ARTS & FARCES internet

Last night, legislation that would prohibit most telemarketers from calling numbers on a centralized list passed the Minesota House Ways and Means Committee. The proposed legislation now goes before the full House for a vote.

Companion legislation is currently working its way through the Minnesota Senate.

The bill calls for a US$1,000 fine for any telemarketer that calls any Minnesota resident who has enrolled on a state do-not-call list. Charities and politicians are exempt from the proposal as is any business communication where there is a pre-existing relationship. Additionally, the legislation would prohibit telemarketers from blocking caller ID devices or the display of false information on them.

What if a bunch of really smart people—or at least a bunch of smartasses—that really “get"the ideas behind Cluetrain and the net got together, virtually, and decided to lay new track?

Where would the track go? Would the trains run on time?

More evidence that business will never be the same.

About a week-and-a-half ago, I wrote that UserLand Software’s latest product, Radio Community Server (RCS) was a swing and a miss.

Problem is, I was looking at the little picture. All RCS does is allow you to serve a community of Radio-generated websites. But when the incremental cost to do that is US$0, that picture changes radically.

The big picture is that RCS is likely to have as great an impact on workgroup collaboration as networked personal computers did. Remember the first time you saw InBox. This is that all over again. (InBox was one of the first email programs for the Macintosh; it notified you of incoming email by scrolling the subject across the menu bar. This was when most people received 3 or 4 emails a day.)

Here’s the really big picture. I pushed hard for RCS to meet a price point that would allow individuals to sneak it in the back door of organizations. In a best case that would be under US$50, so the yearly license for Radio and RCS would be under US$100 and enterprising project managers could pay for it out of their discretionary budgets.

Isn’t this rich? The Bush administration’s acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs is seeking to bar a Nicaraguan official from entering the US because “...nations…were largely responsible for their own economic misfortunes and that they should not seek American financial support until they enforced official integrity and fiscal discipline.”

We cannot excuse the dastardly behavior of the likes of Mr. Byron Jerez of Nicaragua, or even attribute his behavior to the events that lead to putting that country in the tragic position of growing drugs for profit, rather than food for their own citizens. But, the following rationale from our assistant secretary is very rich, indeed.

Addressing the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Otto Reich had this to say: “When we are sure that there’s an individual or individuals who have stolen from the public treasury of their country, we are not going to let them into the United States of America.” (both quotes from the New York Times)

Is it possible for a health care system, when organized by institutions with primary objectives that are more tied to their own economic growth than to patient outcomes, to be a truly healthy system? Medicine acknowledges that cancer cells grow in total disregard of the cells around them. We’ve known since the early eighties that health care was becoming just another commodity in a free market with its marriage to the bottom-line of potent institutions. So, should we be surprised to discover that the typical forces that produce the Enron’s of the world are alive and well in the health care industry? A recent article in the New York Times suggests to me that kickbacks have evolved into a fine-art form with stock or options being offered to executives at Premier, one of two powerful buying groups that serve as middlemen for supply purchases for half the country’s non-profit hospitals. It looks like I’m not alone with that thought.

Larry R. Holden, president of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, according to the Times article by Walt Bogdanich, Barry Meier, and Mary Williams Walsh, had this to say: “Billions of dollars are being controlled by two companies, and nobody knows who they are. Nobody looks at their books. Nobody knows what companies they are investing in.”