What $700 billion could buy

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Great post by Jeff Jarvis…

We’re spending $700 billion to bail out the idiots who got us into this mess and we end up with nothing to show for it but the bag we’re left holding and maybe a disaster averted (we hope).

We could be spending a lot less to get a lot more. A national wi-max buildout would cost between $5 billion and $14.5 billion. That would enable every American to get high-speed access to the internet and to its education, commerce, connectivity, innovation, jobs, and value. With a lot left over.

Or take the $700 billion and divide it by America’s 114.5 million TV households. Minus the 40-percent-plus margin that cable companies make on internet access (that’s the number I heard from them), we could provide broadband access to every one of those homes for about $300 a year. That means we could give every American free broadband access for 20 years.

We could buy 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines. Want world peace and understanding? Give one to every Muslim on earth and every citizen of China (or since China can afford them, make that everyone in India or everyone in Africa and South America combined) and you’d still have more than 500 million machines left over.

Or we could give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions. We could give 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions like mine. That alone would improve our competitive position and transform dying industries.

Or we could more than triple total annual R&D spending in the U.S. I can’t find total R&D on alternative energy but with this money we could multiply what Google.org is spending by a factor of 35,000…

Shiver me timbers

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Friday was Talk like a Pirate Day. Nice to see that Google has finally caught up with the trend.

Inevitably, the conversation in our household turned to Captain Pugwash, the notorious TV pirate. And — as you might expect — there is an excellent Wikipedia article about him. Pugwash also has an extensive presence on YouTube — which a humourless lawyer might conclude was itself an act of piracy. Here’s an example of this delicious type of recursion.

And the indefatiguable Snopes.com has a brisk refutation of the allegation that the names of Pugwash’s crew were sexual double entendres.

Getting us out of the mess we’re in

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Simon Caulkin has some interesting reflections on the managerial aspects of the crisis…

The credit crunch conclusively demonstrates that we can no longer afford a corporate model that generates repeated crises for society as a whole as a byproduct of pursuing vast rewards for a few. This makes a mockery of the corporate social responsibility movement, of which the City is a pillar. CSR is simply incompatible with the unbridled incentive schemes, lemming-like pursuit of risk and unaccountability that have produced today’s meltdown. It is time to bring CSR inside – to do what New Labour flirted with ever so briefly in 1997 and then abjectly abandoned – and lay on companies the formal obligation to take into account the wider interests of all stakeholders, including the community, on pain of having their charter removed. To the conventionalists who object that the notion of benefiting all stakeholders is a recipe for fudge and compromise, tell that to rivals of Toyota (largest auto company in the world), Whole Foods Market (fastest-growing retailer), John Lewis, and many other successful companies that include wider social wellbeing in their corporate aims…

And, in case anyone thinks that the Cameroonians will do any better, here’s a sobering thought from Nick Mathiason’s piece about the cosy relationship that New Labour cultivated with the City.:

But just as Labour grapples with regulating the City, it seems likely that the reins of power will be seized by the Conservatives, bankrolled by hedge-fund managers, spread-betting tycoons and blue-blooded Tory bankers. It could soon be political business as usual.

Toxic assets and silver linings

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This morning’s Observer column…

Every cloud has a silver lining. Ask the cybersquatters. Even as the short-selling vultures began circling Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Merrill Lynch and co, a legion of entrepreneurs began betting on domain names for hastily merged financial institutions. For example, when Barclays and Bank of America began to emerge as buyers for Lehman, names such as barclayslehman.com and bofalehman.com were promptly registered by enterprising hopefuls.

Some of these domains were being offered for sale on eBay last week. For example, www.bankofamericamerrilllynch.com was available at a starting bid of $1,500…

Quote of the day

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“At this point I should note that for the first time, both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies,” Mr. Gates said. “A fat lot of good that’s done us.”

US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, speaking at an Oxford Analytica conference yesterday.

Mellow fruitfulness

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We went on a wonderful walk on the North Norfolk coast this morning, and everywhere we went came on bushes of luscious blackberries. Accordingly, progress was slow at times.

And everywhere we went we were accompanied by dragonflies, often flying in pairs in very tight formation. Here’s one who alighted on my sleeve when I was trying to photograph the berries.

LATER: Richard Earney emails to say that this is “a mature Common Darter” (aka Sympetrum striolatum). What a wonderful thing it is to have erudite readers.

Who killed New Labour?

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Terrific essay in the Economist.

New Labour is dying. It has lost the three vital qualities that kept it alive and vibrant. First, discipline. A shared purpose and scowling party apparatchiks once bound Labour MPs to a party line; now some are calling for Mr Brown to stand down—and he may yet have to, little more than a year after he moved into Number 10. The rumblings about his leadership already constitute a crisis, and a humiliation, for him and his party.

Second, intellectual confidence: the party that once defined the intellectual terrain of politics has been reduced to aping its opponents’ policies. Most important, New Labour has lost the habit of winning.

What has been one of the great election-winning forces in British political history has been routed in a run of parliamentary by-elections and local votes. Its poll ratings are so bad—a survey released on September 18th gave the Conservatives a 28-point lead—that recovery before the next general election, due by June 2010, looks almost impossible. On current form, the resulting defeat may be Labour’s worst since the second world war. In the aftermath of such a rout, some Labour supporters fear, the party may disintegrate, with a revived Old Labour faction, wedded to the ideals of punitive taxation and a monolithic state, reasserting its anachronistic grip…

Best analysis I’ve read.