Hasta La Gadget!

When Microsoft first mentioned that they wanted to dive into the console business, not many people took them seriously. After all, it was a slugfest between the likes of Nintendo and Sega back then, and then Sony came along with their phenomenal bestseller, the PlayStation. Well, Microsoft did make the move into the world of console gaming, and they have not looked back since. Now that we are into the Xbox One console generation, we have received word that Microsoft has already sold 6.6 million Xbox consoles throughout the recently concluded holiday quarter in its quarterly earnings statement, which resulted in a revenue of $26.5 billion. Overall, this resulted in a net income of $5.8 billion.

Although revenues were up over at Microsoft, the overall net income and Xbox sales were down year-over-year. In a similar period during the previous year, Microsoft’s fiscal Q2, the company managed to sell 7.4 million Xbox consoles, which was a rather balanced split between 3.9 million Xbox One consoles and 3.5 million Xbox 360 consoles. Microsoft did not offer deliver a similar breakdown of the 6.6 million consoles which it sold between the time period of October 1 and December 31, 2014, although I am quite sure that we do not need to be a genius to say that more Xbox One consoles had shifted by then, since owning an Xbox 360 is so passe. [Press Release]

Microsoft’s Xbox Division Does Pretty Well , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Is it me, or is the trend of small computers (and by this, I do mean desktops) starting to catch on? Here we are with another Chinese company known as Hongpad that has started to put up on sale a box which will run on an Intel Atom Bay Trail-T processor. The asking price for this diminutive device? We are looking at a wholesale price of $70 to $80 a pop.

It is being marketed in the guise of a TV box, which would allow it to run on either Windows 8.1 from Microsoft, or Google’s very own Android mobile operating system, making it function as a small and inexpensive, low-power desktop machine. The slim form factor should not take away from the fact that the Hongpad Intel Box will sport a trio of full-sized USB ports, a micro USB port, a micro HDMI port, and a microSD memory card slot – oh yeah, not forgetting the headphone jack as well.

It will boast of 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal memory to boot. Do bear in mind that while it supports Windows 8.1, this does not mean that it will ship with an activated copy of Windows 8.1 – since some manufacturers might still load a trial version, requiring you to pay for the full license; which inevitably, would end up doubling the cost of owning a Hongpad.

Hongpad Delivers Another Small PC , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The Republican Congress decided to make overhauling the Social Security disability program one of its first orders of business. On the first day of the new session, it put in place a rule change that would make it difficult to address the shortfall the program is projected to face sometime next year.

Republican leaders like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) justified this change by insisting that half the people getting disability had the sort of back aches and occasional anxieties that we all face. The difference is that they get checks from the government rather than working. For this reason, Rand argued the program is in serious need of reform.

As several analysts quickly pointed out, there is no basis for Paul’s assertion. Only a relatively small fraction of disability beneficiaries remotely fit Paul’s description of people with backaches and anxiety. As the data clearly show, it is not easy to get disability. More than three quarters of applicants are initially turned down, and even after the appeals process just over 40 percent of applicants get benefits.

Furthermore, we know that the vast majority of people getting disability would not be working even if they weren’t getting a check from the government. A study published by the University of Michigan a few years ago examined the work patterns of people who were denied disability. It focused on a group of marginal applicants, people who had conditions that would be approved or denied depending in large part on the administrative judge to whom their case was assigned. These were the sort of people that Rand Paul was talking about.

This group comprised roughly a quarter of all applicants. The study found that among this group, 28 percent of the people who were denied benefits were working two years after their application. Since this was a marginal group comprising less than a quarter of applicants, we can infer that somewhere near 7 percent of the people approved would be working without their disability check.

Furthermore, even among this group the study found that average annual earnings were less than half their pre-disability level. This indicates that these people were suffering from a serious condition, even if didn’t make them completely unable to work.

But this 7-percent number gives a useful point of reference. We can set Rand Paul loose on the people with disability and have him throw off the ones who really could be working. If he has perfect judgment, then we will save the program 7 percent by getting rid of the people identified by the Michigan study. If his judgment is less than perfect, we may still save the same amount of money, but it could mean cutting off benefits for terminal-cancer patients and other people with extremely serious health conditions.

This gets us to the Federal Reserve Board. If the problem is that we are spending too much money on disability, then one sure way of reducing costs is to get the unemployment rate down. There is a regular pattern where more people go on disability when there is a downturn in the economy.

This should not be surprising. There are many employers who keep older workers on the payroll even if a physical condition makes it difficult for them to perform their job. However when there is downturn and they have to cut back their workforce, these workers are likely to be the first to be laid off. In a labor force with a glut of unemployed workers, an older worker with a serious physical problem will find it difficult to get a new job. Therefore many of these people will end up getting disability.

The best way to keep these marginal cases off disability is to keep them on their jobs. Adjusting for the aging of the workforce, the number of people getting disability rose by more than 12 percent from before the recession in 2007 to 2011.

We can infer from this fact that if we had been able to hold the unemployment rate to its pre-recession level, we would have somewhere around 12-percent fewer people getting disability payments. That is considerably more than the number of would-be workers identified by the University of Michigan study. In other words, we are likely to do more to reduce disability rolls by sustaining high levels of employment than by setting Rand Paul loose to get rid of all the shirkers.

This is yet another reason that all good people everywhere should be leaning on the Federal Reserve Board not to raise interest rates this year. The point of raising interest rates is to slow the economy and keep people from getting jobs. We all know many reasons that this is bad, but the disability whiners have given us one more.

If the Fed keeps people from getting jobs, then we will have more people getting disability benefits. If the number of people getting disability bothers you, send a note to Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen asking her not to raise rates.

“The work we do affects the way that we see ourselves and the way that we are seen,” director Ava Duvernay said on Monday during a Sundance brunch co-hosted by Women In Film. “Women making films is a radical act. Radicals don’t ask for permission, radicals take it.”

It was a fitting statement considering the event: a Q&A between with radical trailblazers Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The two were in the comedy “Nine to Five” together in 1980 and recently announced that they will star in a new Netflix comedy, set to be released in May. They’re also best friends hanging out at Sundance for the first time, seeing films, talking to people and just seeing what’s out there.

Moderator Pat Mitchell started the conversation with questions about their early days and finding success. “Obviously having a famous parent helps,” Fonda said, referring to her father, actor Henry Fonda. “The ’70s were when I began to produce movies. It was a much easier time.”

Referring to what it was like when she was just starting out, Fonda said, “I took the easy road for a while. I would say that ended with ‘Barbarella.’ I liked doing something that caused a certain generation of men to have their first erections. But then I became an activist.”

Jane Fonda in 1968’s “Barbarella.”

Tomlin, on the other hand, often quieter than Fonda was on stage, admitted that she was never in search of fame. She got her start as a stand-up comedian in the 1960s and is considered a pioneer for her work in comedy, television, Broadway and film.

“I didn’t go into performing to be famous. I wanted to work. A lot of people don’t value that they have an opportunity to work — to do something. There’s so much gratification in doing something well,” she said. “I didn’t want to be famous. I thought you would absolutely lose integrity. And I have,” she joked, cracking her famous toothy smile.

Lily Tomlin on “Saturday Night Live” in 1976.

The decades-long friendship between Fonda and Tomlin was obvious in plain sight. They needled each other, edited each other and showed a sort of shorthand that delighted the room.

Fonda admitted that it wasn’t always gravy. “I would do it really differently if I had to do it over,” Fonda said. “Relationships are important. You don’t have to sleep with them, but you have to be friends. I made a bunch of movies that didn’t work.”

Tomlin jumped in to her rescue, and with her own advice for the women in the room. “You just have to make yourself good at something. Worthy, good. That builds your confidence,” she said. “You have to make yourself useable. Sometimes you might fall down and your use is debatable amongst the crowds. But you will find a way.”

Mitchell brought up how hard women struggle to be half as successful as men in Hollywood, and pointed out that often it’s all about the money. Access to capital for women in entertainment is one of the biggest problems.

“We should have a women’s bank that funds women’s projects,” Tomlin interjected. And Fonda picked up on her pause: “We all know what we have to do. We have to not be quiet about it, we have to keep talking about it, we have to shame the studios for being so gender-biased,” she said.

Fonda, 77, has won two Oscars and has dedicated her life to improving women’s health and fitness as well as being a top voice in the political protests of the 1970s and beyond.

“Media is the face that the United States gives to the world. And if the women’s part of our country isn’t part of that face, then they’re not getting the whole picture,” Fonda said.

Fonda at a feminist protest in Rome in 1972.

“It’s patriotic to insist and fight and scream and yell and raise our fists and support all the women that are getting their movies made,” she added. “We have to show that women who make movies make money. We have to prove that we can be commercial.”

Offering her support, Tomlin added, “Jane is like the girl in ballet class who always gets a gold star. She works like hell.”

Their upcoming Netflix comedy, “Grace and Frankie,” pits the two veterans against each other. “They hate each other. I’m a tight-ass and she’s a hippy,” Fonda said of their characters.

The two women, who are long-time enemies, have the rug pulled out from under them when their husbands reveal that they have been having an affair and plan on getting married. The season will be streamed in full on Netflix starting May 8.

“It’s my women friends who keep starch in my spine,” Fonda said. “Women’s friendships are one of the reasons women live longer than men. We talk about different things, we delve deep, we go under — even if we haven’t seen each other for years. There are hormones that are released when women are with other women that are healthy.”

Hearing two women with such powerful and long-lasting careers speak about perspective is one of the reasons people put panels like this together. But Fonda’s closing message is a personal one. “When you get older,” she said, “you realize that friendships don’t just happen. You have to cultivate them.”

I quickly grew tired of reading passionate reviews about American Sniper that contained a sentence midpoint which read, “I haven’t seen the movie.” And so it was that I decided to go see the movie myself.

I’ll start by saying that the most common complaint I’ve seen – that “it glorifies war” – falls flat. The theater was full, and as several hundred people sat through the credits in silence, and got up in silence, and walked out of the theater in silence, I’m pretty sure they weren’t all fired up to get out there and go to war. My guess is that like me, they were thinking that war is awful, and horrific, and if it doesn’t kill you it likely breaks something inside you.

My second problem with criticism of the movie is the notion, shared by Michael Moore, that snipers by virtue of what they do are “evil,” and the idea that somehow they engage in dirty pool by shooting at someone who isn’t shooting back. And I have to ask… what rule book are we playing by? This is war, and it hasn’t been a gentleman’s game perhaps ever, but certainly not since we lined up in brightly colored uniforms and marched in neat rows slaughtering each other on an actual field of battle. To wish that war had a code of ethics, and conformed to our ideas of civilized behavior seems naive. We gave up civilized behavior when we went to war. And herein lies the problem.

When we go to war, we are asking people who were raised to not fight on the playground, and to be nice to each other, and to live by the rules of society and a code of ethics where aggression is punished, where the bad guys are the violent ones, and the nice people use their words – and we are asking them to selectively forget that while they go kill people for a few months. Then we let them come home to families, and people who go about their lives oblivious to war. And instead of letting them heal, and process, and put the experience behind them, we make them go back. Again and again and again. We demand they turn this civilian code of morality on, and off, and on and off. We can’t do that to people and expect that they won’t need to find a narrative to justify what they do, a reason that they make it ok. Soldiers kill the enemy in theory so that the enemy won’t kill them – or their buddies, or fellow soldiers. Kill other people before they kill you. And the less they seem like people, the easier it is to kill them.

So what happens when the enemy is a child with an IED? What do you do? This is a question that most of us will never have to answer. And this is why writing a tidy little review of American Sniper is impossible. If you have the actual experience to relate to this movie, you cannot be objective about it, and for good reason. If you are detached enough to be objective, then you lack the experience to make an informed judgment.

Was the story completely “true?” Well, probably not. Welcome to Hollywood. They can’t even stick to the plot of the Hobbit for Pete’s sake. But they are just doing their job too. They make movies so you can sit for a few hours and think outside your box, see the world through different eyes. And this movie does that. The acting in some cases was brilliant, and in others a bit 2-dimensional. And Clint Eastwood is not my favorite person, but he’s a good director.

Was Chris Kyle a hero, or a villain? The answer is neither, and that’s what has people at each other’s throats over this film. In real life very few of us are heroes, or villains. We’re all out there in our grey hats trying to pigeonhole complicated thoughts and unpleasant acts into black and white. Chris Kyle lived in the world of grey. He was wired in a way that allowed him do things that most of us couldn’t do. But do you seek out gentle, compassionate, non-violent, humble caretakers to go to war and shoot people? Probably not.

The bottom line is that Chris Kyle did what we asked him to do. He didn’t perch on a rooftop in New York City and pick off people coming out of an office building. But he had to commit virtually those same acts a few thousand miles away, and be ok with that in his own mind. As a country, I think we need to acknowledge that we ask combat soldiers to do the unthinkable every day. And perhaps we shouldn’t be so critical of them when they do what we ask.

If we are going to criticize, let’s be merciless with those who get us into wars in the first place. Let’s be ruthless with them. Let’s be brutal. Make them justify their behavior – not a sniper, not a Hollywood director. The movie will mean very different things, depending on who is watching. But I hope we can all leave the theater, in our silence, with a sense that war should always be the last resort, and that even when it’s fought at a conveniently far distance from our lives here, it always comes home.