MP3 and Text of Martin Luther King’s Speech.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Thinking Different – US Foreign Investment More Productive?
Dan Drezner writes:
Given the fact that foreigners currently have a net claim on $2.5 trillion in U.S. assets, one would expect the U.S. to be paying out a lot more in interest, dividends, and profits to foreigners than Americans would receive from their investments.
The weird thing is that, so far, this hasn’t been true. Last year the U.S. earned $36 billion more on their foreign investments than foreigners earned in the United States. The question is, why?
It turns out Americans both (seem to) make riskier investments and earn a higher return on investment. One extreme view (not Dan’s) suggests the following:
World Snowmobile Racing Championships – Eagle River
But the wintertime blues disappeared Friday night, Day 2 of the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby, which residents herald as the Indianapolis 500 of snowmobile racing.
Jimmy Blaze followed a fireworks display, which opened Friday Night Thunder, by defying physics and doing a back flip on a snowmobile to the whoops and mitten-muffled applause of the 10,000 people who crammed on a snow-covered hill at Eagle River Derby Track. The temperature had dropped to 25; the wind chill made it feel like 11 and a steady snow fell.
Hundreds of the young men and women in parkas bearing the logos of their favorite sled manufacturers, like Polaris and Arctic Cat, arrived by snowmobile. Families, too, planted camping chairs in the white bowl, but while mothers and fathers watched the racers hit 100 miles an hour on the track’s icy oval, their snowsuit-bundled children found a steeper hill for body-sledding.
The Fiction Zone that DC Has Become
Lessig explains why we’re (the US) so far behind in terms of broadband performance and economics:
How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan.
It will be interesting to see where our Wisconsin politicians land on this matter.
Blodget: The Bear Case for Google
Henry Blodget:
No one else is writing this piece, so it will have to be me. I should say upfront that I’m not predicting that this will happen (yet), and I’m certainly not making a recommendation. I’m just laying out a scenario that could kneecap Google and take its stock back to, say, $100 a share.Google’s major weakness is that it is almost entirely dependent on one, high-margin revenue stream. The company has dozens of cool products, but with the exception of AdWords, none of them generate meaningful revenue. From an intermediate-term financial perspective, therefore, they are irrelevant.
So, the question is, what could happen to AdWords, and what will happen to the company (and stock) if it does?
Rather ironic – and refreshing, coming from Blodget.
More on the KPMG Tax Shelter Case
Yet more examples of the spaghetti that is our tax law:
- Lynnley Browning:
Former KPMG tax professionals who are facing criminal charges over questionable tax shelters challenged the government yesterday to prove that they had broken the law.
The defendants filed more than two dozen motions in United States District Court in Manhattan yesterday, asking among other things that charges be dropped because no court had ever ruled the shelters in question illegal.
- David Reilly and Paul Davies:
One defense filing, submitted to the U.S. District Court in New York, accused prosecutors of “distorting” the facts and “obfuscating the truth-finding process” in order to win the case. By threatening KPMG with criminal indictment, the motion said, the government forced the firm to accept a “draconian” deferred prosecution agreement in which it admitted the tax strategies were fraudulent and agreed to waive attorney-client privilege.
“The goal is obviously not justice, nor truth, but instead the unsavory desire to tack another skin to the wall,” the filing said.
Data Mining Run Amok
Google is likely central to the Internet portion of this effort. There’s no doubt in my mind that Google has a fat contract with the Homeland Security Department. They can track your search behavior using cookies. Affiliates using cookies on adwords. Analyze the content of your weblog for dangerous phrases. Anonymity doesn’t help. They have your IP address and therefore can get the records they need to put a name and a credit history next to your Internet behavior (all without a warrant).
A USDA Yin to that Yang.
REAL ID
Bruce Schneier notes that REAL ID is costing more to implement than our politicians thought.
It’s Not The Technology That Raises Productivity, But How it’s Used
Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers’ desks is unlikely to contribute to productivity. A company has to rethink how business processes are handled to get significant cost savings.
As the Stanford economic historian Paul A. David has pointed out, the productivity effects from the electric motor did not really show up until Henry Ford and other industrialists figured out how to use it effectively to create the assembly line. The same is true for computers: just as the early industrialists had to learn how to use manufacturing technology to optimize the flow of materials on the factory floor, companies today must learn how to use information technology to optimize the flow of information in their organizations.
Canadian Electronic Rights Political Action
In this video, shot by AccordionGuy, a geek who lives in her riding (district), Bulte is asked whether she will take the pledge, and she responds with bile, vowing not to allow “Michael Geist and his pro-user zealots, and Electronic Frontier Foundation members” to “intimidate her.” Her entire response is an embarassment to her and her party, and it’s must-see video for anyone going to the polls in Parkdale/High Park.