Day: October 18, 2002

Doc Searls on Andrew Orloski

Doc Searls has some interesting comments about this pathetic hit piece from The Register aimed at a Microsoft employee who keeps a weblog. The article basically is one long insult toward the MS employee because she apparently devoted her weblog to pictures of her cats, descriptions of her XBox-playing habits, etc.

Doc should just come out and be blunt about it — Andrew Orlowski’s being a John Dvorak-sized asshole there.

It amazes me to no end how obssessed some people are with pointing out that people post “trivial” data about their lives on their weblogs or web sites. With some of these columnists, you’d think that posting a picture of your cat or dog online was akin to spreading child pornography.

I wonder if there were similar critiques of the phone system. I can just see an early 20th century John Dvorak or Andrew Orlowski complaining that people were wasting precious telephone bandwidth merely talking to loved ones and sharing the daily minutae of their lives rather than doing truly important things (as the John Dvorak’s and Andrew Orlowki’s of the world are offering indispensable insights — not).

Jim Roepcke Looking for Employment

Jim Roepcke is looking for employment after the economic downturn hit the software company he’s been working for.

Jim’s got an online resume. I know him largely because he worked on Conversant, the groupware system I use, and through his weblog where he comes across as someone who would be really cool to work with.

In fact, even though I’m a pain-in-the-ass on his site occasionally (okay, more than occasionally), Have Browser, Will Travel is one of my favorite weblogs.

Glenn Reynolds on the Economics of Weblogging

Glenn Reynolds hits the nail on the head in an article on big media vs. weblogs,

But while weblogs may not be lucrative, they’re very powerful and – as Nick Denton has pointed out, they’re very cost-effective. My traffic is (depending on how they count it) about one-thirtieth of the Times’ website, but I feel sure that my costs are much, much less than one-thirtieth of theirs. Which raises the question: what if it really is almost impossible to make money on the web, but so cheap that practically anyone can afford to have a Web presence?

Actually, forget the “practically” part – and, for that matter, the “what if” part. Pretty much everyone agrees that making money on the Web is damned hard. And it’s true that practically anyone can have a Web presence – there’s even a homeless guy with a weblog (called, straightforwardly enough, “The Homeless Guy.”) And with even fairly high-volume webhosting plans available for ten or fifteen dollars per month, (here’s the page for one outfit I know; I’m sure there are others in the same range) the barriers to entry are pretty damned low.

Which is why I get so annoyed at the liberals and leftists whining about how all the political weblogs are right wing. If you don’t like it, stop your whining and start blogging already.

Wacky Proposal for a Rice Cartel

Sometimes there are stories which are so self-refuting that it’s hard to provide further commentary. Such is the announcement that China, India, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam are investigating ways to cartelize world rice markets. They want to do for rice what OPEC has done for oil.

Rice prices have been in free fall since 1997, losing more than a third of their value in just 5 years. World projections show rice production continuing to increase, so the price of rice is likely to fall even further over the next few years while global consumption is projected to decline.

Under those conditions a cartel is a great idea for producers, but how do they ever expect to enforce cartel agreements? OPEC has had a nightmare enforcing its cartel agreements on oil which is a relatively easy commodity to track and exclude potential competitors (not to mention monitor violators). Since rice can be grown throughout most of the world, there is almost no way cartel efforts can succeed.

Ironically, each of the governments involved has had disastrous experience with state subsidies and internal control of food markets. Apparently they believe that if they simply try the same failed policies on a bigger scale that they might finally work. Don’t bet on it.

Source:

Rice producers in ‘cartel’ talks. The BBC, October 9, 2002.

United Nations Population Fund Head Speaks Out Against Potential War With Iraq

The head of the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Thoraya Obaid, said at a recent conference that a United States war with Iraq would “open the gates of hell” and that the way to fight terrorism and oppression was through tackling poverty.

Obaid told BBC News Online,

Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, said last month that war against Iraq would ‘open the gates of hell’ in the Middle East, with instability across the region.

He was right, nobody wants war, and I pray that this one will be averted, because if it breaks out it will destroy people, lives and futures.

To fight terrorism you have to fight the root causes of injustice — poverty, disease, joblessness. Nobody can live without hope.

If by 2015 we can realize the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve global poverty, then we’ll be turning our faces against injustice.

First, the Millennium Development Goals are largely a bad joke — just another attempt by the United Nations to talk the world out of poverty. Look at Obaid’s own region of the Middle East. It is one of the few areas of the world that has been declining economically for the last couple decades. If anything, the Middle East is too stable with theocratic dictatorships having a stranglehold on the regions.

Second, Obaid apparently would just write off Iraqi citizens as well as the millions in the region that would be threatened should acquire nuclear weapons.

This is not to say that the case for a war against Iraq is cut and dried or even that it makes sense, but Obaid’s reasons for opposing a war don’t make a lot of sense since it’s hard to imagine the Middle East having fewer prospects than it already has.

Interestingly Obaid has no problem with lives being destroyed when it comes to forced abortion. She also complained to the BBC about the U.S. cutoff of funding to UNFPA that would have went to China,

That’s 12% of our total funding. It really is a crisis for us. We have nothing to do with abortion at all. So our other programmes are now going to suffer because of an issue we don’t even touch.

That’s just nonsense. UNFPA spending frees up money for China to spend enforcing its one child policy. All China has to do is allocate the money it spends on the one child policy on alternative family planning-related activities.

Source:

UN population head’s war warning. Alex Kirby, The BBC, October 9, 2002.