Day: June 18, 2001

Wisconsin Considers Agri-Terrorism Bills (Plus An Incredibly Misinformed Activist)

When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Ingrid Newkirk said that she hoped foot-and-mouth disease came to the United States, lawmakers in Wisconsin were apparently paying close attention. The state legislature is currently working on a number of bills that would provide for criminal penalties to threaten or commit acts of what is being dubbed “agri-terrorism.”

Sandy Chalmers, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

On the one hand you have a marginal and largely irrelevant fringe group that has shown a pattern of using outrageous statements to get in the newspaper. But on the other hand, we have to take any threat seriously. So, are we concerned? I think vigilance is the most appropriate term. We have to be vigilant and proactive. We have to be prepared for anything.

Part of that preparation includes new proposed laws designed to increase the penalties for damaging agricultural facilities. Several legislators are working on a bill modeled on Iowa’s strict law where vandalizing and/or terrorizing agricultural property is a Class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a $10,000 fine if the total damage is more than $10,000.

Wisconsin lawmakers are also looking at Pennsylvania and Indiana statutes which provide criminal punishment for intentionally exposing agricultural animals to an infectious disease.

State Sen. Sheila Harsdof would like to extend the laws to target people who make threats to infect animals saying that, “There must be some recognition of the damage that can occur simply by making threats.”

But will any new laws be any more effective than the old laws have been in ensnaring extremist animal rights advocates. Tom Thieding, executive director of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, is skeptical. He told the Journal Sentinel,

It’s great to have a strong law on the books, but the sophistication of these wackos is so high tech and so stealth of night that our justice system is just not able to capture these people in the act. You want it in place in the event you catch these guys in the act, but it’s not going to be a deterrent. They’re going to be intent on doing it regardless of the laws that are out there.

On a side note, less than a week after the Journal Sentinel ran its story, an odd letter from animal rights activist Karen Payleitner appeared in the Journal Sentinel which give some insight into how these folks can make such ludicrous claims about animal agriculture, research, etc. — they’re too wrapped up in their fantasy world to even pay attention to their own organizations. Payleitner wrote,

I am a vegetarian, have been a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for nearly 12 years and am a member of many other animal rights organizations. The suggestion that any of us would do something so despicable as to infect livestock with a hideous disease that would harm our own or someone else’s loved ones is not only ludicrous, it is deeply offensive. It is equally contemptible to suggest that we, of all people, would want to cause horrible suffering in animals that we also love and respect.

Well at least she got one thing right, when Newkirk and Bruce Friedrich said how wonderful it would be if foot-and-mouth disease came to the United States they were once again demonstrating how offensive and contemptible PETA is.

Sources:

Lawmakers work to head off ‘agri-terrorism’ in state. Jessica Hansen and Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 3, 2001.

Ludicrous to think groups would do harm. Karen Payleitner, Letter to the Editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 9, 2001.

Michael Hurd: There’s Something Morally And Psychologically Wrong With You

Michael Hurd provides an excellent example at the difficulties that exist when trying to debate extremist Objectivists. In an article for Capitalism Magazine, Hurd argued that it is wrong for Americans to trade with Cuba and China for a number of reasons. I don’t happen to agree with Hurd on this matter, and he’s got a message for those people like me who see nothing wrong with trading with China,

If you enjoy freedom, and you actually want to assist and trade with a country who is known to be a military threat to your freedom, then something is morally and psychologically wrong with you. Quite frankly, if people in a free country abandon rational principles in favor of shorter term gains, then they deserve whatever the consequences may be. Free people remain free only so long as they grasp the principles upon which freedom depends.

Fortunately, from where I’m sitting it is Hurd who is clueless about principles.

It is more than a bit difficult to understand how either China or Cuba could be considered serious military threats to the United States. With Cuba, the United States military could squash that country like a bug if it felt like it. Cuba ceased to be a threat to American security after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

China possess nuclear weapons and so could potentially be a military threat, but the main foreign policy dustups between China and the United States occur largely over the respective role that each country will have within Asia. China doesn’t seem to have any interest in conquering America, even if it does have an interest in regaining control over Taiwan.

More importantly, though, Hurd provides an extremely one side case against free trade, committing facts that get in the way of his argument. One the one hand, it is not clear that blockades and the like are all that effective. The American embargo against Cuba has certainly caused economic hardships for Cuba (though most of that country’s problems are caused by its socialist economic policies), but done little to loosen Castro’s grip. Similarly, Hurd doesn’t bother to mention another “military threat” to the United States, Iraq, where another embargo has been in place for years and again has done little to foster liberalization of a dictatorial military regime.

Meanwhile trade between the United States and China has accomplished much the same thing that trade between the United States and the Soviet Union did — empowered dissidents and anti-government activists. In China, there are a growing number of dissidents who use Western technologies to distribute their anti-government message. This also happens to some extent in Cuba, but thanks in part to the US embargo, far fewer people have access to computers and the Internet within Cuba than in China.

I think the facts speak for themselves: Hurd is wrong. Trade between free and unfree nations promotes peace and undermines autocratic governments. And the only psychological and moral problems reside with those Objectivists who resort to such absurd claims about their opponents.

Source:

Free trade with a slave state?. Michael J. Hurd, Capitalism Magazine, June 16, 2001.

Scott McCloud and Micropayments

Here’s a rambling unfinished article about micropayments I started on yesterday but ran out of time to properly complete:

Slashdot linked to an online comic by Scott McCloud pushing his favorite idea for compensating artists on the web — micropayments. Fortunately McCloud’s piece also includes examples which, if you think about them more carefully than McCloud does, illustrates the problems with micropayments.

McCloud offers two examples:

1. Imagine you could download songs from Napster at 15 cents per song! Wouldn’t you be willing to pay that?

2. Scott Kurtz, who draws the popular PvP comic, notes it was costing him $600/month for a dedicated server for his 30,000 regular readers. McCloud points out that if every one of them would have paid 25 cents a month, PvP could have returned a net profit of $73,000 per year.

McCloud dismisses the obvious alternative — subscriptions. He says the problem with subscriptions and bulk pricing is that people don’t want to put up too much money to pay for something that they’re not sure they’re going to like in the first place.

Okay, I have to confess, he may be right on the Napster part, but I doubt a price that low would be sufficient to entice people into making music as the return isn’t very high. It would be high if you could force people to download an entire album at a time — that would work out great both ways. You’d have the ten song album for $1.50, and the band would have say $1 per album in pure profit. Sell 200,000 copies and you’re doing great. But, with micropayments people would just download the 1 or 2 popular songs from the album. Suddenly rather than 200,000 CDs, a band is selling 400,000 songs at 15 cents a piece, and you’re only clearing $60,000.

The PvP example is even worse. It is absurd to think that all 30,000 people would be willing to put up 25 cents. For example, I wouldn’t. I’ve read PvP a few times, its made me laugh, but would I pay 25 cents a month to read it. Absolutely not. I’d just switch to a different free online comic.

I think this is also absurdly high, but lets assume that half of the people who read PvP for free would be willing to pay 25 cents a month. Now we’re down to $36,500 a year. Is that going to satisfy Kurtz (it would satisfy me, but I have a messed up value system when it comes to money)? How many comic artists are realistically supportable with that model? I suspect the answer is not many.

And beyond that, I don’t want to pay 25 cents a month. If I’m going to pay, just charge me $4 per year. Given the current value of the dollar that’s a price where the asking price just barely exceeds the transaction cost of subscribing.

What’s the solution? I think what it’s going to take is a mix of free and subscription services. The problem with most subscription services is this — they simply want to start charging you for something that they’ve been giving you for free. This is what Salon.Com is trying to do. For a couple years I’ve been visiting Salon every morning for free. Now they want me to pay a subscription fee. For what? So I can continue to visit Salon every morning.

Aside from fact that I’m not sure why I should pay for something I’ve become accustomed to getting free, there’s another problem with a subscription-based Salon — I can’t share it. Today if I see an article that is particularly good on Salon, as I did just the other day, I can mail someone the URL or post it on this web log and comment on it (or rip on it if it is particularly bad). The second articles get hidden behind subscription walls, though, *poof* — there goes much of its value to me.

But there are sites selling content and making money off it. Here’s what I think the secret is (and I plan to put this to the test later this year). With subscriptions you still have to give quite a bit away, otherwise people aren’t going to have enough information to decide whether it is worth it. The subscription part, however, build on that but has to be aimed at the minority of visitors for whom whatever content you are giving away has such a high marginal value, that they are willing to shell out a small amount of money (and I do mean small) for additional content that the casual visitor probably has no use for.

I see this a lot with physical products. I receive an e-mail newsletter every week from a woman who gives very informative advice and has a content-rich site. She makes the money on selling a) physical paper books (remember those — people used to use them before Al Gore created the electron) and b) various supplies that people would find useful in applying her ideas.

The bottom line, though, is that this is a lot of work (duh), and hardly as glamorous as the idea of people visiting your web site and some electronic register going kaching, kaching, kaching, as micropayments roll in. If you look around at the real world, however, you will notice that it is extremely difficult for anyone to make a very good return-on-investment in selling media. When you look at the financial positions of record companies, publishers, and others, they are not exactly the most attractive investment options in the world. People always focus on absolute numbers such as the total size of the industry in billions of dollars or how many billions of dollars in profit record companies made last year, but rarely do you see people take a serious look at the P/E ratios of their stocks much less a look at the long term rate of return return from media companies.

It’s not like these companies are going broke — though many of them are — but it is a lack of profitability compared to other industries (remember stockholders can move their money relatively easily) that has led to the huge megamergers like Time-Warner-whatever. You really need those sorts of enormous economies of scale to make the big bucks in the media game.

Digital Convergence Restructures

Digital Convergence — the company that created a controversy with its CueCat scanner — fired most of its employees recently, and is doing the dot.com restructure dance. For more information see the Dallas Morning News story about the change in DC’s fortunes, CueCat firm fires most workers, restructures. Of course Slashdot noted the upside in that, “But it looks like those CueCats out there are now definitely freely hackable without threat of a cease and desist.”

DC had sent out cease and desist letters to people who posted instructions on the Internet describing how to hack the DC scanner.

United Nations Suspends Angola Relief Efforts

The United Nations World Food Program announced that it is suspending its aid flights in Angola after two of its planes came under missile attack near the city of Kuito. This comes after another aid plane was hit by a missile a little over a week ago. That plane managed to land safely.

Unita, the rebel group that has been waging civil war in Angola for 25 years now, admitted that it fired on the first plane, though so far no one has taken credit for the most recent missile attacks.

Over a million people in Angola are dependent on food that the World Food Program has been airlifting into the country. The BBC reports that because they were fearful that soldier would confiscate their crops, farmers harvested early this year which reduced crop yields to levels far lower than what the country will need to feed itself until next year’s harvest.

Source:

Angola aid flights suspended. Justin Pearce, The BBC, June 16, 2001.

NAIA Wants Investigation of Tax Exempt Animal Rights Groups

The National Animal Interest Alliance recently called for the Bush administration to investigate what NAIA believes are unlawful activities undertaken by animal rights groups acting as tax-exempt charities.

In a press release on NAIA’s web site, Patti Strand said,

We believe that the Administration’s goal to increase the flow of money to legitimate charities through new tax deductions is both admirable and necessary. However, we also believe that organizations that benefit from tax-exempt status and misuse constitutionally protected speech to threaten businesses and private citizens should not benefit from federal help.

Some of these organizations fail to condemn the growing use of vandalism, arson, and other serious crimes that benefit their agenda. They disseminate half-truths to stir opposition to legitimate animal-based enterprises and threaten boycotts and public smear campaigns in order to exact money from corporations, force capitulation to radical demands and raise money from the general public. These campaigns and others have raised millions of dollars based on unproven allegations of animal cruelty and abuse.

Just a little background here. Many animal rights groups, including the big ones such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the United States are incorporated as 501(c)(3) charities. Both the law and IRS statements are often vague and confusing, but a 501(c)(3) charity is only supposed to engage in lobbying and other social actions only if such activities are not a substantial part of their total activities. Nonprofits whose primary activities are lobbying and/or otherwise political in nature are supposed to incorporate under 501(c)(4).

Most nonprofits interested in doing a lot off lobbying create affiliated 501(c)(4) charities. For example, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took out an anti-Bush ad last November, it did so through an affiliated 501(c)(4) (currently, there are no restrictions preventing a 501(c)(3) organization from donating to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit).

I think its pretty clear that the animal rights groups such as PETA are primarily engaged in political activity and really should be forced into 501(c)(4) — which they would oppose because they would lose certain tax advantages.

NAIA has an online-petition at its website which you can sign by visiting their press release web page. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the text of the petition and a link to click on to sign the petition.

Source:

NAIA Calls on President Bush to Act Against Animal Rights’ Extremists. National Animal Interest Alliance, Press Release, June 1, 2001.