Most of Tripoli is occupied by rebel forces, there’s fighting at Gadaffi’s compound, Gadaffi is missing, and France is planning on hosting a meeting next week among NATO allies and the rebels to discuss Libya’s future. Al Jazeera live coverage is here, Guardian live coverage is here, and here’s the New York Times.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Libya
The latest judgment from one of the Guardian’s reporters on the ground:
Having been at the front line it’s clear to me, I think, the regime in Tripoli – it’s a matter of days, or even hours, before it collapses. The rebels are advancing, they’re more or less at the gates of Tripoli… My sense is that Tripoli will fall in the next day or two, possibly as early as tomorrow.
Here’s a thread for Libya-related discussion.
Animal Parade
This is one of the dogs at the animal parade I attended today. For those of you who like pictures of dogs and other pets dressed up and looking silly, knock yourselves out. For the rest of you, here’s an open thread.
Open Thread: Never Rest
This young man is going to do some great things, I predict. I’ve got some early morning plans so here’s an open thread.
Another Free Market Success Story
There’s a shortage of some chemo drugs and antibiotics this year:
More than half the recent shortages have resulted because government or company inspectors found problems like microbial contamination that can be lethal on injection. Others have occurred because of capacity problems at drug plants or lack of interest because of low profits, according to the F.D.A. […] “The race to the bottom has led to an increase of products coming from plants in China and India that may have uncertain supply and may have never been inspected,” Ms. Bresch said. “If the F.D.A. was required to inspect foreign drug plants at the same rate it does domestic ones, we might not have so many of these shortages.”
One example: Johnson & Johnson, whose cancer drug Doxil is in short supply says that “Our third-party manufacturer has had some manufacturing issues related to capacity.” J&J made $2.8 billion last quarter, with a yearly profit margin a bit over 20%, but that’s still not enough.
Perry Can’t Pull Out When Confronted With Abstinence Statistics
Steve Benen highlights this three minutes of stupidity from Rick Perry. The guy just repeats his belief (“abstinence works”) when faced with statistics showing that Texas has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. Steve adds:
In a case like education and lessons on sexual health, the left tends to look at this in terms of results: what works in preventing teen pregnancies and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases? For the right, the question is philosophical: what’s consistent with their morality.
This is basically right, but I’ll add that the elusive and oft-courted “center” is also concerned with, and will vote for, pragmatism, if it’s presented to them in the right package with the right kind of bow on top. That’s a huge and sometimes under-appreciated part of the Obama administration’s rhetoric and style.
Also, too: I haven’t watched much Perry on video, but after watching this one, I’m struck with the force of will that it must take the DC Perry-fluffing contingent to ignore just how much he looks, talks and thinks like Bush.
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HP
When I need to do some calculating, I pull out my 20-year-old HP calculator and calculate the fuck out of whatever needs calculation. When I need some marks on paper, my five-year-old HP laser printer prints the living shit out of that piece of paper, and I expect it will be fusing toner for many years to come. I’ve also got a couple of HP computers that work just fine, and they’re a slight cut above the usual commodity crap you get at Best Buy — that is, they appear to be the product of an engineering team that had a little more on their mind than wringing every last, single penny of optimization from their PC design.
So, it’s hard to watch yet another American company that is clearly capable of producing decent products get run into the ground by the morons in charge. First, Cara Carleton Fiorina bought Compaq with a big flourish, and all that got HP was two of everything in its PC line. HP never integrated Compaq, so it ended up selling PCs that looked like HP PCs, and PCs that looked like Compaq PCs. That’s death in a commodity business where making a lot of one thing is the key to profitability.
Then, Leo Apotheker flew in and bought Palm (WedbOS) almost exactly a year ago. Yesterday, he announced that they’re killing the Palm unit they just bought, in part because the rushed-to-market, crap Touchpad that was introduced a couple of months ago was a flop. From what I’ve seen, WebOS had a lot of potential if it was running on the right hardware. It takes more than a year to get that right, so Leo might as well have invited Carly to a bonfire and burned the $1.2 billion he paid for Palm.
I get that the commodity PC business is morphing into a non-commodity device business, and that Apple is eating everyone’s lunch because they’re building 30 million of one thing instead of one million of 30 things, but weak management at companies like HP is making it really easy for them. The rumbling sound being heard around Palo Alto today is Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard spinning in their graves.