Facebook, okay; but, Google, I've got a problem

A week or so ago I was “playing” with Facebook trying to get it serve me ads on specific topics based on what was in a status or a comment I had written.  Facebook is kind of like your trusty dog, it doesn’t believe you would con it.  And you know you’ve betrayed a dog’s trust, throwing the ball, throwing the ball, then not throwing to the ball and laughing as your dog takes off running to catch the ball that’s still in your hand.

Likewise, Facebook takes everything you write, runs it through a few algorithms and ta da! If you are writing about Destin, Florida, quite possibly you might click on an ad for beach condos on Hilton Head Island (can’t afford them, at least during the “season).  If you use the word liquor, Facebook wants you to “Like” Jim Beam.

That’s all fine and good and actually fun, for a few minutes.  But, have you noticed that Google can give you some odd results lately?  It used to be that I’d almost always find what I was looking for in the first few results, certainly on the first page of results.

I spent most of this week in Iowa trying a lawsuit, though that’s another story.  I’d made a reservation at a Holiday Inn Express in Keokuk last weekend.  While there I did a little surfing a couple of times looking for local restaurants.  I’ve done this before while at home a search for “Midtown brunch” will give you twenty links to restaurant and ratings sites.  Not in Keokuk.  I typed in “Keokuk IA restaurants and got paid results for resorts and hotels with meta tags for the word restaurant.

I finished my trial on Friday, too late to get a flight and decided to stay the weekend in Burlington, Iowa on the Mississippi, making a reservation at a Fairfield Inn & Suites.  This morning I Googled “breakfast Burlington IA” and got a list of Bed and Breakfast place, again that used breakfast as a meta tag.

Google is getting as dumb as Facebook.  It knows I’ve made two hotel reservations in a week and thinks I’ve got some sort of lodging fetish.

Facebook and Google have “personalized” my “online experience” and I’m not at all sure I like it.  There’s of course the creepy factor and the stay out of my business factor.  But the dumb algorithm factor is troubling.

I started computer searching decades ago using Westlaw, a legal database, which required a basic understanding of Boolean logic.  With the advent of Google and its like I didn’t have to be as precise, as the algorithm “crowd sourced” the likely correct results of my search; and, with millions of users it worked really well.

This new emphasis on what I’ve done in the past having a bearing on what I want to do now doesn’t seem to me to be working well.  Maybe they’ll refine it; but, in the meantime, what results that I might well want to see is it filtering based on it’s, flawed, assumptions about me?

Newer isn’t always better.  I don’t mind Facebook’s little games, I’m confident I can outthink a 25 year old billionaire, though I sometimes resent him making me have to do it.  But, I don’t like the idea of Google skewing the results it gives me based on a poor understanding of who I am and what I want.

Are two lousy tickets too much to ask for?

Dear Ticketmaster and The Atlanta Braves,

I have an employee of a very good client who wants two tickets to a Braves Game in June; thus, his wish is my command.

No big deal you would think given the wonders of the internet and a credit card.

Not so.  Google “Atlanta Braves tickets” and see what you get.  First there’s all the paid ads for brokers, ticket exchanges and scalpers.

No “Atlantabraves.com” or anything of the sort.  There are multiple iterations of “MLB.com” all of which somewhere on a crowded, graphically challenged page have a link to Ticketmaster.com.

Click that link and you get a graphic of Turner Field and its seat sections, represented by tiny, tiny little colored rectangles with unreadable numbers in them (which a little further down, you will learn are totally irrelevant to the process of getting tickets).  The different colors represent different areas of seats with different prices.  And you can't enlarge the page.

This wasn’t a real problem as I’ve been to the Ted and knew that I wanted Terrace seats anywhere is sections 201 to 205.  Except you can’t get there from the page.  No, you have to go to a selection area of the page where you type in the number of seats you want, whether you want to “add value” (pre-buy food and drink), whether you have a coupon or promo code and then, you can’t choose where you want to go.  You have to choose “Best Available” or “Terrace.”

Best Available doesn’t get you Terrace and Terrace doesn’t let you limit your choices to the sections you want, it tries to push less desirable sections of Terrace out past the infield on you.

At one point in the odyssey, I gave in and tried to buy seats in Section 208.  I clicked “Buy” and it churned and churned and churned while I looked at the advice that it would take less than a minute and that I should not hit the back button or refresh or I’d have to start over again.

Several minutes of churning and I noticed that Firefox had blocked Ticketmaster’s attempt to redirect me to “another page.”  So I clicked “Allow.”  It seems “Allow” is the equivalent to Refresh and Back and I “had to start all over again.”  I tried several variations of this process with no success.

On to Ticketmaster’s 800 number.  The nice female computer voice directing me through phone hell understood a good 40% of what I said.  Again, you can’t pick what you want, I got the same Best Available or Terrace.   Then you had to pick a price within Terrace.  You can’t pick "any price" and you can’t pick a range of prices.  So I picked a few discrete prices,and each time my friend (I think I can call her a friend, we’d been “talking” for over ten minutes at this point) told me she didn’t have any seats for that price.

I hung up.  Some more surfing and I got the hours (8:30 to 6:00) on non-game days) for the ticket office at Turner Field figuring I’d go down at lunch time.  I did.  Guess what isn’t open at 10:45 a.m.?

If anybody at Ticketmaster or with the Braves reads this, I’ll pay, I really have to get the tickets; but, I’ll be damned if I know how to get them.

Best Regards,

Dave.

So, you want to live in the cloud?

Or, as it used to be called, on internet servers. “The Cloud” is trendy. What it is, is not quite as sexy – a bunch of buildings in a bunch of places with a bunch of servers that have data in them. Usually the data is in more than one place so a place goes down, the others pick up the slack.

Google, at least to my recollection, started the rush to the “cloud” with Google Docs, an online kind of equivalent to the programs in Microsoft Office. Why pay MS hundreds of dollars every couple of years and take up space on your hard drive with the program and the files when you can go to the cloud and use the free Docs program and store your files there?

Apple is building a 500,000 square foot building to house a new server “farm,” reportedly to house data for the rumored “iCloud” it is about to introduce to sync all your music and videos to and from all of your Apple devices.

But, as we all know, computers are finicky things. They quit doing what they are supposed to do on annoyingly frequent basis. The Blue Screen of Death. Control + Alt + Delete. Defragmenting. Viruses and worms.

And all those things happen no matter where you keep the hardware – in your home or office or in a server farm on the other end of the cloud.

Sony’s Playstation Network has been down for about a week and may be up this week after being hacked. Amazon has a very nice server business that didn’t get a lot of attention until recently when it went down and shut down a whole bunch of websites.

I’ve always been wary of the cloud for security reasons, and still am. As a lawyer I can’t see putting client information in the hands of a third party that might access it or let others. But lately, the inherent fallibility of computers (and nuclear reactors, but that’s a different post) has added a new reason for me to keep my stuff closer to home. If one of my computers goes down, the stuff in it is sitting in an external hard drive and mirrored on the other computer. I’m not dependent on whichever flavor of cloud computing company wants my business.

Maybe someday I’ll have to but not as long as I don’t absolutely have to. After all, though I bank online and use ATM’s to get money, I still have a paper check register, keep all my credit card and ATM card receipts and refuse to put money or checks into the machine in front of the bank.

Legal Warfare

I am engaged in the title’s activity.  We’ll see how this post goes as I can’t really tell you anything about the case.

Let’s say the other side is caught cold doing wrong and judicially admits it in the Answer to the Complaint (I have the distinct feeling I’m writing this for an audience of one, Curmudgeon).  For the other three or four of you, if you say something in something you file with the court, you are stuck with it – true or not – it is true.

Ah, but you get a Counterclaim filed against your client that is, charitably put, not quite based on facts or reality.  To add to the insult, the damages claimed would fund the deficit of some of our smaller distressed cities.

You figure out early on that the lawyer on the other side pretty much doesn’t have a case and wants to scare you so you will convince your client to do a walk away – each side dismisses and calls it even.  And while the lawyer is at it, said lawyer is milking his client for fees.  I really would pay for the pleasure of being in the room when the first bill is opened.

Your client understands all this and instructs you to soldier on, the right thing to do for legal and business reasons.

And I am; but, it is really depressing when I step back from it a bit.  I’m going to make a relatively nice amount of money.  My client may even come out ahead if the other side has some money to grab after a probable judgment.

And the lawyer on the other side is creative, if not quite what I consider professional, requiring me to think, something I don’t have to do very often at this stage in my career – I’m told it will stave off senility in the coming years.

But, it is all kind of distasteful.  The other lawyer is condescending and smarmy which makes me want to engage in some equally unpleasant behavior, which I’m so far resisting. 

I don’t like any of it.

Oh My! I'm on the side of the Republicans!

The title was just for shock value.  I’m actually on the side of lawyers acting like lawyers.  Stop laughing.

An Atlanta “silk stocking” law firm, King & Spalding has been under fire for a week or so as one of its partners (at the rate of $520 an hour) took on the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) for Republican House leaders when the Justice Department announced that it would not defend the law in lawsuits asserting that the law is unconstitutional.

The firm’s chairman, announcing the firm would withdraw, said “[i]n reviewing this assignment further, I determined that the process used for vetting this engagement was inadequate.”  AJC.com.  He didn’t mention that the firm was under fire from gay groups and liberal quarters, with protests planned against it later in the week.

The partner who is handling the case, Paul D. Clement, a former Solicitor General, resigned saying “’I take this step not because of strongly held views about the statute. My thoughts about the merits of DOMA are as irrelevant as my views about the dozens of federal statutes that I defended as Solicitor General.

‘‘Instead, I resign out of the firmly-held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high. Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.’

“Clement closed his letter by quoting from a … former King & Spalding partner (and former Attorney General and former federal appellate judge) Griffin Bell: ‘You are not required to take every matter that is presented to you, but having assumed a representation, it becomes your duty to finish the representation.’”  NationalReview.com.  (Emphasis added.)

Laugh if you will, lawyers have certain ethical obligations that result from the grant of the privilege to practice law. King & Spalding got lawyering exactly wrong and Mr. Clement got it exactly right.

I hope Mr. Clement with his new firm loses big time in his defense of DOMA but he should be applauded for his representation.  His old firm needs to take a remedial professionalism course.  Perhaps Mr. Clement will volunteer his services to teach it.

It's 8:20 p.m. and everything in Atlanta is quite nice

I just looked out the window and saw a guy and I assume his maybe 3 year old daughter. She had her dad's Braves cap on, which kept falling off her head and an orange plastic bat. He tossed her the plastic ball which she let land next to her (she's a lefty) and then took a great golf swing, popping it ten or so feet each time. They were always hooks or slices because she came off of the bat with her left hand. She has promise though, nice fluid swing.

Just about the end of twilight and to my mind Spring in Atlanta is quite nice.

Facebook pushes the envelope yet again

Just after lunch I went to the Huffington Post while surfing and was greeted by a popover that informed me that a Facebook friend (one of the owners of a yellow dog which pines over the other owner’s tennis shoe when he is gone) had linked her facebook account to HuffPo and invited me to do the same.

I thought I had blocked all access to my Facebook page other than to friends.  Not so grasshopper.  If your friends like a page or a website or an app, they get access to you now.

If you click through to “Account Settings” and then click this line:

“Info accessible through your friends

Control what information is available to apps and websites when your friends use them”

you will get this below.  When I did, all of the items were checked:

Use the settings below to control which of your information is available to applications, games and websites when your friends use them. The more info you share, the more social the experience.

Bio	My videos
Birthday	My links
Family and relationships	My notes
Interested in	Photos and videos I'm  tagged in
Religious and political views	Hometown
My website	Current city
If I'm online	Education and work
My status updates	Activities, interests, things I like
My photos	Places I check in to

Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you've set to everyone) is available to friends' applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

I don’t remember seeing that screen before; and, even if I had, I damn well know I didn’t check the boxes.  The only thing I can think of that I’ve done is give Photoshop permission to upload pictures recently.  Maybe that reset everything.  Sorry Photoshop and HuffPo, you are now on the shit list.  And Facebook, it may be true that “[t]he more info you share, the more social the experience:” but, I like designing my own social circumstances and I’m getting real tired of you forcing me to catch you each time you decide to change the rules.

Pick a side: my friend says I'm wrong

Regular readers will know that one of my friends is a cop.  We often agree on stuff you might think would separate us.  That didn’t happen today.

I told him about sitting on an entrance ramp to the Connector (I-75 and I-85 are the same expressway through downtown Atlanta for a couple of miles, a design failure) on Saturday, on my way to play golf near the airport.  I just missed getting ahead of what I thought was a police funeral procession, being the tenth or so car not permitted to enter the expressway by the police car that blocked it.  (I had about 15 minutes while sitting to count.)

I watched police cars from a bunch of Georgia cities and counties, maybe a couple of hundred, pass me and then about a thousand, private, motorcycles, then a dozen or so more police cars, all with lights and sirens operating, before I was allowed to move.

Here’s the thing.  All the cars and bikes were in the HOV lane to the far left of the southbound, seven or eight lane expressway.  All of the remaining lanes were empty.

I was finally allowed to move and caught up to the procession in maybe a minute, just past the next entrance – no blocking, cars now were allowed to occupy the lanes next to the procession.

As it turns out, my friend the cop says it wasn’t a funeral (I wasn’t happy but I could have “lived” with fifteen minutes out of my life for a show of respect for a fallen cop).  Nope, I was stopped for no good reason (at least that I can think of or that my friend offered) for the entire connector being blocked for the annual Georgia police something or other ride for the families of slain officers.

Don’t get me wrong, I want police to be paid well.  I want them to be taken care of if they’re hurt.  I want their families taken care of if they are killed.  But I don’t think it’s a matter of respect for a few thousand people to be stopped in their tracks through downtown Atlanta while a thousand or so cops ride south in one lane with the rest empty.  Though I didn’t mention it to my friend, it seems to me to a bit arrogant on the part of the cops.

My friend the cop and I have agreed to disagree on this one.

All spending is discretionary (or, I think we are screwed)

Don’t hammer me on the absolute accuracy of the dollars in this article, though they do seem to be borne out by spending info I found at Wikipedia.

That said, we paid more than $100 billion and $50 billion for our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, in 2010.  Those numbers don’t count money spent from the $513 billion Defense Department budget.  Even if no other money had been spent (and I’m sure that isn’t true) those two wars represent about 25% of “defense” spending and just under 5% of all spending.

According to Wikipedia, the Federal government took in $2.16 trillion in taxes in Fiscal Year 2010 and spent about $3.45 trillion.  Here’s a breakdown of Federal spending for the same year:

Mandatory spending: $2.009 trillion (-20.1%)

$695 billion (+4.9%) – Social Security

$571 billion (−15.2%) – Other mandatory programs

$453 billion (+6.6%) – Medicare

$290 billion (+12.0%) – Medicaid

$164 billion (+18.0%) – Interest on National Debt

$11 billion (+275%) – Potential disaster costs

$0 billion (−100%) – Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)

$0 billion (−100%) – Financial stabilization efforts

Discretionary spending: $1.368 trillion (+13.1%)

$663.7 billion (+12.7%) – Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)

$78.7 billion (−1.7%) – Department of Health and Human Services

$72.5 billion (+2.8%) – Department of Transportation

$52.5 billion (+10.3%) – Department of Veterans Affairs

$51.7 billion (+40.9%) – Department of State and Other International Programs

$47.5 billion (+18.5%) – Department of Housing and Urban Development

$46.7 billion (+12.8%) – Department of Education

$42.7 billion (+1.2%) – Department of Homeland Security

$26.3 billion (−0.4%) – Department of Energy

$26.0 billion (+8.8%) – Department of Agriculture

$23.9 billion (−6.3%) – Department of Justice

$18.7 billion (+5.1%) – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

$13.8 billion (+48.4%) – Department of Commerce

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of Labor

$13.3 billion (+4.7%) – Department of the Treasury

$12.0 billion (+6.2%) – Department of the Interior

$10.5 billion (+34.6%) – Environmental Protection Agency

$9.7 billion (+10.2%) – Social Security Administration

$7.0 billion (+1.4%) – National Science Foundation

$5.1 billion (−3.8%) – Corps of Engineers

$5.0 billion (+100%) – National Infrastructure Bank

$1.1 billion (+22.2%) – Corporation for National and Community Service

$0.7 billion (0.0%) – Small Business Administration

$0.6 billion (−14.3%) – General Services Administration

$19.8 billion (+3.7%) – Other Agencies

$105 billion – Other

Some numbers that jump out at you:

"Mandatory" spending was down 20.1% and discretionary spending was up 13.1% over 2009. 

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending totaled $1.438 trillion, about 40% of all spending.

The Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, State and Homeland Security account for $810.6 billion or about 23% of all spending.

About 39 cents of every dollar spent was borrowed.

End spending in the seven categories just mentioned and the government is in the black.  Can’t do that?

End all the wars, all the economic aid to other countries, shut down all foreign military operations, cut off all economic aid for seniors, students, children and others who have assets or private income that they could survive on, end the Bush tax cuts, end government subsidies to businesses and you might get close to the same point. 

And you’d get a Tea Party membership card in the mail.  And a few wars that threaten our economic interests.  And some more dead or sick little kids.  An even less educated, less able next generation.  A few more seniors dead before their time.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Don't talk to the PO-lice

The title uses the Southern pronunciation.  For purposes of this post, the police are anyone in authority investigating a crime.

The grand jury exchange which the Barry Bonds jury found to be an “obstruction of Justice:

"Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't — we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want — don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.

A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that — you know, that — I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ..."

Jurors were only supposed to make their decision based on the second answer, the one beginning "That's what keeps ..." However, it seemed after the verdict on Wednesday that they looked at the whole exchange. The foreman of the jury, who said his first name was Fred, repeatedly used an expletive to describe Bonds' answer to the question from the prosecutors.

"When you're in front of a grand jury you have to answer, and he gave a b------- answer. It was a b------- answer," Fred said. "He gave a story rather than a yes or no answer."

CBSNews.com.

In January 2000, Ray Lewis, an NFL player, was in Atlanta for the Super Bowl.  He almost certainly saw, and may have participated in a murder.  There wasn’t much of a case against him.  He pled to misdemeanor obstruction for making a “misleading” statement to the police the morning after the murder.

In October 2005, Scooter Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, talked to federal investigators about their inquiry into leaks about Valarie Plame’s connections to the CIA and was later convicted on four of the five counts in an indictment (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one of the counts of making false statements) and acquitted on the second count of making false statements and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service.

Wikipedia.com

None of the three is in anyway an attractive example; but, they are the examples that I’ve got.  None of them would have had any problem had they just kept their mouth shut when the police knocked at their door.

I don’t and would never do criminal defense work.  A couple of decades ago I’d have done anything I could to help a criminal investigation.  I’d have to think long and hard about having any conversation with the police these days.

Political Ethics

Stop laughing.  The phrase in many peoples’ mind is almost as ludicrous as legal ethics.

You hear phrases like “I can’t be bought for a cup of coffee” on a regular basis.  And that is almost certainly true.  But the price of cups of coffee and sandwiches and rounds of golf and a nice bottle of ’97 Beringer Reserve cab to go with some juicy prime steaks at dinner adds up.

Some years back I represented a state agency defending a lawsuit.  I had to spend a lot of time with two fairly low-level agency employees reviewing and organizing hundreds of boxes of documents.  They took very seriously the agency’s “no gratuities” rule.  Instead of me buying them lunch or dinner at a nice restaurant which my firm did for all clients (yes the client is paying for it at the end of the day in the form of rates that are marginally higher than if the firm did no entertaining) we ate lunch at McDonalds and dinner at Western Sizzler so they could stay within their per diem.

Things have apparently changed since then.  Georgia’s legislators trot out the word “transparency” whenever anyone talks about ethics.  They loudly proclaim they aren’t influenced by free suite tickets at Braves and Falcons games.  The Speaker of the House was unashamed when it was reported last fall that he, aides and his family went on a $17,000 jaunt to Europe paid for by lobbyists.

Then, last week it came out that lobbyists had spent over $200,000 over the last couple of months wining and dining Georgia Representatives’ and Senators’ staffs and that the state’s Ethics Commission had ruled that this spending didn’t have to be disclosed under the current ethics law.  So much for the ameliorative powers of transparency, though they may find time before this year’s session ends to amend the law.

If largesse by lobbyists doesn’t buy influence and votes, just why do you think that companies spend the money?  Just as with the river of campaign contributions, corporations spend millions of dollars a year on politicians with the full expectation that it will get them what they want out of the political process.  Remember, corporations have their stockholders’ interests at heart, not yours and mine. 

Calvin Coolidge said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America.  An honest man old Silent Cal.  He admitted what he thought where the current bunch won’t.  We are becoming at most an afterthought in the minds of our well-fed and well-funded leaders.  Rather than getting what we pay for we are getting what corporations pay for.  And suckers that we are, we keep on inviting them back to feed at the public political trough.

Consequences

The longer I think about what needs to be done politically - locally, nationally and internationally, I am more and more bewildered and depressed.

We are a people of… well maybe I need to put that a bit differently.  We aren’t “a people” anymore, if we ever were.

For millennia now, we have fought each other because of ethnic, cultural, religious and economic differences.  I’ve had the advantage of being a white male of a non-descript ethnic, cultural and economic strata growing up in a place and time that made it seem that all would be good and over time, better.

I dearly wish I were rich and could wall myself off from the, I fear, coming storm of fear and hate.  But I’m not and will deal with the consequences of our moral, cultural and economic profilgacy for the rest of my life.

We are not a country or a world of “exceptionalism” other than in a material sense for some people in some places.  Traditional politics will not solve the problems facing us, be the politics those of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Party folks or any international flavor you would like to name.

Some medicine for whichever flavor you favor:

You are a flaming economic liberal and want to spend and spend and spend to make all well for all people in every way.  Noticed how well decades of deficit spending have worked?  Social liberal?  Noticed how your mannered approach to the differences among us doesn't lead to, in the immortal words of Rodney King, us all being able to “get along?”  And maybe more importantly for me, a flaming social liberal, have you noticed that for the most part, most people don’t give a damn about civil liberties, because, pick your reason – they are starving, they are oppressed, they are cussed.  Think that’s going to change anytime soon?

You are a right wing conservative of either a fiscal or social or both, persuasion:  Let’s assume you are right in all your beliefs.  Okay, what are you going to do with “the other,” those you fear and hate?  Those that insist on living their lives immorally to your mind, those that don’t have the physical, mental or plain moral ability to make it on their own in the world.  There are a lot of them, quite possibly more of them than there are of you.  Plan to man the ramparts when they are starving and fed up with your moralizing?

Libertarian are you?  Burn your Ayn Rand books and smell, the more and more putrid, odor of our coming catastrophe.  John Galt didn’t and doesn’t exist.  And if I’m wrong, he’s retreated to the secret valley in the mountains.

Tea Party your bent?  You are deluding yourself – the GOP and its main supporters have no intention of fulfilling any of the unworkable mandates you insist on promoting.  Noticed that the entire U.S. government is at a virtual standstill debating about whether to cut, what, a percent or so of the budget that won’t make a damn bit of difference socially or economically the minute it happens?  When is it that you think that defense and social entitlements are going to be meaningfully cut?  Not anytime soon.

I’m not going to harass my few readers around the world – I don’t know your situation well enough to tell you you’re screwed, though I think you are if you think there’s a good outcome around the corner.

We “the people” really need to get slapped in our individual and collective faces and face the consequences of our long avoidance of reality.  I suggest we all read some history books about what happened to fat and happy cultures.  Or take a look at the Middle East and Africa today for a more current lesson.

We really don’t need to blame our “leaders” as we have encouraged their errors, indeed demanded them to earn our votes.  Bread and circuses are what you get when you think constantly only about your small place in society.  Economic chaos is what you get when you are out to get only what you think benefits you.  Ethnic, cultural and religious hate?  I don’t have a clue what drives you.

Solutions, I have none.  Maybe we will get the next miracle leader to actually fix everything.  I very much doubt it and think we all should start thinking about to do in the absence of a savior.

Perpetuity?

I mentioned here recently that I don’t know anything about antitrust law.  I also know little about patent, copyright and trademark law.

Saturday I went to the Atlanta Botanical Garden.  Lots and lots of tulips, roses aren’t quite here yet.

I’d thrown my ticket on the passenger seat and was about to throw it in the trash this morning; but, for some reason I looked at the back.  In addition to an add for a department store, I read this:  “NO REFUNDS – NO EXCHANGES – NO RAINCHECKS  Visitor agrees not to use commercially any photography taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.  Visitor grants permission to the Atlanta Botanical Garden to utilize the visitor’s image, likeness, and/or sound recordings for the purpose whatsoever in perpetuity.”

Beyond a couple of grammatical problems, are they talking about their recordings of me or my recordings of their flowers?  Both?  Whichever, they get them in perpetuity?

I think even I could beat this back of the ticket “contract.”

A Desperate Letter to a Man That I KNOW Can Save Me!

Dear Ira,

I've been slogging through the WABE (Atlanta) pledge drive for what seems to be the fourteenth week (rather than the ninth day) which of course means that I listen a lot.  As I started typing, you were berating Megan for her pledging deficit. (I also heard you do your magic with the guy that stammered his way through your low key questioning on just why he listened and didn't cough up a few bucks.)  You're much better at the guilt than which ever Baldwin brother has been on lately, I've got to say.

You might have some influence with WABE that I don't have.  You see, I don't want to be a member, I don't want a gift, I don't want to talk to anyone with WABE or read the barrage of what WABE sends me when I give money.  I just want to give some money in return for what I get.  For a number of years after being barraged for more money after giving, I quit giving.  A couple of years ago I started giving again, having been expressly promised that no one would contact me.

And of course, computers have more control than humans and each year I get Emails.  Each year I threaten to stop giving, the latest being a few weeks ago when I got an Email telling me that WABE loved its loyal listeners "like me" and wanted to let me know that I would be getting an Email survey from an independent company to find out what I want to listen to and what I liked about the station and didn't like.  I got the promised Email survey (some promises WABE keeps) and filled it out taking the opportunity to tell the independent people about my ire with yearly broken promises and a vow to not contribute again.

Then, for the third or fourth time in the now seemingly six month current pledge drive (did I say I spend a lot of time listening to WABE?) I heard your voice with the aforementioned Megan and was inspired!

In the event you know anyone down here, say Lois Reitzes, John what's his name, the COO, Denis O'Hare, the Burris kid on the weekends, any of the new reporters that my money has played a small part in hiring (they aren't great yet but they are persistent and not too bad), could you, would you, make one of your calls and question them on why they harass someone who gives them money and asks and pleads not to be bothered?  I'd really like to know why it's so hard to give them money.  I bet they'd pay attention to you, if for no other reason that you'd take the piece to say, who?  Fox News would love it!  Juan Williams could do a series of diatribes about the idiocy of the government funded, insensitive, liberals at NPR.  

Best regards,

Dave

Tax the Corporate Bastards?

When you do, here’s what happens.

The link will take you a NYTimes.com article (I’m going to miss the Grey Lady) about GE.  GE didn’t pay any U.S. taxes last year; indeed, it got a bit over $3 billion back from the Feds for 2010.

Here’s the part that struck me: “Over the last decade, G.E. has spent tens of millions of dollars to push for changes in tax law….[T]he most lucrative of these measures allows G.E. to operate a vast leasing and lending business abroad with profits that face little foreign taxes and no American taxes as long as the money remains overseas.”

U.S. tax structure causes G.E., and certainly other foreign and multi-national companies, to invest overseas, employee people overseas and keep the money from the investments and work overseas.  Capital investment and jobs that could be here aren’t because we see corporations as marks.  Bastards you say?

“’G.E. is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations,’ said Anne Eisele, a spokeswoman. ‘We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our shareholders to legally minimize our costs.’”

She’s right about that boldfaced statement.  Despite what the Supreme Court says in Citizens United about corporations, they, unlike Soylent Green, aren’t people.  Corporations are legal fictions that make raising capital easier and less risky for their owners, people – the shareholders.  The managers are charged with maximizing profit.  If staying out of the U.S. is the “price” of profit, so be it.

What would happen if we started treating corporations as what they are, not people?  Well, we of course wouldn’t tax them; but, they aren’t paying much in the way of taxes now are they?*  We would be giving them an incentive to stay at home with their capital and jobs.  Guess what that means?  They are buying more American goods and employing more American people.  American goods mean American companies that make a profit for their shareholders, people, Americans who pay taxes.  And those American workers not in the leisure classes pay taxes too.  And invest in 401(k)’s and SEPs which invest in corporations’ stocks – profits for corporations mean retirement for people.

Instead of no taxes and capital and jobs overseas, you have capital, jobs and taxes here in the good old U.S.A.

*And though I’ve said it before here, probably too many times, corporations don’t pay taxes.  (I’m in a boldfacey kind of mood today.)  They tack the cost of taxes on to the price they charge people, and then pass it on to the government.  You pay the taxes that corporations remit to the government.

Yet another subject I'm not qualified to opine about...

…and that is anti-Trust law.  Don’t go away, I’m not really going to lecture you on it.  Indeed, I know almost nothing about it other than that the Feds almost always let companies do whatever it is the companies want to do after a couple of small concessions.

What I really don’t know about is telecommunications, other than the effects of the current system on me and what looks to be a worse situation after AT&T buys T-Mobile.

AT&T is probably right that it can save a boatload of money from the purchase.  A forest of new cell towers, a sea of new bandwidth, 30 some million new customers without having to keep many of T-Mobile’s employees and stores - some great looking economy of scale.

AT&T is also probably right that voice and data coverage and quality will probably increase for a lot of people.

What AT&T doesn’t talk about is price, which will almost certainly go up if the deal gets done.  And, did you notice that Verizon said it doesn’t have any big objections to the purchase?  Wondering why?

If the deal gets done, the country will have a de facto duopoly wireless market.  AT&T and Verizon would have 80% of the national market with a few bit players fighting over the leavings.  Neither company would have much incentive to compete on price or service.  Where are their customers going to go?

But I think I could give AT&T what it says it wants and give us a wireless market that provides quality, coverage and reasonable price.

Let AT&T and T-Mobile get married, but:

1) require that phones sold in the U.S. be un-locked, work on both GSM and CDMA and across all spectrums;

2) require that a phone offered to any carrier must be offered to all carriers and/or any consumer;

3) require wireless carriers to offer monthly contracts and pre-paid plans; and, finally,

4) require carriers to "re-sell" data bandwidth to other carriers.

This would allow for more competition from the small carriers and let consumers "vote with their feet" while giving the big boys the economies of scale they want.

Free market economics only works, if it works, when there is a true market.  Like in the cable/satellite business, there is less and less of a market in wireless.

Can you imagine car companies working deals with local governments for exclusive use of their roads as cable companies have done for decades?  Which is the more competitive and innovative market, cars or cable? Want ESPN?  You got to take, and pay for, 50 more channels you don’t want.  Want an iPhone?  Guess what, you can’t go to Sprint or Metro PCS.  The idea of ala carte cable pricing scares Comcast to death.  Monthly contracts and pre-paid plans on unlocked phones that work everywhere would similarly scare AT&T and Verizon to death.  They’d actually have to compete for customers based on quality and price.

And if Virgin and Metro PCS and the other bit players could offer voice and data that they buy from AT&T and Verizon, guess what?  They could offer more competitive pressure to lower or keep prices in check.

The "churn" rate would go through the roof as people hopped from carrier to carrier and phone manufacturer to phone manufacturer looking for the best service and price, until the carriers and manufacturers all gave good service and low prices.

Ah Dave, you dreamer you.

Sea Change or a Sinking Ship?

The New York Times announced today that it is going to a pay wall for its online content on March 28.  Simplistically put, it will give you 20 articles a month (with some exceptions depending on how you arrive at NYT.com).  After that you have to pay between $15 and $35 a month to read the site.

I’m all in favor of The Times and other news providers providing quality product and I know that costs money.  My problem is that my news reading has changed over the last 15 or so years.

I used to read the local paper, watch some network news, listen to NPR and a local radio news program or two and call it a day.  Total cost $10 or so a month for the paper, a contribution to public radio station and an annoyance factor from the radio and TV commercials and pledge drives.

Now, in any given week, most on a daily basis, I read the online versions of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, both Chicago newspapers, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Slate, Salon, Engadget, TechCrunch, three Android OS sites, CNN, NPR, The Apple Insider, Hacking Netflix, The Hill, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, Forbes, Leonard Pitts, Roger Ebert, Google News, The Huffington Post, some occasional Fox News, BBC News, and probably some other publications that aren’t coming to mind as I type this.

NYT is big in the rotation but it’s not $15 a month big.

With some guilt, I hope the Grey Lady fails to attract enough subscribers to make a go of this.  Why?  If it’s a success, many of the news providers listed above will do the same thing; and, I’m for sure not going to pop for multiple $15 subscriptions each month.

But there’s a solution to this problem.  I invented it some time back. A company like Google in the form of Google News or Apple with its iTunes and other products are perfectly situated to start the "News Store." Have a website where someone like me that reads a lot of news from a lot of sources can pay $x a month, something in the neighborhood of $15-20, for "all you can eat" news from the site's content providers. The site takes a cut of the revenue and the rest of it is divided among the providers based on the number of hits they get. Good content, more revenue for the provider, more quality, more revenue - a positive "vicious circle." I think it would be win-win for everyone.

Netflix and LoveFilm in Europe (that Amazon just bought) seem to me to have proved that people will pay for varied content and that the distributer and the content provider can make money under the model. Netflix has perfected the all you can eat for one price model with streaming movies. It negotiates a price with the content providers and keeps the extra as its profit. The trick is to strike a balance where the provider is just this side of happy with the payment, it is just this side of happy with its cut and I am just this side of happy with what I pay.

Just doesn’t seem all that hard to me; but, who am I to tell The New York Times how to run its business?

Can I get some of my money back?

It’s been a long time since I left law school.  Back then in the dark ages, the University of Miami School of Law was well respected, as I recall consistently ranked in the top thirty or so law schools in the country.

No longer.  I was shocked to find that it ranks 77^th in this year’s U.S. News listing.

Skimming the list for Southern schools, it doesn’t even hit the top ten, trailing Virginia, Tulane, Emory, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Florida State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Georgia State and Kentucky.  We whipped Louisiana State and West Virginia though.

I don’t have a big finish for this, I just can’t figure out what my alma mater did to get so bad.

Why do they keep changing things?

I think car designers got over this some years back; but, for much of my life, the hood releases on cars could be just about anywhere on or in the grill.   My last few have stabilized at the middle/top of the grill.

Though there aren’t a lot of options for placement, why do some manufacturers put the gas fill opening on the left and some put it on the right (are there any still behind the license plate?).  Ah, the adventure of putting gas in a rental!

PC’s and Macs do all the same things but insist on putting controls in different places.  I’m not sure which came first; but, why is Ctrl Alt Del, Cmd Option Esc on a Mac?  (I didn’t even know there was a force close function on a Mac until the other day when Photoshop Elements froze – I’d never in two years had a crash.  Take that MS!)

The impetus for this post came yesterday when I got a new phone.  Same carrier – T-Mobile.  Same manufacturer – HTC.  Same OS – Android.  But things had to be just a bit different.  When the phone comes on, you have to unlock it by sliding the unlock icon to the right, rather than sliding it down.  Answering a call and ending it are now left/right rather than up/down swipes of the same icon.  The mini-USB port is on the left side rather than the bottom.  The on/off switch is on the upper right rather than the upper left side, having swapped positions with the audio port.  The “Internet” icon is now the “Browser” icon.  The “hard” buttons at the bottom for “Home,” “Menu” and “Back” aren’t real buttons now, just dedicated spots on the casing that respond to touch (though I kind of like that change).

After a day, I’m pretty much already used to the changed placements and labels; but, I still can’t figure out why they were necessary.  I’ve got it – someone passed the “Designers Full Employment Act” and didn’t tell me.