Hasten down the wire

The blotter: Week ending 7 March 2010

Business

Bob Collins, writing in his news cut blog for Minnesota Public Radio, cites the Economist and US News with the first wave of a potential political push for delayed retirement. Collins notes, “the push to delay retirement is gaining some favor at a time when many older workers are being forced into early retirement because they’re losing their jobs.” Here’s the nut graf from US News: “The number of unemployed Americans ages 55 and older expressing interest in finding a job has grown by 60 percent since the end of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But finding work has proved difficult. The unemployment rate for older job seekers has more than doubled since 2007 to 7.2 percent in December 2009, and the average duration of the job search for older workers was 36 weeks in November—far longer than the 28 weeks most younger workers remain unemployed.”

ESRD

Gary Schwitzer, tenured University of Minnesota Journalism School associate professor, announced his resignation via Twitter. Schwitzer wants to focus on helping people understand issues related to healthcare and devote more time to healthnewsreview.org (hey, full-text for your RSS feed would be nice) which provides analysis of healthcare journalism. Last year, Schwitzer helped develop a health journalism program for the University’s J-School. It’s been shelved, because, after all, who needs quality healthcare journalism.

Intellectual property

Apple this week filed a series of lawsuits against HTC, the manufacturer of Google’s Nexus One smartphone which runs Google’s Android operating system. Apple claims infringement of 20 of its patents. The question is why Google wasn’t named in the actions.

Limits to growth in food co-ops?

In his editorial in the March-April 2010 issue of Utne Reader, “When Growth Isn’t Good,” founding editor Eric Utne laments the growth and necessary relocation of his neighborhood food co-op. The Linden Hills Co-op, in southwest Minneapolis, is one of the co-op movement’s shining stars, doing more than US$9 million each year in business and boasting more than 5,000 member-owners.

Utne’s grief comes from the potential impact of the co-op’s relocation on other locally owned small businesses in the neighborhood. And from the move from a small 5,500 square foot intimate boutique-like retail space to a larger more impersonal, more commercial space. Utne’s also unhappy about the Co-op’s management not communicating effectively about its growth plans.

But as Barth Anderson, writing as El Dragon, points out in his “The Utne Reader: Small grocery stores too big” response, Utne is thinking only about the micro element of a much larger picture. Anderson quotes Greg Reynolds of Riverbend Organic Farm as saying, “It’ll be a good bump for the co-op and it’s going to be a good bump for everyone who sells to them.” Anderson reports the Linden Hills Co-op is Riverbend’s fifth biggest customer and bought 33% more produce last year than it did the year before. “As a customer of mine,” Reynolds told Anderson, “Linden Hills Co-op is growing fast, and after a big move like this, they’ll buy more. They’re a fast-growing co-op, and that’s good.”

What’s “enough” for Utne clearly isn’t for either Linden Hills Co-op or Riverbend Organic Farm. In order for the entire organic foodchain to be sustainable, co-ops like Linden Hills Co-op and organic farms like Riverbend have to grow larger than Utne would like. One of the primary principles of the co-op movement—as Elizabeth Archerd, member services manager for the Wedge Co-op (which has annual sales US$30 million and occupies 11,000 square feet), points out in the comments to Anderson’s article—is voluntary and open membership. Co-ops are forced to grow because they don’t turn member-owners away.

It’s entirely possible that the Linden Hills Co-op could have communicated more effectively with regard to its growth plans, but I’ve got to say that I live in Saint Paul, and I’ve been hearing about the Linden Hills Co-op wanting to relocate to larger space for several years.

Are big box co-ops coming? If they’re cooperatively owned and managed, it really shouldn’t matter. Bringing good, affordable, sustainably produced food to more people should be seen as a good thing.

Disclosure: From 2002-06 I was Utne Reader‘s online managing editor and webmaster. I know Eric Utne personally and consider him a friend. None of that makes him any less wrong about this issue.

The blotter: Week ending 28 February 2010

Business

CitiBank blocked fabulis.com’s bank account for “objectionable content on their blog.” Fabulis.com appears to be setting up a rather innocuous travel portal for gay men.

Censorship

Iceland wants to become a haven for media freedom—under the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative—similar to the way that Delaware is a corporate haven. The idea is advancing, so far unopposed, in the Icelandic parliament. The initiatives core concepts—press freedom, source protection, and immunity for carriers—aim at forming the planet’s strongest journalism and whistleblower protection laws.

ESRD

Tracy Lynn Kaply’s blog, Kaply, Inc. is the best dialysis blog going. I’d say I just adore her attitude, but she’d probably punch me in the tits.

Intellectual property

Microsoft files DMCA notice on Cryptome alleging copyright infringement of the software giant’s surveillance compliance document. Cryptome owner John Young files a DMCA counterclaim, but Network Solutions takes Crytome offline and locks domain. Microsoft backs down a few days later.

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) internet chapter leaked. The leaked material indicates an intention to override the WIPO and to use three-strikes as a model. ACTA negotiations are happening in private, without transparency or public input. Cory Doctorow’s “Copyright Undercover: ACTA & the Web” provides the best overview I’ve found.

Medicare for all isn’t enough

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big-bandwagon supporter of single-payer healthcare in the US for more than 30 years—long before I was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease. As a small business owner I know very well the outrageous costs associated with health insurance and healthcare. Even when I was working at Utne Reader, I paid 100% of my health insurance—more than US$1,000 per month. Since mid-2006 my wife and I have been covered by one of the University of Minnesota’s group plans. For that I feel entirely grateful. US$112 every two weeks is a hell of a lot more affordable.

Like many in my generation, I’ve known I’ll probably have to continue working my entire life for at least 20 years. The knowledge of no retirement for you is mildly disturbing, but we’ve had decades to adjust. What’s really shocking, though, is the cost of our healthcare insurance when we reach age 65. If I can manage to keep from getting fired or laid off from the University for another 18 months or so, I can qualify for the institution’s group retirement plans. Group plans—especially really big ones like the University’s—are much cheaper than individual plans. So, best case, in a year-and-a-half or so I could hypothetically retire from my position at the University and continue to freelance or even go to work for someone else. Or, of course, continue working at the University’s College of Design.

Before I turn age 65, I’d be eligible for the same health insurance plan we have now, only I’d have to pay the full, non-subsidized rate of US$1,125.60 per month for coverage for my wife and myself. After my wife and I both turn age 65—five years for her; ten for me—we’d be eligible for Medicare and the University’s medigap (supplemental) insurance. That’s US$192.80 for Medicare Part B + US$520 for the University’s supplemental insurance—for a total of US$712.80 each month (plus co-pays and deductibles).

That’s best case scenario and last year’s rates. Health insurance rates have been doubling every seven years. It’s a sure bet I’ll be paying two or three times as much for health insurance in my “retirement” years than my mortgage. Because I’m an end-stage renal disease patient on dialysis, Medicare is closer than it may appear—I automatically qualified for Medicare (.pdf; 737KB) 18 months after I started dialysis.

Bee Bleedorn and the Minnesota Creatives

Berenice “Bee” Bleedorn is, without doubt, one of the most remarkable people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I spent a couple of hours last Sunday meeting with Bleedorn and her Minnesota Creatives— a group of her former students and colleagues—discussing creativity.

I had written a short article, “Is it possible to teach creativity?” (second item; the longer, original article is also available (.pdf; 61KB)) for Emerging, the bi-annual magazine of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. Someone in Bleedorn’s network sent her a copy of the article and she contacted both Brad Hokanson, the subject of the article, and me.

The magic for Bleedorn turned out to be the fact that Hokanson uses Paul Torrance‘s 50-year-old scoring criteria for creative and divergent thinking in his undergraduate creative problem solving course. Turns out that Bleedorn is one of the planet’s most effective evangelists for Torrance’s work.

My academic background—both as an undergraduate and graduate as well as a short teaching stint—is in humanistic psychology. There was a natural connection with Torrance’s creativity work, and he visited our campus several times each year. Most of us—students and faculty—were quite familiar with the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (.ppt; 2.7MB). So I was intrigued when Hokanson mentioned using Torrance’s methodologies in his classwork.

Bleedorn, as it turns out, took only a single course with Torrance—when he was still at the University of Minnesota—but the two carried on a professional relationship until Torrance’s death in 2003. Torrance hired Bleedorn as a research assistant and she went on to obtain degrees in education and educational psychology from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in leadership and human behavior from United States International University. Bleedorn founded the apparently now-defunct Institute for Creative Studies at the University of St. Thomas. She’s written extensively, most recently Education is Everybody’s Business: A Wake-Up Call to Advocates of Educational Change, published in 2005. Bleedorn is currently a principal with Creative Development Initiatives.

Bee Bleedorn is also 98 years old.

At the end of our meeting, Bleedorn—did I mention she’s 98 years old—asked me something along the lines of what my professional aspirations were. What I heard was, “what are you going to do with your life, sonny?” Horrifyingly, I didn’t have an answer.

Nielsen on usability progress

Usability improved by about six percent each year over the past decade according to Jakob Nielsen’s research. That works out to a seemingly-astounding 77 percent. That sounds like incredibly good news but it’s not: Usability is improving at a much slower rate than other areas of computing. Nielsen estimates that it’ll take “74 years to reach acceptable user experience quality.”

Ouch.

We’ve known for years that usability success rates are misleading. If 70 percent of users are successful, 30 percent fail. As usability experts, we tend to forget the 30 percent failure rate and focus on the 70 percent success rate.

It takes Nielsen most of a screen to get to the really useful data: “During the last decade, we’ve collected formal usability metrics for 262 websites. In 2000, the average failure rate was 39%; in 2010, the average failure rate is 22%.” Nielsen attributes a doubling of conversion rates (one percent to two percent) to the doubling of website usability.

The big elephant in the room question remains unanswered: What’s an acceptable usability failure rate?

Growing organs in vats: One step closer

Two years ago, Doris Taylor created a beating animal heart in her laboratory at the University of Minnesota. Now, two years later, the University moves Taylor’s research efforts forward with the announcement of the execution of an exclusive, global license agreement with Miromatrix Medical, Inc., a company founded by Taylor. According to the University’s media release, “the technology licensed to Miromatrix holds the promise of one day enabling the replacement of entire human organs with non-transplantable organs, harvested from either animals or donors, which are stripped of their cells and recellularized with cells from the recipient or compatible donor cells.”

Recellularization may eventually allow an end-stage renal disease patient—like me—to “grow” a replacement kidney (or two), using cadaveric organs from donor animals or humans as a basic infrastructure upon which my own cells can combine to create a matching organ. The advantage of using one’s own cells for a replacement organ cannot be understated; since the organ is grown from the patient’s own cells the chance of rejection is greatly reduced as is the necessity of ongoing immunosuppressive drugs.

Taylor’s recellurization process, which she says can be done “with virtually any organ,” uses detergents passed through the organ’s blood vessels to strip away cells from the source organ until only a nonliving infrastructure remains. The infrastructure is then repopulated with appropriate cells from the recipient (or a compatible donor). The structure and integrity of the source organ’s blood vessels are retained during the stripping process and a solution of oxygen and nutrients are then passed through these vessels. Because the recipient’s cells are used to repopulate the source infrastructure an immune response is not triggered.

University of Minnesota’s Great Conversations: Innovative Science; Doris Taylor and Patricia Simmons 14 April 2009:

Journalism or evangelism?

Earlier today, Dan Gillmor, whom I admire and respect a great deal, tweeted the following: “If I ran a news org and 46 percent of audience believed a lie, it would be a mission to make them know the truth” and provided a reference to Steve Benen’s “Confusion-based rage” piece for the Washington Monthly. Benen’s article was a response to Denis Boyles’s “We Are All French” in the National Review questioning the credulity of President Obama’s claim to have cut the taxes for 95% of working families in the US and analysis of a CBS News poll finding that 46 percent of the Tea Party supporters believe taxes to be the same and 44 percent believing taxes have gone up.

Gillmor’s tweet, “to make them know the truth,” took my breath away. Literally.

So I tweeted back: “Really? You’d make them know the truth? Journalism or evangelism? Thin ice methinks, very thin.” Gillmor and I ping-ponged comments back and forth a couple rounds and it dropped.

But this “make them know the truth” stuff is important. Just who’s truth are we talking about here? Yours? Mine? Theirs? Thanks, but no; I’m capable of thinking for myself and I’m almost always more comfortable with my truth than yours. That’s not the job of journalism. Journalism’s job is to report. Accurately. And to call bullshit when seen, even if it means—especially when it means—calling out individuals when they lie. They used to call that speaking truth to power. Journalists, for the most part, don’t do much of it any more and would be well served by following the Quakers’ lead.

To be clear, Obama did, in fact, lower the federal taxes for most US citizens. But the cuts were small—less than US$15 per week for the average worker—and in many cases offset by rising state taxes. To be even clearer, I’d gladly support higher federal and state taxes proportional to the positions on which Obama campaigned and was elected. Except Afghanistan.

At the same time though, we need to agree that journalists of every stripe must return to reporting and calling bullshit when appropriate. But please, leave the evangelism to the evangelists.

Is Raj Patel Maitreya?

Most Buddhists believe in the prophecy of Maitreya as a bodhisattva who will descend from Tusita (the closest Christian analogy is heaven) to Earth, become enlightened, and teach the pure Dharma. Maitreya is believed to incarnate after the teachings of Gautama (Dharma) have been forgotten. Instead of entering nirvana, Maitreya remains embodied so he or she can help and teach the rest of us in the building of a new world. The arrival of Maitreya marks the end of what Buddhists call the middle time, a low point of human existence on Earth.

Although Maitreya, arguably, originated with Buddhist thought, other spiritual movements and religions—including Islam, Zoroastrianism, Bahai, theosophy, the ascended master teachings, and others—have adopted the concept.

Throughout recorded history, individuals have claimed to be Maitreya, usually to form a minor Buddhist sect or cult.

One of the modern followings, Share International—an outgrowth of theosophy—believes Maitreya fulfills the prophecies of most major religions: Christianity (the second coming of Christ); Hinduism (the Kalki avatar of Vishnu); Islam (the Imam Mahdi); Judaism (the Jewish Messiah). Benjamin Creme, the originator of Share International, and his followers believe that Maitreya was embodied in the Himalayas and moved to London in 1977 and then to the US, emerging gradually so as not to impede free will. Largely as a reaction to Creme’s activities, the evangelical Christians (mostly in the US) claim Maitreya to be the Antichrist. Ironically, Creme and his followers do not claim Maitreya as a religious leader; only that Maitreya will unite the global population to reorder social priorities, making food, housing, education, and medical care universal human rights.

SEC may finally investigate role of Goldman Sachs in US mortgage market collapse

After years of doing absolutely nothing, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) appears to finally be investigating the role Goldman Sachs played in the failure of American International Group (AIG) and the collapse of the US mortgage market. Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story report for the New York Times that AIG had already covered Goldman’s insured losses by January 2008. The insurance giant suspected it had overpaid on Goldman’s claims and wanted some of its money back, “insisting that Goldman—like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment—had inflated the potential losses,” write Morgenson and Story. Goldman, for its part, wanted even more money all the while “resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities,” Morgenson and Story report.

In addition to the billions it received from AIG, Goldman also soaked the US taxpayers to the tune of US$12.9 billion.

You know the rest of the story: AIG bailed out Goldman and the US taxpayers bailed out AIG to the current tune of US$180 billion, with no guarantee that’s the end of it.

The SEC reportedly wants to know whether the demands of Goldman and other Wall Street firms “improperly distressed” the already flailing mortgage market. What’s not in doubt is that in 2006 Goldman began to make enormous bets that the US mortgage market would fail. As the mortgage market imploded, Goldman’s profits soared. It’s not inconceivable that Goldman would undervalue the securities in dispute with AIG. After all, the lower the securities were valued, the higher Goldman’s profits. Independent reports—if there is such a thing on Wall Street—indicate Goldman consistently valued the securities at prices lower than third parties, according to Morgenson and Story.

This is not to say that AIG is blameless in this fiasco. As Morgenson and Story report, AIG gambled heavily by writing more insurance than it could have ever possibly covered. More importantly, “without the insurer to provide credit insurance, the investment bank could not have generated some of its enormous profits betting against the mortgage market,” write Morgenson and Story.

Rethinking Apple’s iPad

Either Steve Jobs has so finely tuned his infamous reality distortion field (RDF) that it’s now capable of delayed affect or one of the most important pieces of Apple’s iPad introduction completely evaded me. Either way, I’ve come to partially rethink my position on the iPad.

Late yesterday I learned that Seattle-based Omni Group—the company that makes three pieces of software I live in every day: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan—has intentions to make iPad versions of its software. Most importantly, company chief executive Ken Case wrote that Omni has already started work on an iPad adaptation of OmniGraffle and is putting its work on OmniGraffle 6 for the Mac on hold. I’m not real happy about the Mac version being put on hold, but I learned a long time ago to try to ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

The importance that the bulk of Omni’s team came out of the University of Washington—an institution with one of the historically best human interface labs on the planet—can’t be understated.

Apple iPad? Wait for v2; it’ll have wings

In the single most underwhelming product announcement in either of Steve Jobs’ tenure at Apple, the company today announced its iPad tablet computer. Available in April 2010 and ranging in price from US$400 for 16GB of flash storage to US$699 for 64GB (3G wireless networking costs an additional US$130), the iPad is literally a 9.7-inch, 1024x768 iPod Touch.

Jobs declared that Apple had negotiated a “breakthrough” US$30 per month unlimited data plan deal with AT&T. That’d be the same AT&T that already can’t support the network demands of iPhone users. And breakthrough? Well, not so much; I had an unlimited mobile data plan from Qwest for US$25 per month several years ago, on a network with actual capacity.

Existing iPhone/iTouch software will work on the new device in either a pixel-for-pixel rendering in the center of the display, or in what has to be an extremely ugly “pixel double” full-screen mode. How many developers will be willing to make iPad-specific versions of their iPhone software? If the process is the least bit resource-intensive, my bet is not many. Before dismissing this as curmudgeonly carping, remember that Apple solely—and heavy-handedly—controls the only distribution channel and that Apple has set the price ceiling for serious apps at US$10.

Forget about using the iPad while standing up. The iPad’s keyboard is the same software keyboard used in the iPhone/iTouch, taking up half the screen when deployed. While seemingly almost useable while sitting (an optional dock with physical keyboard will be available), how fast can you type with one hand? Bet good money that somebody right now, in his basement, is developing the iBib—some sort of strap contraption that lets you suspend the iPad from around your neck in order to type with both hands while standing or walking around.

Other complaints: The same walled garden ecosystem as the iPhone/iTouch, no camera(s), no Flash support in the browser, no multitasking, limited video codec support, no DisplayPort, and a weird aspect ratio (it appears to be close to 4:3). Most of these can be fixed.

The one feature of the iPad that I find extremely interesting is the processor: a 1GHz Apple A4, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip. Apple’s now in the chip design business and it’s only a matter of time until this approach migrates up (or down, depending on your perspective) the company’s mobile product line.

Update: Thursday, 28 January 2010, 07:39AM CST: After mulling on my intense subliminal distaste for the iPad, I think I now understand it: The device is targeted solely at consuming media, not creating it. (Also added material to third graf about Apple’s ham-fisted control of only distribution channel and setting price ceiling for serious apps at US$10.)

Toward a user experience strategy

ARTS & FARCES has specialized in user experience for many years, but I’ve been reluctant to write much about the topic. For a variety of reasons, that’s changing now and I’m adding a new “User experience” section to Hasten down the wire.

What better way to kick-off the new section than to publish the basic process the company has been using for more than 30 years to architect information, first in video and print and now most recently on the web. The process has evolved over the years and while I’ll begin with a brief skeleton, my intention is to expand it using Hasten down the wire‘s wiki and eventually publish it as a book-length work.

Important note: This is a work in progress, an attempt to make years of notes understandable to a broad audience. I’ll be adding to it regularly, as time allows, so bookmark it and come back often. In a break from my usual practice of being fully transparent in changes made after initial publication, I’m just going to integrate changes and additions into this article in order to keep it easier to read. And don’t forget to check the project wiki.

Corporate political spending limits rejected

This past Thursday the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (.pdf; 2.6MB), ruled that the US government may not limit the spending of corporations in political elections. The only limitation on corporate political speech that remains is the ban on direct contributions to candidates. Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where every vote is for sale and each of them has a price.

Corporations were granted fictional personhood in 1886 when the US Supreme Court, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, found that corporations were subject to due process and beneficiaries of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. With that decision, corporations were solidly identified with private property instead of the public grants and interests that had been their overarching governance previously. That single decision also significantly weakened the public claims on corporate charters, and is seen by most corporate governance experts as an endorsement of the corporation being a “natural entity” with natural rights, rather than a created fiction chartered by the state for a specific purpose in the public interest, subject to state control. It was a mistake; an error.

As David D. Kirkpatrick notes in the New York Times, “A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union, or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”

The court’s ultra-conservative majority used a questionable interpretation of the First Amendment to establish that corporations enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens. Except more. In short, if this ruling does nothing else—and many experts claim that large corporations will not exercise their new rights—it more solidly codifies corporate personhood. Already some corporations are not welcoming this new development. According to an Associated Press report, some 40 corporate executives sent a letter to congressional leaders, through Fair Elections Now, urging approval for public financing of US congressional elections.

FBI illegally obtains US telephone call records

The FBI illegally obtained US telephone call records—including those of Washington Post and New York Times journalists—between 2002-06 by falsely claiming a terrorism emergency and later issuing national security letters to make the seizures appear legitimate. That’s what John Solomon and Carrie Johnson, writing for the Washington Post, have uncovered. “A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed,” write Solomon and Johnson.

The Post writers report that FBI Director Robert Mueller knew about the problems in “late 2006 or early 2007.” Concerns about the bureau’s illegal actions first arose in late 2004 but the illegal activities continued until 2006, when the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation began.

The illegal requests were clear violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and involved records of calls, not the content of the calls. Prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI was required to obtain subpoenas or national security letters to gain access to telephone records. The USA Patriot Act broadened the use of national security letters by allowing lower-level officials approve them in more cases but still required a verified link to an active terrorism case.

New York Times: Times Select II?

The New York Times is ready to announce its second attempt at a paywall, charging for access to its website. So reports Gabriel Sherman writing for New York magazine.

The US paper of record’s first attempt at erecting a paywall around its online content, Times Select, was an abysmal failure. Readership for the content behind the paywall fell dramatically and columnists including Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd publicly verbalized their frustration.

This time around, the Times will try a metered system similar to the one pioneered by the Financial Times. Online readers will be able to read a set number of articles at no charge before being required to subscribe. The key will be how many free article reads will be allowed per day. Set the number too low and all of your Googlejuice and a good bit of your advertising revenue immediately evaporate. Set the number too high and it’s probably not a sustainable business model.

Sherman opines that Times chair Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may make an official announcement in a few weeks, citing unnamed source speculation that “Sulzberger will strike a content partnership” for Apple’s forthcoming iSlate tablet computing device, rumored to be announced on January 27.

The New York Times is a special case. On one hand it’s the undisputed US newspaper of record. On the other, its an exemplar of everything that’s wrong with corporate media. Web content professionals everywhere will be watching this closely, as the struggle for a sustainable business model for online publishing continues.

Breaking the early adopter barrier

I’ve broken some kind of barrier. My interest level in early technology adoption has gone from eleven to less than one. The days of acquiring the latest and greatest on the day of release (or close to it) are over for me.

Here’s the question: Is it me or is it technology itself? I suspect the latter.

I passed on the iPhone because it’s a walled garden—you can’t add anything to it that doesn’t pass muster with Apple (unless you jailbreak it)—it runs on AT&T’s craptacular network (yes, yes, the very same AT&T that cooperated in former President Bush II’s warrantless wiretapping program, all indications are that it sucks as a telephone, and its two-year contract costs more than a MacBook Pro. Are you kidding me?

Google’s Nexus One may hold promise, but it’s too soon to tell. Google is learning the hard way that when you actually sell stuff—as opposed to giving away services in order to sell ads around them—you have to provide support. And real support services cost real money. Google releases a mobile operating system that is open source—or at least partly so; the services on which it actually makes money remain proprietary—and then turns around and competes with its partners. Is that a sustainable business model? Really?

My wife and I gave up our mobile phones last October when Qwest, our carrier, got out of the business and became an agent for Verizon. We had grandfathered plans: US$30 per month for 1,300 minutes on each phone plus US$25 for unlimited 3G data on my line. None of the other vendors can come close to that deal. So we passed, and added unlimited voice to our landline. No dropped calls and exceptional call quality; imagine that. My line in the sand for mobile is now US$50 per month per line for unlimited voice and data.

New York Times: Walk away from your mortgage

Strategic default. When a Wall Street firm does it, it’s just business; when an underwater homeowner does it, it’s morally repugnant and irresponsible. What’s wrong with this picture? Roger Lowenstein, writing for the New York Times, opines that there’s no difference and that the government should stop trying to scare the pants off delinquent homeowners and get to work forcing Wall Street to modify these fraudulent loans. It would be in the best interest of those deeply underwater on mortgages to simply walk away from them.

What Lowenstein doesn’t say is that it’s well past time for Wall Street to write down their losses on these bad bets.

Strategic default is actively choosing not to pay an underwater mortgage—the condition where more is owed on the mortgaged property than the property is worth. Lowenstein estimates that’s 10.7 million properties in the United States including 65% of all residential mortgages in Nevada. That’s nearly 25% of all US mortgages.

Obama flip-flops on taxing health insurance benefits

During the last presidential campaign, the unions had to bust their collective asses to get their membership to support Barack Obama. They did it by comparing John McCain’s position with regard to taxing health insurance benefits with that of Barack Obama. McCain promised to tax health insurance benefits; Obama promised not to. Fish. Barrel. Or so it would seem.

A year into his presidency and Barack Obama has flip-flopped on the issue, endorsing a tax on high-end employer-provided health insurance. As currently written in the US Senate healthcare reform bill, individual insurance policies with annual total premiums higher than US$8,500 and family policies higher than US$23,000 would be taxed at a flat 40% rate. This is far from Obama’s original flip-flop plan of taxing insurance companies in order to ding high-flying Wall street executives.

At first glance it appears that only corporate executives with really top-of-the-line health insurance policies would be affected, but Steven Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times, reports that many union members will also be subject to the tax. “... [W]hich by one union survey would affect one in four union members.”

Make no mistake. I’m a union supporter through and through. Always will be. Since 2006, I’ve been quite fortunate to have 90% of my family’s health insurance paid by my employer, the University of Minnesota. I have what I find to be pretty close to top-of-the-line health insurance and the total 2010 cost for my wife and me is US$14,089.40. My co-pays are all under US$150, averaging US$10 for drugs and US$30 per month for dialysis. Either the unions are getting ripped-off on their insurance or they’re overpaying by almost double.

Don’t be evil—much

Don’t be evil. That’s Google’s widely known corporate motto. Too bad it’s been rubbed away completely like button labels on a cheap remote control.

As the network neutrality debate has grown more intense, Google has stepped up its public relations machinery to pump out policy statement after policy statement advocating the benefits—no, the necessity—of transparency and free expression.

David Kravets, writing for Wired, cites a Google policy statement dated December 16, 2009 as saying, it was a “company that believes deeply in free expression” and that it was “determined to continue to do our part and make new, significant contributions to promote free expression in 2010.”

Because we must not have gotten it the first time, in a policy statement dated December 18, 2009, Google admits it hasn’t “always done a good job of talking about Google’s philosophical approach to privacy overall—or sharing our strong belief in harnessing data to create products and services that are useful for our users.” Google goes on to write that it’s spent the past several weeks talking with “policymakers, consumer advocates, think tanks, trade associations, and journalists” about Google’s approach to privacy. The company touts three major privacy initiatives for 2009: interest-based advertising, the data libration front, and Google Dashboard. “For 2010, we’re looking forward to taking even more steps to help users protect their privacy,” ends the policy statement.

Obama’s lost year

So, a lot of us way out here on the left got caught up in the emotion of Obama’s oratory and sloganeering. He couldn’t have been clearer:

“Barack Obama will refocus our efforts on Afghanistan. He has a comprehensive strategy to succeed in Afghanistan with at least two more U.S. combat brigades, more resources and training for the Afghan Army, and a comprehensive development strategy.”

That’s one campaign promise he’s kept, and we should have been paying closer attention back then. Okay, we’ll accept responsibility for that one.

But how do you explain Obama’s failure to follow through on his other campaign promises:

• Not closing the Guantanamo Bay prison (and worse, moving it to Illinois)
• extending Bush’s state secrets privileges
• failing to allow five days of public comment before signing bills
• failing to restrict warrantless wiretaps
• failing to stop the use of torture
• failing to re-regulate Wall Street and turning the bailout into a gift
• letting the insurance cartel, PhRMA, and the healthcare providers write healthcare non-reform
• and probably worst of all, failing to close the revolving door between lobbyists and government

US Congress favoring kidney transplants over dialysis

Demonstrating yet again that they have no gift of nuance, or even common sense, Congressional Democrats are proposing to cover the cost of kidney transplant drugs at the expense of dialysis patients.

Since 1973, Medicare has covered most of the healthcare costs of those with end-stage renal disease (permanent kidney failure) regardless of age, including dialysis and transplantation. The government-run healthcare program currently ends payment for transplant anti-rejection drugs—which currently run about US$3,000 per month—after three years. Only the US Congress could institute a policy that uncaring, stupid, and wasteful. People are dying waiting for a kidney. If they get a transplant and can’t afford to pay for the anti-rejection drugs after three years, they invariably lose the organ and go back on dialysis.

According to Kevin Sack, writing for the New York Times, “Medicare spends and average of $17,000 a year on kidney transplant recipients, most of it for the anti-rejection drugs, compared with $71,000 a year on dialysis patients and $106,000 for a transplant.”

A provision of the healthcare reform bill (.pdf; 3.3MB) passed last month by the US House of Representatives extends Medicare coverage for anti-rejection drugs for transplant patients for life, starting in 2012. Unfortunately the provision is paid for by setting a flat fee for dialysis treatments and related medications—called “bundling.” Some dialysis providers argue that the new flat fee won’t cover their costs. But dialysis providers are wildly profitable—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. They’re also wildly inefficient: Bill Peckham did the math last October (also take the time to read his comments to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on the proposed payment rule).

Huffington Post enters online publishing business model derby

The latest entry in the sustainable online publishing business model derby is Huffington Post with embedded commercial tweets and comments. Is it just me or is each new derby entry dumber than the last?

Nat Ives, writing for Ad Age, notes “The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.” Ives goes on to state the obvious: that users will probably accept the new attempt to attract attention so long as the ads are clearly labeled as such.

Ives cites Greg Coleman, Huffington Post president and chief revenue officer, as saying “a health-care company sponsoring a Twitter page around health-care policy might post a paid Tweet ‘to bring to fore the facts’ but in a neutral way.” As if a healthcare company—any healthcare company—will bring actual facts to bear in healthcare reform policy. And in a neutral way? Hah. Coleman tells Ives that these really new ad products—along with third-party traffic research and hiring four senior sales executives—“should more than double revenue by next year and expand it more than six times during the next three years.”

Huffington Post’s traffic is down only a little since Obama’s election, but the site is focusing more and more on the nonpolitical. Ives reports that nonpolitical articles accounted for 82% of pageviews in November 2009.

The trouble with TiVo

When my wife and I first got our TiVo—a Series 2 Toshiba with a built-in DVD player—we were nearly ecstatic. I selected this model because it was the only TiVo available that didn’t require a TiVo subscription. It had limits: most of the fancy TiVo features didn’t work and we could only schedule recordings for three days ahead. But it worked. For a while.

Within a few months it died. I opened it up and was surprised to find hand-installed jumper wires on the circuit board. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but I shipped it back to Toshiba and they repaired it. It’s been working ever since.

What I really want to do is transfer files from our various Macs to the TiVo. But since I’m not a TiVo subscriber, no can do. Bad TiVo, bad.

But then came hi-def and that was the tipping point. I’m in the process of replacing the TiVo with the following:

• Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server
• Kanex Mini DisplayPort Adapter to HDMI 1080p Video w/Digital Audio
• Elgato EyeTV Hybrid with EyeTV 3 software (disclosure Mike Evangelist at Elgato provided this; many thanks Mike)
• Either Behringer Truth B2031A active monitors or B&W’s forthcoming MM-1 powered speakers

Yes, I know this is considerably more expensive than a TiVo with a subscription, but it’s capable of so much more. The Mac Mini will serve as an internal workgroup server and an external prototyping and staging server as well as a media server. There’s no longer any question of whether or not a given media type play; if it’ll play on one of our MacBook Pros, it’ll play on the Mini.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. puts squeeze on responsible users of credit

Today Chase declined a US$30 charge on my WaMu credit card. It was embarrassing as I was at lunch with my manager and a co-worker. When I got back to my office I called to find out what was going on. My credit limit had been “reduced for non-use.” Okay, fine. Fix it. Five different Chase representatives demurred, saying it “wasn’t possible.” Okay, cancel the account. Not so much as a hand-wave attempt at retaining the account. Never mind that I paid the current balance off electronically two days ago.

I’m familiar with Chase declining my card. It happened last August in Atlanta when Chase declined a pretty big charge at the Grand Hyatt Atlanta in Buckhead. A phone call cleared that one up. Chase just wanted to verify that it was me. That’s bullshit, of course; Chase could have asked the hotel to verify my identification.

Now it’s all coming into focus. I use about half of the available credit line each month, paying the balance off in full each month. Apparently responsible credit use doesn’t appeal to Chase, especially in light of the pending financial industry re-regulation that really isn’t but you can bet there’ll be a lot of Congressional chest-thumping going on.

Shortly after I tweeted my most recent Chase experience, Glenn Fleishman tweeted: “Chase is shedding all its pay-off customers by being as unpleasant as possible. I canceled an acct; they didn’t even try to retain.” Well of course, why try to retain responsible users of credit when you can rely on taxpayer bailouts from here on out.

It probably didn’t help that I’m party to a false credit report class action Chase recently settled.

For now it’s all debit card all the time for me. My bank—which reaped absolutely nothing from the giant “too big to fail” clusterfuck bailout—offers zero liability with 60 day notice of fraud or loss. That’s good enough for now, although I’ve also been advised to link a Schwab One brokerage account with a Schwab Bank Invest First credit card which earns 2% cash back on all purchases. I can find the former on the Schwab site, but not the latter. I’ve asked Chuck, but he really needs to fix his website.

Meanwhile, Jamie Dimon, I hope I live long enough to see you third in line in a perp walk behind Bernie Madoff and Lloyd Blankfein. It will happen.

Please, someone put AOL out of our misery now

Of all the online publishing business models to come around the bend, AOL’s is perhaps the most disturbing. Here’s how AOL intends to rebuild its brand as a go-to online content provider: Pay pennies on the dollar for badly written—but quick—“content” based on whatever search terms are at the top of the Google stack right now. Oh, and of course bring advertisers as closely into the production process as possible.

How could that lose?

So, while Rupert Murdoch is calling Google a pirate for aggregating his content, and thinking of taking his marbles and going home, AOL thinks there’s gold in the Google mines. And let’s be clear. Murdoch could prevent Google from spidering his content by adding one simple entry to a robots.txt file on each of his servers. Oh, but never mind; Google blinked before it became a real issue.

You might think this is a fancy-dancy new approach on AOL’s part, but you’d be wrong. It’s actually a retread of what Yahoo did during the last Olympics. Watching the query stream and responding with crap has been done. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.

Has Twitter jumped the shark?

First there was Twitter’s suggested user list. An abomination Ev Williams said he’d kill as soon as the service rolled out its lists feature. Well, lists are here and the suggested user list lives on.

Then, earlier this week, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the BBC that Rupert Murdoch should be open because “the future is in openness not [being] closed.” Pot. Kettle. Black.

The very next day came Twitter COO Dick Costolo telling the RealTime CrunchUp audience about the service’s forthcoming advertising. “It will be fascinating,” said Costolo. “Non traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.” Nothing at all vague in that hand-waving.

Now comes news that one of Dave Winer’s test accounts was suspended because Twitter’s “specialists”—wait for it—“found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules.”

Are you kidding? I don’t think I’m alone in using Twitter more for pre-harvested links than anything else?

So, the question of the day is, has Twitter jumped the shark? By my count it indeed has; four times.

Media food fight in the Twin Cities

Disclosure: In the final days of Utne Reader as an independent publication, Mike Sweeney was brought in as an advisor. Utne Reader was sold shortly thereafter to Ogden Publications, Inc., and I was laid off.

Newly-minted Star Tribune chair, Mike Sweeney, gets space today to rail against government-funded media, or, more accurately, government-funded competition for his Twin Cities media empire.

Sweeney begins with an apparently astounding lack of knowledge of both the internet and publishing business models, writing, “Large technology-driven companies like Google and Yahoo are competing with niche businesses like Politico and the Huffington Post.” But that’s another article.

Sweeney’s first swipe at his cross-metro, partially publicly-funded competitor, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), is claws-in and mostly just a playful tap: “My colleagues have stressed the special obligation a news organization has to be open and transparent.” MPR recently received a US$5 million grant for enterprise reporting, the source of which it has failed to disclose. The public radio outlet hasn’t disclosed the total compensation of its top-level management in, oh, I don’t know, 20 years or so discloses executive compensation each year on publicly available IRS Form 990. Local media critic David Brauer wrote an excellent analysis of the most recent MPR 990, although total executive compensation remains somewhat unclear.

Washington Post’s slide into irrelevance

It’s mostly just sad to watch one of the US’s best newspapers slide slowly but inexorably into irrelevance. It’s not all publisher Katharine Weymouth‘s fault, but sure as eggs is eggs, she’ll be blamed. Weymouth’s seemingly sole objective has been to kill, er, integrate Washington Post Digital with the company’s print operations since she became publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post Media Group in 2008.

Weymouth, Katherine Graham‘s granddaughter and Donald Graham‘s niece, this week disclosed that she was aiming for a Washington Post Digital funeral, er, integration date of January 1, 2010, taking two giant steps closer to her goal. What’s most surprising in Weymouth’s announcement is that digital advertising and marketing will be set up separately from their print counterparts. This is an 180-degree turn from the day Weymouth took over as chief executive of the newly-created Washington Post Media entity in February 2008, when the business sides of the online and print divisions were merged, “while maintaining separate newsrooms and editorial decision-making.”

Caroline Little, who was the head of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive resigned two months after Weymouth took over and Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com executive editor, left later in 2008.

Weymouth was also responsible for the Post‘s infamous alternative business plan: charging lobbyists US$25,000 and up to sponsor private, off-the record dinner parties—Weymouth called them “salons”—with Post journalists at her home. She backtracked almost immediately when the story broke.

Big pharma price run-up to cover US$8 billion cost cutting pledge

Remember when big pharma pledged to support healthcare reform by reducing costs by US$8 billion each year—US$80 billion over 10 years—after the reform measure is in place. Then you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the prescription drug cartel raised prices this year by more than US$10 billion, or about nine percent. Meanwhile the Consumer Price Index has fallen by 1.3 percent.

This is the same kind of price run-up that occurred when Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit.

Merck spokesperson Ron Rodgers told New York Times reporter Duff Wilson, “Price adjustments for our products have no connection to health care reform.” Wilson reports that Merck raised its prices about 8.9 percent over the past year.

University of Minnesota professor of pharmaceutical economics Stephen Schondelmeyer found that drug prices in the US have risen this year by 9.3%. Schondelmeyer’s research was funded by AARP. The prescription drug cartel bizarrely argues that Schondelmeyer’s research is politically motivated.

Revise and extend, right into the penalty box

Surprise! The healthcare lobby has sock puppets in the US Congress. Ace reporter from New York Times thinks he’s onto a big story uncovering it, but fails to get half the story and the half he does get is incomplete. The sock puppetry is a defensive reaction to excellent independent reporting.

As American citizens, we have two options to regain control of our representative democracy: Draft our representatives and take our chances, just like we do with jury duty. Because no one would know who the draftees were before hand, there’d be no opportunity for before-the-fact lobbying; the lobbyist industry would wither and die in one cycle. Either draft them. or adopt some sort of penalty box for our elected officials. Get caught in a lie, or with your hand in the till, or shilling for one of your contributors, or with your dick where it doesn’t belong and bam, just like that, you sit out a few voting rounds. If the penalty is bad enough, you’re ejected—from that game or the season.

Take the 42 members of the US House of Representatives—22 Republicans and 20 Democrats—that parroted a script from a Genentech lobbyist directly into the Congressional Record. That would be a game-ending penalty. No more votes from these rubes for the duration of the healthcare reform debate. Robert Pear, reporting for the New York Times, calls it “an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.” Before too long we’d be down to three or four principled individuals debating the merits of, well, the principles of the issue.

Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-New Jersey) told Pear that he regretted “the language was the same. I didn’t know it was.” Pascrell said he “got his statement from his staff and ‘did not know where they got the information from.’” First, it wasn’t information; it was a script. Second, that you didn’t know where it came from is despicable, rising to the level of ejection.

There were, of course, political contributions involved. And what does Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office have to say to Pear about the situation? “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.” No, of course not.

Reverse rope-a-dope healthcare reform passes US House

By five votes—five votes—the US House approved a healthcare reform plan that at best is mediocre, at worst pitifully lacking. Firedoglake appropriately sums it all up: “Last night, the morally weak failures that are the Democratic Party pulled off a well-executed Reverse Rope-a-Dope.” Best of all, no one—and I mean no one—saw it coming.

House members voted 220 to 215 to approve the legislation that will cost US$1.1 trillion over 10 years paid for by new fees and taxes and Medicare cuts. The New York Times has the results of the roll call vote and an outstanding analysis of the Democrats who voted against the bill. One Republican, Representative Anh Cao (R-Louisiana), voted in favor of the bill while 39 Democrats voted against it.

In Minnesota, the five Democrats voted in favor of the legislation; the three Republicans voted against it.

Democrats caved on subsidized insurance coverage for abortions, passing Representative Bart Stupak‘s (D-Michigan) amendment (.pdf; 82KB) by a vote of 240-194. That’d be 64 Democrats actively looking for progressive primary opposition. [....]

The lost manuscripts: Social implications of hypermedia

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Hypermedia is indeed an interesting development for computer users and offers a wealth of benefits that appear to be available to all. Hypermedia is not, however, a panacea. There are some inherent problems of a far-reaching nature that we must begin to address now.

It is interesting to note that with the introduction of any new technology—and make no mistake, hypermedia is definitely a new technology—it has taken an overly long time for the legal issues and societal impact to catch up with the actual introduction and subsequent availability of the technology. Hypermedia, to date, is no different, notwithstanding the efforts of many hypermedia pioneers to the contrary. In this chapter we will take a step-by-step look at the underlying issues relevant to potential access to an overwhelming amount of information.

US Senate Judiciary Committee chops wood, carries water for Obama

Last Thursday the US Senate Judiciary Committee, in an 11-8 voice vote, reauthorized three sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that expire at the end of the year. Proposed changes from civil libertarians were rejected. The reauthorization now passes to the Senate floor.

The first section reauthorized the roving wiretap provision of the legislation allowing investigators to get secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders for surveillance of a specific target rather than a specific telephone number. Prior to passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, investigators were required to get a separate warrant for each number they wanted to monitor.

The second section reauthorized the FISA court ordered seizure of “any tangible things” deemed to be relevant to a terrorism- or espionage-related investigation. Anything is subject to surveillance—business records, medical records, personal financial records—anything. And it only has to be deemed “relevant” to a terrorism- or espionage-related investigation.

Finally, the Judiciary Committee reauthorized the “lone wolf” provision, allowing FISA court ordered wiretapping of a terrorism-related suspect who is not connected to any known terrorist group of foreign government. Even though the US government admits to having never used this authorization.

Gillmor’s new rules for journalism

Prompted by the anniversary stories of Lehman Brothers failing and the run up to the global financial collapse, Dan Gillmor offers a list of new rules for journalism. Gillmor’s list appears in two parts on his own weblog, Mediactive (here and here), and I hesitated to link to the Guardian‘s compilation—because it diminishes the information authority of Gillmor’s original work; in the best of all possible worlds, the Guardian would have linked to Gillmor’s originals. Someday maybe we’ll get this information authority thing right (perhaps it should be the 23rd new rule: We will link to the authoritative source in all cases possible).

Having immense respect for Gillmor, I have a few nits to pick with his new rules.

Gillmor’s idea of an opt-in service controlled by the publisher to push notices of journalistic errors out to readers is severely flawed. Corrections should be fully and transparently embraced by all publications. Corrections should be given the same weight and prominence as the error they rectify. And I shouldn’t even have to write this, but yes, the correction should actually rectify the error. Completely. I really like the practice of using the delete tag in online publications. It makes for harder reading but the added value of precise context is a fair trade off. Any context at all is lost under Gillmor’s scenario.

Gillmor writes, “We would not run anniversary stories and commentary except in the rarest of circumstances.” It’s not really clear if Gillmor is suggesting that commentary doesn’t have a place in journalism, or that commentary about anniversary stories is not journalism. If the latter, no problem; if the former, I disagree. Commentary absolutely has a place in journalism so long as biases and conflicts of interest are clearly and transparently disclosed. Some of the most outstanding journalism in our collective history has actually been commentary.

The most important of Gillmor’s rules is “We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence.” As we begin to reform journalism for the 21st century, please, let this be the first thing we get right. Second up, and closely tied to this, would be Gillmor’s rule of dropping unnamed sources. Anonymity should be granted only rarely and then used only with a disclaimer. If an unnamed source lies, he or she will be exposed.

Tasini’s seven reasonable proposals

Jonathan Tasini, former president of the National Writers Union, current executive director of Labor Research Association, and named plaintiff in New York Times Co. v. Tasini—which set the bar for the electronic media rights of print freelance writers—has written a new book, The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves and the Looting of America. The title speaks for itself and Tasini offers seven sound proposals to get America back on track:

1. Raise the minimum wage to US$10; to US$20 by 2014.
2. Enact single-payer, universal coverage healthcare by passing H.R. 676.
3. Create a mandatory, universal pension plan (pdf; 696KB) backed by the government
4. Raise the top income tax rate to 40%-45% and add a new bracket of 50% for those with incomes of more than US$1 million. Tax investment income at the same rate as ordinary income.
5. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
6. Mandate publicly-financed elections.
7. Mandate a proportional pay cut on executives who cut workers’ pay.

As to order of implementation, it’s painfully obvious after the healthcare reform debacle in the US Senate Finance Committee that none of this gets done without starting with number six.

A different kind of car; a different kind of car company: Not so much

Yesterday, US carmaker Saturn—a subsidiary of General Motors—failed. As soon as I heard the news, I tweeted: “Different kind of car—different kind of car company. Well, not so much: http://tr.im/Agkc (I own a 15-year old Saturn SL2).” In quick succession, I tweeted:

“Saturn was doing fine independently. Too fine for GM, apparently, as it stupidly spun the company back in years ago.”

“1994 Saturn SL2 is the only American car I’ve owned since 1968 (that was a ‘66 Chevy Bel-Air). Still own the Saturn, still hoping it lasts.”

Shortly after I got home, I got a call from Tiffany Hsu, a staff writer on the business desk of the Los Angeles Times. She’d seen my comments on Twitter and wanted to talk Saturn.

I mostly don’t talk to reporters anymore; if I have anything remotely approaching worthwhile to say, I’ll do it here. But I’ve made two exceptions lately: I spoke with Hart Van Denburg of local alt-weekly City Pages about TwinCitiesTwitter and I spoke with Hsu of the Los Angeles Times because I was familiar with and mostly appreciate her byline.

We talked for a good while about Saturn, GM, and what comes after capitalism. I mentioned that I thought GM should have had its corporate charter revoked—not just for the Saturn fiasco, but for a wide variety of bad, stupid, and harmful acts its made over its history. Instead we have a US Supreme Court considering extending corporate personhood even further.

Predictably, none of that made it into Hsu’s article, but I did get the closing quote: “I’m upset because here we have another major American corporation screwing things up as totally as humanly possible,” Fraase said.

JUSTICE Act to reign-in USA PATRIOT Act

The US Congress will begin to hold committee hearings this week on reauthorizing three sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that are set to expire at the end of the year. A handful of progressive Democrats are not only opposed to reauthorization but are steadfast in pushing for sweeping changes to the legislation.

The three sections up for reauthorization are warrants authorizing roving wiretaps (used about 140 times from 2004-09), warrants allowing the seizure of “any tangible things” relevant to an investigation (used more than 250 times from 2004-09), and the provision allowing a warrant authorizing a wiretap on a single suspect not connected to any foreign terrorist group or government (never used from 2004-09).

Already Senators Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), John Tester (D-Montana), Tom Udall (D-New Mexico), and Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) have introduced the Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools in Counterterrorism Efforts Act of 2009—the JUSTICE Act (.pdf; 147KB). The proposed legislation would impose safeguards on the federal government’s surveillance powers and would revoke the retroactive immunity granted to the telecommunications companies that participated in George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Specifically the bill would ban the “bulk collection” of foreign telephone calls coming into the US.

The JUSTICE Act takes particular aim at the provision of the USA PATRIOT Act, mandating the “least intrusive means” of information collection and Congressional oversight of the use of National Security Letters.

First the siren call, then the screech

When I bought my new MacBook Pro (matte screen, natch) I qualified for a rebate on a second-generation 32Gb iPod Touch that brought the cost of the iTouch down to less than US$100. On an impulse—I despise impuse buys—I bit and bought the iTouch. I’m still waiting for the rebate, and I hate that too, although Apple’s rebate application process was painless and took less than five minutes to complete online.

So here’s the deal with this cheap iPod Touch: Apple gets to unload a boatload of obsolete iTouches just before the release of the updated models (I knew that going in; I’m shocked that the third-generation updates offer only more memory and speed). So I’m feeling a lot less guilty about the iTouch impulse purchase. After all I’ve got less than US$100 skin in the game. But Apple also gets to distribute bazillions of exceptionally cheap gateway drug samples to its iPhone. That, after all, is almost certainly the strategy behind what’s going on here.

And I almost fell victim to it. I’ve been thinking for days about how to justify the cost of the iPhone—it actually sells for less than the comparable iTouch, it does voice command, GPS, crappy photographs and movies, and mobile telephony.

Ahh but there’s a big rub: Total cost of ownership. Apple does its absolute best to hide this bit of the equation; and succeeds remarkably well. I challenge anyone to actually price an iPhone—with the mandatory two-year AT&T contract—on the Apple website without actually buying one. The process goes like this: Click the “Get Started” button and you’re immediately asked to either create a new AT&T account or replace or add to an existing one. Click the appropriate button for your situation and click the “Continue” button. The next screen asks for your billing information for AT&T, including your Social Security number for a credit check. So now you’re into this so far, no way are you going to back out. Apple and AT&T have your Social Security number; they know you’re more likely than not to complete the transaction.

Network neutrality is really quite simple

Saul Hansell, writing for the New York Times, reports that US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Julius Genachowski plans on adding a fifth principle to the network neutrality concepts established by the federal agency in 2005. The fifth principle, according to Hansell, “will prevent Internet providers from discriminating against certain services or applications.”

Internet service providers, such as Comcast, have admitted discriminating against certain kinds of internet traffic. Last year the cable giant was sanctioned for slowing down and rejecting BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast has appealed the ruling, taking the position that the FCC’s network neutrality principles are invalid because they weren’t formally adopted as rules.

Hansell reports that Genachowski will propose adopting the principles as rules. This marks a fairly dramatic shift in the FCC’s core process. Under Kevin Martin, the FCC’s general mode of operation was to respond to complaints instead of adopting rules.

TwinCitiesTwitter gets noticed by City Pages

Hart Van Denburg, writing for City Pages blog The Blotter, writes a really sweet mention of TwinCitiesTwitter. Van Denburg’s article got picked up by the University of Minnesota’s News Service (I’d link to it but it’s a Lyris archive page and wouldn’t work for anyone outside the University).

I don’t respond to many media inquiries—everyone can find what I have to say about most everything—here. But Van Denburg was irresistible. He asked just a few questions that were right on point and brought up the interesting point of aggregation value to outsiders.

First a few clarifications: I haven’t written 20 books about the internet. I’ve written 27 books on a wide variety of topics; three were about the internet but collectively sold more (many, many more) than all the others combined. Dave Winer is almost entirely responsible for TwinCitiesTwitter—I mostly just came along for the ride. Everybody forgets that Winer was responsible for really important software—ThinkTank, Ready, and MORE—long before the commercial internet was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

The reason I responded to Van Denburg’s query was because of his insight into the value of aggregation of geographically-local tweets—and their authors—to outsiders (politicians, advertisers, marketers). Yes, there’s tremendous value there for outsiders. No, I’m not interested in monetizing it. Winer might be, and that’s fine; it’s his code that makes TwinCitiesTwitter possible. It’s just kind of nice to have a few spaces on the internet that could be monetized not be.

The public option was the healthcare reform compromise

The fact that keeps getting dropped in the healthcare reform debate is that a strong public option—a government-run insurance option designed specifically to provide competition for the corporate insurers—was the compromise the US political left made in abandoning a demand for the universal, single-payer, Medicare-for-all model. All three leading Democratic candidates—Obama, Clinton, and Edwards—actively campaigned on a strong public option.

The strong public option was the healthcare reform compromise.

President Obama has failed miserably to rally support for the public option. Failed because he hasn’t; miserably because he hasn’t even tried. According to Rahm Emanual’s political strategy, passing anything is a victory, a victory is imperative, so passing anything will do.

If there’s another way to reduce the growth rate of health insurance costs—not reduce costs, but rather the growth rate of those costs—everyone I’ve talked to is open to discussing it. But it has to be a viable option. The co-op model proposed by Senator Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) and others isn’t viable except to provide cover for the centrists. And, as Jim Hightower articulated so well, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. No one’s been able to answer the simple question: How do you propose to have real, honest competition between a state-based co-op and the megalithic insurance corporations? And the limp-wristed notion of allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines does nothing except raise premium rates, reduce benefits, and eliminate the minimal power the states currently have to regulate corporate insurer behavior. And a trigger? Well, that’s just laughable. How much more of a trigger do you need than 30 million uninsured US citizens? You know it’s wrong if it’s what the corporate providers want.

The coming aggregation of higher education

Zephyr Teachout, writing “A Virtual Revolution is Brewing for Colleges” in tomorrow’s Washington Post, picks up where Kevin Carey left off, envisioning an aggregation of higher education. “The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened,” writes Teachout. “... Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.” She’s scary smart, a visiting professor at Duke Law School, and handled the internet side of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Teachout draws parallels between newspapers and universities in bright bold lines that can’t be missed. Or ignored. “Just as the new model of news separated ‘the article’ from ‘the newspaper,’ the new model of college will separate ‘the class’ from ‘the college.’” Whoa.

Teachout writes that community colleges are already “working with limited resources to maximize their offerings through Internet aggregation.” Meanwhile, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller (DFL-Minneapolis) said on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midday yesterday that Minnesota’s community colleges have the second-highest tuition rates in the US. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Shit, unfortunately, happens

Most informed dialysis patients know the mortality rate among said patients is 20-25% annually in the US. Those aren’t very good odds but they’re certainly better than the alternative.

Last week, a metro Chicago woman died while on dialysis after bleeding out and going into cardiopulmonary arrest. Apparently she was a home hemodialysis patient and pulled a needle out while changing clothes.

Bleeding out has to be one of the most common fears among dialysis patients. That and getting an air embolism during treatment. It’s why I can rarely sleep during treatments—after more than nine years on dialysis, I’m only now able to nod off occasionally. Each time I awaken startled. This is why it only took me about five minutes to consider nocturnal dialysis and reject the idea out of hand. What if I fall asleep, roll over and pull the venous needle out. Just how long would it take me to bleed out?

Last Friday, the patient next to me at my dialysis center nearly bled out. I say nearly because she was conscious when the paramedics wheeled her out and hopefully she got transfused and recovered. It was a horrible event. She coded—her heart stopped and she stopped breathing—but miraculously regained consciousness a short while later. It was unnerving being a few feet away and absolutely unable to help in any way. Three days later I can’t get the look on her face as the paramedics wheeled her out to the ambulance out of my mind.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened during my dialysis run. But when this has happened in the past, blood has spurted everywhere: on the ceiling, all over the walls, everywhere. This time the blood merely pooled under the patient’s chair.

One has to wonder, if the top criteria for determining and administering healthcare were the best possible patient outcomes rather than corporate profits, if things would be different.

Update: Wednesday, 09 September 2009 07:23AM CDT: The dialysis patient in question survived and had an uneventful dialysis treatment on Monday. The event, my proximity to it, and the processes surrounding it are still extremely disturbing.

The lost manuscripts: Ted Nelson: Making it all work on the way to Xanadu

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

The third figure in the hypermedia historical triumvirate is a madman extraordinaire and one of the most brilliant minds of our time. How do you describe someone who carries around an encyclopedic knowledge base between his ears and simultaneously manages to maintain the spark of creativity? What are we to think of an individual who, when after almost 30 years of intense work finally receives adequate funding for his publicly accessible hypermedia repository, scribbles notes on his arm in purple marker during a press conference? How much stock should we put in the ideas of a computer visionary who generally refuses to use a computer? Sounds like my kind of guy. The caricatures are of Ted Nelson: the individual generally credited with coining the term hypertext and popularizing the concept by making it real to anyone who cared to immerse himself or herself in Nelson’s vast stores of rambling knowledge.

Nelson, influenced by Vannevar Bush, first used the term hypertext in the mid-1960s to describe a form of nonsequential writing. Most of his written works, most notably Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines, have served to influence the current generation of hypermedia pioneers more than any other texts. If Bush was seen as a forward-thinker, Nelson has to be perceived as not of this planet.

His project of almost 30 years is Xanadu, a global information repository and network he refers to as the “magic place of literary memory.” Based on his concept of “universal hypertext,” Xanadu will consist of many thousands of nodes throughout the world, some of which will exist as fast-food franchiselike establishments Nelson refers to as “Silverstands.” When Xanadu becomes a reality—as it most assuredly will now that implementation funding has been acquired—many thousands of users will have simultaneous access to mountains of information, through which they will be able to create their own knowledge trails and endless document revisions. Of course, Nelson himself acknowledges that the name “Xanadu” is based on Coleridge’s unfinished poem, so there are no guarantees.

In the late 1960s, Nelson worked with Andries van Dam and a group of undergraduate students at Brown University to create the Hypertext Editing System, one of the first hypertext systems. The initial project was funded by IBM and was used for the Apollo space missions by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The system, almost predictably, was not a commercial success and by 1970 Nelson was on to other projects. Andries van Dam and his students went on to create FRESS (an acronym for File Retrieval Editing SyStem) at Brown.

Iconic architecture and public space

Last July at the Aspen Ideas Festival, one of the sessions was Frank Gehry in conversation with Tom Pritzker. Gehry is one of the US’s top architects, if not the country’s leading architect, known for his iconic buildings.

At the end of Gehry’s converstation, Fred Kent, founder and president of Project for Public Spaces (PPS), rose to ask a question.

Kent asked Gehry if iconic architecture also succeed as public space (it’s about 54 minutes into the video clip). Gehry was dismissive of both the questioner and the question then, and has since refused to consider the question.

James Fallows was in the audience and noted the dismissal in his weblog for The Atlantic, referring to Gehry calling Kent “pompous” and waving him away as, “a dismissive gesture, much as Louis XIV might have used to wave away some offending underling.” Fallows followed-up with additional articles, and links to others. Fallows expressed interest in the question but doesn’t “know enough about the argument as it involves Gehry’s buildings to have a view right now.” Presumably he’s researching the issue.

Jay Walljasper, PPS senior fellow, wrote a piece on the PPS weblog about the exchange.

It’s surprising to me that this issue hasn’t come to the forefront in discussions about the role of architecture in society and in urban planning circles. Maybe it has and I haven’t noticed. To my way of thinking, this is one of the most pressing issues architects face and they should all—including Gehry—be answering the question posed by Kent. As Walljasper writes, “... discussions about how we create congenial public places where people can come together is a major issue of our times. Public space is not just an aesthetic detail, or minor sideshow for the design community. It’s central to the fabric of lives and future of our society….”

Launching TwinCitiesTwitter in three hours

Do you tweet from or about the Twin Cities? If so, consider joining TwinCitiesTwitter, a hyperlocal tweetstream for the Twin Cities—Minneapolis and Saint Paul—Minnesota USA.

Here’s how:

1. Send a Twitter @reply message to @mfraase requesting to be added.

Here’s an example from any Twitter client or your account on the Twitter website:

@mfraase Please add me to TwinCitiesTwitter. Thanks.

That’s it.

Once you’re added, everything you tweet will appear on TwinCitiesTwitter.

How this happened

Dave Winer and I have known each other for years, although I’m pretty sure we’ve never met in person. I’ve used his software from time to time for just about as long as I’ve been using a computer—starting with ThinkTank and just about everything else up to and including Radio; for about a year, this site ran on Winer’s Frontier software, which he graciously provided gratis. Today marks another milestone in that regard.

Last week Winer put together an aggregator for Berkeley-based tweets. Late last night he tweeted asking if he should apply for a Knight grant for his hyperlocal tweetstream. I was scrolling through last night’s tweets and responded that, yes, absolutely—I’d like one for the Twin Cities. Winer asked if I wanted to work together on it: If I got the people together he’d set up the system. I did and he did, and TwinCitiesTwitter launched about three hours later. As I tweeted shortly after the launch, Winer is a mad good hacker and coder and both the Berkeley and Twin Cities tweet aggregators are fine examples.

But both are community endeavors—this won’t work unless there’s a lot of individual participation. Get yourself added and get yourself heard. Tell others about it. I seeded the list to start with Twin Cities people and publications I follow and figured would want to participate. But it was just a start—there was nothing nefarious or even nontransparent behind the launch selections and no one’s been turned away who’s requested to be added. I’m uncomfortable adding anyone else who doesn’t request addition, but I’m open to alternative views about that. If you were added without a request and want to be removed, just let me know.

The power of Winer’s Twitter hack is irresistible. I’d like to see every Twin Cities neighborhood have its own hyperlocal tweetstream. On the other hand, I’d like to see each major issue of the day have its own aggregated tweetstream. The applications for what Winer has created are close to endless.

I wish this was up and running when the tornado recently hit downtown Minneapolis. I wish it was up when the State Fair opened in Saint Paul.

Got ideas? Let’s hear them; if you’re on TwinCitiesTwitter and you tweet them, we’ll all see them. New to Twitter? Rafe Needleman’s “Newbies guide to Twitter” is a good start.

Some suggestions

Please be patient. It may take a while to get you added—I don’t live in Twitter, I have a day job, my own 30-year-old business that acts like a 12-year-old, and a complicated life.

If you tweet about a lot of different things, consider creating a separate Twitter account for your geographically local tweets. Or better yet, tweet local more often.

Take this for what it is: an experiment; a quick hack. There’s nothing going on here other than what you see. Really.

Remember that everything you tweet—everything—gets automatically republished on TwinCitiesTwitter.

Update: Sunday 06 September 2009 09:33PM CDT: Edited how to get added section for clarity; added call for additional ideas and Twitter introduction. I’ll be updating, adding, and filling in blanks as necessary. A lot of the edits aren’t transparent because I believe usability/readability trumps transparency in this one instance. This isn’t the norm for articles on this site where edits and additions are transparent.

Update: Monday 02 November 2009 07:09AM CST: With the introduction of the Lists feature in Twitter, Twin Cities Twitter becomes, at best, redundant; at worst, obsolete. Accordingly, support and maintenance of Twin Cities Twitter is no longer provided. The account will probably be deleted in the near future. Thanks for your past support of the idea.

Disrupting higher education

Anyone who’s been paying attention has to realize that higher education is caught in the same death spiral as real estate and the banks. But instead of debt fueling the spiral, higher education’s spiral is fueled by rising tuition and endowments. It’s unsustainable. Colleges and universities are in the information transportation business. Yes, yes, there’s the self-exploration and professorial interaction that’s an enormous part of the college experience—and the value delivered—but in the main, institutions of higher education transport information. Technology in general, and the internet in particular are collapsing the economics of transporting information in all areas of the culture and economy.

Call it simultaneous disruption from the top and the bottom, but, as Kevin Carey writes in “College for $99 a Month,” in the Washington Monthly‘s outstanding College Guide, “... these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same ways that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart.”

At the same time individuals need almost continual education to stay afloat in an economy and society that are one big disruption after another.

Carey presents StraighterLine as one option: All the higher education courses you can eat for US$99 per month. Sort of like O’Reilly’s Safari for college. Carey sites a woman taking courses through StraighterLine and her daughter taking the one of the same courses at the local community college:

“... she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. ‘He just stands there,’ Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.”

Uh, oh: The trouble with non-free software

Since 1993, I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between open source and commercial software to run farces.com. Most recently—since July 2002 according to the Wayback Machine—I’ve been running some version of Expression Engine or its predecessor pMachine Pro.

For quite some time EllisLab has been working on Expression Engine 2.0, and announced several release dates. In September 2008, Rick Ellis, the company’s chief executive published a statement that “the major systems have been completed” but that “we need to push the release into fall.” That’d be fall 2008.

Today’s promise is to ship by SXSW 2010. Sorry, but I can’t help but be reminded of the Jobsism: “real artists ship.”

Don’t bring a spreadsheet to a gun fight

Adam Greenfield has written an excellent and truly insightful analysis of the US healthcare reform issue: “On systems, and what they do.” From the perspective of an American expatriate in Finland—or just about anyone in the developed world other than the US—issues such as universal healthcare were decided long ago. Political parties still argue about how best to meet the needs of the populace, of course, but no one talks about dismantling the social infrastructure. No one disputes the core tenets.

As Greenfield writes, “it’s not that the opponents of national health are playing the same game by a different set of rules. They’re playing a different game entirely. That is, a plurality of the folks who oppose some kind of public-sector involvement in health insurance almost certainly are not interested in helping to articulate a best-fit, balanced solution that would be minimally acceptable to everyone. Their all-but-stated aim is to deny, attrit, isolate, suppress and, ultimately, shatter their opponents.” Actually, the aim has been clearly stated, but that’s a minor point in a much bigger picture.

Opponents to national healthcare in the US have found an unpatched bug in the operating system that is American democracy, according to Greenfield, and all they have to do is exploit the vulnerability to win.

The lost manuscripts: Doug Engelbart: Augmenting the intellect

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Douglas C. Engelbart, the first of the second-generation hypervisionaries to follow in Vannevar Bush’s footsteps, realized straight away that while hypermedia was going to revolutionize our access to information, some sort of framework was needed to structure the capabilities we were going to be confronted with. His concept of the “augmentation of the human intellect” sprang from those concerns and has provided the framework for not only the budding hypermedia discipline, but most of the personal computer industry as well.

Regarded largely by his contemporaries as a very well-intentioned crackpot (sound familiar, yet?), Engelbart eventually received Department of Defense funding in the 1960s through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Ideas that were birthed at Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) include the mouse, windows, electronic mail, and computer conferencing. Engelbart’s augmentation system for the knowledge worker, however, remains to be implemented in a manner he considers to be acceptable.

If Vannevar Bush was the cerebral intellectual of the underlying concepts of hypermedia, Doug Engelbart was the task master, the visionary who got his hands dirty and got the job on track. Engelbart read Bush’s’ ‘As We May Think’’ piece while he was a radar technician in the Philippines during World War II. The ideas proposed by Bush festered until Engelbart was 25, living in the California of the 1950s, and decided to address in some manner the fact that the most pressing problems facing society were growing faster than the tools we used to solve them. Engelbart envisioned a tool that would give a small work group of people, working together, a better chance at solving problems that were becoming ever more complex.

The chicken and waffles president

The vast majority of American citizens want single-payer, universal healthcare coverage. Fully 72% (only 20% were opposed) of the citizenry want a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans” according to a June 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll. A whopping 76% would settle for the public option.

Yet President Obama refuses to govern like he received a mandate. First refusing to consider a single-payer option and now signaling that he’s willing to jettison the public option as well. For what? Two Republican votes that will probably never materialize. Never mind that Obama campaigned hard on the public option being essential to healthcare reform. In fact, the only thing separating Obama’s healthcare plan from Hillary Clinton’s was mandated health insurance. Obama opposed making people purchase insurance they couldn’t afford.

What happened since the election? Has anyone asked Obama if he’d like some chicken with all that waffling?

Not only would the public option keep the private insurance companies honest, the plan would provide good insurance to millions who currently can’t afford it. But now Obama seems to be trying to talk himself—and us—out of the only real way of containing healthcare costs.

The lost manuscripts: Commentary on Bush’s memex

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

While Bush’s envisioned microfilm application—the memex—was never quite realized (microfilm technology still hasn’t advanced that far), the underlying concept of his vision remains intact and very much alive in hypermedia. The idea of associative thought and information indexed and readily accessible has been made possible through the evolution of the personal computer. Commercially available hypermedia products, especially those that are used with the Macintosh that are based on these ideas, currently enjoy a widespread reception.

The underlying concept of associative links and navigational trails, originally proposed by Vannevar Bush, remains intact and forms the basis for hypertext and hypermedia. Only the media itself has changed; electronic storage and display implements are used rather than the microfilm technology.

One of the most daunting obstacles to the widespread acceptance of hypermedia as a communications medium has been the high cost of mass storage.

When I purchased my first computer, I sincerely felt that I would never have need for more than 143K (the standard disk format of the Apple II) at one time and that, oh, I might need more eventually, but I could always just buy another disk. As of this writing I have in excess of 170 megabytes of data storage on-line and I spend every Sunday evening clearing space for the next week’s additions. The cost of appropriate mass storage (about 40 MBytes is a minimal configuration for an individual hyperspace) has begun to fall drastically and various vendors provide options within the reach of the individual. Optical storage systems also are becoming available at almost mass-market prices and with their capacity of easily handling in excess of 550 MBytes of material (550 million characters), the mass-storage horizon looks very bright indeed.

Jay Rosen on the ethic of the link; Kevin Marks on the value of unidirectionality

The Carnegie Council has published an excerpt of a panel discussion in which Jay Rosen, faculty memeber of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, discusses the ethic of the link (YouTube; 4:21). Hypertext links on the web are how we connect knowledge to people, and sometimes more importantly, connect people to people.

The key to what Rosen is saying is that links connect people to knowledge wherever that knowledge may reside. Corporate media has just started to understand the concept that you can grow your audience by sending them away rather than trying to hold them captive. Outbound links are important, what makes the web the web.

Similarly, Kevin Marks has written an important analysis of how Twitter works and why it became so popular. Early proponents of the web—myself included—bemoaned the lack of bidirectionality in its hypertext links. Marks astutely points out that the unidirectionality of hypertext links on the current web enable “the power-law distributed link structure that builds a small-world network to connect the web and provides the basis for Pagerank. Being able to link to something without it having to give you permission by linking back is what enabled the web to grow.”

If you provide content on the web, you need to listen to this video clip and understand what Rosen is saying and then study Marks’ analysis of Twitter. Therein is a large part of the reason why the news industry is in a tailspin.

Healthcare reform and political terrorism

While it’s nice—if long past due—to see Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes in the New York Times finally and deciseivly dismiss as false the rumor of “death panels” being part of Obama’s healthcare proposals, they don’t go nearly far enough. The reporters claim that the “stubborn yet false rumor” “seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.” This is simply not true, as even the Times reporters acknowledge three grafs later: “... openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey….”

Greg Sargent discovered and reported the conservative agenda earlier this week in The Plum Line: “On a private conference call, a group of top Tea Party and conservative organizers offered a surprisingly frank description of their goal, according to a source on the call: Completely blocking any kind of bipartisan compromise, and completely preventing any type of health care reform bill at all from ever becoming law.”

The Times is to be commended for stepping up and confronting the blatant lies of the conservatives and partially tracing the source of the lies. This is orders of magnitude more valuable than the “he said, she said” stenography to which the corporate media has generally devolved. It’s reporting like this that will hopefully save the news business. But the US paper of record should have been earlier and more forceful in its reporting.

Salon‘s Joan Walsh points out that for weeks, the corporate media were ignoring the lies, resorting to the lazy and empty-headed “he said, she said” stenography we’ve come to expect. Walsh identified the Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstine’s account as the only corporate media instance intent on calling out the conservatives and exposing their lies. Pearlstine’s writing was spot on:

“The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems….”

Perhaps it’s time to consider penalties for public lying and political terrorism perpetrated by the conservatives and the healthcare industry lobbyists.

The lost manuscripts: Memex: Setting the stage

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Ironically, most of the concepts underlying hypertext and hypermedia were proposed by individuals very few of us have heard of. Largely because these farsighted individuals were involved in the business of creating ideas rather than products, they are not remembered. Their ideas, however, will outlive any of our children’s children.

Many would rewrite history and would have us believe that hypermedia, as well as its hypertext harbinger, are relatively new developments. And they’re right when you look at a time line of man’s—or even this society’s—history. But they are seriously mistaken when you look at the miniscule slice of the same time line dealing with computers.

Oh Atlanta

My wife Karen and I returned to Atlanta for the first time in many years last week and I realized—almost immediately, while driving through midtown—how much I miss the US South in general and Atlanta in particular. We went down for my niece’s wedding in Buckhead and reception in Brookhaven. I lived in Atlanta from 1969-72 and 50 miles west of the city from 1972-82 (except for a stint from 1976-78).

On a tight schedule, we didn’t get outside of Buckhead and Brookhaven, unfortunately. Driving in from the airport, I didn’t dare venture any further on the downtown connector than the downtown Peachtree Street exit. As I found out later, the downtown connector north of midtown has completely changed. Even a new freeway has been added. The core of midtown has always been the Fox Theatre for me. From the Fox to 10th, midtown hasn’t changed very much except for the names of the banks and law firms. Once we got to Buckhead though, I was completely lost. Everything had changed. Everything. Except one of my old hangouts, Dante’s Down the Hatch. But even Dante’s looked, somehow, different. It was smaller than I remember, diminished even.

Content templates or page tables: Whatever you call them, use them

Erin Kissane has written a stellar second article, “Content templates to the rescue,” for A List Apart in what hopefully is a continuing series. Her first article in the series, “Writing content that works for a living” was also useful for those of us who wrangle content on the editorial side of the web.

The core problem in large organizations—or small organizations with large websites—is getting knowledge from the experts to the editors and writers responsible for publishing the content on the web. Experts are rarely excellent writers, are often “too busy” to work on something as lowly as web copy, or simply don’t understand why excellent content on the web matters.

Kissane provides a roadmap to getting successful content in such situations:

1. Assign a content lead to manage the knowledge transfer from the experts to the writers.
2. Most importantly, give the content lead the authority necessary to manage the transfer. As Kissane writes, “If the leaders of your organization (or your client’s organization) make it clear that our content lead’s requests are high priority, the work often magically gets done.” Yeah, magically.
3. Define a content workflow as early as possible. It’s important that this happen in the very earliest stages possible.
4. Use the right tools to manage a website’s content.

Kissane’s article mostly focuses on this last step, outlining the use of content templates to manage content—I’ve used them for years, but have always called them page tables. A content template (or page table) is a simplified paragraph-level analog to the website’s wireframes. Kissane’s content templates contain the page title, a brief description of each piece of content on the page, and examples of each piece of information.

University of Alabama-Birmingham researchers faked renal data

Bob Grant, writing for the-scientist.com, reports that renal disease researchers Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras falsified data and lied about methodology in 16 publications and several grant applications over the past eight years while they were at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Thomas and Contreras falsely claimed they performed double kidney removals on monkeys during the testing of two immunosuppression drugs.

Instead of following the protocol of removing one of the monkeys’ kidneys, replacing it with a transplant, starting the immunosuppression drugs, and then removing the remaining native kidney, the researchers failed to remove the second native kidney, falsely making the immunosuppression drugs appear significantly more effective than they really were. More than US$23 million in funding for the Thomas and Contreras research came from the National Institutes of Health.

Thomas initially claimed that Contreras perpetuated the fraud on his own, but the university’s investigation revealed that Thomas actively participated in the fraud.

Thomas will be unable to receive US government funding or advise the US Public Health Service for 10 years. Contreras will be unable to receive US government funding or advise the US Public Health Service for three years.

Getting back in line

When my kidneys failed more than nine years ago, I got in line for a transplant. At the time it wasn’t something I’d call a rational decision—or a decision of any kind, really. It was expected; it was the next step in the course of treatment: dialysis until an organ became available—then the transplant. I didn’t really think about it, I just got on the transplant bus.

Friends and family grew angry when I turned down offered organs. None of it was rational, or even explainable. I still can’t articulate my reasons. I didn’t want to be that indebted to anyone; didn’t want the burden of worrying about if they or their children might need the organ later; just didn’t want that much responsibility.

Three years ago—almost to the day, 26 July 2006—I put myself on hold on the University of Minnesota’s Transplant Center transplant list. I had been on the waiting list for six years and had already turned down three organs. The last one was an unfortunate college kid who was in town visiting his mom. They were out for dinner and he was shot in the head. That did it for me. I’ll never forget taking that telephone call and hearing the horrible details of how the organ became available. I didn’t want any part of it and, by extension, I didn’t want any part of the tragedy behind any viable cadaver kidney coming available.

I’ve written in detail about why I’ve refused cadaver kidneys in the past (here and here). None of that’s changed. I still know that everything happens for a reason and that corporations shouldn’t profit from the misfortune of the chronically ill. I don’t know why my kidneys failed or what I’m supposed to learn from it. That journey’s far from over but I figure I can travel that path just as well with a working kidney as without. The tragedy bit is more nuanced, but here’s how I’m working it out: When a door closes, a window opens. As the door closes on a donor’s life, a window opens for the recipient. Tragedy for one gives way to opportunity for another.

Inspectors generals’ report finds warrantless wiretapping ineffective

Turns out George Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was of questionable worth. Big surprise. Actually, the big surprise is that too few people in the government knew about the program to use it effectively for intelligence work.

Congress ordered a report on the program last year. The 38-page unclassified report (.pdf; 3Mb), produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies—the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, and the Office of National Intelligence—was released yesterday. The bulk of the inspectors findings remains classified. The inspectors found that “other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information,” according to Eric Lichtblau’s and James Risen’s report for the New York Times. In fact, the report indicates that most intelligence officials “had difficulty citing specific instances” of the warrantless wiretapping program’s success in thwarting terrorists.

“The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality,” Lichtblau and Risen write. “The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States.” The inspectors generals’ report referred to these threat assessments—which Bush used to reauthorize the program every 45 days—as the “scary memos.”

The inspectors generals’ report notes that Alberto Gonzales, former attorney general, provided “confusing, inaccurate” statements about NSA surveillance activities to Congress but did not “intend to mislead” the US lawmakers. The report characterizes former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo‘s legal opinions—the ones Bush used to justify his warrantless wiretapping program—as “flawed.” The report also states then-President Bush authorized other surveillance programs that “the government has never publicly acknowledged.” Lichtblau and Risen source unnamed officials as saying “those programs included data mining of e-mail messages of Americans.”

Obama’s two-handed approach to healthcare reform

President Obama’s approach to reforming healthcare is to obtain minimal cost growth slowdowns from insurers and providers with one hand while doling back enormous amounts of cash with the other.

David M. Herszenhorn and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, writing for the New York Times, report that while the healthcare industry has promised to slow the growth of healthcare costs—not cut costs, but slow the growth of increases—by 1.5%. The story that’s not being told is what these companies will be receiving in return.

The pharmaceutical companies, for example, get an agreement from Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), chair of the Finance Committee, to keep Democrats in the US House of Representatives in line with regard to reducing what the government pays for drugs for Medicare patients previously covered by Medicaid. The doctors, meanwhile, get a revocation of federal law limiting the growth of Medicare reimbursements worth a hefty US$250 billion. Hospitals get dinged with lower reimbursements but a simultaneous guarantee that more patients will be paying their bills because they’ll be insured. Wal-Mart gets an exception to mandatory health coverage for large company employees.

Trading clarity for an illusion

The corporate media is so infuriatingly predictable it’s almost laughable. An economy in total shambles, politicians doing the bidding of whoever pays the most—and worse, being exceptionally mean about it—turmoil everywhere you look, and you knew—you just knew—that one of the US national papers of records would trot out the tired and worn “maybe working in a cubicle isn’t so bad” trope. This time, the New York Times was first out of the gate, but I’m sure article-ettes like Phyllis Korkii’s “Hope and Peril After an Escape From the Cubicle” are repeating themselves across the country. The message is clear: Stay in your safe, cozy job; don’t risk anything, you’re almost certain to fail.

A down economy is probably the best time to start a small, nimble, smart business. Add a national healthcare plan to the mix—something the majority of Americans want, yet the bought politicians refuse to even put it “on the table”—and you’d have a pretty hearty entrepreneurial stew. Imagine all those seeds that would be planted by people who stay in corporate/institutional servitude only because they and their family rely on subsidized healthcare benefits.

Since 1979, my partner (who is also my wife, but she was my partner before she was my wife) and I have contracted for everything and everyone from one-person startups to the Fortune 100. One thing’s sure: the smaller the enterprise, the more fun the project was. It comes, I think, from the purity and clarity of vision inherent in the founders of small, agile companies. They may not know exactly how they’re going to do something, but they know exactly what they’re going to do.

Sure, I don’t know anyone that’s self-employed that doesn’t work more hours than someone who works for someone else. I’m sure it has something to do with doing what they love, and doing only what they love.

Those of us that have traded that clarity of vision for the illusion of security in a job are much the less for it. And by extension, so are the rest of us.

Update: Sunday, 05 July 2009 04:10PM: Updated for clarity and to remove an irrelevant and misspoken closing statement.

Washington Post pay-for-access event for lobbyists

Early this morning Politico reported that the Washington Post was offering healthcare lobbyists access to members of the Obama administration, Congress, and Washington Post editorial staff for fees ranging from US$25,000-US$250,000. The Politico report has been updated and the original story is gone.

In the early afternoon, Post staff writer Howard Kurtz wrote that the paper’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, cancelled the series of “salons” scheduled to take place in her home. “This should never have happened,” Weymouth told Kurtz. “The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do. We’re not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.”

Sorry, but the fact that the fliers were distributed to DC lobbyists already impugns the integrity of the Washington Post. It’s not like you can put that particular tootpaste back in the tube.

Twitter-enhanced luminary spectacle, indeed

First the Wall Street Journal publishes a breathless article announcing Steve Jobs’s liver transplant. The article was unsourced and disgraceful in its violation of the Apple chief executive’s privacy. Then the New York Times got all pissy about being beaten to the scoop and published a ridiculous story about Apple’s corporate secrecy.

Now this, from the Times on the death of entertainer Michael Jackson:

“The death of Mr. Jackson was the latest Twitter-enhanced luminary spectacle that is specific to Los Angeles, with the customary body-slamming paparazzi, weeping celebrities, grim-faced officials trying to maintain dignity and tourists seeking their succor along Hollywood Boulevard, where the police were forced to place barricades on Friday to hold back the throngs seeking to peer at his star on the Walk of Fame.”

You’re kidding me, right? Twitter-enhanced luminary spectacle, body-slamming paparazzi, and tourists seeking their succor? If that’s not the worst piece of “news” reporting I’ve ever read, it has to be in the top two.

Never mind that the photo caption at the top of the article notes a billboard “tribune” at the 02 Arena in London. The billboard is presumably a tribute.

Everyone makes mistakes—even stupid ones—but the US paper of record is really, really slipping.

No links because links are votes and represent a value of exchange on the web. The Journal and Times are undeserving lately.

The lost manuscripts: Mac hypermedia introduction and overview

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is the introduction and overview from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

The concept of hypertext, and its more recent hypermedia branchings, has not changed much since first envisioned by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It has taken this long for both the hardware and software to catch up. Now, with the introduction of the Macintosh hypermedia software tools such as OWL International’s Guide and Apple’s HyperCard, we have the beginnings of nothing short of a paradigm shift in the way we deal with data, information, and knowledge.

These software tools, however, are only half of the complete hypermedia solution; to be really useful, they require appropriate hardware that is only now beginning to appear. Apple’s recent introduction of a CD-ROM drive targeted for the mass market signals the first acknowledgment by a major computer manufacturer of this vast opportunity to reshape the way individuals work with overwhelming amounts of data and information, and, in turn, refine that raw data and information into useful knowledge tools.

The availability of appropriate hardware and software solutions for the Macintosh community leaves only a single stumbling block to overcome - a somewhat typical chicken-and-egg dilemma. Few CD-ROM titles will be available, and most will be of questionable quality and innovation, until a terminal mass in unit sales of the CD-ROM drives themselves is reached. Conversely, few CD-ROM drives will be sold until unique and plentiful titles are available. This is at least partially addressed by Apple’s entry into the CD-ROM drive market with a reasonably priced unit that is sure to appeal to a broad base of users.

The foreseeable CD-ROM products, however, can at best be termed first generation and as few as two years from now will be seen as terribly obsolete. CD-ROM is a read-only storage medium (it’s only half-literate; it can’t write), and as Ted Nelson said, “... a read-only medium in this day and age [is] intrinsically oppressive.” For this reason, CD-ROM will not play an equal role (relative to the hypermedia software tools) in the work proposed here; it will be surveyed, along with other mass-storage devices as guideposts to future incarnations of more appropriate hardware.

Wall Street Journal finds the bottom

Most people with chronic health problems are much more private about their health conditions than I’ve been. I made the decision early on that I would operate in full disclosure mode about my health. This wasn’t a gradual process with me. I was all-in from the start. But make no mistake; the choice to disclose was mine and mine alone.

It took me a couple of years after my kidneys failed in 2000 to figure out that my days of working 16-18 hours every day were over. I researched what my obligations were with regard to disclosure and found that there basically were none. But I felt something—not really a moral obligation—but something that told me the best path for me was full disclosure.

When I went to work for Utne Reader in 2002, for example, I disclosed my condition—because not disclosing it would have placed an undue burden on the small publishing company. We worked it out so I’d work 75-percent time, thereby not qualifying for company-paid health insurance. Both parties were satisfied with the arrangement. When I went to work at the University of Minnesota in 2006 I also disclosed my condition. My health condition—and associated costs—wouldn’t make much of a dent in the University’s fiscal situation, but I disclosed in the first interview anyway. Why? To this day I’m still not sure except that something told me it was the right thing to do.

But it was my decision.

Last night, in one of the worst pieces of “journalism” I’ve ever seen, the Wall Street Journal reported that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant about two months ago. The bylined work was totally and completely unsourced. Sources amounted to an unnamed “person familiar with the thinking at Apple,” a corporate governance attorney that has no relationship with Apple or its board, a surgeon in Saint Louis who has never treated Jobs, a Saint Louis transplant specialist who, also, has never treated Jobs, and “people who have seen him” at the Apple campus.

Risen and Lichtblau discover more NSA abuses of FISA

In April the US National Security Agency (NSA) disclosed that its warrantless wiretaps instituted at the behest of the George W. Bush administration—including domestic email—have exceeded any legal limit since late 2008. According to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, reporting for the New York Times, a former NSA analyst “described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.” Email messages were collected in a secret database, codenamed Pinwale, that could be queried freely so long as no more than 30 percent of the total database was searched in a single command.

At the same time, the Obama administration claimed it had taken the necessary steps to bring the NSA into legal compliance. Under the law, the NSA can surveil only those Americans suspected of having links to international terrorism and only then after obtaining permission from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The NSA, in Congressional testimony, steadfastly maintains that any “overcollection was inadvertant.” Representative Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, told Risen and Lichtblau that he disputes that position and that “the people making the policy don’t understand the technicalities.”

Risen and Lichtblau report that the NSA is believed to have overstepped its legal bounds in 8-10 cases. But in each of those cases, potentially thousands of email addresses were illegally surveilled. “Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” a senior intelligence official told the reporters.

Like starting over

A little more than two months ago, my fistula used for dialysis failed. A fistula is an arterialized vein; a vein and an artery that are surgically attached, allowing blood to flow in both directions. Two large needles—in my case 14-gauge—are inserted in the blood vessel, one to pull blood out and pass it to the filter; the other to return it from the filter to the body.

When my fistula failed, I had no way to dialyze—and without dialysis I would eventually die. The only choice available was to have a tunnel catheter surgically placed in my chest with two lines directly to my heart. I was not looking forward to this because the first tunnel catheter I had—when I was first diagnosed with permanent kidney failure—got infected and I almost died from the resulting sepsis. But the choice was to take the risk with the catheter or eventually die.

What I didn’t know was that I was going to have to basically restart the dialysis process from scratch. First the catheter, then one small needle, then two small needles, then two larger needles, then two largest needles.

On June 1, 2009, I had a single 16-gauge venous needle placed with the arterial flow relegated to the catheter. On June 5, 2009, the same; and again on June 8 and 12, 2009.

On June 15, 2009, I had two 16-gauge needles—one venous; one arterial—successfully placed for the first time. That will continue until I gradually work my way back up through 15-gauge needles to 14-gauge needles. Each needle size hurts an order of magnitude more than the next smaller size. The one thing that’s different than when I began dialysis is that each and every needle placement has been successful (knock wood). When I started using my first fistula there were days when I was stuck with eight needles, none of which were successful and I was sent home without dialysis. That was no fun at all, but I have to tell you:

Starting over sucks rocks.

Oh good grief: Paywalls return

The American Press Institute (API) provided a white paper (.pdf; 2.3Mb) to newspaper executives who recently—and almost secretly—assembled outside of Chicago to discuss the future of the news business. The consensus seems to be to build paywalls around corporate news content—walling off that content from being linked to on the internet, thereby tremendously reducing its value. Of course, the newspaper executives can’t come out and say this because any such coordination would be illegal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The API’s paper outlines models and recommendations for charging for content online, insisting that news organizations “establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” What is this, 1999? I thought we were discussing the future of the news business. Scott Rosenberg plays along anyway, writing, “News flash: Pricing a product does not establish its value. What you have to do is find a price that people will pay.”

Rosenberg tried this—many variations of it, actually—when he was at Salon. I tried it when I was at Utne Reader. Rosenberg sums it up quite nicely: “We are grizzled veterans of this argument. We have Been There and Done That. We aren’t grave-dancing; we’re saying, ‘Maybe you don’t want to fall into that grave that almost swallowed us.’” Rosenberg and I learned a hard lesson. If you remove yourself from the internet in any way, two things happen: you become immediately irrelevant and the financial picture is even worse.

Kill GM to save US industrial infrastructure

“Who among us wants US$50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM?” That’s the question asked by Michael Moore, writing for the Daily Beast, in a remarkably cogent article outlining what to do with General Motors.

In short, Moore recommends killing GM with utmost swiftness while making it a top priority to save the US industrial infrastructure. “And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear,” Moore writes. The solution isn’t a smaller GM; it’s a totally different GM.

Moore’s solution is to rapidly retool the former automaker and its remaining factories into modern manufacturing facilities used to build mass-transit vehicles and alternative-energy infrastructure. It’s already been done once and can certainly be done again: In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered GM to stop car production and start making planes, tanks, and other implements of war. GM completely retooled its factories in a matter of months.

Instead of pouring money into GM to build cars, instead use the money to keep the skilled workers primed and ready, “so that they can build the new modes of 21st-century transportation,” Moore writes. Let them start by retooling the existing GM factories.

There’s not only deep justice, but something deeply right about retrofitting GM to manufacture some of the modes of transport it worked so hard to obviate.

Typekit: Typography for the web… finally… really?

Real typography on the web has been as elusive as a shadow at night. One of the brightest web designers, Jeff Veen and his cohorts at Small Batch, aim to change all that with Typekit. Veen thinks modern web browsers have matured to a level where cascading stylesheet (CSS) support is sufficient to specify and render type properly.

The W3C web fonts module for the CSS 3 specification has been available since 2002, but until recently none of the major browsers could link to a font file. Now, all of the major browsers—except Internet Explorer—support this function. And Typekit incorporates support for using Microsoft’s embedded OpenType (EOT) file format as a last resort for Internet Explorer. As Veen writes, “No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.”

A Panglossian web designer would specify type in CSS, link to the appropriate font file, and off she’d go. Except that most typefaces are protected by copyright and aren’t licensed for use on the web. Full stop. Typekit hopes to serve as a licensing intermediary to host type and provide a way of solving browser differences in how they handle type. Veen says that an added line of JavaScript (and a license fee, of course) is all that’s required. Reserving final judgement until the system actually ships, Typekit certainly sounds a lot easier to implement than the current alternatives.

The deadbeats of the credit card industry aren’t who you think

Pity the poor credit card companies; they’re in a tough business. They only stand to make an estimated US$20 billion this year on late fees, over-limit fees, and other penalty fees. Andrew Martin, writing for the New York Times, says the “good deal” for people who pay their credit cards off each month is just about over.

With Congress having just passed legislation that would limit penalties on risky credit card holders, the credit card companies have to make up that revenue somewhere. According to Martin, they’re “going after those people with sterling credit.”

Expect the return of annual fees and the elimination of loyalty reward programs for starters. Next, the card companies will likely eliminate grace periods, charging interest at the point of purchase.

David Robertson who publishes a newsletter on the credit card business told Martin that people who pay their credit cards in full each month “have been enjoying the equivalent of a free ride.” Never mind the fact that credit card companies collect an average of 2-3% on each and every credit card transaction. Free ride indeed. Martin reports that the credit card industry refers to those who pay their credit cards in full each month as “deadbeats.” Nice, very nice, coming from the recipients of the public bailout of the US banking industry.

For one solid week, we “deadbeats” should simply refuse to use our credit cards. Use cash or heaven forbid, a check, for a change. I suspect that would send an audible signal—30 percent worth. According to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report, 70 percent and growing of credit card companies’ revenue comes from interest charges; the rest comes from annual fees and merchant processing fees.

An especially disturbing point of Martin’s report is the finding that Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase “account for 80 percent of the credit card industry.” Too big to fail = too big to exist.

Update: Wednesday, 20 May 2009 12:31PM CDT: I meant to get this in last night but it slipped through the cracks. If the US Congress would grow a set there would be interest rate limits set on the credit card companies. Four percent more than they’re willing to pay for deposits sounds about right.

Want to move to Amsterdam? It’s not moving here

Every couple of months it seems like a first-person narrative of an American expatriate living an European social-welfare existence—most recently like Russell Shorto’s account in the New York Times magazine—pops up. Every time I read one of these I long for the time when the US comes to its collective senses and institutes this kind of a social undertaking on a massive, all-encompassing scale, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh be damned.

When are we going to wake up, come to our senses, and realize that Gordon Gekko capitalism is just, well, wrong.

Face it, the taxes are about the same all in. But instead of reinforcing the American oligarchy, the collective wealth is used in these European states to benefit everyone.

Oh, sure, there are problems. Europeans ride bikes for real, drive too close to each other, and that plastic wrap in European groceries is just too much. The one that really gets to me, though is “consensus and conformity.” As if conformity isn’t the demanded norm in the US. The idea of the American pioneer, the great non-conformist is a myth. It died 30 years ago.

I figure I’ve got no more than 20-30 years of this life left; probably less—maybe a lot less. The question, which becomes more pressing every year, is whether I want to live in the land of Gordon Gekko and his somehow malformed inherently inferiorly designed clones or something more; something else. I used to hope the European social movement would come here, but after the last half of 2008 and most of the first half of 2009 it’s never been clearer that’s not going to happen in the US. Not ever. All that’s left is to put Gekko’s profile on the money.

Merck and Elsevier publish fake medical journal

The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine sounds legit doesn’t it? Of course it does. But it’s a total and complete sham intended to simultaneously:

1. Make money (lots of it) for the publishers
2. Provide an “authoritative” voice for big pharma that it completely and covertly controlled that was trussed up to look like any other authentic peer-reviewed medical journal

Merck, the pharmaceutical giant developed the periodical that looked like a real live peer-reviewed medical journal. Within its pages, Merck published “data” that exhibited the company’s products in a favorable light. The pharmaceutical giant then paid Elsevier, the largest corporate publisher of medical journals, to publish the thing. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine has no editor, doesn’t appear in MEDLINE, nor has a website, but who’s counting.

The story was first broken by Milanda Rout writing for The Australian, and Bob Grant at The Scientist has the most substantial coverage. “Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship,” wrote Grant in his lede.

Reverse merit pay

Merit pay—paying someone based on positive outcomes—has been controversial for almost 40 years. Except on Wall Street where, apparently, reverse merit pay—paying someone based on failure—has become the norm.

Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, reports that “workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began….” Interesting concept: drive your company over the cliff and reap the financial rewards; nice work if you can get it.

Story reports that six of the biggest Wall Street players are setting aside more than US$36 billion for first-quarter salaries for employees. Goldman Sachs alone has set aside US$4.7 billion. “If that level continues all year, it would add up to average pay of US$569,220 per worker,” writes Story. That’s almost as much as the 2007 pay level, which—according to Story—set a record. Morgan Stanley—which lost US$578 million for the quarter—set aside an unbelievable US$2.08 billion for compensation; a mind-blowing 68% of revenue.

Credibility ranking systems

Would you trust judgment of credibility to an algorithm? Maybe I’m showing my age but new-fangled crap like this just makes my jaw drop.

Ars Technica‘s Jacqui Cheng reports that researchers at the Know-Center in Austria are working on just that. Online publications will be ranked as “highly credible, having average credibility, or ‘little credible.’” The algorithm examines “the distribution of words over time, and compares blog topics against articles from mainstream news, which are apparently weighted as being more credible.”

What’s this? The Austrians believe that corporate media are more credible solely because they exist? That’s just silly. Little credible—that’s us.

Little credible like US Representative Jane Harman (D-California). She thought the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretaps were a-okay. Harman is currently upset because the US government wiretapped her legally, with a warrant. The ever-credible Glenn Greenwald sums it up best:

Obama’s claims of executive power worse than Bush’s

Glenn Greenwald notes that last summer when the US Congress granted immunity to the telecommunications companies who were illegally participating in then-President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, government officials were specifically not granted similar immunity privileges.

After having led the lawsuit against the telecommunications companies, in October 2008 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and members of the Bush administration for the illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

On Friday, 3 April 2009—two days late to be a cruel April Fools’ joke—the Obama administration filed its response to the EFF lawsuit (.pdf; 120Kb). The Obama administration seeks immediate dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on the same argument Bush used: the state secrets privilege.

But Obama seeks to extend executive power even further than Bush did by claiming sovereign immunity included in the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits for any government surveillance except in the case of willful disclosure of any illegally obtained communications. Never mind that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Wiretap Act, and the Stored Communications Act (SCA) all specifically prohibit illegal warrantless wiretaps.

Greenwald writes that what the Obama administration is asserting “is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face.”

On Wednesday, 8 April 2009, Olbermann interviewed Kevin Bankston, the EFF’s lead attorney in the lawsuit against the Bush administration. This is especially surprising because Olbermann had been one of the most blatantly uncritical, doe-eyed apologists for Obama in the run-up to the election.

As Olbermann said in his initial analysis, “welcome to change you cannot believe in.”

Berman uses invalid data to call for stronger intellectual property laws

Just when you thought we were finally safe from the intellectual property abuses of Rep. Howard Berman (D-Hollywood), he’s back with a new call for stronger intellectual property laws. Most rational US citizens heaved a sigh of relief when Berman became chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We thought he was rendered harmless, but he’s merely redefined his old saws as foreign affairs.

What’s really disturbing is that Berman is using data he almost certainly knows is unreliable or simply inaccurate. After all, it’s his job to know that the data he is using is reliable and accurate.

All of this came out in a field hearing Berman held in Van Nuys, California on Monday, 6 April 2009 to allow US movie and music cartel executives vent on the terrors inherent in counterfeiting and piracy. Berman opened the hearing by citing four statistics:

1. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) claims that copyright infringement caused an estimated US $18.3 billion in losses in 2007
2. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims the film industry lost US$6.1 billion in 2005 due to piracy
3. The music industry estimates there were more than 40 billion illegal downloads last year
4. The US Chamber of Commerce claims counterfeiting is responsible for the loss of 750,000 US jobs per year.

The problem is that Berman’s information is mostly just plain wrong. The IIPA claimed losses of US$20.1 billion in 2007 (.pdf; 24Kb). Last year’s claim is US$18.4 billion.

Consumer Reports fails epically on refrigerator ratings

Like most of the rest of the planet, my household is several years deep into repair and maintenance mode. We haven’t made any major purchases in years, and hardly any nonessential minor ones. We’ve always been of the mindset that it’s best to fix what you have rather than ship it off to the landfill and replace it with a newer and shinier gee-gaw.

One of the minor emergencies that took place during my lost week with my failed fistula was the refrigerator started leaking. Water had gotten under my office carpet and the kitchen floor before we noticed it.

We opted for appliance repair insurance through our local gas and electric monopoly when this happened several years ago after an outrageous—more than US$300—repair bill from Sears. Now for about US$30 per month, repairs on all of our appliances—including the air conditioner and furnace—are covered at no charge. If the appliance can’t be fixed, we receive a fair-market payment of the appliance’s value. Of course it’s not fair—this is insurance after all, and it’s what the monopoly says it is—but I very highly recommend the insurance plan.

Like I said, we’re in maintenance and repair mode. But we like to have a plan B.

What the hell happened to Frontline?

PBS’s Frontline historically has produced some of the US’s most outstanding and compelling documentaries. But its March 31, 2009 presentation of Sick Around America was among the most biased pieces of corporate propaganda posing as reporting yet seen. The production considered mandatory, for-profit insurance coverage (aka the “Massachusetts model”) as the only viable alternative to the current US healthcare system.

Not one advocate of a single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system in the US was interviewed for the documentary. Not one. Never mind that Representative John Conyers‘s (D-Michigan) H.R.676 proposed legislation to provide single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system in the US has 74 cosponsors. Never mind that the majority of the US populace favors a single-payer, universal-coverage healthcare system. As do more than half of US doctors and two-thirds in Minnesota.

Never mind that Sick Around America was a sequel to Sick Around the World, which aired 15 April 2008. Sick Around the World examined several publicly-funded, single-payer healthcare systems, including Taiwan’s and the UK’s. Not one of the international healthcare systems investigated in the 2008 documentary is based on mandatory, for-profit insurance coverage. In fact, as the Canadian government reports, “the United States is the only OECD country that relies primarily on private insurance for healthcare financing.”

Abandon Zambrano not Wrigley

The Chicago Cubs are the only professional sports team that mean anything to me and it’s largely because of Wrigley Field. I grew up in Chicago and my city bus pass got me into Wrigley’s right-field bleachers with a bag of popcorn, a pop, and a pack of Wrigley’s gum. The Wrigley‘s (and the Cubs) knew how to grow fans for life.

Now comes Cubs ace pitcher Carlos Zambrano—who is a certifiable unadulterated head case to begin with, he’s absolutely bat-shit crazy—telling the Associated Press that he wishes “Chicago would build a new stadium for the Cubs.”

Sacrilege.

Thankfully, Cubs manager Lou Piniella couldn’t disagree with Zambrano about Wrigley Field more. “Wrigley’s got its own uniqueness. There’s no question the facilities need to be redone but that’s going to happen,” Piniella told the AP. “My favorite time of year is when the ivy turns green. It’s really a great environment to play a ballgame.”

And it’s a great environment to watch a ballgame. Keep Wrigley Field; get rid of Zambrano. This is, after all, the year the Cubs win it all.

The trouble with Twitter

Twitter is an important social networking tool for both individuals and businesses. Make no doubt about that. Twitter is basically a short message service (SMS) for the internet. But the trouble with Twitter is that it’s a complete and total attention drain. And for me, I’ve found it to be inessential. Much like SMS messaging on mobile phones. And going forward, my life is all about what’s essential.

This past week I was totally offline and disconnected for the first time in probably 25 years. Coming back was interesting and shocking. The email backlog was truly horrifying, as was the RSS feed backlog. It took me maybe three seconds to decide to ditch Twitter and remove TweetDeck from my dock. I’m almost certain that it won’t return.

It was a matter of priorities. Email can’t be ignored. I’ve carefully pruned my RSS feeds over the years to the really essential information sources. Twitter is at best interesting (but far too rarely) but not really essential. Here’s why: I’d much rather spend more time in the RSS realm reading something that someone took the time and effort to use one of the absolutely horrid weblog or content management system editors to publish an article. Because of the time and effort involved, the quality is usually inordinately better. I’m learning to become outright selfish with my attention and I find low quality attempts to attract my attention extremely frustrating.

Twitter’s just too easy. 140 characters and out. And those damn shortened URLs that are a spammer’s dream, giving you no idea of where you’re attention is being directed. Additionally, shortened URLs steal hard-earned independent Google juice and are totally dependent on the viability of the shortening service being used.

How I got my biker scar

This is a wholly self-serving article, something I’ve studiously attempted to avoid in the 17 years I’ve been writing online. It’s totally self-indulgent and awfully unprofessional. It’s an email to my sister after I got her weird automated voicemail (like the one we have on our landline) and it freaked me out.

It’s of interest only to my family and friends and those facing permanent kidney failure (end-stage renal disease) and hemodialysis. And I publish it here only so I don’t have to repeat the story (although the biker scar bit might be worth it on good days).

If you’re not a family member or friend, just mosey along. This isn’t what you’re looking for. Here’s the Johnny Cash picture you’re probably looking for. And you know what? That’s pretty damned representative of how I feel right now.

Last Sunday morning (29 March) my fistula failed. I met the surgeon Sunday afternoon who did a quick exam and confirmed it had, indeed, failed.

I was scheduled to go to United Hospital for an outpatient procedure to place the catheter in my chest on Monday morning (30 March). Between Sunday and Monday the surgeon and interventional radiologists decided the success rate with trying to de-clot the existing fistula wasn’t good enough so they weren’t even going to try. I was admitted to the hospital.

When I explained that the ID strap would have to go on my right wrist because of the pending procedures, they got pissy and said they’d just have to do it on the floor, then. One of the first things I remember being told about my first fistula was that my left arm was out of bounds for everything—watches, blood draws, blood pressure checks, everything—including ID straps.

They started off really well by sending me to the wrong place. Well alrighty, then. Every time I go to United Hospital they lose patients. It’s not usually me, but it’s happened before, so at least I knew I was in the right place.

The sonogram ultrasound technician was supposed to do a vein mapping of my left arm so the surgeon could decide where to place the new fistula. She did the sonogram ultrasound, but forgot to draw the lines on my arm. Oops.

Clotted fistula

When I was waking up this morning, I noticed—in passing—that my left forearm was sore. As I fully awoke, I panicked. Oh shit, it’s my fistula, I thought. And it was. No thrill. No pulse. Ordinarily I can actually hear the thrill and pulse with my arm laying several inches away from my ear. Ordinarily I can actually see the pulse throbbing away at the surgical scar. Not today.

Quick, run for the stethoscope. Aw crap. No sound at all anywhere up and down my entire forearm. This is not good. My fistula ordinarily sounds like a whitewater river through the stethoscope. Not today.

I called the nephrologist’s answering service thinking vaguely that I remembered reading something about addressing a clotted fistula was time critical. Apparently not; the nephrologist on-call instructed me to call the vascular surgeon who created the fistula. I called the vascular surgeon’s answering service and got a call back instructing me to go to United Hospital‘s emergency room and he’d meet me there. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “wait a minute, there’s probably not a lot that can be done, so just drive down to my office and call my beeper when you get there. I’ll come across the street from the hospital and take a look—it’ll be cheaper and quicker. We’ll decide what to do from there.”

Bernie Sanders introduces single-payer healthcare reform bill

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced the American Health Security Act of 2009 (.pdf; 244Kb) yesterday. The proposed legislation calls for a national single-payer, universal coverage healthcare system that would be administered by the individual states. Sanders’ bill draws heavily on a proposal introduced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) in 1993 and is in close alignment with H.R. 1200 introduced by Representative Jim McDermott (D-Washington) in 2005.

In contrast to other plans that would preserve the private health insurance industry in a central role, the Sanders plan would eliminate them.

Sanders’ plan would, of course, cover all 46 million uninsured American citizens while simultaneously expanding benefits for those with existing health insurance by restoring free choice of providers and eliminating all co-pays and deductibles. In contrast to other plans, Sanders’ plan is the most fiscally conservative, saving more than US$400 billion each year in administrative overhead expenses. The program would be funded by aggregating governmental spending on healthcare into a single fund along with new taxes amounting to less than what citizens currently pay for private health insurance.

It’s important that this proposed legislation get a fair and thorough hearing. Fully two-thirds of the US citizenry and 59% of US physicians support a single-payer plan.

Health insurers see writing on wall, cave on pre-existing conditions

In what’s being called a surprise to legislators, the US health insurance industry has quietly reversed its position on charging higher premiums to enrollees with pre-existing medical conditions. While remaining adamantly opposed to any single-payer, universal coverage plan—which would basically put its constituents out of business—the health insurance industry now says it will end its pre-existing condition policy in exchange for mandated health insurance for all.

In other words, the industry saw the writing on the wall and is deciding to cut its losses on an unsupportable position.

Until now, the health insurance industry has consistently claimed that its business model was dependent upon pricing insurance for those with pre-existing conditions much higher than everyone else. If insurers couldn’t charge more for pre-existing conditions, the industry argued, insurance rates for the young and healthy would skyrocket to unaffordable levels. What was unaffordable for the young and healthy was perfectly acceptable for the ill or those likely to become ill.

What changed?

The health insurance industry is clearly seeing that there is going to be significant movement in the near-term on healthcare and health insurance reform and it’s simply trying to get ahead of the curve on the issue.

Yikes: mega drop-down navigation actually works pretty well

Here’s the shocker for the week. Usability and human factors expert Jakob Nielsen has found that mega drop-down navigation panels actually work for dense or complicated subnavigation structures. This is especially surprising because, as Nielsen showed earlier, regular drop-down menus are a usability nightmare.

Mega drop-downs (when activated from a horizonal primary navigation structure)—or mega fly-outs (when activated from a vertical primary navigation structure) are characterized by two-dimensional panels divided into groups of elements that are structured through layout or typography. To be effective, mega drop-downs and mega fly-outs have to contain the entire subnavigation structure without scrolling. These elements can optionally use link titles to emulate tooltips.

Nielsen uses foodnetwork.com as a mega drop-down example:

Follow the power, not just the money

Woodward and Bernstein taught an entire generation of journalists to follow the money to get the story. Too bad so many of our best and brightest put on those particular blinders. There was a much older story at work in the coup d’état that’s currently happening around the globe. Instead of following only the money that was in the right hand, we shouldn’t have fallen for the misdirection and instead followed the power that was in the left hand. So writes Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, in the best analysis of the global economic crisis yet to surface. Executing an alarmingly embarrassing attempt at channeling Hunter S. Thompson, Taibbi writes, “So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial—we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.” Grit your teeth and read through the Thompson tropes; it’s worth it.

This has been coming to a well-calculated boil for decades: the frog-boilingly gradual takeover of the US government by a relative handful of insiders who used money—old and new—to purchase elections, peddle influence in the bright, but dusty, corners of the capitol, and loosen the already tenuous regulations that kept the financial greedheads in pseudo-check.

University faculty partaking of big pharma payola again

S. Charles Schulz, the chief of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota attended a 2000 medical conference to present favorable research on a new drug. Maura Lerner and Janet Moore, staff writers for the Star Tribune, report that Schulz stated that the drug was “significantly superior” to existing drugs used to treat schizophrenia and in an AstraZeneca media release proclaimed the “dramatic benefits” of the new drug. The drug became a wild success, with annual sales of US$4.5 billion.

Newly released documents indicate the drug company knew the research didn’t support either of Schulz’s claims. Experts question the value of the new drug, citing that it doesn’t work better than existing drugs and has “some nasty side effects.”

According to Lerner and Moore, in an interview this week Schulz acknowledged that his own study did not show that the new drug was any more effective than the established drug.

Frank Cerra, the University’s senior vice president for health sciences told Lerner and Moore that “medical research can be interpreted in more than one way, and cautioned against jumping to conclusions based on Internet documents. He said he was not familiar with details of the Schulz study, but that there was nothing unusual about his relationship with AstraZeneca. ‘I think the role of university professors, particularly in health sciences, is to engage with the pharmaceutical industry and the device industry,’ he said. As long as Schulz disclosed his ties, he said, ‘then the university is OK with this.’”

Openness and transparency indeed: The copyright cartel is at it again

Still think politics as usual will change under an Obama presidency? Here’s further indication it won’t. After promising openness and transparency, Obama is using George W. Bush’s worn out national security argument to obfuscate details about the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) currently being hammered out by the global copyright cartel. Earlier this week the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. Shortly before Obama took office, George W. Bush’s administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

A national security secret that’s been shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland. How does that work? Oh, but wait, it gets better. Cory Doctorow writes in boingboing how members of the copyright cartel have been cleared to partake of the national security secret. “Of course, they’re allowed to know what’s in the treaty—but the public, activist groups, consumer rights groups, and the artists whom this treaty is supposed to protect are all forbidden from knowing what it says,” writes Doctorow.

Obama telegraphs reversal on taxing health benefits

During the last presidential campaign, Barack Obama railed against Senator John McCain‘s (R-Arizona) proposal to tax all employer-provided health benefits. Obama conveniently omitted the second part of McCain’s plan: a tax credit to subsidize the costs of health insurance. Obama went so far as to repeatedly refer to McCain’s proposal as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.”

If you thought Obama really was going to change politics in DC, by now you should be returning to reality from your fantasy. Almost predictably and in a hearing that was almost certainly carefully choreographed, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)—who has legislation pending that includes taxing employer-paid health benefits—asked Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, about the issue. Orszag read from the script that the idea “most firmly should remain on the table.” Call it the congressional telegraph; it’s politics as usual. It’s a way for Obama to signal that he supports an idea he actively campaigned against without having to actually say he supports it.

Although I qualify for Medicare, I retain private insurance. When I had to pay my own freight, the first US$20,000 every year went to health insurance, co-pays, and deductibles. It was unsustainable. In August (assuming I don’t get laid off; an extra-large assumption these days) I will have worked for the last three years as an employee at the University of Minnesota at significantly less than market wages. The University pays a sizable chunk of my health insurance. This makes health insurance sustainable for me.

Get out the pitchforks

American International Group (AIG), the insurance company that US taxpayers have bailed out to the tune of US$170 billion and of which the US citizenry now owns 80%, just doesn’t get it. David Cho and Brady Dennis writing for the Washington Post broke the story that AIG will distribute about US$165 million in bonuses to the very executives who drove the company into the ditch and required the taxpayer bailout to begin with. The bonuses cover 400 employees and range from US$1,000 to US$6.5 million, Edmund Andrews and Peter Baker report for the New York Times.

Never mind that Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, had a come to Jesus telephone conversation with AIG CEO Edward Liddy that Liddy described to the Post as “difficult.” Geithner told Liddy that the “payments were unacceptable and had to be renegotiated.” Liddy wrote a letter back to Geithner agreeing to “restructure some of the payments” but saying he had “‘grave concerns’ about the impact on the firm’s ability to retain talented staff ‘if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the US Treasury.” Liddy was appointed by Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.

What? He’s worried about being able to retain the people that drove the company over the cliff. By all means, let them go. In fact, why weren’t they shown the door when this travesty first came to light? And get this: Geithner’s Treasury Department lawyers concurred with AIG: “the firm would risk a lawsuit if it scrapped the retention payments at the AIG Financial Products subsidiary, whose troublesome derivative trading nearly sank AIG.” AIG promised its employees about US$600 million in bonuses payable in 2009-10.

The unthinkable scenario

“‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model.” There, in one sentence, Clay Shirky sums up the “newspaper problem.” His is the single best piece of media analysis in a very long while.

When the developed world has had access to the global copy-making machine that is the internet for more than 15 years one has to wonder why it took this long to kill the newspaper. And why we didn’t see it coming all along. It’ll probably take another five years or so to finish the job, but it’s safe to say the internet has blown up all forms of corporate media. Any medium that relied on intellectual property laws, monopolistic structures, or inefficiencies hidden by economies of scale are over. Stick a fork in them; they’re done. What Shirky calls the “unthinkable scenario” is here and it’s not going away.

As a result, Shirky says we’re living through the 1500s and the spread of Gutenberg’s movable type all over again. Many experiments flourished during the time, almost all of which seemed trivial to contemporaries. But Shirky focuses on one of these seemingly trivial experiments that, in retrospect, turned out to be an enormous leap forward.

“Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change—take a book and shrink it—was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.”

Think of Craig Newmark as a modern Aldus Manutius. Craigslist began as a tiny experiment that yielded industry-shifting changes.

CNN gets it wrong on single-payer. Surprised?

CNN’s senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, said in her report last week for the cable news network, a report that’s been running in a seemingly endless loop: “Fifteen years ago you sometimes heard—actually you heard quite a bit—people saying: ‘Let’s have a single-payer system like in Canada. The government is going to be the health insurer for everybody.’ You don’t hear that as much as you used to. So more people are on the same page more than they once were.”

Only one small problem. Cohen is flat wrong.

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) points out that it reported on 8 July 1993 that “New York Times polling since 1990 had consistently found majorities—ranging from 54 percent to 66 percent—in favor of tax-financed national health insurance.” FAIR goes on to point out that a New York Times/CBS poll this week (scroll down) found that roughly the same number of US citizens—59 percent—favor government-provided national health insurance.

It isn’t the people who have killed the demand for single-payer healthcare, it’s the corporate media, as the FAIR report in 1993 as well as a newer study released 6 March 2009 clearly show.

Forget newspapers; worry about the survival of journalism

The Columbia Journalism School is one of the best at what it does. Or at least it was. Erica Orden’s piece in New York Magazine uncovers how the school is struggling mightily to remain relevant in today’s media environment.

First the New York Times announces that journalism students would help run its hyperlocal weblog project, “The Local.” Students not from the august Columbia Journalism School but rather from City University of New York (CUNY). Andy Newman, one of the Times reporters running the project disputes this in the article’s comments, writing that “The Local has four, count ‘em, interns from Columbia J-school: Haley Sweetland Edwards, Jeremy Herb, Sung Moss, and Alexandra Cheney.” Erica Orden is a graduate of the Columbia J-school; I guess she slept through the course on getting facts correct in basic reporting.

Then Columbia announces that starting this summer it will restructure its curriculum to encompass digital storytelling. Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Grueskin‘s plan is to update the school’s curriculum to reflect the new realities. Grueskin, the former managing editor of WSJ.com acknowledges that Columbia, while good at teaching the basics, hasn’t kept pace with the changing times in the mediasphere. Columbia is renowned for RW1, Reporting and Writing 1, the core curriculum of the journalism school and something of a legend. Grueskin tells Orden that he wants to see the course “‘transition… from a skill set to a mindset’ citing a live blog of a news event, followed by a slideshow, followed by a longer story a week later as an example of new media practices.”

Nationalization, mark to market, or a middle way

All I know about the economy—and it’s not much, seriously—comes from running a small business for the past 30 years. But I’ve come to believe we’re collectively in water so deep that even the experts don’t have a clue. Take Alan Blinder’s commentary in today’s New York Times, as indicative. Blinder is an economics and public affairs professor at Princeton, former vice chair of the US Federal Reserve, and Democratic advisor.

Blinder says we can’t nationalize the bad players in the financial industry because there are too many of them, it’s too hard to distinguish the bad players from the good, government’s not good at managing businesses, and the domino effect would kick in.

He may be right but it feels like he’s being disingenuous. There’s something less than 9,000 banks in the US. Subject every one of them to the stress test (or something like it). Those that pass get to continue business as usual; those that fail get nationalized with government managers. Medicare is widely acknowledged as better managed than the private sector, and how could a government manager possibly do any worse than the asshats that have been running the financial sector?

On the one hand nationalization. On the other mark to market. The mark to market argument goes like this: all of the so called toxic assets held by the institutions in trouble would be assigned a value based on the current market price for the asset. Once and for all. What’s happened is that these failed institutions have been allowed to continue to carry their toxic assets on their balance sheets at a value far above what the market would pay for them in the hope that the market will come to its senses and properly value the assets these boneheads hold.

So, we can’t nationalize because it’s antithetical to the American way; similarly we won’t mark to market because the rich would have to take a haircut and a shave.

Blinder favors an approach generally called good-bank, bad-bank. He would have each troubled institution split in two. The good bank would get the assets and the bad bank would get all the toxic sludge. The problem is, US taxpayers would end up recapitalizing the good banks. It’s a false middle way.

Times running out for a consensus on a middle way. Any middle way would have to soak the rich who greedily gambled their way into this mess. Anything less will bring the shell-shocked US populace out of its collective daze with the pitchforks.

Limbaugh, the inverse conservative

Rush Limbaugh is “the bloated face and drug-addled voice of the Republican Party.” So said leading Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who, I suppose, should know. He was quoted by Washington Post Staff Writer Perry Bacon Jr. “Along with lots of others, I intend to continue to turn up the heat until every alleged Republican either endorses or renounces Rush’s statement that he hopes our president fails,” Begala concluded.

Begala, like most pundits-for-hire, is hyperventilating at least a little. Limbaugh’s complete statement was, “So what is so strange about saying I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to reconstruct and reform this nation so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? I want the country to survive. I want the country to succeed.”

Limbaugh, who claims to be a voice of conservatism is really nothing more than an entertainer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just that he’s far, far from being a real conservative. While he wildly criticized Bill Clinton and his agenda while president, he mostly gave George W. Bush a pass, except when it came to his immigration proposal.

A true conservative would be just as upset as someone on the other end of the political spectrum with Bush’s record with regard to civil liberties. A core conservative value is liberty and every one of the conservatives I know supports civil liberties almost as rabidly as card-carrying American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) members. Bush’s administration did more than any administration in history to diminish those liberties. Green-lighting domestic military operations, property seizures, First Amendment rights, Fourth Amendment rights, raids without warrants, wiretaps on US citizens without warrants, unilateral repeal of foreign treaties, and ignoring the legislative branch with regard to treatment and rendition of suspected terrorist detainees is just the tip of the Bush administration’s laundry list. Never mind that it took seven years for reason to prevail and the Office of Legal Counsel to repudiate these.

Paired organ donation software launched at DEMO

David Jacobs, a technologist who has worked for everyone from Macromedia to Microsoft, had permanent kidney failure and received a successful kidney transplant in December 2004. His kidneys failed in the spring of 2001 and Jacobs spent 3.5 years on the cadaver kidney waiting list and 1.5 years on dialysis.

Seeing an algorithmic solution to the problem of organ donations, Jacobs set out to implement a solution for complex paired organ donation through his company, Silverstone Solutions.

Paired organ donation is the process by which a person who needs an organ, call her patient A, has a donor—donor A—that isn’t a compatible match for her but is for someone else. Someone else, call him patient B, who needs an organ has a donor, call her donor B—that isn’t a compatible match for him. Donor A donates an organ to patient B; donor B donates an organ to patient A and everyone goes home happy. As you can see these organ pairs can quickly get quite complex. That’s where the mathematical algorithms come in. Screening test results for blood types, antigens, age, and myriad other factors is best left to computers.

Jacobs launched his paired organ donation software on Monday at the DEMO conference. Jacobs told Don Clark, writing for the Wall Street Journal, that his system has already been used by a San Francisco hospital to match 23 pairs of donors and recipients.

Missed martial law and the end of democracy by that much

In a secret 23 October 2001 37-page memo (.pdf; 11.9Mb) to then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo—then a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel—and Robert Delahunty—a special counsel in the office—authorized the US military to operate domestically. President Bush had asked Yoo and Delahunty if he could use the military against terrorist activities inside US borders. Bush got the answer he wanted; the Yoo-Delahunty memo authorized raids on terrorist cells domestically and also authorized property seizures. Yoo and Delahunty rationalized the position by writing that deadly force is a legitimate self-defense. As such, it would override any Fourth Amendment privacy breaches, or pretty much anything else.

Yoo and Delahunty took the position that the Posse Comitatus Act—which specifically bars domestic military law enforcement operations—wouldn’t apply because the military would be performing a national security function, not law enforcement.

Neil Lewis, writing for the New York Times, reports that the memo also stated that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully” and that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

Nine such previously-secret legal opinions were publicly disclosed by the Justice Department on Monday. According to the Washington Post‘s R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen, the Bush administration had maintained that the memos must be kept secret as recently as November.

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