My oblique reference to the Grateful Dead spurred a flood of erudite emails from readers questioning the accuracy of linking the band with the song I fought the law but the law won. In fact the song has a very interesting history — see the excellent Wikepedia entry about it. It’s been recorded by numerous bands, including the Clash and Green Day. But my favourite rendition is the Grateful Dead’s, because they sing it as though they had indeed fought losing battles with law enforcement agencies, possibly in relation to narcotic substances. Apple cheekily used the Green Day version in their SuperBowl ad for iTunes.
The real Iranian crisis: Dubya’s poll ratings
Lovely (and astute) rant by Josh Marshall. Sample:
With respect to what’s coming on Iran, what is in order is a little honesty, just as was the case with the Social Security debate a year ago. The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president’s public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president’s poll numbers.
This is a powerful message because it is an accurate message. We have many challenges overseas today. Chief among them, as one of the Democrats’ senate candidates puts it, is “refocusing America’s foreign and defense policies in a way that truly protects our national interests and seeks harmony where they are not threatened.” The period of peril the country is entering into isn’t tied to an Iranian bomb. It turns on how far a desperate president will go to avoid losing control of Congress.
Go to his heart. Go to his weaknesses. Though the realization of the fact is something of a lagging indicator, the man is a laughing stock, whose lies and failures are all catching up with him.
To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.
The great bulk of the public doesn’t believe this president any more when he tries to gin up a phony crisis. They don’t believe he’d have much of an idea of how to deal with a real one. Enough of the lies. Enough of the incompetence and failure.
No buying into another of the president’s phony crises.
So who’s making the money out of Web 2.0?
Bandwidth providers, says Nicholas Carr…
The way the Web 1.0 dot-com pioneers used pricey computer gear, the Web 2.0 digital-media pioneers use bandwidth. They devour huge gobs of it. YouTube, Forbes’s Dan Frommer writes, is probably burning through a million bucks a month in bandwidth costs, a number that’s going up as rapidly as its traffic. Follow the money. In this case, as Frommer reports, the trail will lead you to Limelight Networks, which YouTube uses to stream all that user-generated content – like 200 terabytes a day – back to us users. Once again, it looks like it’s the suppliers – in this case, the content delivery networks – that are positioned to be the most reliable money-makers as more and more investment pours into the creation of our vaster, user-generated wasteland.
‘Don’t be hypocritical’…
… should be Google’s new motto, now that it has given up on “Don’t be Evil”. The company’s lobbyists have been creating a bogus stink in Washington, complaining that Microsoft is up to its old tricks by making MSN search the default in Internet Explorer 7.
It’s not often I feel sympathy for Microsoft, but this one of those times. Google’s whinge is ludicrous. Here’s Good Morning Silicon Valley on the issue:
Right now you may be fighting tears, more likely from convulsive laughter than sympathy. For starters, users can choose; I made Google the default search engine with a couple of clicks right after I downloaded IE7. Not simple enough, says Google; users should be forced to declare their search affiliation the first time IE7 runs. Mind you, Google has benefited for quite a while from being the default search engine offered in the Firefox and Safari browsers, but the company’s now willing to let those users make an upfront choice as well. For its part, Microsoft says, “The search box in IE7 is not Microsoft’s. It belongs to the user.” MSN is not really the default, says the IE team; the browser just picks up whatever preference the user had set in IE6’s AutoSearch options.
Nicholas Carr has a nice take on this:
But what’s the most powerful and influential default setting in the search world today? It’s not – at least yet – in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s on Google’s home page. I would guess that a strong plurality, if not a majority, of web searches are done through Google’s home page, at least in the United States. As “Google” has become synonymous with “search,” people head to its home page as much out of habit as anything else. It is, quite simply, where you go to search the web. But Google doesn’t give you any choices when you arrive at its home page. There’s a default engine – Google’s – and it’s a default that you can’t change. There’s no choice.
If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals – to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search – it should open up its home page to other search engines.
Amen. Sauce for the goose… and all that.
John Kenneth Galbraith…
… has died, at the ripe old age of 97.
He was the person who first awakened my interest in economics. I read The Affluent Society as a teenager and drew from it the idea that economics might actually be an interesting and relevant subject. (Later acquaintanceship with professional economists cured me of that illusion.) He had a wonderful, elegant, laconic style — he wrote the way Macaulay would have written if he had been tall (JKG was 6’8″ and drew an innate sense of superiority from the fact that he always found himself looking down on people — even the President of the US whom he served as Ambassador to India.) My guess is that most professional economists loathed him. I met him once — when he was a Visiting Professor in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity. I never go to Ireland without thinking of his phrase “private affluence, public squalor”. Mixed obits in the NYT, the Guardian and The Times.
Quote of the day
“It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith.”
U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882.
I love the sentence about the “class of speculative schemers”.
The cost of software piracy
According to AP (quoted in Technology Review)
Piracy accounts for about 35 percent of all new PC software installations globally, an IDC study estimated last year — costing the industry an average of $40 billion annually.
My guess is that most of that is accounted for by people ripping off Microsoft Windows and Office.
Yochai Benkler’s book…
… is out! It’s entitled The Wealth of Networks and is the publishing event of the year as far as I’m concerned because he’s the scholar best-placed and best-equipped to put the network revolution into context. The title — a nod to Adam Smith — indicates the scale of his ambitions. It’s available as a free download under a Creative Commons licence from here here and for purchase from Amazon.co.uk. I’ve both downloaded and ordered, not just because I want to support the author, but also because, in the end, it’s really useful to have a printed copy — especially one that is destined to become as well-thumbed as this.
Shrook
As an experiment I’ve switched from using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader to Shrook.
First impressions: it’s slick, quick and nicely designed. It also has a neat synchronisation feature which enables you to keep details of your feed subscriptions on a central server and then sync from other computers. Useful if you use more than one machine to read stuff.
The economics of cultural change
One of the most interesting Blogs on the Web is the Becker-Posner Blog, in which two of the smartest intellectuals in the US argue in public about important issues. Gary Becker is a Nobel laureate in economics; Richard Posner is a polymathic judge who has written provocatively (and intelligently) about a wide range of subjects.
Recently, the two have been debating the question of why French society is proving so resistant to measures needed to make it economically successful. Posner argued that there are two major reasons, habit and coordination costs, why cultures, including those of nations and companies, often change very slowly.
In his response, Becker argued that “major economic and technological changes frequently trump culture in the sense that they induce enormous changes not only in behavior but also in beliefs” — and then used my homeland to illustrate the point:
Ireland is an excellent example since not long ago Irish family patterns were the object of study by demographers only because they were so different. These patterns involved late ages at marriage, high birth rates, no divorce, and married women who spent their time mainly caring for children and their husbands. Enshrined in the Irish Constitution of the 1930’s is the hope that married women would not work but instead they would be home taking care of their families.
All aspects of Irish family behavior changed radically during the past two decades: the typical family now has only about two children, divorce was legalized and is growing rapidly despite the Catholic Church’s opposition, and the labor force participation of married women is becoming like that in other parts of Western Europe. The rapid economic growth Ireland experienced during the past couple of decades had a revolutionary impact on the incentives of parents to have many children, on attitudes about whether married women should work, and on whether married couples were obligated to remain together throughout their lives. What is fascinating about the Irish example is that these and other changes in family patterns of behavior occurred while Ireland remained a highly devout nation, with the highest rates of church attendance and other measures of religious belief in the Western world…