For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it “guided” combined.
I haven’t bothered to verify this, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
As a kid in the late 70s I used the presence of TV Guide in a home as a bozo indicator for the residents, conveniently allowing me to feel superior to nearly everyone. Including my parents, who I felt did not subscribe due to cheapness and religiosity rather than not having poor taste.
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector.
The most exciting parts of the purpose-driven voluntary sector involve peer production.
Smith also used this terminology in an excellent comment on the nonprofit boom last October:
Some labor economists have distinguished the “intrinsic rewards” (love of the work itself) and the “extrinsic rewards” (money, benefits) from working.
By working for a non-profit, you may sacrifice some extrinsic rewards for some intrinsic rewards. As people get more and more affluent, it makes sense that more and more people will be willing to make that trade-off.
I think of non-profits as the “purpose-driven voluntary sector.” It’s distinct from the pure profit sector, officially dedicated to profits, and the government sector, which is ultimately financed through coercion. If more and more public goods can be provided through the purpose-driven voluntary sector, government can shrink.
I’ve been asked or told about Ron Paul many times over the last months, usually on the assumption that I’d respond positively. It always pained me to explain that while I broadly agree with Paul on policy (with some glaring exceptions like immigration and abortion), I could not work up significant enthusiasm for the campaign, nor even support it (apart from joining his Facebook group, which I’ve left).
First, Paul’s supporters wildly overestimate the chances of the campaign’s success, whether that be election, nomination, or even just effectively growing the constituency for freedom. He never had any chance of winning and I’m happy for the demonstration that merely speaking the truth on national TV doesn’t change anything. Of course many libertarians will ignore that truth and continue throwing money at false hopes.
And while there were bright spots, Paul was an extremely problematic messenger for freedom. He’s a marginal kook, he attracts hardcore kooks, and the fundamental basis of his argument — the U.S. constitution as holy writ — is about the least interesting and least convincing argument possible. In other words, Paul is an embarrassment. (Of course almost every politicianhuman spouts nonsense almost continuously, but more or less conventional nonsense that is not accorded the kookiness factor richly deserved.)
However, I had no idea how problematic and embarrassing Paul would be. While it is conceivable that Paul is not a racist and did not write any of the racist items in his newsletter and did not authorize or know about any of those items, I assign these probabilities ranging from medium to almost nil. Paul’s response is evasive and painful to watch, despite his attempt to redeem himself by focusing on the drug war.
If you really need to read more go here. I urge anyone who has supported Paul in public or private to reverse that support, immediately.
I think I’ve only posted about it once, but I’ve long been extremely skeptical of “digital identity” technologies — evil, hopeless, overhyped (no, giving users control of their identities will not save democracy nor make a pony appear, and there are no scare quotes around the preceding words because I haven’t cornered the market on scare quotes), often more than one of these.
OpenID has been the most reasonable identity technology to come along, mostly because it does very little and builds on existing standards. I still think it’s overhyped. Evan Prodromou recently posted an informative essay on OpenID Privacy Concerns. This bit jumped out at me:
The key to mitigating this, of course, is using strong security on the OpenID provider. The good news is that since your authentication is centralized, you can use much stronger authentication than most Web sites support. I really appreciate using browser certificate authentication on certifi.ca — it’s a very strong system that’s (almost) immune to phishing, brute-force attacks, or other password-stealing scams.
The good thing about OpenID is that it moves authentication to parties that are presumably good at that and can offer stronger authentication methods, without the sites and services you want to login to having to know anything about authentication technologies (apart from having implemented OpenID login).
I knew that an OpenID provider could authenticate however they want, but the usefulness of this did not click until reading the above, though I’m sure it’s been pointed out to me before.
I fairly frequently use the total lack of adoption of browser certificates as a negative example to be learned from when people try to solve supposed problems by throwing crypto into a supposed solution. Perhaps in the distant future this example won’t work, because OpenID (or something else that abstracts out authentication method) is widely implemented, making strong authentication relatively useful and usable.
I endorse Bill Richardson for temporary dictator of the U.S. jurisdiction. His positions on executive power seem acceptable, his overall domestic policies and record as governor of New Mexico are better than most politicians (i.e., not abominable), and his foreign policy is not insane. Regarding the last, Richardson outlines his principles in this video.
True, Ron Paul‘s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.
And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).
I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.
However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.
Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an Obama endorsement.
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:
But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”
I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.
I’ve complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult and expensive service to run — there isn’t much demand. The blog search focused sites I mentioned in the “stinks” post each seem to have gained no traction since then, excepting Technorati, which itself is constantly rumored to be troubled.
To end on a positive note, perhaps blog search is a good use case for distributed search, as it isn’t economic for a centralized entity to do well. This reminds me, whatever happened to various P2P syndication proposals?
So the real winner is Wikipedia — a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.
A recent article in The Economist includes the following chart:
At a glance (apologies for a complete lack of rigor), two perceived traits set the two currently leading candidates (Clinton and Giuliani) apart from the rest: “strong leadership” and lack of “morality”. In other words, voters want an abominable person as their temporary dictator. If I could only ratchet down my cynicism, I would be disappointed and fearful.
The chart above in conjunction with the YouGov survey data it is based on make for great fodder for those who believe “the media” is suppressing Ron Paul: he is the only candidate in the relevant part of the survey not presented in the chart.
The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.
Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein‘s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.
