Author: Brian Carnell

Writing for MP3Newswire, Richard Menta claims that Radiohead’s recent debut at #1 is due in large part to the album being available on Napster 3 months before it was scheduled to be released. According to Menta this sort of music never shows up on Billboard charts usually.

Sure, that’s why Nirvana had such success with their first major label release — because it was on Napster first (oops–no Napster? How did they ever sell CDs in the old days). In fact Radiohead’s debut is due to the immense publicist surrounding the album. I’ve never heard a Radiohead song or care about the group’s music, but even I’ve run across publicity for their latest album.

Besides the real argument against Napster is its long-term effects. Of course you have to out and by the CD now. Why? Because portable MP3 players are still too expensive and/or lack important features. Unless you’ve got a lot of money and/or patience, it’s not very easy to play MP3s outside of the computer environment.

MP3 devices are getting better, however, and it won’t be long before relatively cheap, easy to use portable devices arrive — possibly as soon as Christmas 2001. Once that happens, why buy CDs if the songs are available on Napster and can be taken anywhere with the same versatility as the compact disc?

Feed’s Clay Shirk wrote an excellent article on the problems of visualizing proteins, Seven Ways of Looking at a Protein, and the role that increasing computer power is playing in revolutionizing approaches to the problem.

It’s amazing how important proteins are to life and yet how little understood they are. As research gives us more information about how proteins function the medical discoveries that will flow from this will be astounding.

For the most part, I hold the same view of Camille Paglia that she holds of the Libertarian Party — I wish she’d just shut up because she’s very annoying. On the other hand, she did come up with a pretty good idea for the party in her latest Salon.Com column,

Speaking of preachy thought police, I’m getting fed up with members of the Libertarian Party who think they own the word “libertarian.” Get off my back, please, and focus your attention on the failures of your party to fine-tune and convey its philosophy credibly to the national electorate. In prior columns, I’ve indicated that the Libertarian Party, which once invited me to submit my name for its presidential nomination, is too conservative for my thinking and also too drearily removed from cultural issues. If and when the Libertarian Party nominates someone like the brilliantly analytical Virginia Postrel, I’ll reconsider my support for the Green Party, whose current brand of socialism is indeed excessive.

Postrel’s probably too smart to want to run for President, but I think she’d do a much better job of articulating the issues in a way that would appeal beyond the libertarian faithful than Harry Browne does (am I the only libertarian who finds Browne even duller than Gore?)

Jeremy Rifkin is concerned about the decline in the U.S. savings rate that began in the middle of the 1990s. From saving 8% of income eight years ago, Americans are now saving less than .2% of their income. To Rifkin this can mean only one thing — record economic growth is being bought on credit and is bound to crash and burn (he compares our current situation to that just prior to the Great Depression).

Rifkin’s on the wrong track (as usual). While he’s correct that the number of bankruptcies in the United States has increased from 1994-1999, he forgets to mention that a) it’s ridiculously easy to declare bankruptcy in the United States, and b) part of that acceleration is driven by people afraid that Congress is going to change the law to make it more difficult to declare bankruptcy, as they almost did earlier in the year.

Second, Rifkin ignores capital gains. If you include capital gains in savings, the period of 1995-1998 actually saw the most savings for any four year period in American history. A study by the Brooking’s Institute that factored in capital gains put the saving rate at 15.8 percent. This doesn’t take a rocket scientist or even a biotech critic to figure out — if you’re getting 8 percent return from your bank and 15 percent from your mutual fund, you shift the money from the bank to the mutual fund.

As for consumer credit, it is hard to reconcile Rifkin’s claim that American middle class families are squandering their future on credit when according to the Federal Reserve the median net worth of families rose by almost 18 percent from 1995-1998 (besides which it always amazes me when Leftist complain that the middle class and even the poor often have access to the sort of credit devices that in the past would have been available only to the wealthy).

If Rifkin and others want to ensure middle class families save more the solutions are pretty obvious — change tax incentives which discourage savings by doing things like increasing the amount of money that can be put into an IRA or similar plan (the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill to just do that, but the Clinton administration opposes it and so it will likely die).

Source:

Another Wolf At Our Door. Jeremy Rifkin, The Guardian of London, October 24, 2000.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population and life expectancy have been spiraling downards. The Hindustan Times has an article summarizing a soon to be released report by the Russian Health Minister on the health problems experienced in that nation. Here’s an excerpt:

The report shows that Russia’s population shrunk by more than half a million people in the first eight months of this year, the steepest drop ever during peacetime.

According to the study, Russians have been dying younger and having fewer children due to a post-Soviet cocktail of bad news, including rising rates of poverty, illness, stress, alcoholism, civil conflict and industrial accidents.

Experts say drug abuse and sexually-transmitted diseases are potent new factors in declining male life expectancy, which has plunged from 64 years in the 1980’s to less than 59 years today.

Other dire indicators include the news that Russian women currently have 1.17 children, far below the 2.5 kids per woman that would be required to maintain the population.

There is no question that the Russian government has severely mismanaged its transition from Communist dictatorship to democracy.

Source:

Russia may soon be empty of people. Fred Weir, Hindustan Times, October 25, 2000.