Moral Clarity in Gaza

Moral Clarity on the Israeli-Gaza conflict

Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis -- 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years -- deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.

This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage -- or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb -- will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.

The amazing thing about this commentary, is that it is often applicable to conflicts between Israel and any of the terrorist organizations over there.

Canada Considers Massive 'Internet Tax'

Google actively lobbying against it.
Michael Geist describes the situation in detail.

Basically, a few policy groups are asking the legislature for some laws that have applied to media content before the Internet, to be applied to Internet content. It makes intuitive sense to me until I realize that the government should have no right to regulate media content in the first place.

Craiglist Crime Syndicate

http://news.cnet.com/bank-robber-hires-decoys-on-craigslist-fools-cops/?tag=rtcol;pop

The crook hired people on Craigslist to show up near the scene in a particular outfit while he robbed an armored car and made a getaway using an innertube. Police are still looking for him.

Bankruptcy, Not Bailout

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

I have been sent this link by 2 friends that do not know each other, but know me very well. Jeffrey Miron makes some amazing points.

• The implicit backing of the federal government for Freddie and Fannie encouraged them to take on far more risk than a free market would have allowed.
• "Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending."
• "The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government."
• "If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen."
• "Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street's hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents."

Read the article. He makes many more points that fill in the blanks, but I figured 5 was a good synopsis.

Bring On the Shorts

Bloomberg is reporting that 2 companies, Diamond Hill Investment Group and JMP Group Inc. have opted to let their shares be short sold. I know very little about these companies, but I do know that what they've done takes guts and is the truly moral thing for any company in their position to do.

The regulators are giving the financial companies unfair exemptions instead of letting the market run its course and are protecting the weak at the expense of the good. 

Congratulations to the leadership of these 2 firms in standing up for what capitalism is all about, free and fair competition with transparency and justice for all.

IED video from Iraq

I've recently found this video of an IED explosion. This is the kind of thing that our troops have made such great strides at reducing and eliminating in Iraq.

Information Overload: A Blessed Curse

What is so bad about information overload?
How the Google generation thinks differently.

The first article specifically talks about the advent of email deluge. How the flood of email from colleagues and clients can get far too powerful to feasibly answer or even read.

The second article is by a mom who doesn't understand why her son does 5 entertaining things while researching a report for his science class. The author distills these characteristics in regards to Google infopath adoption.

NATIVES v IMMIGRANTS

Digital natives
Like receiving information quickly from multiple media sources.
Like parallel processing and multi-tasking.
Like processing pictures, sounds and video before text.
Like random access to hyperlinked multimedia information.
Like to network with others.
Like to learn “just in time”.

Digital immigrants
Like slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.
Like singular processing and single or limited tasking.
Like processing text before pictures, sounds and video.
Like to receive information linearly, logically and sequentially.
Like to work independently.
Like to learn “just in case”.

Food Crisis

I found some great commentaries here on the recent rise in food prices.
American Thinker | Financial Times: Economists Forum | New York Times: A Global Need...

Things to think about while listening to the news on the Food Crisis:

Since Gasoline and Biofuels are well on their way to becoming true substitutes, and biofuels are made from food, high oil prices will become directly related to higher food prices. Not only can food substitute for oil, but it apparently works the other way too. I should make a whole blog post just on that.
Wired

India, China, and South America are developing far wealthier populations who consume more of both food and fuel. Driving the demand of both, raising the prices of both.

Those same three regions are also using that wealth to increase their productive capacities. The US utilizes only 0.27% of the world's crop land, but produced 16.8% of all the world's grain in 2007. Which means the US produces grain 80 times more effeciently than the rest of the world, so there's room for 7978% improvement in global grain production without any new technologies. That's about 80 new earths to put that in terms Daniel W. Basse can understand.

I don't have many links to back this up, but it seems that as wealth passes some level, quality begins to take precedence over quantity to the average consumer. High class restaurants serve smaller portions than low class restaurants. Areas with higher average population have more Chipotle's and fewer Taco Bell's. If this is true, then as the West gets still wealthier, it will begin to consume fewer pounds of grain while expending far more in terms of other wealth to get it. That might relax demand for low priced grains for poorer areas.

'Not for Resale' free stuff

Universal Studios sent out a bunch of free promo CD's with a 'promotional use only' label to selected listeners. These CD's arrived completely free through the mail.
Troy Augusto, who decided to disregard that label and sell the disc on Ebay, is now fighting a lawsuit from Universal. The record company claims that the promotion use label identified the product as in part their property, and that they retained all rights of sale. Augusto claims that since the discs arrived in the mail with no action on his part, they were gifts and therefore his property.

The major significance is the challenges this case could pose for the 'first sale doctrine.' Universal wins, could a car manufacturer place a limit on the number of resales for the car? I could do a whole new post on that idea.

EFF has counter sued Universal on Augusto's behalf.

Project Lifeline, Legislating Reality After The Fact

I recently stumbled a wonderful new project by our wonderful government called Project Lifeline.

Thanks to this wonderfully brilliant contribution by our governing officials, banks will actually spend 30 days negotiating with borrowers to resolve their loans before foreclosing on them. This is such a great idea in fact, that banks have been doing this voluntarily for years with no government involvement at all!

This is basically the banks borrowing the governments credibility (imagine!) because for some reason people trust banks less than they trust our 'fiscally responsible' government. When the banks call the homeowners asking them to refinance, people avoid the calls like the plague.

Anon vs. Scientology UPDATE

Anon has released a new and particularly long video announcement.

The text can be found on Google Docs.
See my earlier post on this here.

Information Super-Highway

Somebody accidentally cut an undersea Internet cable off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, which disrupted Internet service in India by a great deal.

I didn't know there were cables spanning the Pacific! That's a lot of water. The description of the cable is amazing as well. 14 cm thick with several layers of steel wire mesh guarding a narrow (like, 1 cm) wide fiber optic core that actually carries the data. It would take some heavy equipment to break that.

Video Game Tax in New Mexico

New Mexico Proposes Video Game Tax to Punish Staying Indoors

But a coalition of groups, led by the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, is sold on the idea that outdoor education programs can inspire children in a way that video games and television cannot.

The coalition wants state lawmakers to create a No Child Left Inside Fund with a 1 percent tax on TVs, video games and video game equipment. The fund would help pay for outdoor education throughout the state.

Joseph Henchman says:

The fundamental purpose of taxes is to raise revenue necessary for programs, not micromanage people's decisions with subsidies and penalties. If a tax targeting video games is justified, it should be on the basis of actual negative externalities, not the whims of social engineers picking things they don't like at random.

For myself, I can say without ambiguity that I vastly prefer this type of policy to efforts to ban certain types of video game content. One advantage is that a direct tax creates a disincentive to hurt the industry.
More ambiguously though, I agree with the philosophy of government given by Mr. Henchman. While it's appealing to think that Parks'n Rec would be paid for by Gamestop, as a service, parks and rec should be paid for by people that use it, not by people that don't. People should want more outdoor activities, government should try to 'make them want' more outdoor activities.

Hat Tip to Joseph Henchman @ Tax Policy Blog

News I Find Interesting

Google may launch iPhone rival with Dell

Scientists discover memory reversal mechanism

10 Amphibians you may not have known about


Hat Tip to Brian Hollar at Thinking on the Margin

Anon vs. Scientology

A hacker group called Anonymous, has declared war on the 'church' of Scientology. So far they seem to have successfully executed a DoS attack on the Scientology website, and a prank on the church's hotline.



Various Media outlets have picked up on this.
Australia Wired The Register National Post

Anon has responded to media coverage of the 'war.'

I fight the urge to support Anon in this solely because of the quality of their videos. But really I don't see what they're going to do. They can't cause any real harm by pulling pranks like a DoS or phone line redirects. They'd really have to cause financial messes, like stealing money from the 'church' and sending it to the FBI, then send an email politely asking them to spend the money investigating the 'church.' That would be impressive, because it's really hard to do. So until they show themselves to actually be serious in this, I have to write them off as a bunch of kids playing important on YouTube.

Branson's Spaceship

Virgin Galactic Unveils Spaceships That'll Take Passengers to Space in 2009

More reasons why I intend to be a millionaire by age 30.

Also, check out the Spaceport in New Mexico that the amazing Richard Branson is building to launch.

Anti-anti-smoking Forces

Customers desert smoke-free restaurant

A restaurant owner in China started to ban smoking in the restaurant, and lost about 20% of his patronage.
Assuming that the smokers know how bad smoking is for their health (which might not be accurate, they might just not know) this owner can see the direct results of his policy in the patronage. It might be that the people that perfer a smoke-free environment just haven't heard about the restaurant yet, and will more than compensate for the 20% loss. But based just on the content of the article. I'd say he should let folks light up.

The All Seeing Eye - New policies

US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search

Without this law, anybody plotting a terrorist attack is going to use encryption, so why bother? If you won't be able to understand the only people that you claim you want to watch, then why pass a law saying you can look at everything everywhere anytime with no notice or accountability?

I lack expertise in this area, but I've read some good stuff about the security features of the BSD operating system.

It seems the interest in encryption has been decreasing for the past 4 years or so. I wonder if this policy will have an effect on that trend.

Seagate has released a full encryption drive, which would not protect against this policy, but would protect against your data from theft of your drive physically.

What would help against this policy is OpenPGP.

Student Expelled For 'getting involved' on campus

Student expelled for student body activism

NEWSFLASH: When you make a stink about something, your target will look at you're background.
The real news is that they might expel you for making amateur movies (nothing indecent, either) for a contest. If you read it through, there was apparently an ad the student put together that scared the president so much he asked for a temporary bodyguard. But seriously, there was no real threat in the ad.

In a related story, from the article above:

FIRE is simultaneously pressuring Valdosta State to reverse its “free speech area” policy, which is unusually rigid in restricting student expression to a single stage on the 168-acre campus, only between the hours of 12 and 1 p.m. and 5 and 6 p.m., with prior registration.

GO MASON.
Go Mason Student Government.
Hat-tip to 'flutterecho' at Slashdot

Information Disclosure

New law enhances Government transparancy

If you pass enough laws, eventually you'll accidentally come up with something good.