Believe it or not. Sometimes writing songs (that is playing / sequencing rather than actual “writing”) can be really rewarding.
When it’s actually done, I might post a link to the song I’m referring to…
Porsche 911.
I really wonder how Porsche market their 911 model in the US after, well, 9-11. I wanted to send them an email to ask but could not find email contact information on the website. Now I have two things to wonder…
Noteworthy.
This is a comment made by “JDA” on Brad DeLong’s website. I find it rather insightful, now that more and more people begin to realise the consequences of the post 9-11 abrogations of civil liberties throughout the Western world.
Here is William Butler Yeats, addressing the Irish Senate on a bill that would give new powers to the Minister of Justice: The Government does not intend these things to happen, the Commission on whose report the Bill was founded did not intend these things to happen, but in legislation intention is nothing, and the letter of the law everything, and no government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used. (Quoted in Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century at 204 (2000))
I might post an email exchange I had with the office of the leader of the FDP shortly after 9-11 on that topic later.
Off the phone. Off the market.
I just talked to a friend who is also suffering from the current anemia of the labour market.
These days, the streets are plastered with highly qualified graduates and post-graduates from the world’s best universities. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung remarked two weeks ago the European elite is currently given the boot by the very same companies that bid up starting salaries to unprecedented amounts during the talent wars of the late nineties. So what goes up must come down? Maybe. Maybe it all does make sense. But we don’t care at the moment.
Isn’t it plainly unfair to have people spend years on their building outstanding CVs and then release them into a sluggish economy? Yes it is. But there you go. I know that markets are marvel and we all benefit from the way they work. They are not supposed to be fair to do their job. But that’s precisely why they do need a bashing from time to time, however unjustified it may be.
And if not now, when? I think I am going to help my fellow victims and go back to do my phd now. Hopefully I’ll finish it right on time for the next talent war…
New Left, again.
OK, now that the left has really come round to understand the coordinating value of markets, they want to apply their knowledge whereever they can. This is an excerpt from a campaigning website of the SPD which tries to motivate people to volunteer for their Online Campaigning Team. Funny…but in German.
Wie werden die Aufgaben an das Online Campaigning Team verteilt? Das geschieht auf dem Jobmarkt.
Der Jobmarkt ist eine Art Marktplatz. Er funktioniert wie ein Internetforum. Die Einträge sind nur fär OCT Mitglieder sichtbar. Wer Aufgaben an das OCT zu vergeben hat, kann hier ein Angebot aufgeben. Die Mitglieder des OCT können auf jedes Angebot antworten. Auf dem Jobmarkt werden die Informationen ausgetauscht, wer bis wann welche Aufgabe erledigen kann und welche Fähigkeiten dafür benötigt werden. Für eine Aufgabe benötigt man z.B HTML Kenntnisse, manche Aufgaben sollen von vielen OCT Mitgliedern bearbeitet werden, manche nur von einem. So soll sich der Markt selber regeln und Angebot und Nachfrage zusammenführen, so dass jede Aufgabe von dem bearbeitet werden kann, der dafür am besten geeignet ist.
Sexy beast.
Ok, just another headline. But this is actually an addendum to the last entry and also a reminder to myself.
At some point I have to tell you why I believe the “new left” is not sexy in most countries. As a teaser – it’s about the victory of Oliver Williamson over Karl Marx (or at a more fundamental level about the behavioral assumptions both made).
Williamson is right in many aspects but his theory is complex, difficult to apply and assuming things about ourselves we don’t like. Entirely unsexy. Marx is wrong in many aspects, but his assumptions and his theory are appealing to what we want to think about ourselves. Communism is a Sexy Beast. And beware, it probably still bites.
(Note: No need to see “Sexy Beast“. It is only an average film and the only reason I can think of for Ben Kingsley’s Oskar nomination is that the eternal Gandhi continuously shouts entirely incomprehensible English insults. I guess that must have impressed the Academy’s jury.)
Do it the German way, if you have to. But do it.
The Social Democrats (SPD) seem somewhat desperate these days. With the general elections looming in only 48 days and the SPD still trailing the Christian Democrats (CDU) by about five cruicial points, Chancellor Schroeder kicked off the ‘official’ SPD campaign in Hannover saying that his government would contine to conduct business, that is economic policy, “the German way” – as opposed to the American way of social security, of course.
While campaigns are not usually a good opportunity for serious policy analysis, this statement is actually interesting, because it demonstrates to which extent this government is at loss about its economic policy. A few weeks ago, the chancellor tried to gain points among the reformist voters who helped him into office back in 1998 by proposing to pursue the implementation of the proposals of a working group (the “Hartz-commission”) under the direction of a member of the VW-board.
These proposals include serious supply side changes to the incentive structure of the German labour market regulations. The deal he tried to cut was – back me again and I’ll be in a better position to keep the Unions in check than a conservative-liberal coalition so I could actually implement the plan.
While this calculation may be right if – and it certainly looks as if – Schroeder himself is the only argument that could keep the SPD in office, many voters seem to have lost their faith in his ability to deliver. After all, they signed precisely that deal in 1998 and the only changes the SPD made to labour market regulation, even after the departure of my-heart-beats-on-the-left finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, made it even more rigid than before.
So it seems the SPD campaigners now believe that they will have to rely more on the votes of the traditional social democratic core than they thought and thus start a campaign to defend “the German way” – the corporatist rhenish capitalism – of organising the economy. Not helpful, you might say and you could be right.
But I still believe in Schroeders deal. Especially if the SPD has to cut a deal with the Liberals after the election instead of the Greens whose very knowledgeable spokesperson for budgetary and economic matters, Oswald Metzger, will not return to the Bundestag due to plainly stupid electoral regulations, once conceived to promote the role of women in the Green party.
So I fear in a coalition with a technically neoliberal chancellor they might try to appeal to leftist tradiationalists and slow down necessary reforms. I would certainly miss Joschka Fischer and will dearly deplore the lack of social progressiveness in the FDP but as things stand today I figure a coalition of SPD and FDP will be the best deal this country can get.
So if Schroeder has to praise “the German way” to be reelected, be it. In any case, I would advise you not to listen too closely to any politician over the next 48 days, it’s campaign time. If you’re campaigning yourself, you’re a journalist or you’re into advertising, you might have have fun.
All others – try to spend the rest of the summer abroad.
Thinking about Marilyn.
Last night arte.tv showed a documentary by Patrick Jeudy about Marilyn Monroe. It was not a story about a sex bomb. Neither was it simply one about poor Norma Jean, Candle In The Wind. The documentary rather told a story about an incredibly beautiful intelligent young woman who got lost somewhere between Marilyn and Norma Jean on the fundamental human quest for happiness.
The story of Marilyn is a story about our hunch that somewhere this big bad world holds something true for us to discover, about our eternal need to do the impossible, to succeed in what we think is most difficult for us to achieve. And it is a story about the risk inextricably intertwined with this quest – the pain which we will have to endure if we stop believing in ourselves. Watching the programme made me realise how much we all have in common with the beautiful Marilyn Monroe. Goodbye Norma Jean. (Photo: Wikipedia.com)
marathon.me.
OK, here is the first diary-like entry in this blog. The picture below is an artwork I did after, well, after running the Gutenberg Marathon in Mainz. An little knee injury actually kept from running the whole thing. That’s the explanation for the ‘almost’. Enjoy.
The future of the music industry.
Last week’s ousting of Bertelsmann’s CEO Thomas Middelhoff prompted a lot of newspapers to reconsider the challenges the internet poses for companies with a business model based on the exclusive licensing and diustribution of intellectual property rights. And so I, too, want to repeat my opinion in this matter.
Granted, the fundamental dilemma posed by changed economics of reproduction and distribution has not yet been solved: How to make people pay for formerly excluable intellectual property rights if they can obtain them for free without restrictions on the Internet. But then, consider the financial and especially societal costs of digitally fingerprinting people’s hardrives and controlling their use of the net. Assuming technical feasibility, Orwell’s nightmare would have become reality. OK, differences in degrees are certainly possible. But the trade-off remains: Which price will information societies be willing to pay to reinstore excludability of information goods at least to a certain extent?
One of the biggest problems in this extremely important debate has so far been flatly ignored. It is the social institutionalisation of the current notion of property. Based on this notion, it is relatively easy for the music industry to claim the moral high ground and persuade politicians to restrict the private flow of information. Coupled with the increased perceived need for security after 9/11 this is a powerful political position.
But everyone trying to climb the moral high ground should stop for a moment and reconsider what’s actually going on there. To know the history of copyright laws since Gutenberg would be a good starting point. After familiarising themselves with this fascinating topic people would have to accept that the current industry and cash flow structures are a consequence of a specific technology and its economics. New technology means new economics and in turm, new industry structures.
Right now, those who became powerful in a world of restricted bandwidth are trying to preserve that position and the related cash flows in a world with different economics. Assuming that the industry structure evolved to suit the economics of its business, it becomes self evident that this structure is not going to fit into the new environment.
In this respect, I recommend the excellent analysis of Harvard’s William Fisher, Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities, as a starting point.
The cultural landscape of the future will reflect the changes in economics. The days of financing the likes of Britney Spears through sales of records as well as the need to have music companies of a significant size to keep a risk-diversified portfolio of acts are likely to end as the last bandwidth restrictions fade. That does not mean there won’t be stars in the future, just that they won’t be able to make the amount of money through record sales they could before. But the same development opens a market to so many musicians who have not been able to live from making music before. I think that is a good thing.
But, of course, you have to decide for yourself.