March 18, 2004

Taking a Break

I'm going to take a break from this blog for a couple of months. Maybe come back in June.

People are still talking about the economics of telecom and spam and the impact of the Internet on various business models, but they are saying the same things that have been said for quite a while. I feel like if I tune out for a couple of months and then tune back in, I won't miss anything.

CYA

March 15, 2004

Moore's Law and Military Technology

Five years ago, Ray Kurzweil predicted that we would see military aircraft the size of birds by the year 2009. Based on this article by Phil Carter, it would seem that Moore's Law seems to be moving faster.

AeroVironment's MicroAir Vehicle looks like a flying laptop with a propeller and is about the same size but carries a digital camera and can fly for nearly two hours. A slightly larger model is the Organic Air Vehicle, which uses a strong fan to keep itself aloft and can hover in place. In DARPA's vision of the future battlefield, unmanned aircraft like these will swarm the skies, providing ubiquitous surveillance for commanders.

March 12, 2004

Biotech and Sports

I argue that we should not think of biotechnology solely in terms of sports metaphors.

sports are a peculiar facet of human experience. They are inevitably zero-sum in character. For every winner, there is a loser. Each tournament has only one champion. When an athlete breaks a world record, the previous record-holder's title is eclipsed.

...In fact, many social phenomena -- particularly those that are studied by economists -- are not zero-sum games. In those cases, zero-sum thinking turns out to be quite counterproductive in attempting to trace out systemic implications.

Another comment on bioethics and the President's council comes from Carl Zimmer.

When our ancestors stood upright and got big brains, Greene argues, these moral intuitions became more elaborate. They probably helped hominids survive, by preventing violence and deception from destroying small bands of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other to find food and raise children. But evolution is not a reliable guide for figuring out how to lead our lives today. Just because moral intuitions may be the product of natural selection doesn't mean they are right or wrong, any more than feathers or tails are right or wrong.

March 10, 2004

I'll take Ohio

Steve Clemons praises the taxpayer support of high-tech research in New York state.

New York has already invested $620 million of a planned $1 billion to create an imaginative network of research and development incubators - dubbed "the Empire State High-Tech Corridor."

...Contrast the energetic New York program with the disappointment among business and labor advocates in Ohio when voters last November narrowly defeated a $500 million state bond issue to fund pro-growth R&D; in the state.

Good for Ohio. The only thing stupider than Federal bureaucrats trying to run an industrial policy is state and local bureaucrats trying to do it. Maryland has wasted a ton of money on incubators, "corridors," and other fads.

If government takes over, what used to be the most dynamic sectors of our economy will wind up looking like our least effective industry.

Email Innovation?

Has anyone tried any of the products from Stata labs? It looks like they have a spam-filter proxy server, which I assume works something like popfile. Also, they have a search engine for email (I know, I know, anybody who could write a grep command could do that, but hey, I'm slow), which I could see really making my life easier.

Thanks to Lawrence Lee for the pointer.

99-cent rip-off

Brother Ernie wonders how Apple can convince people that an iPod that can store thousands of songs should be filled at a cost of 99 cents per song.,

Something's got to give. I don't think that it will be digital storage in which advances continue to outpace Moore's Law. I don't think it will be people's expectations. Thus, it is going to have to be the ala carte pricing point. However, I think the only realistic ala carte pricing point is going to be in the micropayments realm, which is unlikely to work. Thus, a subscription-based model will be the only likely, voluntary solution.

That's the conclusion I reached a couple years ago. The other model I predicted back then would correspond to selling an iPod pre-stocked with 5000 popular songs.

March 09, 2004

If Brad DeLong called me stupid

I wouldn't brag about it. Certainly not if the topic were international macroeconomics.

Regardless of where you are politically, I think that it is safe to say that when it comes to the relationship of savings and the trade deficit, Brad DeLong has still got his head screwed on right. I'm with him 100 percent in this dispute.

It's on other issues, when he gets outside his area of expertise and goes into loony conspiracy theory, that he trespasses against Nugent and Mosler's comparative advantage.

Red Sox Technologies

My essay on technologies that perennially disappoint.

• Micropayments
  
• E-books
  
• Speech Recognition
  
• Video Conferencing
  
• Social Networking Software
  
• Virtual Classrooms

...The engineers, tinkerers, and inventors who are still working on Red Sox technologies all labor under the illusion that all that is needed is a better solution. However, I think that you will find that if you examine Red Sox technologies closely enough, you will see that in each case they address the wrong problem.

March 07, 2004

True Lies

After reading Weinberger's Law:

whatever people most emphasize about themselves is the biggest lie they tell. If your boss tells you that he's all about teamwork, then he's all about himself. If Nixon says that he is not a crook, then he is.

I went back to what I wrote on Orkut for my profile:

I'm somewhere between an academic geek and a normal person.

Presumably, that statement is the biggest lie that I tell. It's not clear what to make of that.

Also, for what it's worth, I've never believed that George Bush is "compassionate." There was no compassion in the glint in his eye during the debates when he supported the death penalty and asserted that marriage is between a man and a woman. And I agree with David that John Kerry's claim to be just a regular guy probably is another instance of Weinberger's cynical law.

March 04, 2004

News of My Death, Reprise

I wrote about the coming death of newspapers quite a while back. One of my points was that the decline in young readership spells doom. Vin Crosbie has more data to buttress that view.

Minnesota Opinion Research Inc. (MORI), presented data showing that young adults are increasingly less interested in newspapers. Scarborough Research found that 44.6 percent of young adults read a newspaper each weekday in 1996 but only 38.5 percent did in 2001.

MORI found that 39 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds read a newspaper daily in 1997 but only 26 percent did in 2001.

Lots more data like that in the full article.

I'm also not at all surprised by this:

The newspaper industry has spent billions on the Internet to create online editions that are read by fewer people, less frequently and less fully than print editions. These online editions haven't helped newspapers attract younger readers, and most of them are a financial drain on the newspapers that support them.

Crosbie's recommendations have some merit. This one...

opening the walls of those newspaper companies' vertical integration and inter-syndicating their and other companies' content right down to the story level.

...even sounds like what I was saying in The Club Vs. The Silo.

But I don't think you can teach the dinosaurs to survive. The decline will be long and slow, and in fact the slowness of the decline will be what makes it impossible to bring about change in the industry. A sudden crisis might bring a creative response. Slow death won't.

The Inquisition

In this essay, I draw parallels between the way Congress treats economists and the way the inquisition treated Galileo.

Imagine that you were invited to a party held at a bar. You show up, and you give $5 to the host. The host welcomes you, slaps you on the back, and asks "What'll you have?" After you give him your order, he heads off in the direction of the bartender. You think that he's going to use your money to pay for your order. But in fact, he is using it to pay for a drink ordered by someone else, who already has been here for an hour. When he orders your drink, the host is going to tell the bartender to "put it on our tab."

And just how big a tab have we run up with Social Security and Medicare? What is the damage? Well, it turns out that the present value of the unfunded deficit in entitlements has been estimated by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters to be $45 trillion. Even if President Kerry or Edwards turned the rich people in the country upside down, emptying their pockets of all their financial assets, homes, cars, and everything else, that still could not cover the tab that Congress has run up on our behalf.

Gilder, the FCC, and the court

The worst thing you could do to telephone regulation is to turn it into a state and local regulatory circus, which is what the FCC proposed to do last year, due to Kevin Martin's treachery. I have no idea what legal basis a court found for voiding that regulation, but George Gilder is now optimistic.

The future will see a fibersphere of all optical networks reaching around the globe and linked to customers by a variety of mostly wireless devices. In this radically simpler and more powerful network architecture, the only locality will be the distance reachable at the velocity of light, not at the speed of politics.

Read the whole thing. Personally, I doubt that the local Bells are going to be the ones who bring broadband to the last mile. I favor deregulation because it is cleaner, not because I expect them to step up broadband investments.

March 01, 2004

Declan on Privacy

Declan McCullagh draws a distinction between private snooping and government snooping.

If you don't like Safeway's discount card, shop at Whole Foods, which doesn't offer one. If Amazon.com's recommendations about books based on your previous orders are annoying, try barnesandnoble.com or walk down to your local bookstore instead. You have a choice.

That choice vanishes when the government demands data.

Clay on VOIP

A couple of excerpts from his latest.

If Plan A is "Replace the phone system slowly and from within," Plan B is far more radical: "Replace the phone system. Period."
...Where Plan A is a fight between incumbent and upstart phone companies, Plan B says that we no more need a phone company than we need a text company.
...telephony is treated as a vice instead of an essential service -- the taxes and surcharges on a phone bill are more in line with the markup on alcohol and tobacco than with gas or air travel.

I think that voice will "tip" away from telephone companies when there is enough wireless Internet access available. If I can get wireless Internet access nearly everywhere, then I can ditch my cell phone and landline phone in favor of an Internet device that happens to be able to handle voice.

February 27, 2004

The Phone Deregulation Argument

First, James Glassman wrote,

The law says that the Bells have "[t]he duty to provide, to any requesting telecommunications carrier for the provision of a telecommunications service, nondiscriminatory access to network elements on an unbundled basis at any technical feasible point on rates, terms and conditions that are just reasonable and nondiscriminatory" [Sect. 251 (c) (3)].

UNE-P rates, set by state commissions, are certainly just and reasonable.

In response, Adam Thierer wrote,

Glassman, Fein, and Norquist have asked the free-market movement to follow them down a path that essentially rejects free markets and instead embraces big government solutions. In light of the miserable failures of the post-Telecom Act regulatory regime, they need to rethink their support for infrastructure sharing and give free markets and real deregulation a chance.

In rejoinder, former Senator Malcom Wallop writes,

Thanks in large part to AT&T; refusing to open its own network to MCI and Sprint in 1984, Ma Bell was broken up by the Reagan Administration (hardly an Administration known for its devotion to government regulation) into AT&T; long distance and the regional Bells. AT&T; was required to lease its network to competitors, resulting in vigorous facilities-based competition in long distance today. And with that competition comes choices for the Bells.

If the Internet had existed in 1984, then the decision to force AT&T; to lease its long-distance lines at regulated rates would have been wrong (Incidentally, I think that Wallop is wrong to imply that this was a Reagan Administration move--see this timeline.) The Internet would have been sufficient to enable competition in long-distance communication.

The idea that we need competition in something called telephone service is anachronistic. We need competition in what Bob Frankston calls connectivity. With connectivity, we do not need special regulatory regimes for voice bits as opposed to other bits.