01 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Wizbang and various links to/from (and update) are all over an analysis by a Dr David Hailey, Associate Professor at Utah State University. Wizbang and co. are all over his retroactive fixing of language etc. to make clear that he never tried to actually locate a typewriter that could reproduce the doc just dug out a suitable digitized font and played with it. All this is well and good but I have two rather more fundamental criticisms that I throw out to see if the true experts can agree with.
My hypothesis is that the good professor is missing the wood for the trees. Now I have a couple of assumptions here that could be wrong (and if so bang goes this ankle-biting into the same grave as yesterday's), but if true really help. The first is that Dr Hailey is working from similar quality digital images to the rest of us (i.e. he doesn't actually have CBS' "originals" either) and secondly he has deliberately sought to explain things away in the best possible light he can. Dr Hailey has three or four good hits in his typeface analysis where he makes some cogent points but I believe that some of them are susceptable to alternative reasoning.
It is worth noting that none of Dr Hailey's actual genuinely typed examples (as opposed to his photoshop recreations) show proportional spacing and no documents in the Bush AWOL archive (including at least one typed at Ellington) show proportional typing. I was merely starting my career as an inky schoolby in 1973 but I later (early/mid 1980s) had access to a core memory computer from that era with numerous teletypes and letterprinting printers. None of the old printers (golfballs and daisywheels IIRC) could do proportional spacing and I recall being immensely impressed when I forced a 1980s era electronic typewriter to do proportional spacing instead of its standard fixed width elite font. We know there were certain models of IBM typewrite could do proportional typing and the Shape of Days blog did quite a bit of research to find out just how much of a high end model they were.
Secondly it is interesting that the real smoking gun memo - the 18 August 1973 one - is the one he makes no attempt at using as an example. This is the memo that LGF (and I and many others) replicated in word and discovered the utterly coincidental tab spacing and line breaking. The first three lines of note 1. of that memo (ending "running", "regarding" and "rating" respectively) only line up as they do in the CBS document if you print from MS Word on American defaults incliding a font of Times New Roman. As I noted on Sept 15 with all other fonts I tried these words do not line up the way they do on the CBS document and others have also failed to get the same alignment using real typewriters etc etc.
Dr Hailey describes the number 1 as having a horizontal "flag" serif in typewriter fonts as follows:
One of the important characteristics of early Typewriter is the nature of the “one.” As I
mentioned earlier, the character "1" in early Typewriter is unique. It consists of a broad,
thick, sometimes slightly curved base and a horizontal top serif that is often as long as
left side of the base. Another characteristic is the uniform width of the stroke used to
create the character.
If you look at an enlarged MS Word 12pt Times New Roman "1" such as that over on the right, you see that it doesn't do badly when it comes to matching the description above. It most certainly has a horizontal top serif as long as the left side of the base whereas, as the good Doctor himself notes, many other computer fonts (such as Palatino Linotype) have drooping flags of a different length. The issue is the perceived different stroke width between the horizontal serifs and the vertical main stroke. My rejoinder is that this is an element of either the copying or scanning process where at a certain combination of contrast brightness etc the thin horizontals become slightly fatter. Certainly as far as can we can tell Dr Hailey has not had access to CBS's documents since his images are as blurry as ours therefore I suggest he cannot tell if this particular copy/scan error has occured.
Dr Hailey also descibes the letter t as worn in the following manner:
By copying a “t” typed with an IBM typewriter and adding “wear” to the cross stroke and
ascender consistent with my hypothesis in figure 11, I am able to replicate the problems
seen in the “t’s” in the Bush memos. The character appears to be worn in a pattern of
fading toward the left and top of the cross stroke and ascender (Figure 12).
This is jolly interesting because the enlarged MS Word 12pt Times New Roman "t" on the right has a rather similar pattern of "wear". I.e. its top left hand bits are cut out. That is an artifact of the font and not surprisingly matches his note that "[t]he top left of the “t” is clearly worn to the extent that it seldom makes an impression.". One other way of saying this is that if any "t" could be found which clearly failed to exhibit this behaviour it would be evidence that the font was not Times New Roman. Dr Hailey kindly confirms my visual inspection that this is not the case.
This is in my non-expert opinion the big elephant in living room of Dr Hailey's analysis. Dr Newcomer has stated that (pseudo-)kerning was impossible in the era these documents where purportedly created and that they show indications of precisely the (pseudo-)kerning inherent in Microsoft's Times New Roman font. For example consider the fragment below (enlarged from his PDF file):
In this fragment we see the classic "fl" ligature that pseudo-kerning produces. We also see another one in the "ay" pair earlier. All in all this looks remarkably similar to the following enlarged MS Word 12pt Times New Roman screen capture of the same text:
I admit it isn't 100% identical, I suspect this is artifect of my being lazy and doing a screen capture rather than printing and scanning. I have noticed that there screen layout does tend to vary very slightly from what is printed and indeed it may vary between HP printers and printer drivers. I also consider this fragment to be decent evidence of my hypothesis that repeated copying thickens things. The words in the two images line up quite well in length as does the over all fragment but each letter looks a lot blockier. I found it curious that Dr Hailey used a bolded version of TNR when he did his compare of the same text. This was blockier which is at first sight reasonable, but it also nicely camoflages the fatc that the overall word widths are the same. If you wanted to hide an embarassing fact this could be one way to do it.
One piece of embarassing counter evidence for Dr Hailey is the letter "h". If you examine the two images in the previous paragraph it is clear that the CBS document's letter "h" has a top serif that descends slightly, it does so at precisely the same angle as the Times New Roman "h". On the other hand none of the various examples of typewriter fonts produced by Dr Hailey and copied at the start of this paragraph exhibit this top serif except just possibly the one in the middle and that one has otherwise no resemblence to the font used in the memos. Likewise the font used in the PDF's fig 5 purported memo reconstruction fails to show this feature as far as can be told (but it is hard to confirm this because the image is rather low resolution).
I was about to conclude this post that the above point when it occured to me that printing this text out on an INKJET printer rather than a LASERJET could 100% explain the noted thickness of the font cross-strokes and the overall thickness of the characters versus the enlarged screen versions. Inkjets are not as high resolution and tend to spatter slightly which could easily account for the observed differences between the CBS memos and the beautiful clean screen captures or laserjet copies that we bloggers have generally analysed.
(Note that where I quote Dr Hailey's document it is the PDF created at 14:38:50 on 29 Sepember 2004 and last modified at 14:39:33 that was stored by wizbang)
Permalink02 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Tim Blair links to this bizarre piece of academic musing by some Australian university type called Christopher Shiel. Shiel is apparently 100% serious when he claims that actually the government is the source of all money and therefore we should give as much money as we can back to those nice chaps in the government:
They all do it of course. Drawing on the resurgence of folk libertarianism over recent decades, all parties now talk as if governments take money from individual taxpayers to spend, with conservatives more intent on emphasizing that they wish to give taxpayers back their money so they can decide for themselves how they wish to spend it. With the parties flinging it about, albeit the Howardians in an appreciably more drunken style than Latho's camp, it may help to remember that it's not really your money, at least as an individual. It's our money collectively, most of which has in fact been provided by governments, past as well as present. Indeed, if morality was the only policy consideration, most people should give a good deal of what they already have back to its rightful owner - the government on behalf of society as a whole.
He then goes on to quote extensively from the latest book by "distinguished Australian ex-pat philosopher, Peter Singer," called "The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W Bush". He states that Singer "takes us through the logic" of this statement in the extract.
Essentially the argument boils down to this: if it weren't for the government providing a legal system and civil society then we could not own any money because it would either be worthless or nicked by someone with a bigger gun. Obviously Shiel and Singer are philosophers who wouldn't dream of getting their neat hypotheses mucked up by actual examples or counter-examples drawn from history and so therefore don't understand the complete and utter falsity of their claim. The problem boils down to the fact that Messrs Shiel and Singer believe that it is impossible for civil society to exist without an overseeing "government" which is of course total codswallop.
One of the best places to look at for counter examples is the settlement of the USA. As settlers moved westward they frequently ended up ahead of the reach of government yet they still managed to claim land, buy and sell goods (and services), hire labour and so on. This is not the only example. Another would be modern day Somalia which is a land without any central government but where - despite this - commerce, trade and the exchange of money for labour continue unabated. I would be the first to admit that a single uniform regulatory framework administered by a single judiciary is apparently more efficient and thus allows for greater security of property for lower cost but that does not mean that the government owns the difference between what prosperity could be gained in an anarchy and one that pertains under a particular government.
From this we see two logical fallacies. The first is that property ownership and commerce requires a government. The second is that we owe the instrument of the improvement between two positions all of the gain of the difference between the two. If that were the case we'd have no incentive to use any improvement to do anything which would mean that we might as well all try and go back to a stone-age world because we would see no point in improving things.
05 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
06 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
The NY Times a week or so ago reprinted an article from "Foreign Affairs" about the role of democracy in economic development. Essentially the article makes a decent case for reversing the standard claim that economic development is a prerequisite for democracy by claiming that, on the contrary, democracy inspires growth.
On the whole I have some sympathy for this counter argument but I think it may well be overstating the case. In my opinion it is not democracy per se leading to wealth so much as that the pre-requisites for successful democracy are identical to those required for sustained economic growth. In other words in my opinion democracy is like a canary in the coalmine indicating when the conditions are ripe for economic growth and development.
The first principle is literacy. A non-literate electorate is not going to make an informed choice about who to vote for. Funnily enough almost any job benefits from a literate workforce, hence a literate worker almost always more productive that an illiterate one. Increasing productivity is a major step towards development. In addition many many jobs and, indeed, many daily actions in a wealthy economy require basic literacy and numeracy.
The second principle is the rule of law. The point about democracy is that each political party has the same opportunity to run the government as long as it has the votes. This essentially amounts to a contract between the parties themseleves and between the parties collectively and the voters. The same applies even more strongly to commercial development. An impartial enforcement of contracts is one of the key reasons why entrepreneurs take risks. If an entrepreneur feels that the chance of someone else benefiting from his risktaking is greater than him benefiting from it he most likely won't take the risk and, as a result, development and growth fails to occur.
The third principle is lack of news censorship. Again in terms of democracy this is an obvious need but it also applies to economic growth and development. If there is censorship of commercial information then businesses will make bad decisions and lose money. This will therefore impact growth. In my opinion there is a very good reason why financial newspapers have less bias and more general news coverage than "general" newspapers - its good for business.
There are undoubtedly other related requirements for both thriving democracy and economic growth (e.g. property rights and lack of red tape) and some will be more important to one than the other but it seems to me that any country that has a literate population with a consistent and fair set of laws and no news censorship will eventually see economic growth and probably democracy as well. However there is one absolute killer that stops both and that is corruption.
The problem with corruption is that it tends to eat things away from inside. A little nepotism or an occasional thank-you gift is unlikely to affect anything, but once the pattern becomes established it eats away at the second principle -the rule of law - and that kills both nascent growth and real democracy. The shell that is left behind looks superficially democratic and may even appear to support growth but doesn't.
Hat tip: I found the original article in a post by Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata.
06 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Michael Z Williamson wrote an absolutely amazing brilliant wonderful book called Freehold last year. Now you can read it electronically for free at the above link or download it in the format of your choice from Baen's Free Library.
Mini-review for those that haven't already started reading:
There are lots of things I like about this book. It describes quite well a libertarian society and how it turns things upside down from the kind of statist society one sees developing currently in the developed world - especially in Europe although it is also visible in the US. As well as a believable and interesting background the characters, both good and bad are well described and multi-dimensional and it has an action story that keeps you turning the pages (or scrolling down if you read the eBook version).
The book reminded me of a number of my favourite Heinlein books in particular The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. If you don't like Heinlein in his "mid season form" then you won't like this, because it covers a number of the same areas and, arguably has as heroine a "boy-scout with boobs" just like much Heinlein. However, while comparing a first time author to a great such as Heinlein is perhaps presumptive I feel the comparison to be both apt and not as one-sided as one might expect. This is a book I'm sure I will be re-reading frequently and which I expect to find interesting twists when I do.
Share & Enjoy
Permalink06 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
A page with a mock CNN poll quoting Kerry's lead amongst ineligible voters has been threatened with the DMCA. Talk about petty, vindictive and fundamentally st00pid.
In other parody news NASA defines space as being 150m up so as to deny SpaceShipOne.
06 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
When I'm not blogging I work in the technology field. In the past I have articles and essays about various high tech topics, mainly on the Motley Fool message boards but also in a couple of other places (e.g. an earlier article on this very blog). All this is to give you some idea of where I'm coming from when I start my analysis of the recent mainstream breakthrough.
One of the things that irritated the (frequently correct) skeptics of the late 1990s tech boom was the lapses into jargon about gorillas, chimps, bowling pins that tended towards the picturesque and was easily misunderstood by the general public - especially the newbie investor. However the jargon had a point and, in certain strictly applied cases, it has predicted corporate and technology successes, if not investment success. The two pieces of jargon I'm going to refer to here are "disruptive innovation" and the "technology adoption life cycle" (TALC). The former refers to an innovation that completely changes the way a particular activity is performed or how a particular object is created. The later refers to the stages through which a new technology becomes mainstream. The best way to describe both of these is to look at an example.
The car is an excellent example of a disruptive technology. The first cars available in the late 1800s were cranky, unreliable. To the manufacturers of horse drawn carts, coaches etc. not to mention the entire "equine maintenance industry", they were more of a threat because they scared the horses than any sort of competition. But in fact the motorcar was not something that they could compete against once it got its worst faults ironed out. Because it was purely mechanical it required less support infrastructure once it became reliable enough and it could be manufactured more cheaply. Finally it produced less visible pollution and had the potential to travel much faster. A horse in say 1890 could gallop at 30mph or more and (at a slower speed) for a whole day while a car was unable to go more than a few yards without breaking down at speeds of more than 5-10mph. In 1923 the horse could still do 30mph while a car was able to run for 24 hours or more at an average speed of over 50mph (the inaugural Le Mans 24 hour race was won by a car with an average speed of 57mph (92 kmh) over 1372 miles (2209 km)) and these days it is unexpected when the average vacationing family drives their car at similar average speeds. The car was disruptive because it was impossible for the existing alternative to compete with it and it met a need that the horse could not.
Initially the first purchasers (what we jargoneers call innovators) bought them because they were different and potentially fast. True they had advantages compared to steam-driven vehicles (such as not needing about an hour to warm up before you could use them), but their advantages compared to horses were less clear. They did not need feeding and they took up somewhat less space and were easier to control but they broke down frequently and required expensive hard to find repairmen when they did. Thus the car promised its users saving from hay costs and the price of stabling but initially replaced those costs with the costs of repair. More to the point the infrastructure was in place to cope with horses - if a horse went lame you could rent/hire/swap/buy another one quite easily for example - whereas for the car even simple things like petrol were far harder to come by and breaking part of the engine was liable to lead to the new toy being ignominiously hauled to a not terribly nearby repair shop by a team of old fashioned horses.
Following on from the innovators were certain people could see distinct advantages in using cars despite their faults. These people - the "Early Adopters" - while still a small proportion of the overall population were sufficient to move the car from being a hobby to being something that could be used to make money. Once money could be made from the car it started to drive the improvements in reliability and infrastructure so that the worst defects of the car were fixed and thus produce something that was nearly as good as a horse but cost less.
At this point the car entered what is called the "Chasm" the place where many inventions flounder. Whether an innovation leaves the chasm depends on whether its benefits can be sold to the "Pragmatists" and enter "Main Street". Helicopters are a good example of something that has failed to cross the chasm. Their worst faults have been ironed out and so they fit in certain niches but there is no widespread adoption. For the car, and particularly the internal combustion engine, however once they became more reliable and the infrastructure to support them became more widespread, their adoption by the leading edge of pragmatists was swift. Then of course manufacturers such as Henry Ford and Michelin cut manufacturing costs and improved reliability so that within a few short years in the early 1900s cars took over from horses as the preferred mode of transport.
The Internet as a whole is clearly a disruptive innovation in many fields. Postal services have seen the decline of letter writing as email takes over, even for businesses, and all sorts of industries have been hit by the ecommerce capabilities of the Internet from stockbroking to books. However just because the Internet is a disruptive innovation does not mean that all Internet applications will necessarily conquer all their traditional counterparts. While the recording industry is certainly facing what I believe to be a disruptive innovation from the combination of MP3 and P2P filesharing, the book printing/publishing industry is apparently doing just fine using the Internet to cut through the distribution chain but not suffering from competition from electronic books. So are web logs the equivalent of Amazon or the equivalent of Napster for traditional journalism?
The evidence indicates that blogs are indeed a disruptive innovation. Compared to traditional journalism they have low startup costs and low distribution costs, but they combine that with low sales revenues and low perceived reliability/accountability. Furthermore, as a result of the low revenue, they are unable to perform all of the functions of traditional journalism - paying a consulting expert for a few hours of his time would move the average blog well into the red and few bloggers are able to afford to even travel to where the news is happening. Thus, as with the initial motor car to horse comparison the blog looks like a joke compared to the existing media. But, again as with the motor car, the blog can fix its disadvantages whereas traditional journalism cannot change the fact that its establishment and distribution entails large fixed costs that cannot be cost-reduced, just as the horse cannot be improved to run at 50-100mph day in day out, the cost of distributing a newspaper or television station cannot be reduced to that of a blog.
It should be clear that the blogosphere has moved beyond the innovator adoption phase. There are millions of blogs in the world and we know that just the aggregate top 10-20 blogs are together serving millions of readers per day. So what were the features that has made the early adopters keen to blog and read blogs? Clearly the first is the (lack of) cost. All it takes to read a blog is time and it takes very little more to write one. In order to surf the web you already have all the tools required to blog so the additional investment is effectively zero. Although blogs do not directly make money for most bloggers they do gain the capability to publish their own thoughts and opinions in a manner that would otherwise be unavailable.
The first crude mostly hand created blogs started around 2000 although some sites with blog-like features were available earlier. The first versions of the major blog publishing systems supporting features such as comments and RSS feeds showing up in 2001. This latter date marks the start of the early adopter phase. Since then development has been fast, the trackback system arrived in mid 2002, services such as Typekey comment registration, comment management and indeed the separate hosting of comments and trackbacks (e.g. Haloscan ) and scanning services such as technorati showed up in short order as limitations were discovered. Each of these helps to make the blog more useful and thus adopted by more people. Moreover as the features and reliability of blogs have increased their uses as a replacement to even more sorts of traditional journalism have increased.
Initially blogs challenged only the most fluffy or self-absorbed forms. A blog was essentially an online, not really interactive diary. As such it challenged gossip columnists and those tedious sorts of columnists who write entire columns about their daily life as an overpaid resident of Manhattan (you know the sort that whines continually that the Honduran nanny is impossible and how shoddy their favorite coffee shop has become recently). Next (or possibly simultaneously) blogs started to replace the columnists in technical journals and the combination of a number of blogs with comments, trackbacks and links began to challenge the publishing of special interest magazines. Not that all special interest magazines are threatened by any means but blogs allow far faster and easier discussion than having an infrequently printed newsletter or similar with a large letters page for a hobby or small interest group. There are numerous blogs (e.g. Sam Ruby's intertwingly) that are effectively commentary on some code or standard or other technical topic that is of little interest to the rest of the world. This is not a direct challenge to conventional journalism since no journalist or publisher would ever want to spend time and money printing a journal to compete, however they are an indirect threat because if a topic does become interesting to a larger audience the chances of a journal being setup are lowered because all the information is at the blog. If the blog is taking ads (using blogads or google) then there is even less chance of forming a competing outlet. As time goes on this seems likely to increase with more and more areas where a technical or trade magazine could be viable reduced.
The same limiting effect applies in other fields, for example while foreign correspondents write about the doings of the rich and powerful in far off lands, they rarely write about the details of everyday life. On the other hand bloggers in foreign countries frequently write about the foibles of their neighbors and the view of the man in the street for the posturing politicos. These sorts of background article may in fact be more interesting and important than the headline interview with the president, but they are something that requires the writer to be immersed in the local culture to write effectively. The general retrenchment of the news business means that the pool of foreign correspondents of the sort that lives for years in a country is steadily decreasing. Combine that with the increase in blogging expats and multilingual locals and you have another ares where the blogs are able to make a serious challenge to traditional journalism. At this point it could be that the traditional journalists are still ahead but the low cost of blogging threatens the cost structure of maintaining journalists abroad. The foreign correspondents are able to justify their salary etc. only through their access to the top levels of society. This is the sort of classic rush to quality approach in the face of a disruptive innovation that has killed numerous high technology businesses. Apple, IBM and Sun (as well as numerous failed companies such as DEC and Wang) have, in their different ways, moved up or tried to move up market as a way to respond to the threat of the commodity Wintel PC. The point is that the blogosphere is acting just like the PC nibbling at the niches that are only marginally profitable for big media and slowly but surely increasing the number of these niches.
I think the answer to this is a resounding YES. The fact that blogs were able to provide the pressure that led to Trent Lott's removal and to the debunking of the CBS forgeries is evidence of their reach. Another is the aforementioned advertising methods and the fact that certain blogs are as a result able to make money. Blogs have moved mainstream as it is more than the early adopters who are using them. Pragmatists who want to see different news and analysis read blogs in addition to their other sources of news. Over the last year or two the blogosphere has tornadoed with growth rates of 100% per annum or more and technorati now claims to be monitoring over 4 million weblogs. Not only that but weblog hit counters are indicating ever-increasing traffic growth. True the growth is uneven and the distribution of traffic between the top sites and the rest is exceedingly skewed but that is no different to the difference between the distribution levels of the Daily Telegraph in the UK and the Riviera Reporter here. The difference is that not even Fox News is growing its readership at the same rate as the top blogs let alone the blogosphere combined and in fact the majority of traditional journalism outlets are slowly losing their readership. This is not necessarily directly correlated with the growth in blog readership since it started long before blogs were common yet I suspect that blogs are aiding and abetting this trend.
Although blogs in the West and particularly in the English-speaking world are doing great things I suspect the next major achievement for blogs will occur in other parts of the world. Much of the coverage in the traditional media recently has been about the US pyjamaclad ankle biters, but the challenge to traditional journalism is far greater in those countries where censorship is a fact of life. For people who live under censorship, the traditional media is already completely discredited the only question is whether blogs as a whole can fill the niche of trusted news and analysis provider. Mobile phones proved themselves by the mobs that protested in Manila some years ago. Blogs may well be as instrumental in governmental overthrow or the debunking of fraudulent elections and the like somewhere in the world. My favorite nation is Iran which has an enormous number of blogs and a lot of extremely frustrated young people. Whether revolution will occur or not I cannot say but it looks to me that the Iranian regime is getting weak.
In the English speaking world I fully expect the fact checking and research capabilities of thousands of bloggers to provide a healthy reality check to traditional journalism. Whether bloggers can become the prime source for future talking heads I do not know but I do expect that many bloggers will become more and more influential amongst the decision-makers and the other chattering classes. I also expect blogs to evolve in a way that readers find it clear whether a particular blog or blog article is primarily a linking one synthesizing data from elsewhere, an analysis one or one that presents new facts itself. So far the latter has been rather thin on the ground although InDCjournal, Wizbang, The Shape of Days and Dean Esmay amongst many others have all interviewed sources and produced exclusives as a result. What these baby steps have shown is that nothing about blogs prevents them being investigative journalists other than a lack of salary from blogging. Although I suspect no blog will ever provide the sort of regular salaried income produced to the top traditional journalists, I can certainly see blogging provide a better and more certain income than that received by the numerous freelance journalists, agency stringers and the like who get paid only when their material is actually used.
I suspect that traditional journalism is going to go the way of the train in the face of competition from the car and aeroplane. This is better than the fate of the horse which has been relegated to being almost purely a leisure pursuit but does imply a significant decrease in influence and importance. As I noted in the early adopter section punditry is looking particularly vulnerable, in fact I suspect in the next year or two we will see all major pundits either embrace the blogosphere or disappear. The analysis of bloggers is not noticeably of lower quality and indeed bloggers such as Wretchard and the no longer blogging Steven DenBeste seem to provide consistently more accurate and apposite commentary on current affairs than that produced by the majority of oped pages. Likewise the decline of the computer/IT trade press into pure infomercial/advertorial looks assured. There is very little value that the current trade press provides to its subscribers and most of that value is obtainable from other sources. I no longer subscribe to any trade journals and I have not noted any loss from doing so. Undoubtedly some high quality trade journals such as the EE Times will persist but purely online sites such as the Register and the Inquirer, which are similar to blogs in style, are in fact better than the weekly journals in most respects since they are updated daily if not hourly with new stories.
I suspect that all journalists will in fact migrate to the blog world either directly or indirectly and their current employers will, over time, move to a model of republishing the best of the web. With traditional content providers such as AP and Reuters just looking like one source of content competing with many others. I have no doubt that respected brands such as The Times or The Washington Post will remain, but rather than be perceived as the provider of original content they are likely to be repositioned as a trusted source of web content. In other words the news process will begin to split itself in to components that can be aggregated in multiple different formats.
The following books describe disruptive innovation, the TALC and related terms
The Junkyard Blog links to a complementary article by a blogger called "Old Patriot" who seems to expect more cooperation and less competiton between blogs and the rest of the media. This is - I feel - a classic example of the working of the blogosphere. In near real time I am able to update this essay to refer to and argue with others. No traditional printed media can do this and very few take advantage of the online world to do so except by occasionally rewriting history by silently changing erroneous articles.
Let me make it clear - I expect the majority of journalists to become bloggers in one form or another. This is no more said out of malice than Henry Ford might have predicted the change of stables to gas stations. Because of the limitations of branding and reputation online the only way the blog world can build trust is to exhaustively document its sources and changes to its output. The coincidental result is that the blog world has an inbuilt transparency that current traditional journalism does not have. As the Junk Yard blog says:
If we didn't already have blogs, we'd have to invent them now. But our role as watchdogs over both the political and the powerful doesn't mean we're at war with anyone. It means we're checking up on them, seeing that they get their facts right and clear out their own unacknowledged biases. When we spot those biases and errors in facts, we do come down like a ton of bricks. It's the only way we could get the MSM's attention, and is a fully justified response.
The way I see it is that no journalist in the future can afford to not have a blog where he puts up his own corrections and ammendments and where he debates the alternate views of the readers of his columns. As soon as a journalist becomes a blogger (think Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, Johann Hari...) he (or she) is able to receive criticism of his or her articles and can then respond to that criticism in short order. Debates that might once have taken weeks in the letters page of a newspaper (assuming the newspaper was willing) can now be over in a day or two and the result is likely to be a second column for the journalist quoting his readers comments and making counterpoints which are stronger because they have already been tested in the blogosphere.
07 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Reading the ISG reports, the details in the news articles and the blog posts about them we see that Saddam Hussein did everything he could to subvert the UN inspectors and the permenant UNSC.members Russia, France and China. Furthermore, hidden at the bottom of the news articles is the information that despite Saddam not having stockpiles of WMD he did everything he could to make sure that his WMD programs could be started at extremely short notice.
Even, for the sake of argument, ignoring the Hussein regime's human rights record and links to terrorism etc., the justification of toppling Hussein is IMHO proven on strict legalistic grounds sincethe ISG has proven that Hussein was in violation of UN resolution 1441 and numerous previous ones dating all the way back to the cease fire at the end of the first Gulf War.
Despite this we have the "Not in our Name" antiwar protesters and their apologists in the media and leftwing political groups stating that we should not have gone to war. In other words we should have rewarded a regime that did its best to evade its treaty obligations, bribe its inspectors and had no intention what so ever of not producing WMD in the future.
We now see precisely how much deterrent the UN is to the rogue regimes of the world and the answer is not a pretty one for those people who defend the UN. Regretfully it looks like Darfur, despite all the attention, is going to confirm that answer, namely that
07 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
The Register has an interesting piece on Microsnot's DRM plans. I mention this solely because I have been considering dipping a toe in the DRM world by actually buying some protected eBooks over at Fictionwise. I've been tempted numerous times but so far each time I've gone to fictionwise I've nearly bought stuff and then decided I don't want it enough because of the *ç%&ing encrypted ebook formats which are generally the only ones on offer. Right now despite all the discounts (which do make fictionwise interesting) the idiotic protection still makes me annoyed and debate whether its worth the hassle given that I can get enough unencrypted stuff from Baen's Webscriptions.
However I noticed that almost all the books are available in Microsnot's Reader format so that if someone had a way to decrypt that format so that I could store the unencrypted versions in some convenient manner (and possibly run some HTML converting perl script to add them to my existing Baen library) this would make my bitching and moaning a one time operation. And, thanks to a helpful person at Baen's Bar it looks like this is indeed an option becuase there is a nice program called Convert LIT which does precisely what I want.
Of course I still have to bend over and get a nice insecure Passport account and I still have to install M$ Reader which bitches and moans about requiring Administrator privileges both to be installed and then to register with Redmond (<% insert obligatory rant about broken Microsnot security model %>) and of course running the Convert LIT executable is almost certainly illegal (perhaps its significant that the program is called clit.exe?) so I will neither confirm nor deny that I have done that...
However going back to the title, the fact is that I have spent a lot of money on eBaen books over the last couple of years, by my calculation I have bought over 100 titles at an average cost of about $4 each for a total expenditure of some $400 or so, and I have no intention of reducing that rate of purchase until Baen runs out of books that I want to read. Fictionwise, by contrast, will get perhaps a tenth of that amount if it is lucky, and more likely will get less as all I will do is buy a couple of books which aren't available from Baen but which fill in a series that I already own either on paper or electronically. This is partly becuase the Baen books are cheaper but it is mainly because they are easier to read. I don't need to putz around with passwords once I've downloaded the files and I don't need to run some special version of software to read them, a web browser is entirely sufficient and finally, if (as has already happened once) my computer goes to the scrapheap in the sky, I can still read all my books without doing anything more complicated than copying them from my backup hard disk. No read to reregister my computer or figure out what my password was or anything.
The fact that Baen also provides entire books for free (as I noted yesterday) is just an additional loyalty enhancer. Oh and by the way I have never ever violated the Baen copyright and I doubt I ever will, why would I when a Baen ebook costs $4-$6? Fictionwise on the otherhand I note has ebooks priced at Hardback prices. I object to paying $15-$25 for a bunch of electrons, especially when they are copy protected so that I cannot legally print them or read them on more than one machine. As the introduction to the Baen Free Library says (I paraphrase slightly) treating your customers like felons is not a great way to inspire customer loyalty.
08 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Harry's Spot has an post about inheritance tax which is just plain wrong. It is inspired by a Joan Bakewell piece in the Grauniad which advocates spending the dosh now rather than trying to find a way to pass it on to the kids or charities after you die. There is nothing wrong with that sentiment but it will not suit everyone. It seems that the desire to provide for ones offspring is inbuilt into human nature and thus we generally like the idea of leaving money to our offsping, nephews, nieces and so on and we dislike being foced to hand over a chunk to the grasping taxman instead.
However Harry's Spot contributor Marcus feels that this is unfair in that it benefits one set of descendants more than others and hence it should be taxed.
There's something about inherited wealth that I find unnatractive on moral grounds and I am in favour - in broad terms - of the idea of Inheritance Tax. Why should an accident of birth perpetuate a lifestyle of riches which a person hasn't worked hard for ? And why shouldn't one of the aims of government be equality of opportunity for all citizens ? If IHT plays a part in this transfer of assets then that's fine by me.
This is completely wrong IMO, why should we effectively punish good parents for their attempts to improve the lives of their children? This piece illustrates exactly why socialism is bad becuase it removes the incentives we have to save and prosper. If we have no incentive to help our children we will not give it to the government but rather (as Joan B says) spend the money now and leave nothing to the government. Then when our children get into a tricky position they have no fallback other than government largesse to tide them over. And of course government largesse will tend not to finance potentially wealth and job creating entrepreneurial activities which would be financed by someone wth a private income.
The next part throws up the rich trust beneficiary as the strawman for those who benefit from inheritance. This is completely bogus in two different ways. Firstly the number of people who inherit sufficient unearned income to live on is miniscule - the majorty of people pass on very little other than their house and furniture and secondly those who look like they will be leaving a big legacy are the ones who work the system so that their legacy avoids as much tax as possible. In otherwords the people who pay IHT are the middle-class suckers not the seriously wealthy.
To look at an example - it is true that selling the house at today's inflated property prices will likely lead to a tidy sum but without skillful investment a legacy of say £250,000 is not going to provide enough to live on (assume two children sharing the inheritance of a £500,000 house). Assuming a 5% annual return and you are looking at income of £12,500 a year. This obviously helps when times are tight but £1000 a month is unlikely to pay the mortgage let alone provide enough to live on. However that £250,000 could usefully help finance expansion of a small business or starting one up and that will help the government more in the long term because it will cause people to pay income tax and VAT and it will reduce the number of people on the dole. If the government gets its 40% cut on the value above £263,000 then the inheritance is reduced to a shade over £200,000 each. In income terms that cut is a straight 20% reduction (or about £200/month) which might not be significant, although for example the difference between £800 and £1000 could be the difference between being able to afford childcare or not. However the £50,000 reduction in capital does make a big difference. £50,000 would (for example) allow a company to buy a van and hire a driver to make deliveries itself rather than paying a carrier and the government would in fact gain quite a lot of that anyway in taxes.
Inheritance tax is a classic case of government intervention to change incentives in such a way that private enterprise has a negative incentive while sponging off the state has a postive incentive. Since the state is, in general, an extremely poor producer of wealth and services in genera this is a bad bargain. According to fellow blogger Tim Worstall it could be even worse if you believe a paper by economist Professor Nordhaus that claims entrepreneurs produce £97.8 of benefit for everyone else for the £2.2 they get themeselves.
I'll close with a thought - historically we look down on graverobbers and their ilk - these days thanks to IHT the government is effectively a grave-robber.
08 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
10 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
A retiring head teacher from a top private school in England has been told that he is not allowed to be a "qualified teacher" in the state school system. Despite having spent over 20 years teaching Maths, a subject which has a teacher shortage, it seems that he needs to take a one-year course to obtain a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education in order to be permitted to register as a qualified teacher.
The best line, however is this one from Carol Adams, the chief executive of the General Teaching Council:
"As we explained to him, however, we cannot confer qualified teacher status on him. We are not being bureaucratic, we just don't have the power to issue it unless it has has been through the process."
The line is not just wrong it is almost hilariously wong. Indeed you are being bureaucratic and mindlessly so and the excuse trotted out - namely
"We did have a scheme where someone with the standing of Mr Jones-Parry could be assessed by a head teacher in a matter of weeks," she said. "Unfortunately the funding ran out and the scheme was abandoned."
is a classic example of bureaucratic empire building at work. You see a program that needs a couple of people to look at the CVs of volunteer teachers is never going to get as much funding, prestige or underlings for the manager as a program that approves Post-Graduate Certificates in Education which need forms to be developed, institutions to be vetted etc. etc.
(Hat tip: Samzdata)
Permalink11 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
12 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
A piece by Daniel Drezner sparked by the arrival of the 40 year mortgage, leads me to consider briefly the differences of home-ownership and mortgages in different countries. It was sparked by a reflection that in France I was unable to obtain anything more than a 15-year mortgage for my house and was limited by law to a mortgage whose repayment was a third of my gross monthly income. At first sight the French system seems much better than the US (or UK) ones where mortgages are frequently 30 years duration and where there is no particular limit to the amount borrowed other than the willingness of the borrower to pay the monthly repayments and the lender to judge the risk that the borrower default.
I am certainly not alone in noting that loans backed by the security of ones home is a classic way for entrepreneurs and small businesses to raise the working capital they need to get started. And, as I noted on Friday, passing on one's home to one's children is an extremely common artifact of modern widespread property ownership and provides a significant resource for one's children (or grand-children) to use to finance their educaton or business. In France the ability to do this is extremely limited by the restrictions noted above. For example due to the limitation on the repayment amount I was forced to put considerably more down-payment into the house we own here than otherwise [ironically this was in my case probably a good thing since the money invested in the house in 1999 was therefore unable to be invested in the stockmarket in 1999]. Similarly the short term of the loan means that the monthly repayments are consequently higher further reducing the total amount that can be borrowed.
It may be a joke that "French has no word for Enrepreneur" but it is a joke with a basis in truth. The French are remarkably bad at founding growing businesses. There are countless small businesses (often now registered in the UK) but they rarely grow. Likewise large businesses persist and merge, demerge, borrow etc. but compared to the Anglo-saxon world the number of recently founded businesses who start small and grow to be large is miniscule. So miniscule in fact that I cannot actually think of any one other than Airbus, which was of course given lots of state assistance. The US has many examples of companies like Apple or Microsoft which have started with a couple of men in a garage and are now multi-billion dollar enterprises. Although not as widespread companies such as ARM or Virgin have done the same in the UK and there are thousands of companies who have grown to the point of employing a few hundred people. This layer is far smaller in France and, while it is still large in other continental countries such Germany and Italy, there are frequent articles about the general decline of this "Mittlestand".
To me the lack of investment by small enterprises is symptomatic of a culture that is biased against risk, something that starts when the govrenment limits the sorts of mortgage available.
14 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
Johann Hari can sometimes sound terribly libertarian for a leftie. He wrote last month (and I missed it then) about the benefits of legalizing drugs. Compare and contrast with Korea and prostitution. As I noted then drugs and sex are businesses. If you disagree with people using them then you need to look at different methods of prevention such as education and marketing. As Hari notes legalization has a very very important benefit:
Nobody will be shot in Chicago today because of a dispute about alcohol. That is because the supply and distribution of alcohol were brought back into the remit of the legal economy in the United States in the 1930s. The problems inherent to a vast illegal trade – and the network of criminal gangs that it necessarily involves – quickly disappeared. True, some of the gangs transferred to other criminal activities, like protection racketeering. Most went bust and found their way into the proper economy, sometimes as licensed alcohol sellers. We have travelled so far from that world that it would seem bizarre today to imply there was anything illicit about liquor store or even a recovering alcoholic in the White House. One day, this is how we will think about the legal suppliers and users of drugs.
And he also makes a good point about how drugs are driving the illegal firearms market and that most of the deaths by firearms in the UK are due, directly or indirectly, to drug trafficking. Of course then he goes off the rails a bit because he is so radically opposed to firearms of any description and fails to apply his previous logic to the firearms issue.
Once ordinary people begin to fear unexpected gun crime like this – a moment getting closer every day – they begin to believe that they need guns to protect themselves, and a terrible spiral is created. This is the case in the United States, where ordinary people get guns for self-defence and a whole panapoly of social problems are unleashed: their arguments are far more likely to descend into shooting, terrible accidents happen when children discover their parents’ guns, criminals get even bigger guns than everybody else… anybody who has ever watched ER could continue this list in several different ways.
As with drugs the point is that firearms are better off legalized, regulated and available to those who have fear of assault. This all comes down to what engineers call gracful degradation. An unarmed society collapses when an armed criminal tries to impose his authority. An armed society tends to shoot him. Of course there are
It has occured to me that the left is generally good at identifying the problems while the right (and those terms are used in an exceedingly general sense) is better at identifying the solution. the problem is that the left seems to think that the solution to anything is government action whereas the right, once they have had a problem pointed out, tend to look at more imaginative ways to fix it such as by changing the risk/reward or supply/demand ratios. And it is impossible to alter these ratios if the product under discussion is judged illegal.
15 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
16 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
17 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
This weekend I met some Zimbabweans for the first time in over a decade. These ones were ex-farmers who had see their land appropriated by the state and who had, as a result, lost pretty much everything. What really hurt was not so much the loss of the land so much as the fact that the new owners were completely incompetant. Anyway that, and the way they are attempting to survive and help Zimbabwe, is not the subject of this piece.
We had in interesting discussion about Zimbabwe and its leader, Comrade Bob, after which it occured to me that there really are people who would be better off dead. I rather doubt that contributions would be tax deductable but it seems to me that, in terms of return on investment of giving, near to the top would be to finance a program of assasination for named individuals. This could be considered terrorism of a whitehat sort although more recently terrorist organizations seem to prefer to go after random civilians than the leadership. Personally I believe that one successful assasination would probably do more good that a million tons of aid to starving refugees.
I therefore propose that a non-profit organization be formed to coordinate the termination of tyrants. This organization could put a bounty on the successful elimination of named individuals or could in fact locate and hire the assasins itself. In order to minimise the terrorism charge the bounties/contracts would only be handed out after strict and open review of the charges. Charges would be placed based on the assumption that the leader takes responsibility for the actions of his regime or group and thus when documented atrocities occur unless the leader makes an attempt to bring the perpertrators to justice he is considered responsible. Assasination need not be limited to the single leader, if (say) a particular general or minister is also considered to be entirely responsible for the secret police then his name would also be placed on the list.
18 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
19 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
19 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
21 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.
Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.
I think in many ways the British were very misled in going to war against America and in trying to enforce their will on people who were quite different from them at the time.
Aside from the minor fact that the revolutionary war was nowhere near the bloodiest war fought by America - some bloody civil war battles killed as many soldiers as the entire revolutionary war - this indicates a certain optimism of the facts of life at the time. Carter has written a historical novel about that time which makes his naivite even less excusable.21 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
21 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
21 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
21 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
22 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
22 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
27 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
27 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
28 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
28 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
28 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
29 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink