loan limits, to let firms refinance their commercial real estate loans under the Small Business Administration and to use funds from the Wall Street bailout so community banks can make more loans to small companies.

If you're a small business owner, what are the biggest problems facing you today? What do you think about the White House message to small business, and what would your response be?

Google's Had Enough of China?

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Thursday

First, my heart goes out to the people of Haiti. The devastation (please note: some of the photos here are quite distressing) there is just heart-wrenching. Everything I've heard so far says that the most helpful thing people can do (unless you're a disaster recovery specialist who can help in-country somehow with relief efforts) is to donate cash. Be smart, don't get scammed, but consider even a small donation. After the big tsunami a few years back I began contributing to Oxfam and the Haiti devastation reminded me to double-check that I renewed my contribution for this year. But there are plenty of other legitimate relief agencies who need support, as well. Google's compiled a list of links and the White House is recommending donations to the Red Cross.

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Now, on to our regularly-scheduled Technology Thursday post. Google made some geopolitical news this week when it announced, in a truly fascinating blog post, that it is going to stop censoring its results in China, knowing that may well result in them being forced to remove themselves from the Chinese market entirely.

Find Ten Red Balloons for Uncle Sam

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Thursday

Uncle Sam wants you (and a bunch of your buddies) to find 10 red balloons.

This Saturday!

Seriously.

DARPA is the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Perhaps best-known for supporting the development of ARPANet, which led to today's Internet and World Wide Web (a vast oversimplification of the history, but you get the idea), DARPA funds innovative research in a range of areas. This fall, DARPA has issued the DARPA Network Challenge to see just how good this social media stuff really is. (Actually, I don't know for sure what their objective is, but that's almost certainly part of it.) Here's the deal:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

$40,000 will be awarded to the first person to submit the locations (latitude and longitude) of all 10 balloons. Here's the best part:

Of Thermometers and Steam Cleaners and Magic Mice

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Thursday

Three gadgets I've been thinking about recently are thermometers, steam cleaners, and magic mice.

We finally found a usable thermometer for my toddler. We probably own about 6 different thermometers at this point. I have a confession to make - I have never taken my kid's temperature rectally. He did not get sick until he started daycare at around 5.5 months and at that point his head (off the charts since birth) was big enough that I just used the ear thermometers. I know that this fact may seem terribly unjust to parents who've had to struggle with taking baby temperatures that way, but there it is. Even so, the ear thermometer we were using was often inconsistent and even though it only took a few seconds, it still took too long for even my reasonably patient kid. Plus, you're supposed to change the plastic covering every time you use it, and who can remember to do that? Or where the extra covers are stored?

After watching the nurses at the pediatricians' office use their super fast and supposedly highly accurate temporal thermometers over the course of several visits, I decided we needed to get one.

Not Yer Mama's Privacy Policy

Technology Thursday

Defining privacy across generations is not a straightforward task. The other day, President Obama gave a speech urging America's students to stay in school. Prior to that speech, he took questions from a group of students here in Virginia. One of the questions was about advice he had for them on career paths. He urged them to be to be careful about what they post on Facebook, because someone will bring it up later and use it against them. First of all, this is pretty standard advice -- not particularly original as these things go. But, more fundamentally, I think it's a bit wrongly-aimed.

Gay Marriage: Where Politics and Empathy Collide

Family Friday

As a therapist and student of human nature, I have become increasingly convinced that opposition to gay marriage is primarily driven by a lack of empathy.  Empathy involves the ability to see and understand the world through a different framework from one's own. 

Most of us are not born naturally empathetic; empathy emerges gradually.  As children, we typically assume that our own frame of reference works for everyone.  For instance, preschoolers will prattle on to strangers about their classmates, assuming that if they know these children, of course other people do too. 

Once we reach adolescence, our brains become more capable of abstract thought, which is necessary (but not sufficient) for empathy.  We may realize that others' viewpoints differ from our own, but assume it is because ours are superior.  This "I'm-saved-you're-not" phenomenon can, for some, last a lifetime.  

Back to gay marriage: when I was twelve years old, lesbians might as well have been aliens, for all I knew.  Cable TV happened to descend upon my suburban neighborhood the same year that my pituitary gland started firing.  As I watched MTV, stunned, I suddenly realized what all of the fuss was about.  The five beautiful men who comprised Duran Duran partied on a yacht, chased women through the jungle, and cavorted on a beach.  Michael Hutchence of INXS writhed across a dinner table, shoving grapes in his mouth and seeming on the verge of ecstasy.  From then on, although I've questioned many things in my life, my own heterosexuality was never one of them.  

Discernment in a Disinformation Age

Image by sfjalar via Flickr

Technology Thursday

Fram. Those of us who've been on the Internet a long time (in my case, nearly 20 years now - oh dear) cringe whenever well-meaning but not-so-Internet-savvy friends and relations send us the latest "toxic tampons" or "Obama wants to kill old people" email. I remember having a discussion once with someone about how what they were sending was, well, completely bogus. I pointed them to Snopes.com -- a pretty good debunker of some of the crazy stuff that tends to circulate. Their response to me: "Yeah, well, but how do you know to believe Snopes.com and not these other sites?"

I sighed (internally).

The Relationship of Levi Johnston to Sarah Palin

Family Friday

My jaw dropped when I saw that Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby Tripp, called a press conference yesterday to explore the motivations of his son's grandmother in stepping down as governor of Alaska.

No, I wasn't shocked that Johnston claimed Sarah Palin is quitting to cash in on speaking and book deals. I simply couldn't believe that someone in this 19-year old young man's entourage didn't stop him from trashing his child's grandmother to the national media.

Not that it's the first time. In an April interview on the CBS Early Show, Johnston said the Palin family lied about him living in their home and his sister Mercede called the family snobby.

Levi Johnston is a great example of how not to behave as a new parent. Rule number one: don't alienate the people naturally inclined to love and care for your baby -- you'll probably need their help down the road.

Choosing a Pie (Banana Cream) Over A Pitbull (With Lipstick)

  Work Wednesday

I was convinced that I was going to blog this week about Sarah Palin and her strange step down from the governorship of Alaska. After all, I’d spent much of the fall's pre-election frenzy obsessed with Palin, venting about her candidacy with like-minded friends who were distressed over John McCain’s calculated and cynical pick of an unqualified ultra-conservative woman for the VP slot. After watching Palin in the debates, I joined the "Sarah Palin is NOT Hillary Clinton" Facebook group and clicked the online donation button for her opponents' campaign. I even stayed up until 2:00 a.m. with a (now former) work colleague and Palin supporter - an otherwise incredibly smart, thoughtful, and professional working mom - setting forth the case against Palin calmly and, I thought, convincingly. (I don't think I persuaded her, though.)

Then, last Friday, there was the reality of Sarah herself, breaking through my vacation-inspired Blackberry moratorium (O.K., I didn’t really stick to it), rambling incoherently about how "only dead fish go with the flow" as she resigned, nearly two years before the end of her term. Labeling others as "quitters" (yes, she had the chutzpah to use the word more than once) as she said "ta ta" and bailed on Alaska and her declining approval ratings.

There also was our pending name change from MomSpa.net (think: relaxing) to CurrentMom.com (think: electrifying - or at least energizing). (Look for the switchover soon!) What could be more current than a post on Palin’s resignation? Well, lots of things, I guess. Like Michael Jackson’s extravagant funeral or Mark Sanford’s unending narrative of infidelity. (It’s summer. No hard news, please.)

But when I arrived home, watched Palin on You Tube, and sat down to write, the words just didn't come.

Not for lack of material. (Not with lines like, "So I choose for my state and for my family more freedom to process all the way around so that Alaska may progress.")

Not for lack of outrage at Palin’s use of her family (she said she "polled" them and got four yeses and a "hell yeah") as a justification for her resignation. (A digression: It's hard for me to believe that Palin's kids - or any kids - would ever say that they wanted their mom to leave her job so she can - listen closely - "work very hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government and strong national security for our country and support for our troops and energy independence and for those who will protect freedom and equality and life." That sounds suspiciously like a stump speech to me.)

And not even because just about every journalist, pundit, comedian, and blogger had managed to fork up a rationale for the resignation over the July 4 weekend - somewhere between the franks and the fireworks.

I didn’t write about Palin because I made banana cream pie with my three-year-old son instead.

Metro is Infrastructure

Technology Thursday

Stacy wrote about the recent Metro tragedy the other day. I have also been reflecting on the accident as I ride Metro to get to my office downtown . On the one hand, I understand statistics and that Metro's safety record is still very good. And that riding Metro is far safer than driving. Nevertheless, this kind of system failure definitely hits close to home.

There is a lot of conjecture about what caused this particular accident and details are only slowly emerging. The Post reported that the cars had been recommended for removal. We know that Metro's maintenance budget is terribly underfunded. We know that major failures like this don't usually tend to happen unless multiple things go wrong at once. We know that Metro's trains are usually run on autopilot and that software was almost certainly involved. And even as the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies sort out what happened and (hopefully) how to prevent such a thing in the future, we know that regardless of the particulars this was a systems issue. A systems issue on a critical piece of infrastructure. And we know that this country has been neglecting its infrastructure for far too long, kicking the ball down the road to the next Congress or the next Administration. Metro is a particularly egregious case of what I believe is irresponsible behavior and neglect on the part of the jurisdictions within which it operates.