Mike Linksvayer

Tim Lee points out a couple more cases where critics of open source use fallacious broken windows arguments.

Open source skeptics, particularly those otherwise economically literate, need to be beat over the head about this for awhile.

Meanwhile, I hope economists begin attempting to quantify the value of peer production output.

Google’s post introducing nofollow was unfortunately titled “preventing comment spam” leading some to call nofollow a complete failure as comment spam is “thicker than ever.”

If nofollow works it does not prevent comment spam but works against sites linked to in comment spam from appearing in search results. For what it’s worth spammy search results seemed to me a growing problem perhaps a year ago. I haven’t reached a spammy site from a Google search result in a long time. If my experience of less spammy search results lately is not anomalous, has nofollow helped achieve this? Only Google and near peers are in a position to know for themselves, but I certainly wouldn’t write nofollow off as a failure, complete or otherwise.

Google should publish its findings regarding whether nofollow has improved search results. If the answer is yes, web software creators and web publishers wouldn’t make the mistake of turning it off for untrusted links. If the answer is no it should be deprecated.

Addendum 20060601: The next time Google or similar ask publishers to do something the results of which can only be evaluated by the asker a committment to publish an evaluation should accompany the ask.

I should have said Google web search above. As Chris Masse points out in a comment below, blog search still stinks and so far Google and Yahoo! blog search do not improve the state of the art, contrary to my expectations.

Ben Adida notes that people are writing about RDFa, which is great, and envisioning conflict with microformats, which is not. As Ben says:

Microformats are useful for expressing a few, common, well-defined vocabularies. RDFa is useful for letting publishers mix and match any vocabularies they choose. Both are useful.

In other words RDFa is a long tail technology.

Evan Prodromou thinks the future is bleak without cooperation. I like his proposed way forward (strikeout added for obvious reasons):

1. RDFa gets acknowledged and embraced by microformats.org as the future of semantic-data-in-XHTML
2. The RDFa group makes an effort to encompass existing microformats with a minimum of changes
3. microformats.org leaders join in on the RDFa authorship process
4. microformats.org becomes a focus for developing real-world RDFa vocabularies

I see little chance of points one and three occuring. However, I don’t see this as a particularly bad thing. Point three will occur, almost by default: the simplest and most widely deployed microformats (e.g., reltag, relnofollow and rellicense) are also valid RDFa — the predicate (e.g., tag, nofollow, license) appearing in the default namespace to a RDFa application. More complex microformats may be handled by hGRDDL, which is no big deal as a microformat-aware application needs to parse each microformat it cares about anyway. From an RDF perspective any well-crafted metadata is a plus (and the microformats group do very careful work) as RDF’s killer app is integrating heterogenous data sources.

From a microformats perspecitve RDFa might well be ignored. While transformation of any microformat to RDF is relatively straightforward, transformation of RDF (which is a model, not a format) to microformats is nonsensical (well, I suppose the endpoint of such a transformation could be xoxo, though I’m not sure what the point would be). Microformats, probably wisely, is not reinventing RDF (as many do, usually badly).

So why would RDFa be of interest to developers? In a word, laziness. There is no process to follow for developing an RDF vocabulary (ironic), you can freely reuse existing vocabularies and tools, not write your own parsers, and trust that really smart people are figuring out the hard stuff for you (I believe the formal background of the Semantic Web is a long-term win). Or you might just want to, as Ben says “express metadata about other documents (embedded images)” which is trivial for RDF as images have URIs.

Addendum 20060601: The “simplest” microformats mentioned above have a name: elemental microformats.

It gladdens me to see that Irrepressible.info, an Amnesty International campaign “to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress”, includes a supply-side anti-censorship component:

If you have a website or blog, help us spread the word and undermine unwarranted censorship by publishing censored material from our database directly onto your site.

The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.

Unfortunately the mechanism offered, a javascript include, only requires a censor to block a single site (fragments.irrepressible.info) to prevent censored browsers from seeing the censored material. Worthy idea anyhow, not least because awareness of censored material is raised in non-censored areas, which will result in increased diffusion of censored ideas through human networks.

Via Tom Palmer.

David Friedman’s post on The Death of Copyright, New Art Forms, and World of Warcraft:

As increasing bandwidth makes it more and more difficult to protect movies by either legal or technological means, I expect that we will see more and more of a shift away from conventional movies towards substitutes that, like games, are different each time you play them.

There is, however, a countervailing effect. As it becomes easier and easier to replace actors with computer generated images, the cost of making movies, even quite elaborate movies, will fall. For the net result, stay tuned—for the next decade or so.

Nothing new for anyone paying attention, but a nice summary of where content production is headed — server-mediated or supercheap.

Protection of old business models presumably slows the transition of capital and talent into the service of the new, perhaps lowering the probability Hollywood will be a dominant center of cultural production in the long term. Or perhaps the additional wealth afforded by protection now puts Hollywood in a better position for the future. Regardless of impact on Hollywood’s prospects, protection now would seem to retard the future.

Todd Henderson:

Conditional prediction markets (e.g.,, what will Firm X’s stock price be in one year if the strategy proposed by a corporate raider is adopted) could allow corporations to estimate the effect of different major decisions, such as whether to acquire a target, whether to adopt a governance reform, or whether to dismiss a CEO, on stock price.

Henderson doesn’t take this as far as corporate governance by futarchy, but that’s the logical conclusion if such prediction markets work well.

Via Chris Masse of course (Mr. Liquidity, please note “…make it possible to generate sound predictions even in very thin markets”).

Art Hutchinson quoting a subscriber-only WSJ article:

In 2000, nine of every 10 dollars raised by non-U.S. companies outside their domestic markets was through U.S. exchanges… By last year, only one in 10 such dollars was raised in New York.

Hutchinson:

As the WSJ notes, that’s a truly radical change. Some of it is no doubt driven by exchange rates, but only some. Another major factor has been increased regulatory oversight in the U.S., (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley), providing a sobering lesson in the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation in a fluid, free-market global economy.

I’d strike “well-meaning” from the above, but another beautiful example nonetheless.

People should have the same freedom to respond to stupid policymakers by deserting the policymakers’ jurisdiction.

On this Memorial Day (U.S.) I honor draft dodgers, deserters and others not stupid enough to be darwinized at the command of their parentlandjurisdiction’s politicians.

Today’s LA Times has a story about a group trying to get 5,000 people to buy timeshares on a Fijian island as part of a social experiment. A cynic would think Tribewanted.com has figured out how to create reality TV very cheaply by getting people who claim to dislike reality TV to pay to be cast members. I’m not that cynical.

Sounds like a reasonable idea, with passing resemblance to far more ambitious projects such as seasteading and the Free State Project. I hope Tribewanted succeeds and is copied by dozens of copycat projects catering to different groups.

The Tribewanted FAQ says:

If, in the unlikely event that Adventure Island doesn’t go ahead, tribewanted will refund 100% of all membership fees. Unfortunately, if a tribe member decides to cancel their membership or not visit Adventure Island they will not be able to get a refund of any kind.

They could’ve made it even easier to sign up by offering a greater than 100% refund in case the project does not go ahead.

Via Boing Boing.

Jonathan Rauch’s Stoking the Beast in the Atlantic is deliciously ironic:

Niskanen recently analyzed data from 1981 to 2005 and found his hunch strongly confirmed. When he performed a statistical regression that controlled for unemployment (which independently influences spending and taxes), he found, he says, “no sign that deficits have ever acted as a constraint on spending.” To the contrary: judging by the last twenty-five years (plenty of time for a fair test), a tax cut of 1 percent of the GDP increases the rate of spending growth by about 0.15 percent of the GDP a year. A comparable tax hike reduces spending growth by the same amount.

Why? Perhaps because more government seems like a better deal when taxes are higher and vice versa. Those campaigning for small tax increases or decreases (any seen in the last 25 years) may wish to reexamine their strategies. I expect that really large and immediate changes would not be governed by this effect, as spending changes of similar magnitude would have to occur simultaneuously.

It is too bad tax rates are not explitly linked to spending. The only way to effect a tax cut should be to cut specific programs and the only way to fund specific programs should be to raise taxes.

Rauch’s article is justly getting attention, including many comments on the Washington Monthly website. That site discussed a slightly older version of the same data. The paper by William Niskanen and Peter Van Doren includes another intriguing observation (bold added, italics in original):

My brief article in 2003 presented evidence that the rate of growth of real federal spending in the years since World War II was lower during administrations in which at least one house of Congress was controlled by the other party. The only two long periods of fiscal restraint were the Eisenhower and Clinton administrations, during which the opposition party controlled Congress for the last six years of each administration. Conversely, the only long period of unusual fiscal expansion was the Kennedy/Johnson administration, which brought us both the Great Society and the Viet Nam War with the support of the same party in Congress.

One reason for this condition is that the prospect for a major war has been substantially higher under a unified government. American participation in every war in which the ground combat lasted more than a few days – from the War of 1812 to the current war in Iraq – was initiated by a unified government. One general reason is that each party in a divided government has the opportunity to block the most divisive measures proposed by the other party.

My own judgement is that our federal government may work better (less badly) when at least one house of Congress is controlled by a party other than the party of the president. American voters, in their unarticulated collective wisdom, have voted for a divided government for most of the past 50 years. Divided government is not the stuff of which legends are made, but the separation of powers is probably a better protection of our liberties when the presidency and the Congress are controlled by different parties.

I’ve suggested vote trading for divided government.

I’ve been saying for awhile that San Francisco ought to be “Sanhattan” referencing of course Manhattan and the SF parochials who use Manhattanization as a pejorative. I finally searched for the term while writing about free parking and was slightly disappointed to find that an area of Santiago, Chile is already known as Sanhattan. Unless there has been an incredible amount of building since I visited that city in 1998 (loved it) I find it hard to justify the name.

Anyhow, I welcome plans to build the tallest building on the U.S. west coast in San Francisco, and lots of them. Manhattanization is boring. Turn the whole of San Francisco into Hong Kong. Too bad Hong Francisco or San Kong don’t flow like Sanhattan.

Brad Templeton has an excellent immigration rant. Following an anecdote about immigrant entrepreneurialism:

Being anti-immigrant reminds me of racism, to use an inflamatory term. Racism is the belief that the broad circumstances of a person’s ancestry affect their worth as a person, and should affect their rights in society. Anti-immigrant nationalism is actually stronger. I was born 20 miles from the U.S. border, to parents also born there (though they were born to immigrant parents from Europe.) What moral code says that those like me deserve less of such fundamental rights as the ability to work, freedom to travel, freedom to live on my land, or to vote for those that will govern us? How can a few miles difference in birthplace morally command such a difference?

Indeed!

Bryan Caplan has some interesting evidence that “[d]irect observation of immigrants leads to more reasonable beliefs about the effects of immigration” — people in states with more immigrants view immigration more positively, even under the assumption that all immigrants view immigration positively.

I’ve mentioned RDFa a couple times in passing.

Ben Adida has been doing an awesome job leading the standards effort the last year and a half, which will pay off handsomely over the next six months. A few days ago he launched RDFa.info, the place to watch for interoperable web metadata tools, examples, and news.

A researcher seems to have pretty good evidence that much of the post-conquest depopulation of Mexico was due not to smallpox and other old-world diseases, but hemorrhagic dever. This does not mean “maybe the Spaniards get off the hook.” It probably makes them more culpable:

[Acuña-Soto] also thinks he may have solved one of the other great mysteries of cocolitzli—namely, why it hit the Aztecs hard but left the Spanish largely unaffected.

Hemorrhagic viruses affect human populations that are already stressed, Acuña-Soto says. “The natives were poor and probably near starvation and living in unsanitary conditions where the rats would congregate. They also worked in the fields, where they’d be exposed to the rat droppings. The Spanish made up the upper classes.”

There is a tiny hint that hemorrhagic fever could have played a role in the depopulation of the Americas post-1491 but before substantial European contact (my extrapolation and emphasis):

The evidence from the Douglas firs shows that during the 16th century central Mexico not only lacked rain but also suffered the most severe and sustained drought in 500 years, one that encompassed nearly the entire continent.

(Acuña-Soto thinks hemorrhagic fever outbreaks are related to conditions immediately following severe drought.)

Via Tyler Cowen.

Via Chris F. Masse, who does not provide a permanent link to his “external link” post, The Journal of Prediction Markets is launching late this year with several usual suspects on the editorial board. I used Inkling’s make your own market feature to create a play market in whether the journal will be Open Access:

Pays if the Journal of Prediction Markets is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals before 2008/01/01.

See the Wikipedia article for background on Open Access.

Just for kicks — as an insider decision, this is probably not a good subject for a prediction market.

I noted with interest that the journal is to be published by the University of Buckingham Press, the publishing arm of apparently the only university in the UK jurisdiction not funded by the state. Although it is small I am surprised I had not heard of this university previously due to its free market connections or in the Economist, which loves to write about the sorry state of British higher education and the even sorrier state of higher education on the European continent.

Should I take this opportunity to ask Mr. Masse (who is entirely above insinuation, a better person than I) about French universities?

Addendum 20060523: Masse thinks I’m crazy for creating a market on Inkling. He doesn’t like Inkling because they removed one of their founders from their site (irrelevant, Masse-ive overreaction) and believes that liquidity is the most important attribute of an exchange, implied corollaries being that it is dumb to start a new exchange in an area where one already exists and it is dumb to allow user-created markets, both of which will lead to diffuse, thinly-traded markets. I think the field is far too young to say that a newcomer cannot topple existing exchanges even if they are natural monopolies (We’ve discussed this before) or that large numbers of niche (and thus thinly traded) claims will not prove valuable.

Why has Masse not created a market at Inkling? Is his consultancy page correct?

Each player in the field only sees his/her little part of it —I have to have the complete, global, situational, long-term, overview outlook perspective.

Is he overconfident in his negative assessment of Inkling or merely falling behind in his research?

Richard Posner compares immigrant amnesty to tax amesty. His excellent point is that amnesty is a conventional policy tool and should not be despised.

However, Posner is not nearly cynical enough about the motives of thosse who complain that amnesty “rewards criminals.”

The Americans who for one reason or another are most concerned about illegal immigration are not much or maybe at all concerned about legal immigration, and so converting illegal to legal immigrants should be regarded by them as a highly beneficial step.

Hardly. Today’s most “concerned” are just as fond of citing IQ studies and “national culture” as the racialists who shut down legal immigration a century ago. They are the ones in need of amnesty.

Posner’s final paragraph is also excellent:

The solution is for Mexico and the other poor countries from which illegal immigrants come to become rich. As soon as per capita income in a country reaches about a third of the American level, immigration from that country dries up. Emigration is very costly emotionally as well as financially, given language and other barriers to a smooth transition to a new country, and so is frequent only when there are enormous wealth disparities between one’s homeland and a rich country like the United States. The more one worries about illegal immigrants, the more one should favor policies designed to bring about greater global income equality.

Now I know why I don’t play MMORPGs.

Bore me with a spoon golf club level bazillion sword of power networking.

Not that I begrudge anyone else’s fun. Enjoy!

I agree with Alex Tabarrok’s pragmatic Open Letter on Immigration and hope it gains wide support — as it appears it already has amongst the top econobloggers.

My thoughts match those of Michael Giberson:

We should find a policy solution that readily accomodates the personal pursuit of freedom and opportunity, and which does not restricts the ability of persons to pursue freedom and opportunity based upon where on this planet they happened to have been born. Lucky for me, the consensus view of economists is that what I think of as the right thing to do for moral reasons is also likely to be, on net, a benefit to society overall. Actually, lucky for us that the right thing to do is the good thing. Lucky for all of us.

I’ll go further and suggest the letter that people ought to be signing on with is the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid.

The SF Chronicle’s lead editorial today warns that “we” (I assume they mean organizations in the U.S. jurisdiction) need to hurry up and adopt IPv6: