This past weekend I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. I wasn’t prepared. I thought I’d like it; I thought I’d be impressed; I assumed that I’d want one. But wow - I had no idea how utterly attractive the thing would be. I didn’t realize just how light 3 lbs is, or how thin the thing is, or how fantastically it all works together.

There are so many little, tiny design choices that are just sooo correct, and that I wouldn’t have known I wanted until I saw them, that it’s just amazing.

Now, I’m not about to give up my MacBook Pro for the little guy. I love screen real estate (lots of it) and while the MBA keyboard is spifftacular, it’s not the perfect laptop keyboard that the MBP’s is. Still, it was an incredible piece of hardware, and I want one. Or two. It’s much more impressive in person than in any ads for it, which is saying a lot. If you haven’t touched one, held one, then you don’t really know what the thing is like.

This morning I read Wil Shipley’s first impressions. They’re very Shipley-esque (read: funny and interesting), but the first one was exactly the feeling that I got when I saw it up close:

It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

He also says this, which is not really MBA-specific, but certainly a problem I’ve love to see solved:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I’d be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the “I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side” market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

To that I’d like to add a hearty “Amen!”

You may or may not have heard of the Laffer Curve. It’s a theory that decreasing tax rates may, under some circumstances, increase tax revenue (and vice versa).

Now, you don’t have to accept that the Laffer Curve is true if you don’t want. You don’t have to accept that the earth is round, or that the sun goes around the moon, or that the Washington Redskins are evil, no matter who coaches them. Facts don’t care if you believe them, and you certainly don’t have to believe them.

Still, it’s just willfully ignorant to go around trumpeting that you reject the “Laffer Curve Theory” if you don’t even know what it is. And most of the people I’ve heard take issue with it clearly didn’t know what it actually says. I’m not saying that, “They disagreed with me, so they were wrong.” I’m saying that they were busy disagreeing with some straw man they’d concocted that had hardly any resemblance to the Laffer Curve itself.

So, if you want to know what the Laffer Curve is about, Larry Kudlow pointed to this terrific video a few days ago, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It’s only around 7 minutes long, and moves quickly, and is quite clear. Just don’t get distracted by the short appeal for a flat tax toward the end; the Laffer Curve is not connected to any particular means of taxation.

p.s. - I’m not a flat-tax proponent myself, largely for pragmatic reasons, namely, I don’t think it would remain transparently applied, and would quickly turn into a bureaucratically-managed VAT nightmare. But that’s another story.