Year: 2007

Radiohead $2.26 on every album download

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Remember when I commented on Radiohead making their album available online and allowing their fans to pay whatever they wanted?

After 29 days, some numbers are in, $2.26/album, with about $2.7 million in total sales. The coverage, of coursee, is that this is a pittance compared to the $19.95 for a CD, but that’s not what the band gets, that’s what the studio, retailer, record executive’s coke dealer and worthless brother-in-law, etc. get, not the artists.

Radiohead mad a lot more money in a few weeks than than they would in a few decades doing this. I recall hearing an interview with Aimee Man, formerly of ‘Til Tuesday, and she releases under her own label now, but her old stuff, the stuff that made the top ten and hit MTV forever, it was still “not recouped”, i.e. she had gotten no royalties.

The phenomenon is going to move down the chain, and I won’t shed a tear to see the demise of the record distributor paracites.

Russian Votes to Leave CFE

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It’s not much of a surprise that the lower house of the Duma has voted to leave the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

No surprise. What is a surprise, at least to me, is that the Duma voted 418 to 0 to do so.

While the Duma is weak, and largely populated by Putin lapdogs, the unanimity shows something: That the Russians believe, accurately in my opinion, that the missile defense installations are directed at them.

I agree. Bush and His Evil Minions™ wanted to show Russia who was boss, out of the same sort of dick swinging that got us into Iraq.

Bad move.

Pat Robertson Endorses Rudy Guiliani; Brownback to Endorse McCain

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For anyone else, I’d call it a sign of the apocalypse, but for Pat Robertson, I just ask how much he got for selling his endorsment. There are very few more venal and self serving creatures on this planet.

As to Brownback and McCain, it’s no big. They are both Senators, and far closer on issues than most people recognize. Additionally, I could not see him endorsing Romney, he’s a Mormon from Massachusetts, and Huckabee and he were gunning for the place in the campaign, so he was an unlikely choice.

Of course, I pegged Brownback as the Republican nominee, which goes to show that my powers of prognostication stink.

Economic Avalance Update: November 7 Edition

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The Dollar hit another all time low, it’s currently at $1.4645:1.0000€, oil peaked at $98.62/bbl, the Canadian Dollar briefly broke $1.10 US today and the Dow dropped 361 points.

Not only do I expect to be right on the Euro breaking $1.50 and oil breaking $100/bbl before year’s end, we may see significant moves toward moving oil to Euro denomination by next June. Iran and Venezuela are already pushing for this for political reasons, and the dollar’s decline will likely put pressure on other petro economies to go a similar way.

To quote Paul Krugman (PDF):

Almost everyone believes that the US current account deficit must eventually end, and that this end will involve dollar depreciation. However, many believe that this depreciation will take place gradually. This paper shows that any process of gradual dollar decline fast enough to prevent the accumulation of implausible levels of US external debt would impose capital losses on investors much larger than they currently expect. As a result, there will at some point have to be a ‘Wile E. Coyote moment’ – a point at which expectations are revised, and the dollar drops sharply. …..

You have to love an economist who can invoke the Warner Brothers.

Bush Water Bill Veto Overriden

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The vote was 361-54, and the Senate is expected to override too.

This bill has broad bipartisan support, and big spender Bush vetoed it because he is having to pretend that he gives a damn about the budget to reinforce his own delusions of manhood.

Why this is significant is because once he is overridden, it will become progressively easier for it to happen in the future.

There are already reports that there is an S-Chip bill that will get a veto proof majority in the works. It gets much harder for the Republicans to whip the vote when they have already helped override a veto.

Yesterday’s Election Results

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Great Smackdown of Tim Russert: Stop the Inanity | The American Prospect

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Paul Waldman has the same fantasy that I do:

I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a candidate will say, “You know what, Tim, I’m not going to answer that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a disgrace. You have in front of you a group of accomplished, talented leaders, one of whom will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States. You can ask them whatever you want. And you choose to engage in this ridiculous gotcha game, thinking up inane questions you hope will trick us into saying something controversial or stupid. Your fondest hope is that the answer to your question will destroy someone’s campaign. You’re not a journalist, you’re the worst kind of hack, someone whose efforts not only don’t contribute to a better informed electorate, they make everyone dumber. So no, I’m not going to stand here and try to come up with the most politically safe Bible verse to cite. Is that the best you can do?”

It is a mark of the hacktacular nature of the Washington Punditocracy* that this man is treated with any respect.

*Which might be better described as a Kakistocracy.

Hey, I Know, If I’m Offensive Enough, then I’ll Get Attacked by the Right Wing Blogs, and My Readership Will Skyrocket!!!

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On a more serious note it is true that religion defies logic. In fact the definition of religious faith is that it defies logic.

Religion is about knowing the unknowable, and as such, whether you take the tales literally, or as metaphor, the stories, narrative, and cosmology of any religion are supposed to be intellectually absurd. Religion is supposed to transcend the intellect on some level

This is why, for example, Talmudic discussions of exactly what substance the 10 commandments were supposed to be made of* hold little interest for me, except to the degree that they can be shown to be allegories that show us how to live our lives.

But for those of you who simply want to be offended, there is this (Praise be to Tshirthell.com):

.

*Sapphire. What’s more the first set, the ones Moses smashed, were supposed to be carved entirely by God, while the second set are supposed to have been cut into tablets by Moses, and then God carved the words on them. It’s supposed to indicate that God was displeased at that whole Golden Calf thing.

Free Market Gets Us Slower More Expensive Internet

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No surprise, the U.S. is lagging in broadband penetration, performance and price, and it is falling further behind. The free market shills claim that it’s bad data, but every study confirms this.

This is not surprising. Telcos are not in the business of providing good service. They are in the business of making money, and it is far more profitable to use their natural monopoly, the ownership of the last mile of wire to the home, to keep competitors out than it is for them to invest in new equipment.

Given recent deregulatory decisions by the FCC, the level of competition, and hence the level of innovation are low, and prices are high. They will remain that way until the government steps in.

What Chris Bowers Says

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The media in general, and the Washington punditocracy* protray the “Blue Dog Democrats” as brave people standing up to the extremists in their party. Chris Bowers makes a convincing argument that the opposite is true, that these are folks who are the most extreme sort of hysterical fear.

The concluding ‘graph:

Blue Dogs actually seem like the most scared people in all of Washington, D.C. as a result of this article. They are afraid of Republican attacks. They are afraid of conservative pundits. They are afraid of their constituents. They are afraid of motions to recommit that are meaningless in terms of actual policy. And they are protected by Emanuel and Hoyer, who seem petrified of all the same things. They seem to all operate in a perpetual state of fear, despite their surface machismo. And yes, it does seem like fear, rather than simply conservative beliefs in this case, because otherwise why would they be in favor of a meaningless procedural motion that has nothing to do with policy? The widespread fear in the tough guy wing of the Democratic Party is one of the great ironies of modern American politics.

I would add that not only does this make it more difficult to accomplish things, their behavior reinforces Republican attacks against the Democrats as without principle, or guts, and never willing to take a step to do the right thing.

It is a tragedy of the commons. By acting in their own perceived (and only perceived, look at Ron Paul, whose support is driven by his forthrightness, not the policies involved) best interest, they destroy the common resource of productive political discourse.

*Which might be better described as a Kakistocracy.

A Spammer and A Genius

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It appears that spammers are using sex to enlist human brain power to foil Captchas.

This is a Captcha:

Basically, the spammers have, “created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image”.

The Captcha comes from a site that uses them to prevent spam, Yahoo comes to mind as a prominent example.

This is brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. If only this man could use his powers of technology and psychology for good, instead of evil.

Iraqi Inspector General will Audit Iraqi Security Forces

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When the IG turns over these rocks, it will not be pretty.

IG to audit Iraqi security forces

By Megan Scully CongressDaily November 5, 2007

At the urging of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction plans to review how many trained Iraqi personnel are actually serving in the nation’s security forces. The audit was sparked by an Oct. 31 letter to Stuart Bowen, the U.S. inspector in charge of investigating Iraq reconstruction, in which Dorgan expressed frustrations at the Bush administration’s inability to provide reliable statistics on the size of the nascent security forces.

…

Senate Investigating Top Televangelists, Demanding Financial Records

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I should note that it is Republican Senator Charles Grassley who is appearing to take the lead on this.

They want to see if too much of the tax exempt* money is going to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Ole Anthony, of the Trinity Foundation has been trying to get coverage of this for years, and finally went to Grassley because the press would not cover it.

My guess is that part of the reason for the lack of press coverage is a fear of being attacked by the religious institutions, and the other reason is because churches are allowed to conceal their financial dealings in ways that other non-profits are not,‡ which makes it tougher for the average reporter to get the information they need to make a story.

With the threat of congressional subpoenas, the information that Grassley gets should be more complete.

*I actually have some experience with laws involving tax-exempt religious and educational institutions, section 501(c)3 of the tax code. In 1990, I incorporated a group that put on a literary conferences, Arisia as a Massachusetts non-profit and a federal 501(c)3†.
†Truth be told, in a sane world, it would have had to incorporate as a 501(c)7, a membership organization, but the 501(c)3 code is lax enough to slip it in, and we needed the low postage rates available for a 501(c)3, but not a 501(c)7. It was legal, as to the ethics, I try to think about Arisia as little as possible for any number of reasons.
‡BTW, one of the problems about getting information about how churches are run is that unlike other tax exempt organizations, churches are not required to file form 990s, which are public documents with fairly full financial disclosure.

Weapons of Mass Digestion*

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Your tax dollars at work.

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

…

If Mudd and Hulon are still working for the FBI, something is deeply wrong.

*That title is not my idea. It comes from the guy who runs MyNuMo, who, like everyone on the bloody internet, writes better than I do.

Economic Meltdown News.

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With everything seeming to come apart at once, one wonders if the other economic world powers have decided that the United States is simply too dangerous to allow it to continue it’s role as the worlds sole remaining superpower.

Given that the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, it would be logical to attack where this country is weakest.

In the short run, the fact that the US has rulers who appear to be insane would argue for this, and in the long run, it’s probably to their advantage too.

The dollar vs the Euro, $1.4571:1.0000€.

Oil Hits $97/bbl. Violence in Afghanistan, and a bombing of a Yemeni oil pipeline kicked everything up, as Emeril says, “another notch”.

Oil Hits $97 on Bombs, Demand Forecast: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Indymac, one of the largest independent mortgage lenders in the US, reported losses that were 5 times their earlier predictions. The third-quarter net loss for Pasadena, California-based IndyMac totaled $202.7 million, or $2.77 per share. IndyMac had on September 7 forecast a loss of nil to 50 cents per share.

And it appears that the financial upset is roiling the 10 year Treasury note market too.