Debt deal: anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup by George Monbiot starkly highlights the ongoing bizarre nature of US politics and voting, mostly with regards to the latest political spat surrounding the debt bill.

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor.

Monibiot says there are exceptions to these rules, but they’re largely solid. In the US, like most countries, there’s absolutely no balance between rich and poor:

As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

In fact, in the US, as in other countries, even the middle classes are now finding costs spiralling. Logically, then, the vast majority should demand over the short term to make the super-rich pay more tax, in order to rebalance society and not have everyone but billionaires screwed over. But in the US, the reverse happens, because the super-rich control the media and have a sneaky plan:

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Thus, you have poor, jobless people and even the reasonably well off fighting tooth-and-nail against tax rises that wouldn’t affect them but that would potentially make their lives better, and demanding breaks for people who already have more money than they know what to do with. As Monbiot says, many people in the USA therefore

mobilise against their own welfare.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, but the UK’s getting sucked into this way of thinking. Rather than looking east (or north-east) at the genuine big societies of Scandinavia, where there’s a high-tax but also high-support and high quality of life agenda, we have people begging for taxes to be slashed, while the Tory-led government argues for a Big Society that means “deal with everything yourselves, but we won’t support you and, in some cases, we’ll demand you don’t do what you want to, if we decide you shouldn’t be doing it”. Marvellous.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. UK politics will in 2015 take a depressingly huge swing towards partisanship again, when the Liberal Democrats return a dozen or fewer seats. We’ll again see the Tories and Labour trading blows, trying to win an election by using policies to seduce a few important seats, probably in part by pledging to keep taxes low, even for people earning millions. (Scotland will be a partial exception, since the SNP will remain strong, although that party’s tax plans appear to be in almost constant disarray.)

I don’t want to see a return to the kind of Wilson-era supertax, which inspired George Harrison to write Taxman. I don’t think a 95% tax on the super-rich is sensible, and it would almost certainly be detrimental. You’d end up with a ton of tax exiles, more tax cheats, and a lack of willingness in the entrepreneurial space. But the Tories seem determined to scrap the 50% tax band (applied only to earnings over £150,000—about seven times the skewed national average), which doesn’t seem a particularly sensible move. And when you look at the compromises in the USA—slashing benefits for the poor, in order to ensure the rich don’t have to pay an extra penny in taxes—arguing for a low-tax society seems like precisely the opposite of what civilised nations should be doing.

Via Ben Brooks, a nice email from Bill Gates (PDF) that showcases his frustration at using Microsoft.com in 2003. The interesting thing isn’t that Microsoft’s site sucked back then, nor that it had usability issues, but that Gates’s email shows his thinking wasn’t in fact a million miles away from Steve Jobs’s. So why he’s still firmly behind Ballmer as CEO of the shaken giant is baffling.

From The Metro:

Baroness Greenfield is concerned about the banality of Twitter

Baroness Greenfield doesn’t understand Twitter.

Baroness Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology, fears [social networks] may be having a negative impact on users.

It’s true. Those damned social networks, which keep you in touch with people and enable you to share ideas and communicate. THEY ARE EVIL.

She claimed that a focus on developing internet friendships and the constant feedback they involve had the potential to ‘rewire’ the brain, making people expect instant gratification and reducing their ability to concentrate for prolonged periods of time.

Ooh! Look at that cute LOLcat!

Sorry, what?

Baroness Greenfield suggested the ‘banality’ of the information exchanged on Twitter could become a problem.

The banality in my Twitter feed today being arguments about the US debt ceiling, tons of comments on design, responses to Daily Mail/Liz Jones idiocy regarding the NHS, and articles arguing about the pros and cons of activism.

In other news, the banality of information exchanged by professionals (say, professors of pharmacology), TV pundits and people in pubs “could become a problem”, but it all depends on who you’re conversing with.

The academic said: ‘Why should someone be interested in what someone else had for breakfast?

Why should we be interested in the views of someone who’s clearly never used Twitter, but nonetheless feels compelled to churn out the same old ill-informed arguments about the service?

It reminds me of a small child (saying): “Look at me Mummy, I’m doing this, look at me Mummy, I’m doing that”.

Unlike, say, a professor of pharmacology doing an interview for a newspaper and parroting the same old garbage we’ve heard a thousand times before?

‘It’s almost as if they’re in some kind of identity crisis.

It’s almost as if they’re keeping in touch with people and letting them know what’s going on in their lives, from the banal to the extremely exciting and interesting. Not everyone juggles sharks for a living, every second of the day, Baroness Greenfield. And not everyone can be a professor of pharmacology with a poor understanding of Twitter.

In a sense it’s keeping the brain in a sort of time warp.

MY BRAIN IS DOING PELVIC THRUSTS ON TWITTER! PLEASE SEND HELP, BARONESS GREENFIELD!

In case you’re not keeping up regarding Nintendo, things aren’t looking good. From dominating the handheld space a few short years ago, it’s now found itself in the position of finding its older handheld (the DS) outselling its newer model (the 3DS) by nearly two-to-one, and the new console having its price slashed, in an attempt to boost poor sales across the entire range. The company’s CEO has taken a 50 per cent pay cut, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to have any big answers to Apple’s iOS and even Sony, matching Apple in making genuinely multifunctional devices.

To my mind, Nintendo has the following options:

• Dig in. Nintendo has said it believes that dedicated gaming units are still the way forward. It could produce a follow-up to the 3DS (perhaps the Game Boy 2, to leverage that still-loved brand), but this would be a high-risk strategy. It’s increasingly common for kids to be armed with iPods, and once they have one, dedicated units look limited by comparison (especially those largely utilising physical media).
• Follow the crowd. Nintendo could fight back against Apple and Sony by nicking their best ideas. Have the next Nintendo console, at the very least, be fantastic online (for browsing, not just multiplayer games), work well as a media player, and have a top-notch games and apps list, which are largely available via download and for a more affordable price than existing Nintendo games. This has less risk in the sense of future-proofing, but Nintendo would have to take great care to differentiate.
• Do something entirely different. Apple—the company, remember, in part responsible for the Apple Pippin—largely blindsided Nintendo in handheld gaming. Apple didn’t design the iPod as a gaming unit, but it did design iOS devices as something different to what existed at the time. A combination of factors then led to devs and gamers flocking to the platform. Is Nintendo capable of creating something so awe-inspiring, new and innovative (rather than welding a 3D gimmick to an existing console) that it could go for this option? I’d like to think so, because while it’s also high-risk, it offers plenty of rewards if the Japanese giant got it right. And it’s not like Nintendo’s been bereft of new and exciting ideas in the past.

Whichever path Nintendo chooses, I think it’s got one more shot at this, before it finds itself in the same position as Sega around the time of the Dreamcast. If that ever happens, the company ends up with option four, which I’m sure it would never want to do:

• Be like Sega. Nintendo could give up on hardware entirely and go software-only in the handheld space, either with lucrative exclusive deals with a single platform, or by casting the net wide. Imagine if Super Mario Bros., MarioKart and other famous Nintendo brands were to officially exist for iOS. Angry Birds would be ousted from the number-one spot for good—those birds and pigs would never know what hit them. But this would come at a price—the ability to control the hardware and software, and to innovate when it comes to making new hardware. That said, given how regularly Nintendo recycles its famous IP, this wouldn’t necessarily be a poor option, especially for gamers.

Callum Jones:

Sky have attempted to buy every successful programme on television in the past two decades.  But, instead of buying out shows when they are initially offered, they wait for other channels to show them for their first few seasons.  At which point, should the show in question be a success, they use the ludicrous amount of money they have access to and outbid the broadcaster who first bought its rights.  This dirty method, unfortunately, guarantees Sky more customers and more viewers.  In case you don’t believe me, I’ll run by you a fraction of the programmes Sky Television have bought via these methods:

24 (from the BBC)

Entourage (from ITV)

ER (from Channel 4)

Flight of the Concordes (from the BBC)

Friends (from Channel 4)

Glee (from Channel 4)

Grey’s Anatomy (from Channel 4)

Lost (from Channel 4)

Mad Men (from the BBC)

Prison Break (from Channel 5)

The Simpsons (from the BBC)

As of today, it’s been announced that Sky’s grabbed F1 coverage from the BBC, a network that has provided superb coverage of the sport. The BBC simply couldn’t afford to outbid Sky, not least with the British government hobbling the BBC by freezing the licence fee. The Murdochs still claim the BBC is too rich, too dominant and has too much influence, while regularly outbidding it for anything considered popular. One wonders how Sky will act once it’s obliterated terrestrial channels, and once it’s colluded with successive governments to essentially turn the BBC into PBS UK.