Don Marti has one of those posts I can’t resist reprinting in its entirety:
The New York Times columnists have gone to the well for reasonable pro-bailout arguments and come up dry. Time to fall back to name-calling.
People who don’t favor handing over $700 billion to known financial failures are “nihilists”, “madmen”, and “idiots”.
Look, Rep. Pete Stark, as a former bank founder and CEO, has more bank knowledge than the bailout cheerleaders, and he has come out against it. Rep. Stark is a Democrat, but this bailout issue isn’t the Republicans against the Democrats, or the free-marketers against the statists. It’s common sense against One-Big-Project-Can-Solve-Everything-ism.
Let’s bulldoze a neighborhood for One Big Freeway, and put the people in One Big Tower. Let’s put a huge percentage of the federal budget into One Big Airplane for the USAF. Let’s all read One Big Newspaper. Or let’s do One Big Bailout.
Come on, people. That never works. If there are bailouts needed, make them small, and focus them on the people who need them. Borrowers who are paying on deceptively sold mortgages? Municipalities that need bond underwriting? Fine, dig up some of the many good ideas floating around economics departments, and use them. Local and regional banks, which didn’t post the paper winnings of the big ones, are ready to take on a bigger role. Losing gamblers, and the East Coast Media Elite that wants to throw good money after bad? Let them fail.
I recorded a video interview about the financial services bailout with Mark “Rzzn” Hopkins and Sean P. Aune of Mashable recently, focused particularly on the tech sector. We focused on making sense of things, something that hasn’t happened in Congress yet.
I think it’s pretty informative, and somewhat calming, as it should be. I’m less and less convinced that there’s a “crisis” that taxpayers ought to take pay for taking care of.
If you find the title of this post provocative, you’ll be interested in a Cato Institute book forum on Friday, October 10th.
In The Crime of Reason, Nobel laureate in physics Robert Laughlin argues that intellectual property laws and government security demands threaten the development of new knowledge. Without change, we risk bequeathing our heirs a world where knowledge is criminalized and our intellectual tradition of unfettered inquiry is lost.
The event should be a fascinating inquiry into the role of information and information rules in our society. Thomas Syndor of the Progress & Freedom Foundation will comment. I’ll be your humble moderator. It’s noon on Friday, October 10th, at the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Luncheon to follow.
I’ve posted a copy of the proposed bailout legislation online in html format, which is easier to read, copy, and paste. Considering its size and significance, I urge you to review it and share it with others.
There are a couple of elements of the legislation where I might add some insight, so here goes.
Congressional Oversight? Nope. $700 Billion Spent
The bill made available Sunday devotes a good deal of verbiage to oversight of the proposed $700 billion bailout. But it doesn’t do anything to prevent that money being spent. Continue reading →
“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:
Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.
I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.
In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.” It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users. It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.
For years there’s been talk of broadband over power lines as an alternative way to deliver Internet into the home. Today I heard about an interesting concept–using broadband to complement the delivery of energy into homes. I’ll call it power over broadband lines (PBL).
Today the Technology Policy Institute hosted an interesting conference on Energy public policy issues. Kathryn Brown of Verizon discussed the idea of a “smart grid” and the way that broadband and ICT can help add to the smarts. Energy meters in the home could tap into the ‘Net to help users monitor and evaluate their energy use. Energy companies could also use broadband communication networks to better monitor distribution and be alerted to problems on the energy grid.
Maybe, just maybe, the power of the Internet can come help rescue an energy industry that faces many technical, regulatory and environmental challenges.
I’m currently at a talk by Martin Wattenburg, who runs a fantastic visualization site from IBM research. Here’s my favorite visualization to date:
Apparently this got an immediate reaction from someone with a different partisan orientation:
The site is chock full of interesting tidbits. Here is a chart of the inflation-adjusted sized of historical bailouts. Here is a graph of personality types by state. Here is a graph comparing historical immigration rates.
The best thing is that you can upload your own data sets, choose your visualization, and share it in a web 2.0-savvy manner. It’s a really cool site, and I encourage you to check it out.
My employer, The Cato Institute, has put together a couple of podcasts that make for interesting listening as we try to understand what has happened in mortgage finance and financial services – and what is to come.
Dorn puts together Cato’s annual Monetary Conference, which draws some of the most knowledgeable analysts in the country and world. It happens November 19th this year. I’m guessing it will be well attended.
And so the series continues. The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice has just released “a scathing report” finding that over a 5-year period the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “lost dozens of weapons and hundreds of laptops that contained sensitive information.” The DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that 418 laptop computers and 76 weapons were lost. According to the report:
Yesterday’s report showed that ATF, a much smaller agency than the FBI, had lost proportionately many more firearms and laptops. “It is especially troubling that that ATF’s rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and [Drug Enforcement Administration], and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information,” Fine wrote. […]
Many of the missing laptops contained sensitive or classified material, according to the report. ATF began installing encryption software only in May 2007. ATF did not know what information was on 398 of the 418 lost or stolen laptops. The report called the lack of such knowledge a “significant deficiency.” Of the 20 missing laptops for which information was available, ATF indicated that seven — 35 percent — held sensitive information. One missing laptop, for example, held “300-500 names with dates of birth and Social Security numbers of targets of criminal investigations, including their bank records with financial transactions.” Another held “employee evaluations, including Social Security numbers and other [personal information].” Neither laptop was encrypted.
The findings regarding lost weapons were equally troubling, if not a bit humorous:
A major breathalyzer vendor is facing increasing pressure to make the source code of its product available for inspection by defendants. I’m pleased to see my home state of Minnesota leading the charge. The Constitution gives you the right to confront your accuser, and if your accuser is 50,000 lines of assembly code, then you have a right to examine that code. And if CMI doesn’t want to release the source code for its products, then it shouldn’t have gone into a business in which its product is the key witness against defendants in criminal cases.
CMI’s argument that releasing the source code would put it at a disadvantage is nonsense. Making the source code available for inspection would not entail licensing the copyright of the code to anyone who wants it. So it’s true that a competitor might somehow get a copy of the source code, but it wouldn’t be able to do anything with it without facing a copyright lawsuit. And just looking at the assembly language isn’t going to be very helpful. Assembly language is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the small amount of insight a competitor might glean from seeing the source code would be outweighed by the risk of a successful copyright or trade secret lawsuit down the road.
Incidentally, all of these points apply with equal force to touchscreen voting machines. Those should be available for public inspection too, although unfortunately there’s probably not an explicit constitutional provision allowing you to confront your election judge.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.