Eleven weeks ago I mentioned I might switch to the Mac. After a lot of mostly successful experimenting with my new MacBook, I went back to the Apple store last week and purchased a Mac Mini for my desktop. The Mini is powerful, but its dimensions are just barely larger than Adam Smith's 1776 book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (In other words, it's small enough to fit unobtrusively on, or under, the desktop.)
The PC is now unplugged; the main thing I'll miss about it is the street mapping software (...that's a hole in the Mac software suite that Google maps does not fill). I wonder how Microsoft would respond if I asked them when they plan to make MS Streets & Trips available for the Mac.
(Actually, I had a great run with PCs, but I made myself a promise back in 1982 that I'd switch platforms every 25 years.)
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Coming soon...
Is economic doomsday just a decade or two away? If so, is my generation the culprit? I'll have a better idea in a few days.
After finishing a few more cleanup tasks on the switch, I'll finish digging into the baby boomer demographics question, which I've had in the works for a while now. (As you may recall, that problem is supposedly going to crater the economy and force our grandchildren back to subsistence farming, according to our fear-peddling politicians and journalists.) I'm approaching it from a different angle: instead of figuring out how much everyone's taxes will have to increase, I'm figuring out how much productivity-driven growth it would take to make it a non-problem. The doomsters tend to bury their economic growth assumptions, I've noticed; but I'm making growth and productivity the centerpiece. Should be ready in a few days. (Graphics and fonts will look a little different from now on.)
I consider supply and demand. If the baby boomers are really productive, they will be in demand. As they age, the supply of such highly productive workers will dwindle and therefore their salaries will rise.
With such incentives rising, more and more will be willing to work just a year or two or five more, or with greater hourly flexibility, in ecxhange for continuing their rich lifestyles.
This will have the following effects on the economy: The least productive will retire and be replaced by younger people. The more productive will continue to work. The economy will grow faster with this natural improvement in effeciency.
The Social Security and Medicare will have less strain than is currently predicted, due to the fact that fewer will be relying on it and more high salaries will be paying into it. By the time all boomers are truly retired, the economic growth will have taken care of their payments, and they will have fewer years of full SS draw to strain the system.
Posted by: pawnking | 23 May 2007 at 08:00
I'm really looking forward to your posting on this. Any chance you might include an analysis, whether for good or for bad, of young Mexican immigrants, whether legal or illegal, on the equation?
Posted by: Perry Willis | 23 May 2007 at 10:06
The other issue with boomers is that they are living longer healthy lives, so could easily work a little longer. Gradually moving the retirement age up would easily solve all problems for the near term.
In the long run we don't know what the problems will be, but I doubt they will be about funding boomer retirement plans. More likely is that everyone will have indefinite life spans and significantly augemented abilities (both biological and computer-assisted).
My time horizon for concern is getting shorter all the time: I think the world will be so different in 30 years that being concerned about potential problems then doesn't make any sense today. I've reached a point where I can't take seriously any problem that is projected for more than 20 years from now.
Posted by: Tim Lundeen | 23 May 2007 at 11:16
Two incredibly useful features of the Mac that are sometimes easy to overlook and underutilize because they have no analog on Windows nor icon/labeled control.
1) Magnify: Control-key plus mouse scroll wheel. Zoom in on any part of the visible screen.
2) Expose': F9, windows selector.
I bought my Macbook after realizing it ran a Linux Kernel under all that elegance. I didn't catch on to the more subtle features of the GUI for some time (I don't read manuals).
Posted by: woodchuck64 | 23 May 2007 at 15:55
If you must have Streets and Trips, use Parallels, which is virtual machine software for the mac. Install XP and Streets and Trips into the virtual machine, and off you go.
Devices and VMs can be tricky, but I'm thinking that a simple GPS using a usb connection should be easy. Surely someone has done this before -- google for it.
Posted by: John | 23 May 2007 at 19:08
Well my friend if you were maybe 15 years younger you'd keep a Windows machine going for purposes of playing cool games. I wouldn't give up Windows but I look forward to adding a Mac to the stable again, had a lot of fun with one in the mid 90s.
Posted by: Kevin | 24 May 2007 at 20:13
Tim,
"The other issue with boomers is that they are living longer healthy lives, so could easily work a little longer. Gradually moving the retirement age up would easily solve all problems for the near term...."
The reality is that 70% of workers retire at or before 62 now and that employers are more than willing to remove them from their work forces, even if they have to buy them out to do so.
There is little real moral difference between cutting back payouts and increasing the retirement age. The origin of social security includes the fact that most workers failed to live long enough to collect. If you want to return to this, just be honest enough to say so.
Regards, Don
Posted by: Don Lloyd | 25 May 2007 at 06:34