Fifth or First?

Many of us are celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions regarding same-sex marriage, which in one case struck down the absurd Section 3 of 1996’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) thus entitling  same-sex couples to Federal benefits, and in the other effectively allowed same-sex marriages in California by leaving in place a local trial court decision.   No doubt, the gay marriage movement has gathered a head of steam, and hopefully will continue to garner much needed victories in other venues.

The always offensive and now unconstitutional Section 3 of the DOMA simply states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

The Court found Section 3 unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment.  Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.  By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Although the “equal under the law” argument as presented by the Court is valid and relevant, I would have liked the Justices to go further, since in my view Section 3 violated not only the Fifth Amendment, but also the First Amendment, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Many religions accept and celebrate gay marriage.  Others do not.  For an Act to define marriage the way some religions do violates the First Amendment in two ways.  First, it “establishes a religion” by making law a concept only espoused by some religions.  In addition, it prohibits the free exercise of the many religions that accept gay marriage.  I’m puzzled by the reluctance of the Court to see this as a First Amendment issue as well as a Fifth Amendment issue, particularly since the most vocal opponents of same-sex marriage oppose it on religious grounds.

Perhaps this reluctance is somehow related to the many other clear violations of the “religion” portion of the First Amendment that continue to exist unabated.  For example, the phrase “In God We Trust”, which appears on our currency, was adopted as our National Motto in 1956 (by the way, it was adopted in a Cold War effort to distinguish the U.S. from the officially atheist Soviet Union).  How is this motto, inherently offensive to those of us who do not believe in God, consistent with the First Amendment?

Prayers and invocations are de rigeur at presidential inaugurations, and yes, they are usually multi denominational, but no matter, they are religious in nature, and therefore have no place in a Federal Government ceremony.  Many people seem to think that as long as diversity of religion is acknowledged, religious freedom is being respected.  That is simply not the case.  Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.

The Pledge of Allegiance, which opens congressional sessions among many other events, reads:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [emphasis mine].

The words “under God” were not part of the original pledge as written by Francis Bellamy in 1892.  They were added in 1954, by President Eisenhower, who had been baptized a Presbyterian just a year before he orchestrated the modification, which was suggested by George MacPherson Docherty, a Presbyterian pastor.  How is adding this language to the Pledge not a gross violation of the First Amendment?

There are countless other instances of clear First Amendment violations that are inexplicably allowed to continue, but the last one I’ll mention here is that religious institutions are not taxed by the Federal Government.  The Treasury forgoes as much as $71 billion a year due to this blatantly unfair policy.

Religion is certainly a polarizing matter, and the political coverage afforded by appearing to be devout is amply demonstrated by the politicians themselves, who never fail to end a speech with the offensive “God bless” this, and “God bless” that.  Understandably, no one in power seems to have the courage to advocate a more strict enforcement of the First Amendment, which is regrettable, since in addition to ending all sorts of objectionable practices, it would require the removal of religious considerations from the debates surrounding issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, scholastic curriculums and many others.  And what a wonderful world this would be.

Movie Review: Man of Steel

As I watched Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel, I kept yelling at the screen (in my mind, of course).  Mostly, I yelled, “enough with the crumbling buildings already!”  I yelled other things as well, but let’s begin with the crumbling buildings.

The last third of the movie consists almost entirely of Kal-El fighting General Zod and his associates using Metropolis as the venue in what was meant to be an epic confrontation but turned out to be an excruciating, seemingly interminable sequence.  And yes, to see them catapult into each other  and plow through whatever is in their way causing widespread destruction was pretty cool the first time I saw it.  And maybe the second.  But the effects became repetitive and tedious, and despite the instant destruction of anything they touched, the combatants themselves seemed impervious to any damage.  Instead of being caught up in the fight, I kept thinking that at this rate the entire planet will be destroyed before the battle is over, and so what purpose will it serve to fight to save humanity if all of humanity becomes collateral damage to the fight?

Effects work well when they support the story.  In Man of Steel, the story is secondary to the excessive barrage of CGI effects, as is amply demonstrated when, in a shocking non-sequitur, Kal-El and Lois Lane choose to have their first kiss (and Superman’s only attempt at levity) at a moment when yes, Zod has been defeated, but Kal-El and Lois are literally standing in the middle of a freshly devastated city with presumably tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of agonizing injured.  It seemed as if the writers knew they had to cross this scene off their checklist and just shoved it in there without pausing to think of how inappropriately it would play out.  Cringeworthy.

And take the religious references.  Please.  Kal-El is first Moses, sent forth from Krypton in a futuristic version of the biblical basket.  Then, with the subtlety of a jackhammer, he becomes the sacrificial lamb Jesus Christ, suspended in mid-air with his arms extended.  Still later, he consults with a priest inside a church, with a painting of Jesus (draped in a red robe, of course) visible in the background.  He is willing to give himself up to Zod to save humanity.  But of course.  The icing on the cake: Kal-El is 33 years old.  There is nothing wrong with the religious references per se, and they are actually part of Superman’s rich history.  But to be pounded over the head with them is a bit unnerving.  Subtlety and nuance are apparently not in Snyder’s repertoire.

In another appalling non-sequitur, Kal-El, fresh from his conversation with the ghostly consciousness of his father during which he (Kal-El) finally understands that his ultimate purpose in life is to bond with and protect the people of earth, decides to... return to Kansas to spend some quality time with his mother.  Huh?  And apparently he would have stayed there indefinitely, the people of earth oblivious of his mission, but for General Zod’s appearance on the scene.

I’ll preface the following discussion by stating that while I’m comfortable with my knowledge of the Star Trek universe, my familiarity with Superman is almost entirely derived from the 1950’s series with George Reeves in the title role, and the 1970’s and 80’s Christopher Reeve movies.  That said, my impression was that this Superman origin story sorely lacked the reverence for the source material so richly exhibited in the latest Star Trek reboot.  Somehow, J.J. Abrams and company were able to bring a new cast as well as contemporary effects and techniques into Star Trek while lovingly preserving the essence of not only the  characters and their relationships, but also, and most importantly, the feel of it.  That is why 2009’s Star Trek and 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness appeal to newcomers while delighting old Trekkers like myself as well.   Such is the respect with which Abrams treats Star Trek that in the 2009 movie he cleverly branched off a new time continuum to allow for creative freedom with the characters in the future while leaving their heretofore existing universe intact.

Man of Steel lacks such respect.  The earlier incarnations of Superman presented a title character that was consistently self-assured and even a bit cocky, but always with a self-deprecating, disarming sense of humor.  Henry Cavill’s Kal-El is bewildered, brooding, dour, dark.   Lois Lane’s sense of awe and wonder is nowhere to be seen.  Gone are the nuanced, metaphorically suggestive yet superficially innocent scenes epitomized by Lois Lane and Superman’s flight scene in 1978’s Superman.  Again, in Man of Steel there is no subtlety, no nuance, no layering.  In their place: body slamming and crumbling buildings.

In another affront, Man of Steel callously alters the franchise’s pivotal relationship by having Lois Lane determine Superman’s true identity early in the movie.  And so it is that as the movie ends, at what is in fact the beginning of the story we all know, Lois Lane knows exactly who Superman is when he begins working at the Daily Planet.  The entire Clark Kent subterfuge, so vital to the evolution of both characters, simply does not apply (at least to Lois Lane) in this reboot.  Apparently the writers plan to take their relationship, like the franchise, in a different direction.    They can count me out.

The End of IR

The late Richard Bruno, who taught me Financial Accounting at Babson College, used to refer to the Internal Revenue Service as the IR, instead of the IRS.  When asked why he left out the S, he would say that that organization does no service to anyone.  I think most people would be in full agreement with Professor Bruno, even without considering the recent scandal involving the IRS’s injection of politics into their screening of would-be tax-exempt groups.

But complaining about the politicizing of the IRS’s activities is, at the risk of sounding a bit cynical, sort of like complaining that a mosquito bites.  There will be outrage, of course, and finger pointing.  Heads will undoubtedly roll.  But while the affair was despicable indeed, in the end it was just human beings acting like, well, human beings.  The larger issue, and the one we should be focusing on instead, is that the federal income tax itself should be abolished, and the IRS, to everyone’s delight, should cease to exist.

Although the federal government enacted a temporary income tax to pay civil war expenses in 1862, the federal income tax began in earnest in 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes”, was ratified.  Today, the IRS collects over $2.4 trillion each year from around 234 million tax returns.

Both the concept of an income tax and its implementation are deeply flawed.  As former congressman Ron Paul indicates on his website:

An income tax is the most degrading and totalitarian of all possible taxes. Its implementation wrongly suggests that the government owns the lives and labor of the citizens it is supposed to represent. Tellingly, “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” is Plank #2 of the Communist Manifesto, which was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848.

But not only is an income tax per se conceptually inconsistent with our philosophy and form of government, its implementation has resulted in a patently absurd system.  The 73,000 page  tax code is almost comically complex, and taxpayers are bewildered by it.  Not even the professional advisers most of us depend on to help us determine what we owe and submit the required forms to the government pretend to understand the entirety of the code, and many tests have determined that different IRS agents, when asked specific questions regarding tax return preparation, will more often than not give conflicting advice.  Tax evasion is rampant, and the system encourages honest taxpayers and their advisers to use the inevitable unintended loopholes which are a logical consequence of the unwieldy code to pay the least tax legally possible.

The people behind the FairTax Plan support legislation that would eliminate the federal income tax as well as payroll taxes.  There would be no need for the IRS, which would be abolished under the plan.  The government revenue lost would be replaced with a national sales tax on new goods and services, excluding necessities.  People and corporations would be taxed on what they spend, not on what they make.   Makes perfect sense.

Mr. Paul goes a step further:

I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything....  We could eliminate the income tax, replace it with nothing, and still fund the same level of big government we had in the late 1990s. We don’t need to “replace” the income tax at all. I see a consumption tax as being a little better than the personal income tax, and I would vote for the Fair-Tax if it came up in the House of Representatives, but it is not my goal. We can do better.

Whether we dramatically reduce the size of our government as Mr. Paul suggests, or enact a national sales tax to replace income and payroll tax revenue, it is abundantly clear that eliminating the federal income tax and abolishing the IRS would benefit everyone significantly.  Yes, literally millions of jobs, within the IRS and related industries, would become obsolete overnight.  But those jobs represent a grotesque misallocation of resources anyway, as intelligent people are spending countless hours on artificially constructed busywork instead of directing their efforts at the plentiful real problems we face.  They will need support in their transition, but the temporary resources required for that support pale in comparison with those that are wasted every single day maintaining our current system.

As was abundantly clear to anyone who witnessed the Google I/O keynote presentation in San Francisco yesterday, we have solved much harder problems than this.  When provided with the proper incentives, there is no limit to what we can accomplish.  The species that targeted their political adversaries at the Cincinnati IRS office and went phone-tap crazy at the Justice Department is the same species that literally mapped the entire world and placed the results on servers accessible to anyone.  The same species that developed the technology that enables computers that we carry in our pockets to reply to any question we ask them.   The same species that responded to a clearly unrealistic challenge by, well, meeting it.

How can we possibly continue to be burdened  by the albatross that is the federal income tax and the inefficient, unnecessary ecosystem it has generated?

IR, your days are numbered!

Django is Jackie

A powerless black man is selected by a powerful white man to play a historic role for the ultimate benefit of both men.  The role is difficult and fraught with challenges.  In playing his new role, the black man is chastised, ridiculed and attacked.  For bringing the black man into his new role, the white man is chastised, ridiculed and attacked.  The black man ultimately finds redemption, and although many years later vestiges of prejudice clearly remain, for the most part the world has moved on from the absurd notions that actually made the role he was placed into anything but normal and commonplace.

The black man is Jackie Robinson.  The white man is Branch Rickey.

Or, the black man is Django (the “D” is silent).  The white man is Dr. King Schultz.

Both apply.

Many people, including New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, determined that the 2012 movies “Django Unchained” and “Lincoln” told the same story, each in a vastly different, yet equally valid, style.   And while it is true that in their movies Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg presented different “solutions” to the problem of slavery, an even more interesting comparison may be made between “Django” and “42”.  For while in “Lincoln” the former slaves simply stand by while their fate is decided by others, in both “Django Unchained” and “42” a black man is specifically selected to take an active role in the solution of the issue at hand: slavery in the case of “Django”, and the color barrier in baseball in “42”.  

At first sight, the methods used by each man are as different as they can be: Django literally blows up the plantation while Jackie Robinson contains his emotions in the face of unabashed bigotry.  Yet there is more similarity in their approaches than meets the eye.  Both are simply acting within the roles they were given.  Richey explains to Robinson that the only way they will be successful in paving the way for future men of color in the major leagues is by showing almost heroic restraint, which Robinson does.  And in Django, Schultz gives the former slave various roles to play, each of them requiring brutal violence on Django’s part.  Against his nature, Django relents, dispensing pain reluctantly at first, but with gusto in the end.

So Jackie Robinson is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Django’s Malcolm X.  Robinson maintaining his dignity in the face of unspeakable insult is about as satisfying to watch as Django taking revenge on the lords of Candyland.   And it continues to be as puzzling as ever that the species that delights upon Robinson and Django’s triumphs is the same as the one that constructed the worlds which made their acts necessary to begin with!

Embargo

Predictably, the Cuban-American community in South Florida is absolutely aghast that Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z chose to spend their 3-day anniversary vacation in Cuba.   Also predictably, two Cuban-American legislators, Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, both Republicans, have demanded (yes, demanded) that the Treasury Department investigate the trip, which they believe violated the decades-old US embargo against Cuba.  In their letter to the Treasury Department, Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart asserted: “Cuba’s tourism industry is wholly state-controlled, therefore, U.S. dollars spent on Cuban tourism directly fund the machinery of oppression that brutally represses the Cuban people.”  

Among other provisions, the embargo prohibits US tourism to Cuba, and only allows Americans to visit the island on trips that focus on “educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction” between Americans and Cubans.  The Treasury Department, the government entity charged with enforcing the embargo, apparently granted Beyoncé, Jay-Z and their group a license for the visit, as it does for approximately 10,000 Americans per year, under that exception.

The legislators are totally missing the point.  Quibbling about whether or not the trip violated the embargo is a waste of time.  Everyone would be better served if they would instead question the existence of the embargo itself, which has long proven not only to be a catastrophic failure at accomplishing its stated objectives, but has probably helped keep the undeniably abhorrent Castro regime in power for over 50 years.

As  Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies stated in a 2009 The Guardian article:

The embargo has been a failure by every measure. It has not changed the course or nature of the Cuban government. It has not liberated a single Cuban citizen. In fact, the embargo has made the Cuban people a bit more impoverished, without making them one bit more free. At the same time, it has deprived Americans of their freedom to travel and has cost US farmers and other producers billions of dollars of potential exports.

As a tool of US foreign policy, the embargo actually enhances the Castro government's standing by giving it a handy excuse for the failures of the island's Caribbean-style socialism. Brothers Fidel and Raul can rail for hours about the suffering the embargo inflicts on Cubans, even though the damage done by their communist policies has been far worse. The embargo has failed to give us an ounce of extra leverage over what happens in Havana.

With regard to tourism specifically, Mr. Griswold continues:

Advocates of the embargo argue that trading with Cuba will only put dollars into the coffers of the Castro regime. And it's true that the government in Havana, because it controls the economy, can skim off a large share of the remittances and tourist dollars spent in Cuba. But of course, selling more US products to Cuba would quickly relieve the Castro regime of those same dollars.

If more US tourists were permitted to visit Cuba, and at the same time US exports to Cuba were further liberalised, the US economy could reclaim dollars from the Castro regime as fast as the regime could acquire them. In effect, the exchange would be of agricultural products for tourism services, a kind of "bread for beaches", "food for fun" trade relationship.

Obviously people may have different opinions regarding the effectiveness of a policy before it is enacted, or a short time thereafter, since at that point its effects are not yet known.  But now, almost 53 years in (the embargo was instituted in October of 1960), we can safely say that the embargo, whose stated goal was to encourage Cuba to move toward "democratization and greater respect for human rights," has failed miserably.

So why is it that in the face of the embargo’s obvious failure, so many in the Cuban-American community do not even question the desirability of its continuation?  In 2011 former presidential candidate George McGovern blamed "embittered Cuban exiles in Miami" for keeping the embargo alive all these years, because of their dislike for Fidel Castro.  A bit of an oversimplification perhaps, but not too far from the truth.  The embargo was a knee-jerk reaction, a short-term maneuver, yet emotional resentment and politics conspired to convert it into a sacred cow of astounding durability.  It is the most enduring trade embargo in modern history, and has even made the strangest of political bedfellows: the Cuban-American community and the Republican party.

The Castro brothers’ rule has spanned the administrations of  ten U.S. Presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama).  Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and its former bloc collapsed and China reinvented itself into a thriving market-based economy.  Cuba remains a totalitarian, repressive state.

What would the situation in Cuba be like today had the US taken a different approach?

It almost certainly would be better than it is, and could not possibly be worse.

The Thin Layer

Instead of waiting behind the other 50 people in line at a highway off-ramp, a motorist passes everyone and cuts into the line right at the exit.   

During the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew a guy hawks bottles of water at $50 each on the streets of South Florida.

At a supermarket checkout, a new line is opened.  The last person on the next line walks over and becomes first on the newly opened line, despite the fact that others were in line longer and would, in all fairness, be entitled to a spot before him on the newly opened line.

An app developer comes up with a name for his iOS app similar enough to that of a highly successful app that hapless users will purchase and download his app thinking it’s the highly successful one, and once they realize it’s not will not bother to do anything about it and will instead simply write off the lost $1.99.

A parent enrolls his daughter in an expensive test preparation course for her upcoming SATs, knowing that many of the other college applicants she will be competing against cannot afford those courses and his daughter will therefore have an unfair advantage.  

Where is the line that separates “smart”, “resourceful” and “skillful” from “greedy”, “despicable” and “scummy”?  Exactly when does a shrewd operator become an asshole?

As I wrote some time ago, capitalism works and communism doesn’t because we humans are a greedy, selfish lot.   However, during our lives we are presented with mixed signals and confusing messages.  As children we are taught that sharing is good, yet in business school we are taught how to amass as much as we can at the expense of our competitors.  We are expected to help the less fortunate, but are considered more successful the more we have.   We live in an absurdly unfair world, where undeserving people have much more than they could ever need while deserving people are starving, simply because they happened to be born to a different circumstance.  So we give the homeless guy at the stoplight a dollar, and then meet with our accountant to see what we can do to lower our tax bill.

How responsible are we, if at all, for the welfare of others?  Are we only responsible for ourselves?  Ourselves and our immediate families?  Extended families?  Neighbors?  Friends? Fellow citizens?  Do those that have have an obligation to give back?  Or do human beings simply live in a “dog eat dog” world, just like all the other species on the planet, but unlike them have ridiculous delusions of incorporating a “morality” layer that mitigates our innate survival instincts?

Human behavior, unlike that of other species, varies widely when it comes to our respect for our fellow men and women.  Some people manage to get through their whole lives without infringing on the rights of others, while others dedicate their entire lives to benefiting at others’ expense.  Some people patiently wait in line, while others cut in.  Many dedicate large parts of their lives, or their entire lives in some cases, to helping others they perceive to be less fortunate than themselves, while others spend their lives scheming to find ways to deprive others of their fortunes.  Most of us lie somewhere in between.

We seem to be the only life forms on the planet with that thin layer of consciousness right above the survival instinct, sort of like the skin that forms on the surface of heated milk.  The skin is so insubstantial that most humans require some sort of perceived selfish incentive to follow the skin (consciousness), and not the body of milk below (instinct) when making decisions.  But, as thin as the layer is, it does exist.  And it does not exist in the animals that we evolved from.  Does this mean that, as natural selection and evolution continue inexorably, the layer will gradually thicken and become more prevalent?  Will the species that evolve from us no longer require selfish incentives to do the right thing?  Why do we even have that layer to begin with?  Why did natural selection result in a being with consciousness?  

One sensible answer is that the consciousness mutation resulted in a being more fit to survive.  So it would follow that a being with a higher degree of consciousness would be even more fit to survive.  So it would further follow that the species that evolve from homo sapiens will no longer be bound by greed and selfishness.  Our progeny will not require absurd constructions like religions to do the right thing.  Police forces and armies will be looked back on as relics of a bygone era.

Before we go too far into Pollyanna territory, we must consider another possibility, sadly perhaps more likely given the current state of affairs.  The greed and selfishness will overcome the layer of consciousness, and we will self-destruct, becoming simply another in a long line of failed species.   In that case, maybe a few million years from now a layer of consciousness will mutate into a progeny of today’s shark, or cockroach.  And maybe that species will be better equipped to withstand its growing pains than the long-gone homo sapiens.

Elizabeth McGovern

If I had been told a couple of months ago that I would enjoy watching a British TV series about the happenings of a noble English family and their servants in the early part of the 20th century, I would have dismissed the idea out of hand.  But, after hearing about how good Downton Abbey was ad nauseum, I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked.  I’ve now watched the entire first three seasons, and anxiously await more episodes to become available.

The only American actor in Downton Abbey’s fine ensemble cast is Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Cora Crawley, the Duchess of Grantham, with aplomb.  However, the first time I saw Ms. McGovern as Cora I felt a sudden, inexplicable pain in my stomach.  At first I didn’t understand the nature of the pain, nor the reason I felt it.  After a bit of research, it all made sense.

A cursory look at Elizabeth McGovern’s IMDb page reminded me that her second major role was that of Jeannine Pratt, in 1980’s multiple-Oscar winning “Ordinary People”, starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch.  Even though Ms. McGovern was 19 years old at the time, she played a highschool student, a year or two younger.  And there it was, plain as day, the cause of my pain.

You see, even though I share my birth year (1961) with Elizabeth McGovern, it did not bother me to see her playing her Ladyship the Duchess, clearly a woman of a certain age.  What bothered me was that Ms. McGovern managed to go from teenager to grandmother, all during my adulthood!  For I was in my sophomore year at Babson College when I saw “Ordinary People”.

Realizing that I have been an adult during Ms. McGovern’s entire transformation from Jeannine Pratt to Cora Crawley viscerally brought home the fact that I have been around for a long time.  It was not simply a matter of noting that a woman my age was now playing older roles.  It was getting coldcocked by the fact that, as an adult, I have witnessed the nascent stages of an actress’s career, and am now witnessing the same career’s denouement.

Time seems going by at a pace as artificially accelerated as it is in those time-lapse videos of flowers blooming.  I could use some slow motion.  And now.

The Right Tool for the Job

All of my computers have become vastly overqualified.  I have a $1,500 MacBook Air, but I’m using $250 of it. Enter the new Chromebook.

Around 11 years ago, I decided to make a conscious effort to move all my data to servers accessible over the Internet (the term “Cloud” was not in vogue at the time) so that I would be able to access it from any of my computers.  The process was difficult at first, since Internet connectivity was not as ubiquitous as it is today, and there were nowhere near as many high quality cloud services available as there are now.  However, initially making use of pioneering companies such as NetLedger (now NetSuite) for accounting data and Writely (now part of Google Drive) for web-based word processing, and gradually incorporating other services such as Google Apps, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Services, Sliderocket, Gliffy, Evernote, Mint and many others, as of roughly 3 years ago my migration to the cloud became complete.  The only application I need to run on any of my computers is the browser, and all of my data, spreadsheets, word processing documents, PDFs, photos, videos, music, movies, TV shows, presentations, diagrams, etc., is available from any Internet-connected computer.

Using my gorgeous 13” MacBook Air for my general computing chores became like using a Lamborghini to go to the corner grocery store: total overkill.  But that’s not exactly the right analogy, since there’s nothing wrong with going to the grocery store in style.  It felt more like I was not sufficiently leveraging the effort I had made to migrate to web-based services.  Thanks to the cloud, I no longer needed an expensive computer that did so much more than what I required.  It just felt wrong to the part of me that takes pride in using the proper tool for the job at hand.

That same part of me has been drawn toward Chrome OS since it was announced in July of 2009.  Yet there was no way I could justify spending $500 on a Chromebook when the computers I already owned were fulfilling my needs, and then some.  However, with the introduction of the $249 Samsung Chromebook, resistance became futile.  I ordered it as soon as it was announced, received it 2 days later and have been delightfully using it ever since (3 days so far).

Before I go any further I must admit that, in addition to the aforementioned MacBook Air and my new Chromebook, I own a Mac mini, a MacBook Pro, and an iMac (not to mention an iPhone 5, an iPad and a Nexus 7 tablet).  And I love them all.  But for the past few days, the device I’ve reached for in almost every computing situation has been the plastic, cheaply built Chromebook that was most obviously not designed by Jony Ive.  Why?  Because it’s the right tool for the job.  It is only able to do precisely what I need it to do: provide a gateway to the web.  No more, no less.  And in doing only that, as a by-product of its efficiency, it eliminates virtually all of the hassles inherent in other operating systems and native apps, like the constant updating, long boot times, exposure to viruses and the need to back up, among others.

Will our grandchildren’s computing devices be progenies of today’s iOS, Android, Windows, OS X or Linux devices, all with their native apps?  Or will they be descendants of the incredible $249 computer I’m writing this on?  I’m so in love with the flat-out efficiency of this machine, which looks like it was purchased at Toys ‘R Us but makes cheap components shine more than they have a right to, that I’m betting on Chrome OS, Web Apps and Chromebooks as the eventual winners.  To me, nothing makes more sense than having my data in both a place and a format that allows me to grab any computer and just point the browser at it to use it.  Apple and Microsoft will [eventually] lose, since they are betting their companies on expensive machines and native apps.  Google and Amazon will [eventually] win, since although they are hedging their bets, they are doubling down on the web.  You heard it here first.