Wine online
The US is such a strange country. You can buy guns freely, but I’ve just discovered that it’s illegal to sell alcohol over interstate boundaries. This is, as you might expect, acting as a damper on e-commerce in the wine business. It also conflicts with the Constitution’s endorsement of free trade. So the Supreme Court is going to consider the issue. Wine buffs await the outcome with bated breaths. So, presumeably, do small wineries.
Freedom of information?
Want to see why some people are worried about the security and privacy of their personal data? Well, try this.
Thanks to James Miller for the link.
Come back, Mary Poppins — your country needs you!
In the UK we have our own little conflict-of-interest circus over the business of a visa for the ex-lover of the Home Secretary.
But over on the other side of the pond, a more encouraging little scandal has emerged, blinking into the light. Dubya had nominated Bernard B. Kerik, a macho creep straight from central casting (shaven head, big ego, bristling moustache, black belt in karate — see picture, and note Stars and Stripes drooping sadly in background), to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security.
Photo (c) the New York Times.
After a textbook start (high school dropout, fathering an illegitimate daughter in Korea, whom he refused to acknowledge and support, serving as bodyguard for Saudi royals and then becoming a New York narcotics cop) he got his big break in 1993 when New York Mayor, ‘Sir’ Rudolf Giuliani, appointed him as his chauffeur and bodyguard. Thereafter, as Sidney Blumenthal chronicled in a nice little potted bio last week, Kerik went from strength to strength.
“Giuliani made Kerik deputy police commissioner and chief of the corrections department. One million dollars in taxpayers’ money used to buy tobacco for inmates disappeared into a private foundation run by Kerik without any accounting. In 2000, Giuliani leapfrogged Kerik over many more qualified candidates to appoint him police commissioner.
Kerik spent much of his time after 9/11 writing a self-promoting autobiography, The Lost Son. The city’s conflict of interest board eventually fined him $2,500 for using three policemen to conduct his research.
Dispatched to Iraq to whip security forces into shape, Kerik dubbed himself the ‘interim interior minister of Iraq.’ British police advisers called him the ‘Baghdad terminator’, and reported that his reckless bullying was alienating Iraqis. ‘I will be there at least six months,’ he said. He left after three.”
Just the kinda regular guy, in other words, who Dubya would want to tend to the security of the United States. But this grand plan has come unstuck. Why? Nanny trouble. Let the New York Times tell the story:
“On Friday, Mr. Kerik informed the administration that, contrary to assurances he had given the White House counsel’s office before the president nominated him on Dec. 3, a nanny he had employed appeared to have been in the country illegally and that he had failed to pay taxes on her behalf. He told President Bush in a brief phone call about 8:30 p.m. Friday of his decision to withdraw, said a White House official.
White House officials were clearly annoyed at Mr. Kerik for not determining the nanny’s immigration status before this week but said they had no evidence he had sought to mislead them. ‘It was Kerik’s screw-up, it was that simple,’ the official said. ‘But it’s a mistake you can’t tolerate with someone who has oversight for immigration.'”
In the old days, mistresses were the cause of chaps’ downfalls. Now it’s nannies. Mary Poppins, where are you when you’re needed?
Supremes to take the ‘enabling infringement’ case
From today’s NYT:
“WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 – The Supreme Court, accepting urgent pleas from the recording and film industries, agreed on Friday to decide whether the online services that enable copyrighted songs and movies to be shared freely over the Internet can be held liable themselves for aiding copyright infringement.
For the entertainment industry and for everyday consumers, the case is likely to produce the most important copyright decision since the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home.”
We’re back to Sony vs. Universal in 1984 when the Court ruled by a whisker that makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home. Ed Felten has an entertaining account of this in his Princeton President’s Lecture
Not for sale!
Well, the CCIA may have caved in and taken Microsoft’s money, but I’m glad to report that Living without Microsoft is not for sale!
A blogged dialogue? Or a dialogic blog?
Nobel laureate Gary Becker and judicial polymath Richard Posner have set up a joint blog in which they will have one posting a week arguing about a significant issue. I’ve been reading and admiring Posner’s stuff for years. This is a really interesting idea. Here’s how they introduce the concept:
“Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek[base ‘]s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the ‘blogosphere.’ There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.
We have decided to start a blog that will explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format. Initially we will be posting just once a week, on Mondays. In time we may post more frequently.”
If you can’t beat ’em, buy them
Alan Murray has a terrific column in the Wall Street Journal about the way the Computer and Communications Industry Association has been bought off by Microsoft.
The article begins…
“Ed Black, the head of a struggling computer trade group, spent a decade on a quixotic quest to slay mighty Microsoft for its antitrust abuses. “A rapacious monopoly,” he called it. The company’s behavior is “consistently, constantly illegal.” It “steamrollers companies” and “crushes the few who will not bend to their will.” When the government settled its antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001, Mr. Black said it was “selling out consumers, competition, and all those who want a vibrant, innovative high-tech industry contributing strength to our economy.”
Well … never mind. Microsoft is still every bit the monopolist it was a decade ago. But Mr. Black is a changed man. He will personally pocket millions of dollars as part of a nearly $25 million settlement he negotiated between Microsoft and his trade group, the Computer and Communications Industry Association. In return, he will abandon his antitrust efforts against the company.
It’s as if Ralph Nader had been bought off by General Motors. And everybody ends up happy.”
And it concludes…
“The Microsoft saga serves as a reminder of an important truth: Capitalists, for the most part, don’t care much for capitalism. Their goal is to make money. And if they can do it without messy competition, so much the better. As long as it keeps its monopoly, Microsoft can afford to share the wealth with its onetime rivals. For Microsoft, those fines and payments add up to less than a year’s profit from the operating system. For the others, it’s easier to take Microsoft’s money than fight.”
How to win at roulettte
Bring some kit to the casino. Specifically a laser scanner inside a mobile phone linked to a computer. The scanner measures the speed of the roulette ball as the croupier releases it, identifies where it falls and measures the declining orbit of the wheel. The data is beamed to the microcomputer, which runs through thousands of possible outcomes to forecast which section numbers the ball will land on. These data are flashed on to the screen of the phone just before the wheel makes its third spin, by which time all bets must be placed. Having thus reduced the odds of winning from 37-1 to 6-1, you then place bets on all six numbers in the section where the ball is predicted to end up. Then pocket your winnings. And it’s all perfectly legal. See the Times story of the trio who won �1.3 million in the Ritz casino on London using the above method.
What next for IBM?
So IBM has found a buyer (Lenovo — China’s largest PC manufacturer) for its PC business. What will it do with the cash? One theory is that it will either try to buy Apple, or at least form a joint venture with Steve Jobs. Hmmm… IBM should remember what happened to Disney, which once gleefully partnered with Mr Jobs’s other company Pixar, and is now licking the resulting wounds.
The Pro-Am revolution
No, not golf tournaments in which professionals team up with B-list celebs, but the title of an interesting Demos pamphlet by Charlie Leadbeater and Paul Miller about how amateurs are increasingly doing their hobbies to a professional standard — and in the process doing a lot of good for society. I’ve always been irritated by people who use the term ‘amateur’ as a term of disparagement. In doing so they impute connotations of incompetence or frivolity. But the word ‘amateur’ actually means doing something for the love of it (Latin amo = I love) rather than for mere money. The open source movement is a terrific example of a powerful movement driven by ‘amateurs’ who produce code to a ‘professional’ standard. Indeed, sometimes to a higher standard than the stock-optioned professionals working for certain software monopolists.