Monthly Archives: July 2001

Help Make Genocide Safe for the Governments of the World

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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).

Internet Advertising, AT&T, and Innovation

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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.

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

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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!

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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.

Those Greedy Bastards!

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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?

House Approves $670 million “Plan Colombia” Budget

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On July 25, 2001 the U.S. House of Representatives approved the $670 million ‘Plan Colombia’ spending package designed to fight the drug war in Colombia. Democrats in the House of Representatives wanted to divert some of the money to drug treatment programs in the United States, but that proposal failed to garner enough votes. Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that even if you accept that Plan Colombia’s methods are ethically justifiable, they simply are not working. In fact Plan Colombia is backfiring in dangerous ways.

The main focus of the plan is to eradicate coca crops in Colombia by spraying herbicides on large patches of crops. The plan has created a number of controversies. Aside from the repugnancy of spraying toxic chemicals on the land of peasants struggling to get by, the United States is using mercenaries to carry out the risky spraying operations.

A recent audit of the spraying by the United Nations Drug Control Program found that the spraying was, in the words of The BBC, “inhuman and ineffective” since spraying occurred even only small plots of land where only a very small amount of illegal crops were being grown. Of course the United Nations hardly has its hand clean since it accepts the right of the United States and Colombian governments to spray herbicides on larger plantations where coca crops are being grown (so much for the “freedom to farm” promised by Republicans so many years ago).

Meanwhile, the spraying is not nearly effective as it was originally claimed to be, except perhaps at creating outrage among farmers.

In an analysis for the Cato Institute, Ted Galen Carpenter reports that the United States claims there are about 340,000 cares of coca under cultivation, and that spraying that began in December has occurred over about 75,000 of those acres.

But a new study by the United Nations suggest that there are far more than 340,000 acres of coca under cultivation, and that U.S. estimates of Colombian cocaine production ere far too low. Whereas the United States estimated that about 780 tons of cocaine were produced ever year, the United Nations reports estimates that as many as 900 tons of cocaine come out of Colombia each year.

The upshot is that despite claiming to have fumigated 22 percent of all farmland growing coca, there has been absolutely no movement in cocaine prices within the United States. If the spraying were really eliminating coca plants, there should have been a rise in cocaine prices as coca became more scarce. As Carpenter writes, “The fact that not even a modest price spike has occurred clearly indicates that Plan Colombia is having now meaningful impact on the supply of cocaine.”

What it is having an effect on, however, are Colombians’ attitudes toward their government and the United States. Carpenter reports that at a recent trip by Colombian President Andres Pastrana to a drug-producing region, Pastrana was met by demonstrators carrying signs showing a Colombian flag being subsumed by the American flag with the caption, “Plan Colombia’s Achievements.” According to Carpenter,

Given the political situation in Colombia, the outpouring of such sentiments is cause for great concern. The Pastrana government already confronts a three-decade-old insurgency being waged by two left-wing guerilla armies. The last thing Bogota should be doing is giving in to U.S. pressure to wage a drug war against its own population. That course of action is certain to produce more recruits for the radical leftist insurgencies.

It won’t stop the drug flow, it will alienate Colombians, and it is going to cost American taxpayers $672 million. Only in Washington, DC, could such a plan stand even a chance — but there, of course, it will flourish.

Source:

Plan Colombia: Washington’s Latest Drug War Failure. Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute, July 27, 2001.

US congress approves anti-drugs aid. The BBC, July 25, 2001.

US backs Colombia drugs fight. The BBC, July 25, 2001.

A Good Article about Bad Robots

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CamWorld posted a link to a very helpful page on How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away.

Conversant has really helped me cut down on the bad robot traffic by making it relatively easy to serve up “Please go away” pages to known bad robots. For example, I can wrap the template to this site with a macro like,


Sorry, e-mail collecter bots are not welcome.

[Normal page template goes here]

The server handles the rest (a similarly easy-to-use method is available for serving up pages optimized for known search engines — or to block known search engine robots altogether). Of course some robots disguise themselves, while others ignore the robots.txt file. The article lists some very clever ways to identify those robots and then prevent them from visiting your site.

You probably can’t completely get rid of these annoying bots, but you can make it a lot more difficult for them to harvest e-mail addresses.