All posts by James O'Keefe

Economy, Government

Greenspan takes no blame, has no shame

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Well it seems former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is saying he saw the housing bubble, except that he wasn't able to stop it.  If his inability to fess up to his own complicity in the financial meltdown wasn't bad enough, now he wants to blame Fannie & Freddie (GSEs).  As Barry Ritholz wrote back in 2008:

  • 50% of subprime loans were made
    by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal
    supervision; another 30% were made by banks or thrifts which are not
    subject to routine
    supervision or examinations    . How was this caused by either CRA or
    GSEs ?
  • What about "No Money Down"
    Mortgages (    0% down
    payments)     ? Were they
    required by the CRA? Fannie? Freddie?
  • Did the GSEs require banks to
    not check credit scores? Assets? Income?
  • What was it about the CRA or
    GSEs that mandated fund
    managers load up on an investment product that was hard to value,
    thinly traded, and poorly understood

I expect that there will be more attempts by conservatives to blame government laws & regulation for causing the crisis and ignore the fact that a lack of government financial regulation caused the crisis.

Art, Books, Competition, Economy, Film, Innovation, Music, Patents & Copyrights, Television, Web/Tech

Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use & Where do people find the time?

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Clay Shirky wrote an interesting blog post about "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" (thanks to Boing Boing and TechDirt, among others).  Here is an excerpt:

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand
curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since
then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly
the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry
Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free,
and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that
users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for
content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will
have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have
to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a
choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because,
spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we
will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have
grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

With that article in mind, it seems time to revisit another one of his articles, "Gin, Television, and
Social Surplus" that I mentioned to my friend Amy last month and haven't gotten around to sending her:

I started
telling her about the Wikipedia
article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the
planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of
this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people
are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an
ruckus–"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And
a little bit
at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the
while–from, "Pluto is the ninth
planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped
orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."

So
how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit,
all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit,
every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia
exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100
million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin
Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but
it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of
thought.

Here is a talk he gave on his book "Here Comes Everybody" which elaborates further on the post's topic.

Looks like I need to pick up a copy of his book.

Spontaneous Ideas

Rent a dedicated ssl pipe for a day?

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We have a problem at work, how to get a large amount of data from one distant location to another.  We could dump the data one or more disks and either FedEx it to us or have someone carry it on a plane.  Either is pretty expensive and, if you are bringing it internationally, runs the risk of getting stuck in customs.

We could set up a dedicated line between there and here, but the lead time is a month or more and they want their customers to rent it for a while.

What is needed is a service where you plunk down your corporate credit card and rent a dedicated pipe between two locations for a brief time (a day or two).  The pipe would need to be SSL of course.  With all of the excess fiber rolled out in the late 90s, I would think that someone could pay for dedicated lines and then rent them out for a day or so.

Web/Tech

The iPad is out today, I will not be an early adopter

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As most people know judging from the volume of hype, Apple's iPad is out today.  Being a long-time NeXT supporters and now a Mac/iPod/iPhone convert, you might think that I would be receiving an iPad today.  Thankfully for our bank account, I won't be.  It certainly looks cool, and I am sure it will do well and I know I will drop by the Apple store to take a look at it, but there is no way we can justify an additional LCD screen in the house.  Besides, I like to wait until they fix the inevitable bugs in the first generation of any product.

That being said, the inexpensive, bare-bones Kobo eReader looks intriguing.  If only I had the time to read enough books to justify it.

Spontaneous Ideas

Web service for “assemble-your-own-book” market?

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Web service for “assemble-your-own-book” market?

My friend and former co-worker, Dave, writes:

Many years ago, when I was a technical writer, my team explored the option of moving away from writing the source files for documentation as actual document files (FrameMaker, Word, etc.) and towards writing them as heavily-indexed articles in a database out of which we could assemble documents as needed.

The idea being that if you wanted a manual that documented everything about process X, we could produce that; if you wanted a manual that documented operational instructions for all our processes, we could produce that; if you wanted a manual that documented operational instructions and technical reference data for all processes in a particular group, we could produce that. The three manuals would overlap significantly, but be distinct manuals written for distinct audiences.

We dropped the idea after a while, but I often think about it when contemplating the ways that the web behaves differently from published books. In some ways, it’s precisely that model – especially what the “semantic web” folks are trying to move towards – although people are still mostly talking in terms of search operations rather than filter/sort/assemble operations.

All of which has gotten me wondering whether there’s anyone out there marketing into the “assemble-your-own-book” market for reference materials.

For example, I can totally imagine a company that publishes travel books exposing a web service whereby you can identify where you want to travel, what price range you are operating in, and what sorts of things you are interested in, and they print up a nicely bound volume of “Exploring Nature Trails, Snail Farms, and Art Museums in France, West Germany, and Denmark on $50-$100 a Day” that you can take with you.

I wonder whether there’s actually a market for that sort of service.

By Will Alone, Current Affairs, Strategy & Tactics, Thailand

Thailand Red protests heat up

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I cannot say that Thailand has been quiet since the last time I posted, but with the recent protests by the Red-shirted demonstrators who are protesting the current government things have moved up in their intensity.  NPR reported 100,000 anti-government non-violent protesters have taken to demonstrating outside of government buildings. 

Recently, many protesters gave a little bit of their blood so that they could pelt government buildings with bags of the blood.  The news reports I have heard indicate that the protesters are sending a message that they are willing to shed blood in violent opposition to the current government. An alternative interpretation could be that they are showing that they are willing to withstand violent attacks by the government nonviolently.  Not being there or knowing Thai, it is hard to discern the truth.

The military at least does not appear to be attempting to escalate their own violence, but is hoping the protesters tire and leave.

Spontaneous Ideas

A social network for close friends? [Updated]

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Ok, last of the ideas for the night.

The thing I have noticed about social networks is that I have a lot of “friends”, but I cannot say I am terribly close to most of them.  Seems like the connections are shallow and not deep.

Don’t get me wrong.  It is nice to get status updates from classmates I haven’t seen in 20 years or co-workers who left the company a year ago.  As a Gub noted when we ran into each other last weekend, it is nice to have a finger in each others lives.  This is especially true after I found out that a friend of mine from my high school years died this year.

Still, perhaps there is a need to have a social networking site that limits the number of friends you can have.  Limiting your list to 3, 5, or 10 friends really focuses you mind as to who and/or what is important.  I have tended to only “friend” someone who is already on a site, and not invite people to a social networking site.  I would feel more compunction to invite someone on to a site where my friends were limited.

But what is the win to having the network of close friends?  What services should a site like that provide that would make people desire to visit it.  Certainly, its simplest competitor is email since anyone can create a list of people to send email to and then send a note just to them.

One serious downside is if you are limited to 3, 5 or 10 close friend slots, then how will someone feel if you take them off of your close friend list?  It strikes me that folks should not know who is on your list, in fact they should probably not even need a note if they are no longer your close friend.  They just stop getting your notes and updates.  Perhaps, even, close friends can be one way just like Twitter: except instead of signing up to get someone else’s status messages, you are signing up to send someone your status messages.  The limit of the number of friends you can have and the ability to block such incoming messages should cut down on spam.

What the added value is, I am still not sure.

UPDATE: A friend of mine pointed me to ASMALLWORLD.  It looks like a social networking site for the rich and/or influential and bills itself as:

… the world’s leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. ASMALLWORLD’s unique platform offers powerful tools and user generated content to help members manage their private, social and business lives.

Membership to ASMALLWORLD is by invitation only, which is part of what makes this network unique, and the connections, authentic. Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network. If you know someone with this privilege, you can ask them to invite you. If not, please be patient and continue to ask around in your own personal and professional circles.

An integrated media company, ASW is an ideal match for advertisers seeking to target the world’s tastemakers and develop heightened mindshare with this sophisticated and influential group. [bold from site]