Just had a great two-hour argument with a Sueddeutsche-Journalist about the vices and virtues of his profession. And now I come home to find this article in his newspaper about how a proposed state law is about to legalise preemptive eavesdropping on journalists in Bavaria. I may be too tired to reflect on this, but I am certainly not tired enough to oppose it.
Much Ado about not much.
The McKinsey Quarterly looks at the incentive effects of the Bush dividend-cut proposal and decides that it, well, is largely a placebo. Won’t hurt, won’t heal, as most shares are held by tax-exempt entities anyway –
“The fact, however, is that tax-paying US individual shareholders own a minority of all US shares?28 percent in 2002, whereas tax-exempt US institutions and individuals who hold shares in tax-exempt accounts owned 61 percent. (The remainder was in foreign hands.) … Since these investors are indifferent to the issue of taxes on their dividends, they are unlikely to set in motion the kinds of changes in their portfolios that would drive up share prices.”
BECKAM is how you say Beckham
BECKAM is how you say ‘Beckham’ in English English, not ‘Beck-ham’ like you might in American English. So, of course, there’s a problem if you’re asking some legasthenic guy who’s not into football to tatoo your lower back with a huge hommage to your favorite player, as Michelle Plummer, 35!, did (from Spiegel Online.)
I know what Robert Kagan is doing tomorrow.
Well, I don’t. But as he lives in Brussels, he might very well check out the European Institutions on their open day (from EUobserver.)
Saddam Hussein, MBA.
This is good. Condoleeza Rice has presented a new rationale for the current lack of Iraqi WMDs – while admitting that
“Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war”,
she readily explained why that should have been expected anyway – Saddam knew about “Just-In- Time” manufacturing – “Just-in-time assembly” and “just-in-time inventory”. Now really. But speaking of management buzzwords, I guess one could make a real case for Saddam excelling in “global sourcing”… (from the Autralian f2-netowork via Tom Tomorrow).
Generous.
I heard that not too many German doctors are being recruited by the British NHS. After reading what they would earn, I am even more surprised about that than before… It is clearly possible to live in London starting form 55,000 GBP annually, plus GBP 30,000 relocation aid. Doesn’t sound too bad to me, I have to say.
They’ll get the pricing wrong.
For at least five years. If you search my blog you will find that I have repeatedly said that all attempts to sell musical downloads will suffer from problematic price policy. Apple’s new itunes download service is no exception. True, it is probably closer than anything previously seen to actually enhancing the user experience with digital music. According to wired news,
“… opening day downloads equaled the number of songs legally downloaded over a six-month period last year.”
But it is nonetheless bereft with a pricing dilemma. A dollar a tune is not always a justifiable price, even though NY Times columnist David Pogue is ridiculing criticism of this pricing policy.
In fact, for most downloads it is clearly too much, even though things are cheaper when an entire Album is downloaded – for 10 dollars. While a tenner a disk makes downloading for some albums cheaper than your local record store, it is, on the other hand, probably a prohibitive price for DRM protected material, and, moreover, a price justifiable only due to the channel conflict with the non-digital distribution universe, which still makes it necessary to spend millions on marketing songs to people who are not interested in them anyway. It is a price only justified if the advantages of the internet, especially in the realm of marketing to a smaller, but more appropriate audience, are not exploited.
Thus, a dollar a buck can just be the beginning. People will continue to negotiate this price by using KaZaa and Grokster. Record companies will continue to try to scare unwitting conservative politicians about “the end of property” as well as send cease-and-desist letters to people sharing songs.
The big unknown variable is the political one. Will politicians be willing to understand the conventional definitions of property are just not appropriate in the digital age? Or will they allow the record industry to gain a windfall from perpetuating the economic structures of previous times for an unknown amount of time? I firmly believe that eventually, the social and economic institutions will adjust to a new reality.
But again, it is a matter of pricing. This time, a matter of the price that our information societies will be willing to pay for patrolling people’s hard drives and digitally fingreprinting their lives. Maybe US Sen. Santorum’s intervention telling homosexuals that they do not have a right to privacy came at the right time. I don’t know. But it is more important now than ever to tell people that digital privacy is an important issue. Something, many people were concerned about when it wasn’t a real issue yet, back in the 1980s.
Now that it is one, people don’t seem to realise that the same mechanism that allows to reduce the prices of individual songs could be the reason for the end of civil liberties as we know it. [ author off to pay to see a film in a real movie theatre…]
Welsh & Scottish regional and British local by-elections
The Guardian is looking at yesterday’s Welsh & Scottish regional and British local by-elections and decides that, even though the Tories fared siginificantly better in the local elections than expected, they are still no threat to anyone but themselves. Fair enough. The problem with this conclusion is, however, that the same must then be true for NewLabour. And that’s why it’s actually useful that the voters sent their government this message. Here’s more coverage from The Guardian.
They take no chances.
If this report by Telepolis is right, then Hillary Rose, the former chief RIAA lobbyist, is currently rewriting the copyright laws of Iraq. Just in case the Iraqi ideas about intellectual property rights should differ from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Actually, the journalist Gregory Palast is not unjustifiedly wondering whether the combination of sharia and the DMCA would result in hands being chopped off for filesharing. Hmm, I guess I am favoring a kinder, gentler version – just chop off the index-finger. After all, isn’t it always that bad guy that clicks on ‘download’?
I want to believe.
Telepolis’ Toward other Earths – Toward extraterrestrial Life portrays international efforts to chemically fingerprint 2014 planetary atmospheres for “signs of extraterrestrial life”. May the force be with them ;-).