Month: July 2001

Help Make Genocide Safe for the Governments of the World

Now this is my kind of poster (click on the image for a PDF version):

But there are a couple things I would change.

The poster drastically underestimates the number of people murdered by governments in the 20th century, which is closer to 170 million than the paltry 58 million claimed here (the Soviet Union and Communist China together easily eclipsed that figure).

And, of course, lumping in Bill Clinton with three of the worst dictators in human history is beyond absurd. I’d put a murderous dictator who is currently in that fourth spot like Saddam Hussein (I can think of better choices, but he’s the only one that the average American would recognize).

Zambia Needs Food Aid; Internal Audit Finds Massive Government Corruption

The BBC recently reported that Zambia “has made an urgent appeal for aid to feed some two million people after bad harvests caused by floods and drought in different parts of the country.” Zambian Vice President Enock Kavindele said that his country needed at least 100,000 tons of maize to make up for the poor harvests.

Floods in Zambia have damaged roads and bridges, and raised the risk of epidemics and livestock disease as well.

Meanwhile, a report by Zambia’s Auditor General maintained that official corruption in the Zambia government is still rampant, diverting much needed government resources to line the pockets of corrupt officials.

Auditor General Fred Siame noted that some officials award contracts to companies they have a vested interest in, and often a single company “is awarded tenders to manufacture, distribute and maintain various categories of goods and services ranging from school desks to road rehabilitation.”

The extent of the corruption amounts to “billions of kwacha being misapplied everyday,” according to Siame.

So far, corrupt officials in Zambia are not held responsible for such corruption. As he told the Post of Zambia, “The successful prosecution of senior officials who have been charged with corruption will go a long way in changing the perception that senior officials or big fish easily lay off the charges and only the small fish are fried.”

Sources:

Zambia appeals for urgent food aid.

Zambia: Corruption levels worry auditor general, ACC. Reuben Phiri, The Post of Zambia, July 26, 2001.

Internet Advertising, AT&T, and Innovation

TechTV producer David Roos was recently complaining that it was my fault that CNET had to lay off many of its staff members. See, I’m one of the people Roos complained about who don’t click on any of CNET’s ads.

Frankly, like Jim Roepcke, I simply don’t visit CNET much anymore because, to put it bluntly, the site really sucks. It used to be on my list of sites I had to visit every morning to keep up with the cutting edge of tech happenings, but now it consists largely of rewritten press releases and comments on earnings and pricing of high tech stocks. Boring.

But even if I were visiting the site more often, I still wouldn’t click on the ads because advertising doesn’t work, and Internet advertising is the worst of the worst.

Joseph Sobran has an insightful article on the downfall of advertising. He’s concerned with radio advertising, but all of the problems he cites are even more prominent with web advertising.

Rather than tell me something interesting about a product, I see banner ads that leave me completely clueless. Either that or the ads are completely irrelevant. Why would I want to download a white paper from IBM, as a recent CNET ad urged me to do? As Sobran writes,

What makes commercials especially annoying is that most of them are so badly done. They don’t interest you in the product or give you any useful information about it. And they certainly aren’t entertaining. The harder they try to be funny, the worse they are.

I see the ads that people pay to place on my AnimalRights.Net and Overpopulation.Com web sites and most of the time I have to shake my head and wonder what the hell these people were thinking.

So what’s a wannabe profitable corporation to do when their lousy products marketed with lousy ad campaigns fail to interest anyone? Why blame it on the Internet infrastructure, of course?

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a much maligned article describing corporations who want to turn the Internet into a toll both in an effort to make money.

The worst offender in the story has to be Thomas Nolle, identified as a “New Jersey telecommunications consultant” who says,

The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn’t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network.

This may sound absurd (and it is, of course), but it is also conventional wisdom within the academic communications community. Most college-level communications textbooks, for example, defend cable monopolies as necessary to avoid market failure, and before the 1980s many of these same books and authors defended AT&T’s monopoly as necessary to avoid market failure. Is it any surprise at all that these nitwits are now turning their attention to the Internet and arguing that monopoly-style regulatory schemes are the only solution to avoid market failure?

It is worth remembering how AT&T secured its long-standing monopoly — it convinced the U.S. government to semi-nationalize the phone system during World War I on the grounds that having a stable, widely available phone system was in the interests of national security. Combined with long-distance rate regulation, the government did what AT&T had been unable to do after its patent on telephones expired: kill off the companies competitors.

The one thing I don’t understand, however, is why people get upset when sevice providers such as Excite@Home announces deals to place some third party content on internal servers to provide very high speed access to multimedia content.

Some people strongly object to this as “walling off the Internet,” but how is it any different than my cable system setting up a proxy server to speed delivery of third party content that is accessed frequently? Or downloading a multimedia file and placing it on my home file server for that matter?

As far as I’m concerned that’s the right way to create private Internets along side the more public Internet. Trying to build tollbooths in to the infrastructure of the public Internet, however, is the wrong way to do this.

BrokenSaints.Com an Amazing Example of What Can Be Done in Flash

Broken Saints is an awesome example of using Flash to create a compelling hybrid between a graphic novel and a full-blown movie. This is one of those things you come across and think, “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?”

This is the kind of multimedia content I would pay for.

Lance Armstrong, Performance Enhancing Drugs, and Deion Sanders’s Retirement

This weekend I happened to run across ABC News doing a brief bit about Lance Armstrong winning his third straight Tour de France. Of course they couldn’t leave the topic without mentioning long-standing suspicions that Armstrong uses performance enhancing drugs.

ABC falsely reported that Armstrong had flat-out said he doesn’t use such drugs. But they were running clips from an interview in which Armstrong never actually says, “no, I don’t use performance enhancing drugs,” but rather dances around the issue by noting he’s passed all his drug tests, he can look his family in the eye, etc.

He’s so good, that I don’t think it would really matter whether he is or not (I doubt drugs can give him such a huge advantage in quantities that won’t show up in a drug tests).

But the thing I found strange was the cycling world’s position on cortisone — it’s banned, except in very small amounts, by the Tour de France and other races. In fact the press freaked a few years ago when Armstrong tested positive for very small amounts of cortisone — he’d used a cortisone cream to treat a minor injury, and the level in his system was only about 8 percent of the maximum level.

I found that bizarre because in most sports I follow, not only is cortisone not banned, but athletes who don’t take cortisone shots to deal with pain are often looked at as whimps (the actual pejorative used is far more uncouth, but this is a family blog).

In the National Football League, for example, heavy use of pain killing chemicals is considered the norm. In order to get ready for a game that had no playoff implications (because the Dallas Cowboys were already out of contention), Troy Aikman once took an epidural the Monday before the game, followed by several cortisone shots throughout the week, and then another cortisone shot right before the game.

In fact it is very common for players in pain to receive cortisone shots in the locker room during halftime. In a completely meaningless game between the 2-6 Cincinnati Bengals and the 2-7 Cleveland Browns last October, for example, Cincinnati quarterback Akili Smith received a cortisone at halftime to alleviate pain in his knee (which was an incredibly stupid thing to do IMO).

Anyway, Armstrong is obviously much better than the other racers in the Tour de France and once athletes get to that level, often the psychological aspects of the sport become as interesting as the physical aspects. I saw an interview where Armstrong was describing how he fooled the other riders into thinking he was tiring on one of the more mountainous legs of the race, only to blow away the field at the end.

That reminded me of a story I heard Deion Sanders tell a reporter. Whatever else you think of Sanders, who announced his retirement this week (and he was certainly never much of an inspiration or role model), he was clearly the best corner back ever to play in the National Football League. He was so good, in fact, that quarterbacks would sometimes simply refuse to throw to the receiver on the side of the field he was covering.

So Sanders had a plan. He’d run his first few man coverages so there was no way the quarterback would be foolish enough to throw the ball, but also so it looked like that’s all the speed he had. Once he had sold that routine a couple of times, he’d run with the receiver and pull up a half-step or so, making it look like the receiver had him beat.

As soon as that football left the quarterback’s arm, then Sanders would quick in the speed leaving the receiver and quarterback wondering what just happened. Of course the cockiness Sanders had to have to pull that off didn’t exactly translate well off-the-field, but it’s one of the reasons he returned almost 17 percent of his interceptions back for a touchdown, not to mention the all-time NFL record for touchdowns on returns (fumbles, kickoffs, punts and interceptions).

Those Greedy Bastards!

For months now, California Gray Davis has been moaning about the evils of private power companies charging that state outrageous prices for electricity, and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer even went so far as to say that, “I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO Kenneth] Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi my name is Spike, honey.'”

But it turns out that while Enron and other companies may be greedy bastards, the politicians in this case are of the lying variety — the prices California was paying to Enron and other private companies for power was a bargain compared to what it was paying public utilities to buy power.

Of course as National Review notes, Davis only released information on exactly how much each utility was charging California for power after a lawsuit forced his hand.

It turns out that while private companies were charging California $250 per megawatt, the L.A. Department of Water & Power was charing the state $292 per megawatt, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District a whopping $330 per megawatt. Meanwhile California managed to pay Seattle’s City Light Department an amazing $634 per megawatt of electricity.

The added irony in this, by the way, is that municipal power departments like this are allowed to buy power from the federal government at prices far below what most private utilities can produce electricity at. So these utilities were buying electricty at extremely low prices and then turning around and charging prices far in excess of what private companies were charging.

I wonder if Lockyer wants to personally escort the people who run the public utilites to 8-by-10 cells?

Source:

The Suits Tell the Tale: Gov. Davis deceived Californians about the energy crisis. Jerry Taylor and Pete VanDoren, National Review Online, July 27, 2001.