Robert X. Cringely recommends himself for CTO of the USA:
The U.S. CTO — at least this FIRST U.S. CTO — will be the buyer-of-cool-stuff-in-chief for the entire nation.I would make a better buyer-in-chief than almost anyone else because of two important characteristics in my warped personality: 1) I would be immune to special interest groups so this wouldn’t turn into another National Information Infrastructure boondoggle, and; 2) yet as a true enthusiast I would buy with such reckless abandon that I’d easily fulfill the economic stimulus needs while spewing money widely enough to guarantee at least a few good technical investments for the nation.
This latter point probably requires some explanation. As we can see from the current $700 billion bank bailout, the ranks of those actually benefiting are pretty small. We’re $325 billion into the thing and consumers — the people paying for it — have yet to benefit at all as far as I can tell. Most banks haven’t even benefited. And those that have benefited have done little to share their wealth. To put things in the most positive light I can, let’s attribute this to the very surgical nature of this process. To put it more honestly, nothing really changes except the rich get richer.
Look at Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure program of the 1990s, which was intended to build for us all exactly the sort of data network enjoyed today by people in Japan and Korea. $200 billion in tax credits were distributed, primarily to telephone companies. That’s $200 billion in government revenue foregone, which is just the same, it seems to me, as writing a check. And what did we get for it? Limited Internet service in schools and no Internet service in homes. The DSL we have today we paid for, believe me — phone companies sell that stuff at a profit. However well intentioned Al was, his system was gamed by the phone companies who took the money and ran.