Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

On David Brin's "The Transparent Society"

Michael Froomkin writes:

Discourse.net: CFP '08 Accepts Our Panel on 'The Transparent Society': I’m delighted to report that my proposal for a panel on “‘The Transparent Society’ — Ten Years Later” has been accepted for CFP’08, thanks no doubt to the sterling panelists I was able to assemble. Our panel is now scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 3:30-5:00(PM) in the George room at the Omni Hotel in New Haven.

Computers, Freedom and Privacy is the most fun conference I go to; the program can be variable, I admit, but the hallway conversations are always fantastic. Come - it’s fun.

Here’s the panel description:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of David Brin’s controversial book, “The Transparent Society”. The book argues that in the face of the explosion of sensors, cheap storage, and cheap data processing we should adopt strategies of vision over concealment. A world in which not just transactional information, but essentially all information about us will be collected, stored, and sorted is, Brin says, inevitable. The only issue left to be decided is who will have access to this information; he argues that freedom, and even some privacy, are more likely to flourish if everybody - not just elites - has access to this flood of data.

Brin proposes a stark choice: either the information will be “secret” and “private”—in which case only governments, always potentially repressive, will have access. Or, the information will be “open” and “public” and we will all be transparent to each other. Given this choice, Brin argues, better to be naked to each other than to empower a few with unique access to information about the many. The attempt to protect privacy as we know it carries too great a risk, as it leads if not inevitably than at least all too easily to a world of enormous information-driven tyranny in which the powers — primarily governments — with access to our ‘private’ information will abuse it. In contrast, a high-transparency world with very little privacy is one in which citizens have tools that allow them to monitor their governments.

Brin proposed a paradox which infuriated a good segment of the privacy community. It is normally an article of faith for privacy advocates that privacy empowers, and the removal of privacy is at least disempowering and at worst oppressive. Brin counters that privacy advocates have it exactly backwards: trying to maintain traditional ideas of information privacy in the face of technological changes he sees as (now) inevitable is what will disempower and perhaps oppress; only a program of radical information openness, nakedness even, stands a chance of leveling a playing field on which information is truly power.

The reception of “The Transparent Society” reflected the audacity of its claims. Some dismissed it; some attacked it; a few embraced it. What is striking, however, is that the ideas have had staying power: the book remains in print, it is regularly footnoted, and it comes up in discussion. Right or wrong, “The Transparent Society” has become more than a polar case trotted out as a good or bad example, but an as-yet unproved but also un-falsified challenge to how we think about privacy — one that demands continuing reflection (or, some would say, refutation).

The tenth anniversary of publication is an appropriate time to do that reflection at CFP.

About the presenters:

David Brin (remote participation): David Brin is the author of “The Transparent Society,” the inspiration for this panel. He is a noted futurist and science fiction writer.

Alan Davidson: Alan is the head of Google’s Washington, DC, government affairs office. Previously he was Associate Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Alan is a frequent speaker and presence in national privacy debates, and a frequent CFP participant.

J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley: In addition to his work as a macro and economic historian, Brad has written extensively about the economics of information and the Internet. He runs a very popular economics and culture blog, “Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong’s Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal” at http://delong.typepad.com/. Brad served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the Clinton administration, 1993-95. He is also a founder-member of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill.

A. Michael Froomkin (Moderator): Professor of Law, University of Miami: Michael has been writing about privacy, encryption, and anonymity for almost fifteen years. His writings include “The Death of Privacy?” 2 Stan L. Rev. 1461 (2000). He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Editorial Board of Information, Communication & Society and of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. He is on the Advisory Boards of several organizations including the Electronic Freedom Foundation and BNA Electronic Information Policy & Law Report. He is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He is also active in several technology related projects in the greater Miami area.

Stephanie Perrin: Stephanie is the Acting Director General of Risk Management, Integrity Branch, Service Canada. She is the former Director of Research and Policy at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and was prior to this a consultant in privacy and information policy issues, president of her own company Digital Discretion Inc., and a Senior Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington. She is the former Chief Privacy Officer of Zero-Knowledge, and has been active in a number of CPO associations, working with those responsible for implementing privacy in their organizations. Formerly the Director of Privacy Policy for Industry Canada’s Electronic Commerce Task Force, she led the legislative initiative at Industry Canada that resulted in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, privacy legislation that came into force in 2001 and has set the standard for private sector compliance. She is the principal author of a text on the Act, published by Irwin Law.

Zephyr Teachout: Visiting Asst. Prof. of Law, Duke University: Zephyr is one of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of online political organizing. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Zephyr is noted for advocating the Internet as a tool for creating local offline groups. publications include “Mousepads, Shoeleather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics”(Editor) (forthcoming August 2007, Paradigm Publishers); “How Politicians can use Distributive Networks” (New Assignment, November 2006); “Youtube? It’s so Yesterday,” (with Tim Wu) (Washington Post, November 2006), and “Powering Up Internet Campaigns,” book chapter in Lets Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.

The Computer Revolution Continues...

Take value added by manufacturing industry in 2000, project it forward using the BEA's chain-type indices for real value added by industry, and here is what you get:

Peak-to-peak, the Bush business cycle of the 2000s looks to have been the first business cycle in America in which real manufacturing output was essentially flat since... well, ever. But real computer production still managed to double.

Ezra Klein's Menagerie of Decent Conservatives

He names five:

Ezra Klein Archive | The American Prospect:

• Megan McArdle.... I read Megan long before she moved to DC, and in fact, long before I knew her real name, or had ever met her.... I read, and link, to her because she's the writer on the right who's engaged in the project most similar to mine: Namely, trying to seriously examine social and economic policy. But... she's also my inverse. Where my project is trying to figure out social policy from the premise that the economic system is stacked against the not-so-powerful, her premise -- and target -- seems to be that the political culture is stacked against the interests of the rich and economically dynamic.... [S]he comes to some bizarre -- and occasionally cruel -- conclusions, but she also gets in a lot of worthwhile insights, and asks a lot of questions that I find useful. So if what you're interested in is a right wing version of me -- which is to say, a social policy writer who comes to the opposite conclusions and starts from the opposite premises -- she's your girl.

• Ramesh Ponnuru: I find it exhausting to wade through The Corner, but Ponnuru is an interesting thinker with takes policy research very seriously. His article on the conservative approach to health care is about the best I've read on the subject. If I could get a feed of just his blog posts, he'd probably be atop my list.

• Ross Douthat: Great writer, deep thinker. For better or for worse, Ross is among the conservative writers most palatable to liberal readers, probably in part because he's often writing in contraposition to the Republican establishment.... [R]eading Ross will tends to give you insight into how the Republican party is experienced by its more thoughtful members....

• The American Scene: A totally unclassifiable group of political thinkers assembled by Reihan Salam, who's possibly the world's least classifiable individual, period. Includes Peter Suderman, who's one of my favorite cultural writers, and James Poulos, whose stuff I enjoy quite a bit.

• David Weigel: Weigel's one of Reason's guys... loves politics, is obsessed with the horserace, and hates both parties. It's like reading a sports blog by someone who loathes all the teams but can't tear himself away from the joy and spectacle of the competition.

Four of these are, IMHO, OK. But I really have to dissent from the recommendation of Ponnuru. I can't understand what Ezra Klein is thinking.

When I think of Ramesh Ponnuru, I think of someone who is "mystified" at being accused of offering "bad math" in his comments on Bush's Social Security plan:

Ramesh Ponnuru: My post criticized Jacob Weisberg for claiming that President Bush had been unwilling to cut Social Security benefits and had instead balanced the books on his reform plan by invoking high stock-market returns. That wasn't true. Bush proposed cuts in future benefits...

Alas, Bush never "balanced the books" on his Social Security reform plan. Never. Jason Furman--the only person ever to go public with any estimates of the budget impact of the Bush plan, such as it was (certainly no Bush appointees ever had any numbers to talk about), calculated that it closed "only 24 percent of the 75-year [estimated Social Security funding] gap..."

When I think of Ramesh Ponnuru, I think of the guy who flamed Rod Dreher for being concerned about the interaction of industrial air pollution with his kid's asthma.

And, of course, when I think of Ramesh Ponnuru I think of the guy who fled in terror from the subtitle and dust jacket of his own book:

Ramesh Ponnuru: The Corner on National Review Online: A QUIBBLE byRamesh Ponnuru: Garance Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death[: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life], which she describes as a "book on Democrats." The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it's tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn't meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don't mean by the phrase. I'm not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I've tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)

But what Ponnuru was "complaining" about did not come from Amazon but from Ponnuru's own publisher, Regnery. Here was the inside flap of his book:

Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?

If you look at their agenda they are.

IT’S NOT JUST abortion-on-demand. It’s euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide—-and a potentially deadly concern with "the quality of life" of disabled people. If you think these issues don’t concern you—guess again. The Party of Death could be roaring into the White House, as National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru shows, in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.... Ponnuru details how left-wing radicals, using abortion as their lever, took over the Democratic Party-—and how they have used their power to corrupt our law and politics, abolish our fundamental right to life, and push the envelope in ever more dangerous directions.... Ponnuru’s shocking exposé shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them. But he also shows how the tide is turning, how the Party of Death can be defeated...

There is a Ramesh Ponnuru who is a reasonable thinker. But there is also a Ramesh Ponnuru who will say anything to get in better with Republican office-holders. And there is a Ramesh Ponnuru who thinks his job is to feed the wingnuts. You cannot separate them. You shouldn't pretend that you can.

If Ramesh Ponnuru wants to pull an Andrew Sullivan--to perform a public apology and penance for his past sins against sanity--then Ezra Klein can add him to his menagerie of decent conservatives. But until then, no.

Bad Machine! Down!! Bad MACHINE!!!!

Google Mail has decided that ALL of the comments on my weblog are spam. Excuse me while I go train it...

Information-Wrangling Tools

I am supposed to be smart. I should be able to find a way to use all of these in a way that is truly useful:

• Tumblr
• Evernote
• Jott
• Sandy
• del.icio.us
• Skitch

Opera Branches Out: La Boheme

Opera branches out:

The Metropolitan Opera: La Boheme - NCM Event (2008): Fathom presents the excitement of The Metropolitan Opera Saturday Matinees - in HD on the Big Screen! The LIVE broadcast of Puccini's La Bohème will be shown for one day only on Saturday, April 5 at 1:30PM ET / 10:30AM PT in select theatres nationwide. A magnificent cast comes together for Franco Zeffirelli's iconic production of the Puccini favorite. The exciting young conductor Nicola Luisotti presides over a glorious vocal ensemble led by the mesmerizing Angela Gheorghiu, who sings Mimì at the Met for the first time in twelve years, opposite golden-toned tenor Ramón Vargas as her lover, Rodolfo...

This is not Mimi-the-ingenue we have here...

$20 a ticket x 325,000 tickets is $6M a year:

On Air & OnLine: The Met's experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form," said the Los Angeles Times of the groundbreaking series of live, high-definition performance transmissions to movie theaters around the world. The series enjoyed box office success, reaching an estimated audience of more than 325,000 viewers. In 2007-08, the Met offers its second season of international HD transmissions—this time with eight broadcasts, up from last year's six. Don't miss the chance to enjoy thrilling, world-class opera at your neighborhood theater!...

Henry Murger (1851), Bohemians of the Latin Quarter:

Today, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia. The greater number of our contemporaries who display the noblest blazonry of art have been Bohemians, and amidst their calm and prosperous glory they often recall, perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the verdant slope of youth, they had no other fortune in the sunshine of their twenty years than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the wealth of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous citizen, for all those for whom an "i" can never be too plainly dotted in definition, we repeat as an axiom: "Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hôtel Dieu, or the Morgue."

We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris.

We will begin with unknown Bohemians, the largest class. It is made up of the great family of poor artists, fatally condemned to the law of incognito, because they cannot or do not know how to obtain a scrap of publicity, to attest their existence in art, and by showing what they are already prove what they may some day become. They are the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats high in presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of the master and the school. This Bohemian is recruited from amongst those young fellows of whom it is said that they give great hopes, and from amongst those who realize the hopes given, but who, from carelessness, timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary. They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads of poets, and, persuaded that they are gleaming in their obscurity, wait for others to come and seek them out. We used to know a small school composed of men of this type, so strange, that one finds it hard to believe in their existence; they styled themselves the disciples of art for art's sake. According to these simpletons, art for art's sake consisted of deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance, who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to come of their own accord and place themselves under them.

It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges you to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of humanity, and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman.

For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If they would, however, many could escape from this fatal denouement which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread, but this duality which almost always exists among strongly tempered natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics, is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded sooner if it had not remained invisible.

In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the few lines in a dispatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they are buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand dead. So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun, never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the obscure workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and without sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an accomplished task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of indifference...

Fafblog! Back to Save the Universe!

Fafblog! is back to save the universe. We demand a new era of Fafno-Gibletsian rule over the cosmos! None will be able to stand in our way!

I Find Myself Unable to Disagree...

How could anyone possibly disagree with this, from Paul Graham?

How to Disagree: The web is turning writing into a conversation.... Many who respond to something disagree with it.... Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say.... The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word....

If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well... here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

DH0. Name-calling.... DH1. Ad Hominem.... DH2. Responding to Tone.... DH3. Contradiction.... DH4. Counterargument.... DH5. Refutation.... DH6. Refuting the Central Point....

Truly refuting something requires one to refute its central point, or at least one of them. And that means one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is. So a truly effective refutation would look like:

The author's main point seems to be x. As he says:

quotation

But this is wrong for the following reasons...

The quotation you point out as mistaken need not be the actual statement of the author's main point. It's enough to refute something it depends upon.

What It Means

Now we have a way of classifying forms of disagreement... while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.

The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments.... By giving names to the different forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional....

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it.

Comment Moderation Strategies

Barry Ritholtz points us to the owl-like Teresa Nielsen Hayden::

The Big Picture: My own policies are clearly stated here, but I like the description of how to get your comments banned over at boingboing:

Q. What's likely to land me in your bad graces? A. Since you've asked, here's a nowhere-near-exhaustive list... http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/27/boing-boings-moderat.html

Making False Advertising True

Nick Barrowman gave his weblog a somewhat deceptive name:

Log base 2: perspectives on history, science, technology, politics, language, and culture from Nick Barrowman.

So he tries to recover:

Tom Slee: Mr. Google's Guidebook

Tom Slee writes:

Whimsley: Mr. Google's Guidebook: Mr. Google is lying! (I wrote) His Guidebook no longer reflects the paths set out by travellers as they navigate their lives. It is no longer an outside observer of people's wanderings. Google's success has changed the way people find their routes. Here is the way it happens. When a new cluster of destinations is built there may be a flurry of interest, with new signposts being erected pointing towards one or another of those competing locations. And those signposts have their own dynamics, perhaps forming a power law as set out by Mr. Shirky or perhaps something different, as Mr. Shalizi has explained.

But that's not the end of the story. After some initial burst, no one makes new signposts to this cluster of destinations any more. And no one uses the old signposts to select which particular destination to visit. Instead everyone uses Mr. Google's Guidebook. It becomes the major determinant of the way people travel; no longer a guide to an existing geography it now shapes the geography itself, becoming the most powerful force of all in many parts of the land.

So my Netflix Prize essay got selected by Mr. Google's machines as one of the more interesting and insightful commentaries - the machines are perceptive, we must grant them that - and it soon appeared as number 3 on the list of recommended destinations for anyone looking for "Netflix Prize", right after the official site itself. And now no one is guided here by those few original links - the relevance of their effect is as vestigial as the effect of the Vikings' property rules. Mr. Google's Guidebook has cemented the verdict in place long after the early discussion has lost its relevance, like the edges of the Chinese take-away and like Mr. Wainwright's guides fixed the routes of the paths he charted. With little new being written about the Netflix Prize the Guidebook is the major source of new journeys. And so the Guidebook changes the pattern of the landscape from a rich, linked one with its power law shape (or other shape). Instead, there is a two stage process in the evolution of much of the landscape. The first stage is a brief discussion, from which Mr. Google picks a few winners. In the second stage, after that discussion has faded away, the continuing popularity of the winners is assured simply by their positioning in the Guidebook. Mr. Google has singlehandedly changed the way people travel, changing the selection of destinations from an ongoing referendum to a brief discussion from which he anoints a few winners.

Mr. Google no longer gives you what you want, he selects a winner from the crowd and then tells you it's what you wanted.

I was just about to put down the pen, exhausted now, when I heard a creak and the door to the library opened. I lurched around to see coming through the door --- Mr. Google himself! His face was no longer subservient as befits a butler. Instead it was smirking. And his teeth - surely they had not been so pointed before. I shrank.

But Mr. Google did not attack me with a knife, or bite me in the neck. Nothing so dramatic. He simply looked over at my scribbled notes and sighed a world-weary sigh.

You don't understand do you sir?

What do you mean Google? I understand everything now.

Really? This document here? And what does that matter if no one reads it? And who decides whether anyone can come here to view it? Exactly how do you propose to publicize your absurd opinions if not through me?

My shoulders sagged. Defeat. Of course, there was nothing I could do. "So you'll silence it then. Keep people away. My revelations will moulder, along with that masterpiece about the toilets".

No (said Google). That's what I mean - you really don't understand. You see, I don't care if people come and look at these hen scratches or not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. As long as I can sell a few advertisements on that page of my guidebook I really don't care. After all, what better praise for a Guidebook than to help people find out what's wrong with it? Just leave your manuscript with me. I'll look after it.

He held out his hand, imperious now. I felt disheveled after my long night. My brain was spinning. I could see no alternative. In a vain attempt to maintain some self-respect I drew myself up to my full height and pulled back my shoulders, adopting a bearing appropriate for my class. "All right Google. Here you go. Don't lose it now."

"Thank you sir. You can be sure I won't lose it. I never do lose anything you know."

I turned away from him and stumbled down the stairs. I had ended up giving him an order, and he had accepted it. Yet I could not shake the impression, even as he brought me a glass of sherry that evening in my sitting room, placing the silver tray beside me with deference, that Mr. Google - far from being a butler and travel guide - was more a master than a servant.

In the Age of the Cellular Phone...

In the Age of the Cellular Phone...

"He asks if he can hang up now and have us call him back in five minutes."

"Why?"

"He says he is checking into a hotel."

"Where is he?"

"You mean what city? I have no idea."

"This doesn't strike you as odd? That you call people up and talk to them and yet you have no idea, physically, where they are located on the globe?"

"I had never thought of it that way..."

Paul Krugman's Weblog Is the in Place to Be...

Right now I could quote from and comment on Paul Krugman's weblog all day. It is, today, the best place to go for rapid, timely, yet economically-sophisticated analysis of the Panic of 2008:

Paul Krugman:

Many people still don't quite get the Fed's problem.... One big part... is that cuts in the interest rates they can control aren't translating into reductions in the interest rates that matter for the economy... the most important channel through which monetary policy affects the economy is housing -- and the Fed's cuts have not succeeded in producing easier mortgage credit because the financial system has been falling apart. But... there is another important channel for monetary policy: low interest rates tend to cause a low dollar, which is good for net exports.... So the second panel in the graphic doesn%u2019t show a failure of policy -- it shows the one area in which monetary policy is working!... [I]f a weak dollar wasn't helping net exports, we'd be in much worse shape than we are.

Indeed. I find myself praying daily for a small run on the dollar myself...

Tor Books Enters the 21st Century: Step I

This threatens to be, in the words of Jo "Authoress of the Damnedest Versions of Both the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Jane Austen (Actually Anthony Trollope) I Have Ever Read" Walton:

more fun than a barrel of Arcturan spider-puppies!

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Making Light: Phase one: collect underpants: Yes, we're building a new web site, separate from our perfectly good corporate site.... [A]s I told at least one web reporter, if we knew exactly how it's going to work, we'd be done. We don't, entirely, so we're not, entirely.

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day--and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers.... We know that the site will also feature new original fiction... free of DRM... lightweight "social networking."... Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn't to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it'll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So this is, like, a big Tor promotional exercise, right?

PNH: Only in the sense that Tor is a pretty good brand to put on something associated with science fiction....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So what about the free e-books?

PNH: I'm glad I made you up so that you could ask that question! As you know, Bob... we are, For A Limited Time, sending... links through which they can download free, un-DRMed digital editions of various recent Tor books in a variety of formats.... However, the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn't the case....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: Is to be a Focal Point Fanzine, meyer.

PNH: So very busted.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: We thought so. We recognized the signs. The sensitive fannish faces. The faint but unmistakable aroma of mimeo ink. Exactly whose idea was this?

PNH: Well, er, Fritz Foy, former Holtzbrinck CTO and incorrigible ubergeek... and the aforementioned Irene Gallo...and, er, well yes, both Nielsen Haydens. Not long after the project's initial phase, Teresa was promoted to the Vingean Beyond, from whence she sends occasional messages of encouragement to those of us back in the Slow Zone where FTL and true AI are impossible.... And of course we'd be nowhere without the energy, enthusiasm, focus, and endless Outlook-calendar meeting notices of professional Web producer Larry Hewitt, hired by our corporate management to turn our gauzy ideas into a properly flowcharted plan. (Look! He has a plan! We must eat his brain!) We cope.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So when do you launch? Do you have a beta phase? Are you looking for early volunteers?

PNH: Again you anticipate me with the slan-like acuteness of your fine minds!... Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. Anyway, that's our plan.

Reading Books Online

Adam Engst writes:

an Open Letter to Steve Jobs: In Support of an iPod reader: Reading habits have undoubtedly changed, since we have more entertainment and research options available to us than ever before... the prime mover... is that Americans are now spending 32.7 hours per week online, almost twice as much as they spend watching TV (16.4 hours per week) and more than eight times as much as they spend reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours). If you want to point to an industry in trouble, look no further than newspapers, where circulation is in a steep decline.

The key point is that time spent online is largely time spent reading (and writing), whether email (57 billion messages sent in 2007 by IDC's estimate), blogs (over 70 million, with 1.5 million posts per day, according to Technorati), or more traditional online news and entertainment sources. People read more than they ever have, thanks to the Internet, and new forms of reading are appearing all the time. Witness the Japanese "cell phone novel," meant to be read in serialized form on the ubiquitous mobile phone. The Economist reports that since appearing in 2001, the genre has grown to become an $82 million business in 2006, with some ebooks receiving over a hundred thousand downloads per day.

I've called out all these numbers in order to encourage Apple to acknowledge that people read vast quantities of text and to focus hardware and software design efforts on making it easier to read on the iPod, iPhone, and future devices. The iPod and iPhone can be used to read some online content now, along with small bits of text synced from a Mac, but the experience could be significantly improved with native support for PDF, better user interface support for stored text documents, and more.

But I, speaking as a reader and a publisher, would really like to see Apple create a larger version of the iPod touch optimized not just for a better video experience, but also for a best-of-breed reading experience. Apple has the hardware design and user interface chops that Amazon lacked when creating the Kindle.... Equally important is the iTunes Store....

Such a device would make good business sense for Apple too....

John Markoff has speculated that your dismissal of American reading habits is actually a calculated setting of the stage for just such a device. You didn't have kind words for cell phones or the MP3 players that predated the iPod, with justification - they were (and for the most part remain) utterly awful. So Steve, here's hoping that an upcoming special event will feature an iPod reader, designed to do all the great things we've become accustomed to from an iPod, but with the addition of native support for downloading, managing, and displaying textual documents of all sorts....

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let's add to that The Hobbit and Harry Potter, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work...

Introduction to Financial Engineering: Emanuel Derman Laughs in the Dark

Emanuel Derman, author of the excellent My Life as a Quant, is putting the lecture notes from his Columbia Master's in Financial Engineering course up on the web:

Laughter in the Dark: An Introduction to the Volatility Smile: These are unpublished lecture notes from the Master's in Financial Engineering Program at Columbia University. I have used many published papers and books to improve (I hope) the pedagogic nature of these notes, and perhaps not referenced them properly. Since they are in rough form, I will be pleased to correct any errors or omissions. I'll add new lectures as the semester progresses.

• Lecture 1: The Principles of Valuation
• Lecture 2: Dynamic Replication: Myths and Realities of Options Pricing
• Lecture 3: The Smile: Constraints and Problems

Cows with Weblogs

From Charlie Stross:

Charlie's Diary: News from the Weird: Yes, that was the subject of conversation in the pub last night. I can't provide any URLs, but I am assured that the dairy industry in Scotland is extremely interested in fitting their herd with telemetry to track everything from their location (via GPS) to their blood pressure, activity levels, and possibly even emotional state: an eventual goal is that the subjects of this exercise will effectively become spimes. As Bruce Sterling (who coined the term) explains it, "a Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities." Presumably the blogging bovines would emit an RSS feed that their owners could browse (or should that be "graze"?) in order to determine that Daisy has gotten into the bottom field again, or is overdoing the clover.

NB: I want the wikipedia admins to know that I am very annoyed that someone has deleted the wikipedia article on spimes. It's all very well to do the housekeeping, but it's gone too far when useful resources are being erased before I can link to them from my blog, dammit...

Dennis Perrin Needs More Work...

Dennis Perrin needs more work--paying work. If you haven't grappled with him and his positions, you should do so for Millian diversified-intellectual-portfolio reasons if for nothing else--and he is smart as a tack and witty as Lord Rochester.

Here's Dennis:

Dennis Perrin: For the past seven years, I've worked as a janitor for a small cleaning company, since there are no writing jobs for me here [in Michigan]. I've performed blue collar work at various times in my life, so I'm no stranger to physical labor (an upside: my hands are so rough and calloused that if the Khmer Rouge ever comes to power, I'm spared from execution). I'm not crazy about living in Michigan... and cleaning up after heavy-set cubicle slaves who stave off their sadness and anger by eating all day long and trashing the bathrooms long ago lost its charm. Still, it's paying work, and me and mine need the bread.

Yesterday, out of the blue, my company informed me that I was demoted. My hours have been cut, and more cutting may follow. It's the economy, I'm told.... Remember kids: Go to college and get a degree. Don't be like your Uncle Dennis who barely got out of high school and hasn't seen a classroom since.

Quick aside about my company. It's run by Birchers. Not Birch-like people with quirky views about the world, but actual, honest to Krishna, card-carrying members of the John Birch Society. When you walk into their offices, you're met with signs that scream U.S OUT OF THE U.N.! and JOSEPH MCCARTHY WAS RIGHT! Various pamphlets and magazines are strewn about, all explaining the numerous plots by international communism and its corporate global mechanism to enslave decent, hard-working Americans, and turn them into cogs for the Chinese, who really run the world. One of my bosses told me with a straight face that in the near future, China will militarily invade the United States, and that this epic battle was predicted by George Washington, who apparently had a vision of yellow hordes swarming the future homeland.

"Well, they couldn't do much worse than our current rulers," was my reply. "Maybe we'll finally get decent Chinese food in Michigan."...

Not long ago, a fairly well-known liberal who likes my writing while strongly disagreeing with most of my opinions, suggested that I go easy on the Dems, especially in an election year. If I was more Ezra Klein and less Alex Cockburn, he said, I could get steady writing work with some leading liberal outlets. "You're an excellent stylist and funny," he added. "But you trash those who could do you favors."

I suppose he's right. I do know some of the libs who make a living boosting the Dems and lauding contemporary American liberalism, whatever the hell that might be. But sisters and brothers, do you honestly see me writing the kind of mush you read in the American Prospect, The Nation, New Republic, and Salon? I can write in many different styles, and am a quick study when engaged in literary impressions, but I've tasted too much freedom to go back to the hack work I performed long ago. The downside to this is that by speaking my mind, I don't get steady writing jobs. My book deal is a pittance, basically gas money and maybe dinner for four at Applebee's. That's it. I'm essentially writing it for free, though I'm assured that once it appears, I'll get all kinds of speaking and debate gigs. I've heard this dirge before. We'll see.

One new feature that's soon to come will be original video content, featuring yours truly as host and narrator. These are gonna be humorous, absurdist shorts that I'll post here, at YouTube, and perhaps at Huffington Post (and no, I don't get paid there, either). I'm looking to branch out in several directions, but this will take time. I have a few irons near the fire, but nothing definite. So it goes. If you wish to help me, there's the PayPal button to the right. If you have writing work, whether essays or gag writing, I'm available. If you need a funny speaker for an event, look no further. I'm ready to blow this pop stand, for a reasonable fee, of course. A girl has to, umm, eat.

Tax Policy Center Briefing Book

An excellent resource from Len Burman et al."

Tax Policy Center Briefing Book: The Tax Policy Briefing Book: A Citizens' Guide for the 2008 Election, and Beyond is the result of a collaboration among many people. Of course, the authors credited in each entry provided the book's content, but some people deserve special credit for the roles they played. Leonard Burman conceived the briefing book and laid out its basic structure. The design was created by Matthew Hirschmann, Mark Hill, and Warner Witt of Lisa Carey Design and implemented by Urban Institute webmasters Amy Gill and Dana Campbell with IT support from Doug Murray. Michael Treadway edited every entry. Renee Hendley coordinated the project and created all of the graphs and tables. Julianna Koch posted every entry, set up the web links, and dealt with the many changes a new project demands. Roberton Williams reviewed the economics of each entry and oversaw the book's content and organization.

Funding for development of The Tax Policy Briefing Book came from a generous consortium of donors who support the Tax Policy Center's general operations. They include the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Brodie Price Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ford Foundation, George Gund Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Sandler Family Foundation, Stoneman Family Foundation, and a number of private donors.

Prior Restraint...

Michael Froomkin writes:

Discourse.net: On the fringes of the public sphere:Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California has issued a pair of (unprecedented?) ex parte orders in a case brought by Bank Julius Bear against Wikileaks.org.... One order requires an ISP, Dynadot, to take down all DNS records pertaining to the wikileaks.org site.... I presume Dynadot was their registrar as this had the effect of making the wikileaks.org domain inoperative.... This isn't a classic prior restraint on speech since it reaches the registrar not the speaker -- but it's close enough to stopping the delivery trucks on a newspaper that I think this aspect of the decision is a cause for some First Amendment concern. The IP numbers for the site still work, though. Try http://88.80.13.160.

The second order is a much broader gag order that enjoins everyone sued by the plaintiffs... and "all others who receive notice of this order" (!) and orders them not to do any of the following: "displaying, posting, publishing, distributing, linking to and/or otherwise providing any information for the access or other dissemination of copies and/or images of the JB Property -- and any information or data contained therein, including on [listed websites or other websites they control]."

Leaving aside the sweep of the order -- on what theory does this court have jurisdiction of everyone who learns of the order? -- this seems like a classic prior restraint and is thus presumptively unconstitutional. Whether any of the very limited exceptions might apply is hard to tell from the documents available, but I'm pretty skeptical.... Note, however, that even after the Progressive case, the law on prior restraint is only that it is a very very very high bar -- not foreclosed utterly...

Print and Brainwidth

Hoisted from Comments:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: You have three points:

1. Podcasts are wonderful and consume lots of bandwidth.
2. Uploaded backups are wonderful and consume lots of bandwidth.
3. Videoconferencing is wonderful and consumes lots of bandwidth.

To which I respond:

1. Podcasts are very low brainwidth, compared to Gutenberg technologies: text and graphics. Most of us knowledge workers spend all day behind computer screens--reading things. This doesn't need bandwidth. Podcasts are not quite entertainment, but they're not that important.
2. I'm not a trusting soul. I prefer to safeguard my own data. (BTW, I'm cognizant of the need for offsite. But see point #1; personal data don't require that much bandwidth.) If you still feel confident in the willingness of the informatics industry to safeguard your data, read the terms and conditions of the service provider of your choice. They ain't liable to nobody for nothing.
3. Whether or not teleconferencing cures global warming, my post specifically excluded business applications.

I know only that my knowledge of the relationship between print, audio, interactive audio, video, interactive video, and face-to-face is much too shallow and incomplete. Anybody have any help to offer?

Econ 101b: February 6 Lecture: Extending the Solow Growth Model: From Malthus to the Singularity

Econ 101b: February 6 Lecture: Extending the Solow Growth Model: From Malthus to the Singularity

Lecture Audio

---

• Greg Clark's World Economic History in One Picture
• Longest-Run Economic Growth Once Again
• Divergence
• The Basic Malthusian Model
• How Does This Model Behave?
  • Let's simulate it: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_xls/20080205_Malthus.xls
  • One sample path
  • Add in Αποκαλυψις Ιωαννου: a famine that kills 20% of the population...
• The Malthusian Nightmare
• How Did We Escape from the Malthusian Nightmare?: Demographic and Invention Transitions
• The Invention Transition
• Optimal innovation

New York Times Death Spiral Watch (Reviewing Lee Seigel Edition)

Outsourced to Timothy Burke of Easily Distracted http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke:

Barbarians at the Gate: I’m not the only one to take note of the New York Times‘ baffling decision to review Lee Siegel’s new anti-Internet broadside not once, but twice. Both times, moreover, the assignment was given to reviewers who were clearly predisposed to sharing Siegel’s hostility to all things online and favorable in their outlook towards the author himself. You’d think, if you’re going to review a book twice, that you’d seek a more sharply critical perspective for the second one, just to create something of a debate.

This points to two issues that the Siegel reviews raise, actually. The first is largely specific to the Times itself, and its long-standing attempts to choreograph the conversations of the highbrow American (or at least New York) intelligentsia.... Who should a review editor assign to do reviews, anyway? To someone you know has a favorable take, who will protect the reputation of a favored author or performer? To someone who will do a hatchet job? I don’t think it’s stretching things to say that highbrow editorial staff and their critics have indulged in fairly corrupt answers to these questions.... That’s Anton Ego’s world, only more conspiratorial and incestuous....

I don’t pick up the Times looking for a hostile review of Siegel so as to comfort me, nor react against it simply because the reviews were positive. What I care about first is simply whether they’re interesting to read, whether the reviewer writes compellingly, whether there’s an original take or appreciation of the work....

In that context, wasting two reviews on anything short of The Great American Novel is lamentable.... In that context, assigning a review to someone who is as uncurious and temporizing as John Lanchester in the Sunday section was seems a waste of space. Lanchester at least observes that it’s possible that the book isn’t particularly true, though he does so in the most mealy-mouthed way....

This goes to the second problem with the Times... [it] sees itself as one of the leaders of the charge against new media.... I met a Times reporter last year whose work I really respect.... I was fairly startled when the conversation briefly turned to the revenue situation of the major daily newspapers at the reporter’s bristling and unreserved hostility towards digital media, just because he seemed so much less reflective at that moment....

What we won’t be paying for (at least not much) in thirty years is literary and cultural reviews and op-ed pieces. Not just because better can be had already online, in many cases, but because the old media ill-serves educated readers in those areas and has always ill-served them. This brings us back to the ethics and aesthetics of the closed world of editorial elite and the literati.... We don’t have to settle for the choices that come out of small incestuous circle-jerk of New York editors, from their dispensing of favors through their immediate social networks.

That in the end is what made Lee Siegel so furious, as Ezra Klein noted. He’d been handed a microphone, because he was an already-anointed cultural critic of note within those small social worlds.... He was given the stage and a big introduction, only to find that most of the audience had left the building, and those few that stayed threw rotten tomatoes. That’s a long way from getting a seat at the Algonquin Round Table.

So no wonder there are others in that small world who feel sympathy for Siegel and praise his rage against the Internet. They’ve got a union card for a closed shop that once had a monopoly, but suddenly the world is full of little entrepreneurial factories churning out commentary and reviews that’s more readable, interesting and diverse.... So they’re not about to consider that the angriest, most isolated, most asocial person on the Internet in his day might have been Lee Siegel himself, that the skunky odor around his TNR column wasn’t generated by his detractors but wafted from the main entries, and that the main thing being destroyed, at least as far as cultural criticism goes, is a tottering, threadbare cocktail-party monopoly built on self-congratulation.

Tom Slee Tells Us to Read Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch"

Tom writes:

Whimsley: The Big Switch: The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr, is published by W.W.Norton, January 2008.... Unlike most technology commentators Nicholas Carr knows that if you want to predict what's happening next, you've got to follow the money. And he does so very well, which makes this book (and his weblog) recommended reading for anyone interested in where  technology is taking us.

Google is everywhere in The Big Switch and the reason is simple: cost.

No corporate computing system, not even the ones operated by very large businesses, can match the efficiency, speed and flexibility of Google's system. One analyst [Martin Reynolds of the Gartner Group: see here ] estimates that Google can carry out a computing task for one tenth of what it would cost a typical company.

That means, if you are a company and you have a computing task to be done that Google already does, you can save a bunch of money and you can now start outsource your CPU cycles just as you previously outsourced other tasks. And that means that the computing landscape will get shaken up. Not in a matter of months, but over the next decade or so. It's amazing how quickly we get used to a landscape and many of us are now so accustomed to PC's and the basic layout of corporate computing systems that they seem almost natural. But Carr warns us that this is going to change and, as if to confirm his claims, last week Sun Microsystems, supplier of many of the computers that make up corporate data centres, announced that by 2015 it won't have a single data centre. Information Technology is not sacrosanct.

Google's cost advantage comes partly from a built-in inefficiency of corporate computing: capacity underutilization. Many applications demand their own servers, and those servers must be able to handle the peak load that the application will experience even if that peak load happens only rarely. As a result most corporate computers, most of the time, do nothing except consume electricity and produce heat. This inefficiency was unavoidable until recently, but now high-speed Internet availability makes it possible for companies that have the resources (Google and a few others) to build warehouses full of servers that look like power stations (see Google's The Dalles centre in Oregon, below, with two football-stadium-sized buildings full of perhaps 60,000 servers). And then they can supply CPU cycles over the Internet just like electrical utilities supply electricity. The demand on Google's CPU cycles is smoothed out, being balanced among many consumers in different timezones with different needs, and that only helps their efficiency. It's what Carr calls utility computing...

Let Me Highly Recommend Skitch...

Paul Krugman writes about Reaganomics:

Reaganomics - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog: Since we are, improbably but importantly, discussing Ronald Reagan again, I thought it might be worth posting a few graphs on the Reagan economic record. First, the unemployment rate. What this figure shows is that “Morning in America” was a one-shot affair — a recovery from a very severe recession...

But I am more interested in how Skitch http://plasq.com/skitch allows me to grab and quickly annotate graphics. Highly recommended, pointer courtesy of Daniel Jalkut http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/ at Red Sweater Software.

James Fallows Is a Full Cult Member

The Cult of Mac has him--and Kenneth Rhee--in its grasp. Resistance is futile:

James Fallows: No political content! #1: Back to the Mac? The message below is from my "friend" -- never met him, but corresponded for years -- Kenneth Rhee of Northern Kentucky University. We made contact long ago via a support forum for the nonpareil info-handling program Zoot. Zoot is Windows-only, so Rhee, like me, has done his main work on PCs.

Recently he made The Change -- after wrestling with a new ThinkPad that came with Windows Vista pre-installed. This week Rhee submitted the following report on the the Zoot forum, plus some passages from a followup email to me:

I switched over to the Mac last year after getting a bit frustrated with Vista (I still run Vista in my Thinkpad on a rare occasion if I want to get "frustrated-little joke here but it seems to happen every time I use it these days).

My experience goes something like this. I wanted to use a few Mac programs and bought a MacBook thinking that I'll probably use it 10-15% of my time. After a month, I noticed that I was using my Mac 85-90% of the time, and having more fun using it rather than getting more frustrated fixing things or waiting for things to happen. So, I switched over completely and bought a new MacBook Pro with Leopard to replace my Thinkpad and haven't looked back.

I also run Fusion with Windows XP in my Mac on those occasions I need 100% compatibility. The irony is Windows XP in my MacBook Pro (2.2G) with 1 G of RAM starts/shuts down and runs much faster than my Thinkpad (2.3G) with 2G of RAM with Vista. In fact, my initial MacBook (2.16G with 2G of RAM) runs circles around my Thinkpad, it's not even funny.

Perhaps if I had gotten my Thinkpad with XP, I might not have completely switched over, but I guess it was a lucky break for me that I didn't.

...Just the other day I had my MacBook Pro packed for a trip, and I had to do something quick at the last minute before we departed, and I turned on my hibernated (not sleep mode) Thinkpad check on one email quickly.

Believe or not it took the Vista laptop 5 minutes to wake up and restore for me to get the work. My MacBook Pro boots cold much faster than this! In the meantime, my wife was waiting for me to come down from my study and getting anxious

I don't want to tip my hand about what future installments of this series might disclose, but: I too have a new ThinkPad with Vista installed. I too find that it takes between three and five-plus minutes for that computer to become usable when coming out of hibernation. And I too have noticed that the new Intel-based Macs can be made to run the Windows programs I really care about, like Zoot. Hmmmmm. Stay tuned.

---

I could hardly live without Zoot, but it's an acquired taste. A new version is now near the end of its beta cycle. I recommend it, as I have for more than a decade, but if you try the free download, be prepared to spend a little time getting to know the program.

A Change of Ranking...

Afer much thought, I have decided that If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride -- A Pony! is not the best weblog post ever.

Instead, the best weblog post ever is Dead Right.

---

I still cannot believe that "dark satanic millian liberalism" gets only eith hits on google.

More Things to Read...

Steve Randy Waldmann:

Interfluidity :: Link Lovin' fer the New Year: I decided long ago not to have a "blogroll", figuring that I would naturally link to the people I read. But it hasn't really worked out that way. There are lots of amazing authors whose every word I hang on, but whom I rarely have occasion to link. This interweb is an amazing thing. Banks may implode and currencies morph to toilet paper, but intellectually, these are the best of times. There has never been a conversation like this, so many wonderful minds communicating in a forum that is open to everyone, but still relevant, even influentual. Thank goodness for this crazy machine, and for all its cogs and pulleys — writers, commenters, and especially readers.

I want to devote my first post of the year to highlighting and thanking some of the people whose words keep my brain pleasantly marinated....

• http://economistsview.typepad.com/
• http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/
• http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/
• http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
• http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press
• http://www.aleablog.com/
• http://scurvon.blogspot.com/
• http://abnormalreturns.com/
• http://www.financialarmageddon.com/
• http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini
• http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/
• http://ml-implode.com/
• http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/
• http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
• http://accruedint.blogspot.com/
• http://crookery.blogspot.com/
• http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/
• http://nihoncassandra.blogspot.com/
• http://jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com/
• http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/
• http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/setser
• http://macro-man.blogspot.com/
• http://piaohaoreport.sampasite.com/

What Is "Egregious Moderation"?

It's a rotisserie-league journal of politics and reality: an egregiously-moderate forum for people who want an online source for punchy liberal analysis and evisceration; especially evisceration. In the age of the internet anyone can speak in the public sphere, and anyone can be a rotisserie-league magazine editor as well. Guaranteed Betsy McCaughey free! Guaranteed Charles Murray free! No claims that the dinner-party-going "commentariat" is highly qualified because guest lists that cross ideological lines help liberals understand Bush loyalists! No Jonah Goldberg--but plenty of Spencer Ackerman!

Recently in Egregious Moderation:

• Tim Burke: Competency as a Cultural Value
• Angry Bear on the Unemployment News
• Spencer Ackerman: And it was in his name artillery lit the sky on fire
• Tom Schaller: The Republicans' Accountability Moment | The American Prospect
• Simon Rosenberg: On Obama, race and the end of the Southern Strategy | NDN Blog
• Harold Meyerson: Iowa's Verdict | The American Prospect
• Mark Kleiman: Piety, Virtue, and Folly
• Steve Randy Waldmann: When a rose is not a rose: TAF is not "just" the discount window
• Rick Perlstein: The Lives They Lived - Harry Dent
• Michael Tomasky: They'd Rather Be Right
• Eric Rauchway: About forty-five years ago. When did you start?
• Alisa Rubin and Damien Cave: In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict
• Ari: Ron Paul: Very Gradual Emancipationist
• Dana Goldstein on Ron Paul
• Nicholas Antongiavanni: Curtains for the Necktie?
• Sir Charles: Hillary Rodham Clinton as the New, New Nixon?
• Kevin Drum: "They Will Get Overrun"
• Kevin Drum: Who Knew?
• Malcolm Gladwell: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race
• Mark Schmitt: The Spectre of Gingrichism
• Kieran Healy: The Troubles: Kinds of Quagmires
• Rick Perlstein: Church of Bush
• Daniel Davies: What do we owe?
• Mark Kleiman: The Reality-Based Community: Torture and capital punishment
• Daniel Davies: In the opinion of Commentary magazine, the Prime Minister of Israel is insufficiently pro-Israel
• Kevin Drum: WHAT THE TAPES WOULD HAVE SHOWN
• Larry Johnson: Torture Tapes
• Andrew Samwick: Yes, Mikey, It Really Is About Illegal Immigration
• Matthew Yglesias on the New Republic
• Dilip Hiro: Bush's Losing Iranian Hand
• John Sides: Are Whites More Likely to Support the Death Penalty When They Think Blacks Are Being Executed?
• Matthew Yglesias: Ehud Olmert, Jew-hater
• Stephen Metcalfe on William Saletan: What Does My Anger Have to Do with Your Crappy Research?
• Cosma Shalizi: Last Words on Saletan
• Michael Perelman

Journalismus als Beruf, or Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein watch the toddlers on the bus--the American campaign press corps. The only solution I see is simply to shut them all down: the modern style of campaign coverage started by Teddy White in 1960 with his The Making of the President is pernicious and harmful. Its practitioners should all be sent to do something more useful. Proofreading Google Books comes to mind.

Here's Ezra Klein:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: THE PRESS CORPS: [I]t is a bit astonishing to watch the real-time narrative construction that went on at last night's debate. I must have heard the term "meltdown" in reference to Hillary 65 times. And I talked to reporters who would literally say, "I thought she did okay, but I just misjudged it" -- the aggregate conclusion of the corps became some sort of objective, or at least agreed-upon, truth that the outliers measured themselves against. Very, very odd. Particularly because the part that much of the press liked least -- her heated recitation of the programs she's fought for -- came off, to me, as one of her best moments.

Meanwhile, there is, on some level, an acknowledgment of the weirdness of all this. I was at a bar talking to some leftier members of the press last night when a reporter wandered up and asked if "we were discussing Hillary's meltdown, or talking about real things?" Most of the folks I talked to happily admitted how unbelievably awful and surreal the spin room is, but everyone was in there. At one point, I asked an older reporter why everyone was assembed together for this debate, and he turned to me and said, "there's no good reason. Reporters are creatures of habit, and all this is now habit"...

Here's Chris Hayes:

Why Campaign Coverage So Often Sucks: [A] quick thought about the psychology of the po