Category Archives: Current Affairs

The Long Tail Offline

Chris Anderson has been posting about the Long Tail, which is about how only a relatively small number of movies, records, books, etc. get wide distribution, and if you plot all of a given type of product, such as movies, on a graph with x being number of copies sold or viewed for pay, and y being individual movies in descending order of copies, you see a short fat head that gets regular distribution and a very long tail that does not. The main point is that the long tail has as much value as the fat head, and with the Internet it is now possible to distribute the long tail to cult movie viewers, old movie buffs, afficionados of certain genres, etc.

Here’s a different case where everyone takes the long tail to be representative when the short head accounts for most of the money:

The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

“It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan said.

MILLION-DOLLAR MURRAY Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. by MALCOLM GLADWELL New Yorker, Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20, Posted 2006-02-06

The money in this case is medical expenses paid for by hospitals or the state, for care of homeless people. Continue reading →

Life in the Tort Lane

Gunnar Peterson begins a post with:
American corporations spend more on tort litigation than R&D. Full stop.
and ends it with:
Tort litigation can be viewed as a spend since it protects existing assets, R&D is a speculative investment, what is the right balance?
I agree with everything in between those two quotes, and I probably agree with them, too.

However, too many people read this situation to mean that tort reform is the answer. Set legal limits on how much juries can award plaintiffs and corporations expenditures on tort lititgation will go way down. That particular outcome probably would result, but that’s not all that would happen. Continue reading →

Terrorism Insurance

When I posted recently about entrepeneural initiative moving outside the U.S., this wasn’t quite what I had in mind:

He walked into the offices of the Iraq Insurance Company and bought a terrorism insurance policy. It looked like an ordinary life insurance policy, but with a one-page rider adding coverage for "the following dangers: 1) explosions caused by weapons of war and car bombs; 2) assassinations; 3) terrorist attacks."

New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance By ROBERT F. WORTH, New York Times, Published: March 21, 2006

It seems that ordinary life insurance policies don’t cover such deaths, because the state used to, or people turned to their family or tribe. But now the state doesn’t, and the problem is too big for tribe or family. Enter the entrepeneur.

Continue reading →

Life in the Slow Lane

America, the Fat, Dumb, and Happy:

Over the past century, Americans have become accustomed to winning every global battle that mattered: two world wars, the space race, the Cold War, the Internet gold rush. Along the way, Americans have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and lived lives that were the envy of the rest of the world.

It was nice while it lasted.

Can America Keep Up? Why so many smart folks fear that the United States is falling behind in the race for global economic leadership By Richard J. Newman, U.S. News & World Report, 3/27/06

Two decades go Europeans, Australians, etc. used to tell me the U.S. was complacent. That was nothing compared to now, when the U.S. has pulled over into the slow lane.

Continue reading →

Online Education: Risk or Opportunity?

Online education has been booming, and now probably will boom more, since the U.S. Congress is proposing to lift its requirement for 50 percent of courses to be held in physical space to qualify for federal student aid. Extensive lobbying by the for-profit online educational lobby helped produce this change, and high level connections didn’t hurt:

Sally L. Stroup, the assistant secretary of education who is the top regulator overseeing higher education, is a former lobbyist for the University of Phoenix, the nation’s largest for-profit college, with some 300,000 students.

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress By SAM DILLON, New York Times, Published: March 1, 2006

The risk comes here:

Yet commercial higher education continues to have a checkered record, particularly for aggressive recruitment and marketing. The Department of Education’s inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., testified in May that 74 percent of his fraud cases involved for-profit schools.

The article didn’t say what percentage of online degrees involved fraud; one would guess it’s a small percent.

A related risk that I’ve heard some executives complain about is that online education doesn’t provide the socialization for which college is famous. But of course we’ve heard that about everything online from electronic mail to IM to World of Warcraft, and we’ve seen that online communications, while indeed lacking in the face to face aspects, provide certain socialization advantages, such as time-shifting, global reach, and the ability to communicate with more people of more different types.

So I’d say the jury is still out as to whether online education is a risk or an opportunity. Like many things, it is probably both.

-jsq

PS: Seen in a posting by Dave Hughes on dewayne-net.

The Internet for Free Speech in China

Sometimes the Internet can still be a force for free speech:

Li Datong, shown outside the China Youth Daily, challenged a plan to dock reporters’ pay if government officials took issue with their stories. The speed and power of the Internet helped launch a campaign that ultimately compelled a government retreat from the plan.

The Click That Broke a Government By Philip P. Pan Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page A01

Apparently sometimes even the People’s Republic of China has to bow to public opinion, and the Internet can be used to mobilize that opinion.

-jsq

U.S. Congress Members Decry Internet Censorship (in Other Countries)

The Human Rights Caucus of the U.S. Congress complained about alleged censorship in China by Microsoft, cisco, Google, and Yahoo!, as noted by fergie’s tech blog. Microsoft and Yahoo! took more or less the same position Google has been taking, that business in China isn’t business as usual and doing business there at all promotes free expression in China.

Meanwhile, two women were removed from the House Chamber the other night for wearing shirts with writing on them, one saying Support Our Troops, the other noting how many of them had died. The latter was handcuffed and arrested. The House police later admitted she broke no law and apologized, which is more than China does, and of course we’re talking a great difference in scale. So the House Caucus of course has a point ( wish I’d thought of it) even though it would come off better if they’d keep their own house in better order.

A hearing by an actual House subcommittee is expected in a few weeks. Clearly aiding government censorship can have political consequences, which means it is a business risk. Let’s just hope these hearings stay on that track and don’t veer off into reccomending greater U.S. government control of the Internet or further consolidation of Internet ownership by fewer firms.

-jsq

Security for Whom?

Previously I mentioned that Exxon-Mobil had invested a few million dollars in PR against global warming. Well, I don’t know whether there’s actually any connection, but the same company posted its highest-ever profits last year:
Exxon’s revenue last year allowed it to surpass Wal-Mart as the largest company in the United States, and by some measures Exxon became richer than some of world’s largest oil-producing nations. For instance, its revenue of $371 billion surpassed the gross domestic product of $245 billion for Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world’s fourth most populous country with 242 million people.

Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company, By SIMON ROMERO and JOHN HOLUSHA New York Times, January 30, 2006

Meanwhile, Exxon-Mobil says its profits rose 40% last year while the amount paid in taxes rose 14%. What does this mean to the rest of us? Continue reading →

One Reason People are Dubious about Global Warming

Here’s one reason people are dubious about global warming: about $8.6 million pumped into 40 think tanks by ExxonMobil from 2000 to 2003. I suppose less than $9M over 3-4 years is peanuts to a corporation that size, and could be considered a sound PR investment.

Maybe for the current executives and big shareholders, who will all be dead before the largest effects of global warming come into play. I’m not so sure about the rest of us.

-jsq

PS: Link found on Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Notes.

Continue reading →