The Wall Street Journal has a nice spread of a house for sale in Gloucester. It’s on the water with beautiful views. The house has some nice amenities, but a rather ordinary looking kitchen. The article explains that the owners paid $125,000 for it in 1977 and are asking $2,650,000 now. It further explains that they undertook some renovations in the “late 1980′s early 1990′s” and that the home has new windows.

Putting aside the supposed renovations, for the home to appreciate in value to $2.65 million, it would have had to appreciate at an average rate of 9.7%, which is a pretty incredible return for a piece of property. According to Wolfram Alpha, the inflation rate in the United States for the period from 1977 to 2010 is 272.6%. By that measure, the house should currently be worth $338k, or an average annual rate of 3.06%. But the family did put in some renovations. Are we to believe that the value of those renovations were $2.3 million? Perhaps we could believe that had the house been totally dilapidated when they bought it, but they lived in it for a decade before beginning their renovations, meaning it couldn’t have been a gut rehab kind of thing.

Nope, the housing boom is alive and well. And it will continue so long as the federal government continues to put the full weight of its muscle behind the housing market.

I’m beginning to despise Google.

I started noticing that Google appears to have disabled YouTube when its embedded in a web page for mobile safari. Used to be that on the iPhone it would show a graphic of the video, and when tapped would open the YouTube app. On the iPad, it would actually play in the webpage, with the option to go full screen. As of now, so far as I can tell, nothing appears at all.

Please let me know in the comments if you’re experiencing the same thing. Just scroll down a few entries and tell me if you can see the video of me reading the Declaration of Independence on your iPhone or iPad.

It strikes me as awfully suspicious that they should do this simultaneously with launching the new mobile YouTube site. I’m guessing what they’re trying to do is to get you to log in to your Google credentials in your web browser so they can associate your mobile web surfing with your desktop web surfing. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google shut down the YouTube app altogether. In fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t.

Google really is evil.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Via the Presurfer.

So I went to Chicago this weekend. I flew Southwest into Midway, a great flying experience overall. I’d never flown into Midway before, and its a great little airport that’s right close to downtown. Highly recommend it.

Southwest just started flying out of Boston, and as a result, they’re the only airline flying domestic flights out of the nominally International E terminal. I suspect that is why this section of the airport had those full body scanner naked picture machines installed, instead of the normal metal detectors.

So despite the airport being pretty non-crowded (is there an opposite word for crowded?), the line to go through security was painfully slow. It’s probably accurate to say they take 3-5 times as long to get through as the normal machines. You have to stand with your legs apart and your hands on your head while the machine renders a 3-D image of your naked body. Oh sure, the signs tell you your privacy is assured, but I don’t believe it.

Its only a matter of time before a cache of these images winds up online. I watched as a father and his 13 yr old son went through the machines in front of me. I couldn’t help but think that these machines make being an airline screener a pedophile’s dream job. I cringed as I watched the 13 yr old spread his legs and pose for the naked picture. I’m reminded of the posture photos that were taken of college kids back in the 1960′s. I never understood how people were convinced to pose for those things. And yet they did, in the thousands. History repeats itself I guess.

In any event, I requested the pat-down. I believe I told the TSA woman I didn’t want nude photos taken, and would like the pat-down. They had me walk through the machine to the other side, where I received a lengthy pat down from a man. I was annoyed that they wouldn’t walk me around the machine, but I didn’t put up a fuss about it. Maybe I should have. I assume that it wasn’t scanning anything as I walked through. During the pat-down, they asked me if I had anything in my pockets, and I told them my wallet was in my pocket. I didn’t put it through the scanner because it was full of money. A different TSA agent took my wallet and thumbed through it in front of me and handed it back to me, telling me to hold it out while I got the pat-down. The TSA agent who did teh pat-down must have been 25 or so, and he seemed nervous and maybe a little embarrassed doing it. He wore rubber gloves, and literally patted ever inch of me other than my junk, because terrorists would never hide a bomb there. In any event, it eventually ended and I gathered my things and proceeded to my gate. Oddly enough, they never put me through the metal detector.

These machines are seriously stupid and need to be removed. While I was the only person requesting the pat-down, I was not the only person annoyed. The father of the 13 year old told the TSA agent that they either needed to figure out how to be more efficient with these machines or they needed to go. And it generally seemed that everyone in line was annoyed with the process. I’m going to take a wild guess and say these machines get dumped in a landfill in a year or so, but what do I know. I would have thought that Sarbanes Oxley would have been repealed by now after it single-handedly killed the IPO market, but it lives on. Maybe congress will double down and force everybody through the machines and eliminate the pat-down option, as they’ve done in London.

Check out this fat guy reading the Declaration of Independence, on an iPad no less…

More pics here.

UPDATE: Marshall’s write-up is here.

May God save us…

Last year, I made the case against Sonyo Sotomayor based on the fact that she was ugly. Now it looks like the meme has caught on, with respect to Kagan:

Inside and out, Elena Kagan is vile and ugly (and I rarely, if ever, comment on a woman’s unfortunate genetic endowments but will forego that compact just this once, her outer being more likely a product of her inner self.)

I’m afraid I would have to agree with the sentiment.

This article speaks for itself pretty much [emphasis mine]:

The voters sent town officials “a very clear message” on June 14 when it rejected a town sponsored Proposition 2 1/2 override that would have helped bridge a nearly $3.5 million budgetary gap between available funds and needed expenses.

And Ralph Jones, chairman of Belmont’s Board of Selectmen, said he and his fellow town officials certainly heard voter concerns.

But rather than a blunt and simple “no” to providing an additional $2 million for town functions and schools, Jones has interpreted the results with a more subtle analysis.

If the town and the board are willing to ask for more money in the future, Jones said, they must first demonstrate it can run town government with greater efficiency, and that responsibly lies principally with the three-member board.

And in the first of several moves he and the board will promise voters in the coming year, Jones feels the first place to demonstrate this new emphasis on cost savings is with the biggest expense of all: salaries.

“I don’t see a lot of waste in town government, but what I and many people saw in the past election was that employee compensation for many town workers is much too high,” Jones said, noting that those salary increases were occurring during the worst recession in nearly 70 years as state and town revenues fell.

He said the increases of high-salaried school personnel over a recent 24 months period were “really unheard of and that’s what captured the public’s attention.”

Jones said the town side of municipal government – the departments outside of the schools – must also be aware of large year-to-year budget increases, especially in overtime pay for public safety employees.

Jones said where he and the board would begin taking control over compensation expenses during new contract negotiations with the town’s unions later in the year.

“We will take a very tough approach to protect the taxpayers,” said Jones.

While unwilling to show the town’s hand in the coming contract debate, he said the town has found itself being placed into a structural deficit in past bargaining negotiations.

He said in the past, when inflation is two to three percent, wages would be negotiated in the four to five percent range.

“Today, we have zero inflation and we don’t need to provide a salary increase of five percent when all we can raise from property taxes is by two-and-a-half percent,” said Jones.

We will need to hold any increases down to where we as a town will not be pushed deeper into a financial hole,” said Jones, who expects a tough fight over the coming contract.

Benefits will also be on the table in the negotiations with the focus on the town’s percentage of employee’s health care contribution.

“We need to once again look to transfer more coverage to the workers,” said Jones. With a state required minimum town contribution of 50 percent, “we have decreased the town’s payments from 90 percent to 80 percent in the past and have to do even more now,” he said.

Wow. What can I tell you? It’s good to know that the message got through to someone. The fact that pay raises went out during this recession shows an appalling lack of judgment. And frankly, we should be looking at getting to the minimum 50% health care copay, which is still generous compared to what private sector employees pay.

But I honestly have to wonder if departments aren’t overstaffed, and whether or not they don’t overpay the staff that they have. I remember seeing a job posting in Belmont that looked like an over glorified accounting type job paying $120k. Absolutely nuts.

I got a call from the Globe wanting to talk to me about local issues. I was happy to talk to him. Maybe, in the spirit of doing some local reporting, what we need to do is grab the payroll ledger from town hall (its a matter of public record) and publish it online here. Then we can really make some serious suggestions about what and who needs to be cut.

Anyway, there’s more to the article, so read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: My bad, the Belmont Citizen-Herald apparently published the school salary scale in the lead-up to the election. LOL.

I feel I need to say a few words about the defeat of the Town of Belmont Proposition 2 1/2 override on Monday.

I understand that Belmont is relatively cash strapped compared to communities like Waltham, because Belmont is a pure bedroom community. There is no industry to tax in Belmont. So despite the wealthy neighborhoods, the Town is never particularly flush with cash. Despite this, Belmont consistently has good schools, and its high school is rated one of the best in the state. Belmont’s family atmosphere undoubtedly contributes to the high school rankings, as kids from stable homes tend to do better in school, regardless of what is spent.

So there are some legitimate reasons why people may want to raise taxes in Belmont at times, and there are legitimate reasons to believe that the schools (the largest component in any town’s budget) do not need more money. And I think that civilized people can debate that.

But the tone in Belmont has become acrimonious. I think I know why.

There are a group of people in town, now calling themselves “One Belmont“, who have taken to what I would describe as blitzkrieg tactics. They were successful in getting the Wellington School rebuilt, but unsuccessful this go-around. The tactics involve quietly organizing among known allies in town, quietly getting the measure on the ballot, and then at the last minute, bring out printed signs and flood the papers with editorials and friendly stories about the vote. This way, there is no time for an opposition to realize that there’s an organization afoot, and this no time to organize a counter campaign. It’s the sort of tactic that will work once, but not twice.

This time around, there was a debate held on public access TV on the merits of the override. And someone paid for a robo-call (presumably to target elderly voters in town) to stop the override. The vote was decisive. Six out of eight precincts votes the measure down, by an average margin of 53%.

Now there are three things I want to address here: 1) the supposed use of proceeds, 2) the inappropriateness of the use of funds , and 3) the supposed dirty politics of the robo-call. I’ll conclude by prognosticating about Belmont a bit.

I want to quote Belmont Patch about the use of proceeds here [emphasis mine]:

With the extra $1 million, the schools will be able to restore about six teaching positions that include early intervention specialists in reading and math to help struggling students, an MCAS support teacher at the middle school, curriculum directors for science and for social studies; keep the elementary school libraries open; maintain freshman sports – preventing about 90 students from having to compete against older, more skilled players for scarce positions on junior varsity teams – and the middle school cross country track teams for 100 students; purchase textbooks and technology equipment; restore half the cutting to building and grounds of school buildings; and maintain support staff including guidance counselors and psychologists.

Capital improvements, with an additional $600,000, would include road repairs, sidewalk repairs; re-pointing the police station; and funding for the outside of the high school to prevent water damage and improve energy efficiency.

An additional $400,000 for operating expenditures would allow the town to hire two police officers, one for traffic management and the other a full-time school resource officer at Belmont High School; two firefighters to fulfill enough staff for all shifts; restore Sunday hours at the library from 16 to 30 weeks a year; one police cruiser; and a mechanic and truck driver for the public works department.

So reading through this list one can see that the predominant use of proceeds is payroll related. This is a critical thing to note. While some of the monies were being requested to pay to maintain existing positions, much of it was being requested for new positions. Has there been some sort of crime wave at Belmont High School that requires the stationing of a full-time police officer there? Is traffic so bad that we need another full-time hire on the force just to deal with traffic? Certainly not that I’ve noticed. Have we found ourselves unable to put out fires in Belmont due to an understaffed fire department? Does the town really need a full time mechanic? Why can’t we take our vehicles into a shop for repair? And we need a truck driver as well? Is there really idle stuff that needs to be driven around town on a full time basis? Really?

And one also needs to ask the question, if we’ve done without already, do we really need to restore cuts previously made? Are Sunday hours needed 30 weeks out of the year for the library (even putting aside whether or not the whole idea of town libraries is an anachronistic relic of an earlier era anyway)? The loss of the above listed teaching positions hasn’t stopped Belmont from being one of the top high schools in the state, so do all of those positions need to be restored? Are our building grounds under-maintained at their current levels?

Of the $2 million, $600k appears to be for capital improvements, and of that some amount could certainly be put off for another year. Does the Police Station need to be re-appointed now? What’s the ROI on the energy efficiency improvements for the high school, and over what time frame? Do we need a new police car this year? Was a car totaled or something?

You see my point. Very little of what’s listed seems to be essential or necessary for the Town to continue functioning. And even those things which are necessary, we could do without or delay on spending the money for a year or two. The reason why we ought to defer any spending possible that we can ought to be obvious:

WE ARE IN A GIANT RECESSION.

So let’s ask the really hard questions: How many administrative employees has the Town of Belmont laid off during this recession? How many pay raises has the Town of Belmont put off because of this recession? I can tell you that in my company, we cut 5% of administrative staff, and have put off pay raises for two years running now, and will likely do it again this year. Where I work this isn’t a formal hiring freeze, but informally, it’s very difficult to hire other than for replacement staff. So seriously, in light of that, what business does the Town of Belmont have wanting to hire new police officers and firemen and mechanics and truck drivers and extending the hours of the library and whatnot? Even if you think that the school expenditures are necessary, at least half of what’s being requested is stuff that at a minimum could be put off until the economy improves. The fact that it’s even in there shows a callous disregard for what’s going on in the private sector right now. It would appear that the mindsets of those in Town government need a serious readjustment.

Which finally brings me to the robocalls. I have no idea who is behind them, but I would prefer that those who are active politically stand by their statements. I also haven’t heard any of the calls, and the only transcript I’ve seen is here:

Town officials want to take money from you and give it to their employees in salaries and benefits that would be generous in normal economic times but are unconscionable now. Town government must live within a budget just as the rest of us do.

Remember, that after one year the town can spend the override money any way it likes.

There was also talk of a push poll but nobody seems to have a transcript or recording of it, so I’m discounting the likelihood of it being real. But with regards to the transcript above, how inaccurate is it to say that the preponderance of the monies are slated for payroll? Seems pretty accurate to me. And are government pay and benefits better than private sector pay and benefits? Studies seem to indicate that could be the case. So why the hullabaloo about the robocalls?

It’s all just sour grapes. The blitzkrieg tactics didn’t work this time. And frankly, they were underhanded to begin with. It was in response to those tactics that the robocalls were generated. And while I would have preferred that whomever paid for them announced who they were, there was nothing to object to in the transcript that I can see.

What is most interesting here is that in the last election all three candidates running for selectmen supported an override. Yet the town voted that override down by 53%. It strikes me that there is a need for a candidate who better represents the views of the people of Belmont. The lack of diversity in the last crop of candidates is striking.

The other thing I want to say is that the bitter whining among override supporters is completely unbecoming. Getting angry at your fellow residents isn’t going to convince them to change their minds. Neither will Washington Monument gambit tactics. The Belmont High Assistant Principal sent a letter out that deserves quoting because it so completely encompasses everything that is wrong in the town currently:

Our answer to this problem is to shorten the length of Ceramics 1, Drawing and Painting 1, Photography 1, Sculpture 1, History of Popular Music and Music Workshop from a full-year to a semester.

So not only are we trying to engage in Washington Monument type cuts here, but we also were asking for money before cutting a class on the HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC. I’m sorry, but if you didn’t know to cut frivolous classes BEFORE asking for more tax money, then you really need a wake-up call.

So I’d like to conclude with some advice to my fellow residents on how to properly go about making a request for more money. I am sincere in my advice, because the tone of the debate needs to be turned down a bit. We need to focus on facts and not be screaming at each other.

1. Before you ask for new funds, you need to demonstrate that you’ve already cut everywhere you can. In a recession, that means cutting administrative staff, holding back pay raises, and ending frivolous spending of all kinds. Without that, your requests fall on deaf ears.
2. In a recession, every expenditure listed for the override must be absolutely necessary. Anything that can be put off for another year, and I mean anything, doesn’t belong in the request. If that means that the request is smaller, or too small to make sense, then re-evaluate whether or not you should be doing it. But raising taxes in a recession to pay for things that could be put off another year or three is a non-starter. So too for hires that may not be necessary at all, such as a full time police officer at a high school that has no noticeable crime problem.
3. Campaign early and often. Explaining all of this will take time. Most people don’t live their lives with their heads in the town budgets. But they’re capable of understanding if you take the time. So no more surprise party blitzkrieg tactics. Explain the cuts, explain the deficit, and show how the money is necessary. A real case built on facts and not silly slogans will win converts.
4. For god’s sake, when you choose a logo for your group, don’t make it look like the BP logo. Other logos to avoid resemblance to are the swastika, the hammer & sickle, and the burning cross.

That’s it.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m posting pictures nightly from my ongoing trip to Aruba here.

Enjoy.

Ira Stoll nails it on the head here, so I’m just going to quote him in full:

“I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself,” Apple’s Steve Jobs said. “Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

Imagine if when Apple was founded, some rich and powerful business executive had said, “I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of personal computer users myself…Anything that we can do to help IBM, Digital, Wang and Burroughs keep getting paid, so they can afford to keep their research and development operations and salesforces intact, I’m all for it.”

From Future of Capitalism.

America is getting the point that its president doesn’t have a clue.

He doesn’t know how to stop the oil from spilling. He is bereft of ideas about how to create jobs in the aftermath of the recession. He has no idea how to keep the European financial crisis contained. He has no program for repaying the massive debt hole into which he has dug our nation without tax increases he must know will only deepen the pit.

Some presidents have failed because of their stubbornness (Johnson and Bush-43). Others because of their character flaws (Clinton and Nixon). Still others because of their insensitivity to domestic problems (Bush-41). But now we have a president who is failing because he is incompetent. It is Jimmy Carter all over again.

Read Dick Morris.

So engadget says today that the new appleTV is going to be based on the iPhone OS:

The new ATV will do away with its current OS X-lite variation as a operating system, and will instead adopt the iPhone OS for the underlying experience. There’s no word at this point on whether apps and the App Store will be coming along for the ride, but it makes sense given the shared platform. Of course, scaling iPhone apps to that 52-inch plasma in your living room isn’t exactly a no-brainer. Perhaps not surprisingly, Apple won’t deliver the ATV news at the upcoming WWDC — that event will be focused on the capabilities of the new iPhone — but development on the product is most definitely full steam ahead.

They also mention that the device will only have a power in and a video out port, that it will put out a full 1080p and it will be priced at a $99. This doesn’t sound at all quite right. I have trouble imagining that any device meant to stream video at full 1080p wouldn’t come equipped with a gigabit Ethernet port. And while $99 strikes me as a low target price, it’s doubtful that apple has already established a price for a product that does not yet exist.

Furthermore it seems to me that the existence of an appleTV based on the iPhone OS is the best explanation as to why iPad apps are referred to as “HD”. My guess is that the resolution of the iPad is enough to display an app on an HD television screen. Moreover, if it weren’t then it would almost be required that apple announce the device in advance so that developers can get started working on apps for it. The only reason not to announce it early is that apps already work on it. Which I suspect they do.

More curious to me is the absence of a video-in port. This tells me that the device is not meant to act as a pvr. Could it be that they plan on selling streaming television provided directly from cable networks and other producers? Remember, Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder in Disney which owns ABC, who made an iPad app that basically throws all of the network’s content online Hulu style. In fact, only Comcast owned NBC seems to be resisting the move at this point. I think this device may be designed from the outset to make both broadcast and cable tv obsolete in one fell swoop, all the while facilitating the purchase of more content from the iTunes store and enabling the streaming of iTunes content from your PC. If that’s the case then it’s a bold move, and one that makes Google TV look like Child’s play.

I just wonder if Apple isn’t opening too many fronts against too many competitors at this point. Let’s just list briefly who apple will be competing against if the appleTV is delivered as described:

• Microsoft
• Google
• Adobe
• Nintendo
• Sony
• Comcast
• RIM
• Nokia
• Motorola
• HP

Am I missing anybody?

Finally I wrote this entire blog entry on my iPad using the web interface of WordPress. Not ideal, but it worked. I’d rather have had a dedicated WP application, but I really can’t stand the stretched iPhone versions of apps. I should hope that an iPad specific blogging tool is developed relatively soon, and if it already exists, plea keg me know what it is.

UPDATE: just discovered the WordPress app for iPad. Must have just been released because I looked for this a few days ago. Anyhow, looks decent so far. I’ll Include a review when I write a thorough review of my iPad, which I’ll do in late June after my vacation.

Is the iPhone “open” or “closed”? In a sense it seems like a silly question. Clearly it’s both, the iPhone has a proprietary layer built on top of an open source core, FreeBSD. The fact that its API is published and that they let 3rd party developers write software for it makes it open as well, though not open source. Which is really the only critical difference between it and Android. Android makes the layer they build on top of Linux open source. But this really shouldn’t matter anyone other than network operators.

The real question is does Apple support open standards, and it’s hard to argue that they don’t. HTML5 is fully integrated, and developers are free to build HTML5 apps and have users install them with shortcuts on their iPhones and iPads. In fact, when the iPhone first came out, that was how Jobs wanted all development on the iPhone to occur. AT that time, the iPhone really was a closed platform since it had no public API to write native applications to it. But Apple changed direction, and now it’s hard to say that the iPhone isn’t an open platform in that sense.

But what about Flash? Well Flash is a proprietary standard, and Apple has no obligation to develop a Flash plug-in or executable for it. They do prevent Adobe from developing a version for the iPhone, but this is largely due to battery life and CPU issues. Which brings me to my next point.

Mobile devices have constraints that desktop devices do not. Constraints include battery life, storage, and CPU. An application that hogs the CPU, runs down the battery and eats up all your memory is going to ruin the mobile computing experience. And the party that will get blamed for that is the brand name on the device. Just witness the row over tethering. The iPhone has had tethering since iPhone 3.0 was announced over a year ago. iPhone tethering is available internationally, but AT&T forbids it. But who gets the blame for a lack of tethering in the US?

Apple.

Hence the App store, ostensibly. Apps which would ruin the mobile experience are essentially forbidden from being installed on the device. And that includes anything that would run down the battery quickly or hog the CPU. For that reason, runtimes are not allowed. This much I understand.

What I don’t understand is the censorship. What does stopping porno have to do with assuring a decent mobile experience? I agree that such apps are a stupid waste of time, that there’s more porno to be found using Safari than anyone could ever want from buying iPhone apps. But still, why ban them? It only creates confusion as to what the App store is about.

But what’s worse in my mind, what’s truly unforgivable, is the fact that there are no shortage of apps out there that have bad reviews not because people didn’t enjoy the app or anything, but because the app crashes or is buggy. That I do NOT understand. If Apple isn’t testing these apps to see that they work, to see that they don’t ruin the mobile experience, then what the hell are they doing? In fact the opacity of the App Store approval process is the only element of the iPhone ecosystem that truly is closed.

So Apple needs to do two things, pronto. 1) they need to provide a clear set of guidelines as to what is being tested in the App Store approval process. That set of guidelines should be published somewhere on apple.com for everyone to see and understand. And 2) they need to stop censoring for content. If that means they need to open an adult section of the app store, so be it. But censorship can never be a black and white, open affair. Just look at the legal definitions for obscenity for an example.

I think if they take those 2 steps they can end this “open vs. closed” debate and put it behind them. But so long as the app store approval process remains opaque and broken, this openness question will continue to dog Apple.

I have to admit that I’m deeply confused about Google’s moves right now. It seems to me that a war with Apple can only be destructive towards Google’s ends. Google appears to be letting the acquired Android division lead the company, rather than vice versa. I do not see this ending well for Google.

Google bought Android in 2005. That’s 2 years before the iPhone came out. The logic at the time was sound. Namely, Google is in the advertising business, and since nobody had hitherto come out with a smartphone that could display mobile advertisements in a reasonable way, Google would just go ahead and build the platform for that to happen, and then give it away to anyone who wanted it. It held a certain logic.

Even after the iPhone was released, it acted as a certain insurance policy. It in effect said to Apple, “Don’t mess with us, because if you don’t let us put our services and ads on your device, we’ll release our phone OS to the world…” And Apple seemed to make every effort to integrate the iPhone into Google’s services, like maps, email, and search. So there really should have been no conflict.

But now Google has declared war on Apple, over principles that really, make no sense. Google has always been about open standards, and yet they choose to take a stand over supporting Flash, a proprietary standard if there ever was one? They choose to support Flash despite the obvious battery life problems it causes? Just to stick their thumb in the eye of Apple? What?

They call their platform open because they release the source code? But then they tell developers they shouldn’t use undocumented APIs? How is that open? They have an app store, just like Apple, which 99% of installed apps come from, and yet they’re open because of the 1% that come from elsewhere? What?

In reality, the issue for consumers isn’t the phone and how open it is or isn’t to developers, it’s the network, and the extent to which they cripple the hardware that they sell and try to funnel users into using bullshit “Vcast” type online music services and whatnot. Apple’s biggest coup with the iPhone wasn’t just the hardware and the software and how well it all works (though that is no small achievement). It’s that they got AT&T to let them sell the phone that they wanted to sell. From all accounts, Verizon wouldn’t let them do that, so intent on selling Vcast crap they couldn’t abide by a phone that let people install stuff (like music even) not bought from Verizon. So no iPhone for Verizon.

None of what Verizon is up to benefits the consumer in any way whatsoever. The consumer wants a phone as designed by the phone engineer, not as crippled by the network. And Apple was the first to deliver that. Now an open source phone will have appeal to a network operator, because it will allow the network to build their Vcast crap right into the OS, and to cripple 3rd party software and whatnot. But that doesn’t appeal to the consumer. To be crystal clear about this, consumers, myself included, would rather have phones built and designed by the likes of Microsoft that are sold as originally conceived and designed than have the best phone ever built that was crippled by the network operator.

Google’s open source “advantage” is that it lets the network operator cripple the phone. Good luck with that business model.

Meanwhile, Google pisses off Apple, and throws away the ability to sell ads on the iPhone. Google may not strictly speaking be forbidden from doing so, but they will never get the well-oiled integration that Apple provides. What’s more, Google may well be thrown off the iPhone in every other capacity. I’m predicting that maps and search will be gone within a year. And will Google even be allowed to sell ads on their own Android phones? I wouldn’t count on it. I would think that Verizon and company will get into that business themselves. “V-ads” they’ll call them.

I don’t quite see how this ends well for Google. I suppose their strategy may work better in the international market where carriers can’t dictate which phones are allowed on their networks, and thus crippled phones are not an option. But domestically, I think Google is hanging themselves for the sake of glory for the Android division. Seems really foolish to me.

Boing Boing points out that the house from the Amityville Horror is up for sale again. The last owner paid $310k for it in 1997, and is now asking $1.15 million. That calculates out to a 11% annual compounded rate of return. And they say the real estate bubble has crashed.

The horror.

When magicians use the term “Misdirection” they are referring to the practice of directing the audiences eyes to one location, while the trick is actually being performed elsewhere. Misdirection is precisely what Apple is doing now.

I simply can’t believe that all these leaked iPhones are accidental. Yes, the front facing camera is cool, and it looks like there will be a white iPhone. But other than some minor difference in form factors, what else is there? Frankly, Apple already released the big news in announcing iPhone 4.0, which will have multitasking. The front facing camera is interesting, but really, what else is there? We always knew that the next iteration would be faster with more memory, so who cares?

No, Apple is intentionally leaking images of the iPhone at this point. They may have figured the jig was up after a prototype was stolen some weeks back, but I suspect that these leaks were always in the works. Because Apple has something much bigger they’re announcing.

Now what that is I don’t know. But I can guess. And I suspect it’s that AppleTV will cease to be a hobby. I suspect that the new AppleTV will be based on the iPhone OS, and that it will run iPad apps beautifully. It will probably come with a new touch screen remote that enables you to “touch” your tv screen from a distance. And it will put Google’s TV efforts to shame, and put Apple and Nintendo on a much more direct collision course.

The new AppleTV may be a PVR or may even provide some sort of streaming TV service over IP. It will be offered in a stand-alone box, but it could be integrated into a television set sold by Apple. Whatever it is, it won’t be on sale until the fall, and dev kits for the new Apple TV will be distributed at WWDC.

I have no inside information obviously. But Steve Jobs himself is saying that something big is coming down the pike. Which leads me to wonder what it is that nobody is looking at. And I think the answer is AppleTV.

Today is the day. Here are a few links for you:

• Wikipedia Entry
• facebook page
• twitter feed
• Zombie on the celebrations, a must-read
• Mohammed eats bacon
• Reason Magazine on why they’re holding a contest, and the contest (link to be posted when Reason posts later today)

I didn’t draw anything, but if anybody has anything they’d like to post, let me know. My personal favorite so far is this one here.

Server was down. But now we exist again. Woo hoo!

Meant to post this earlier, but as expected, Verizon delayed their installation date, BY THE ENTIRE SUMMER!!!

Dear Robert Sama:

We can’t wait to bring you blazing-fast FiOS Internet and an overall experience that will blow you away! This e-mail confirms your revised installation appointment for Verizon FiOS Internet Service.

* Scheduled Installation Date – 08-31-2010
* Scheduled Appointment Time – 8:00AM-12:00PM(Hrs)EST
* Product Package – Verizon FiOS Internet Service
* Verizon FiOS Internet Service Order Number – XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Don’t forget to visit What’s Next to learn everything you need to know to have a successful FiOS installation! We look forward to revolutionizing your home with Verizon FiOS.

Please don’t hesitate to call our customer service support center at 1-888-553-1555 should you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you for your order.

Verizon

Nice.

Rob Sama, April 2009:

The corporate income tax code isn’t just insidious because of its corrupting effect upon congress. It’s insidious because it constitutes a double tax on earnings (capital gains being the other tax) and it discourages capital accumulation. A business that is retaining earnings to reinvest in its operations should be encouraged to do so.

But our current tax regime encourages businesses to spend money on any and all expense items possible (meaning not physical plants), including interest payments. In other words, the corporate income tax encourages businesses to finance their operations with debt instead of equity. This may be good for the banking industry, but it isn’t particularly good for business. And we can see the effects of an economy built on debt instead of equity today, namely that in a downturn the debt cannot be rolled over and businesses fail.

Best to eliminate the corporate income tax, and tax distributions made from dividends.

Stanford University professor in the WSJ today:

President Obama has put tax reform on the agenda, but surprisingly little attention is being paid to fixing the most growth-inhibiting, anticompetitive tax of all: the corporate income tax. Reducing or eliminating the corporate tax would curtail numerous wasteful tax distortions, boost growth in both the short and long run, increase America’s global competitiveness, and raise future wages.[...]

This complex array of taxes on corporate income produces a series of biases and distortions. The most important is the bias against capital formation, decreasing the overall level of investment and therefore future labor productivity and wages. Also important are the biases among types of investments, depending on the speed of tax vs. true economic depreciation, against corporate (vs. noncorporate) investment, and in favor of highly leveraged assets and industries. These biases assure that overall capital formation runs steeply uphill, while some investments run more, some less uphill. It would be comical if the deleterious consequences weren’t so severe.

I’m one year ahead of what gets published in the WSJ. Don’t you forget it.

So I was listening to WBUR this morning on the way into work and they were talking about these new restrictive fishing rules being set up, which take effect tomorrow. I tried to find an article on WBUR’s website on this to link to but failed. So far as I can tell, the new rules do three things:

1. Restrict the total catch for fishermen to 1/10 what they were previously allowed.
2. Force fishermen into groups (shares, they called them) where the restrictions on how much fish they could catch was allocated to the group, not the individual fishermen. This means that potentially the first fisherman out for the season can catch all the allowed fish for the season and the rest of the members of the group go belly up (no pun intended).
3. Make fishermen who accidentally catch a fish that they’re not licensed to catch lose their license for the season. So if you drop a net and pull up one fish that you weren’t supposed to catch, you’re toast.

The guy they interviewed said he thought the new rules were designed to put fishermen out of business, and its hard to disagree. WBUR then interviewed someone from the state fishing board, who proceeded to say some pretty incredible things. He acknowledged that these measures would cause fish prices to rise at the supermarket, but he also went on to say that we here in New England have been spoiled by the general availability of fresh fish like cod and haddock, and that people in Nebraska didn’t generally have access to fresh fish like that, and that we would have to just make due.

The worst part about it all s that the fisherman they had been interviewing said that stocks have been replenished, and that there is no risk of extinction or depletion off the coast of Massachusetts any more. He cited some scientific study. WBUR reporters never put someone on to refute that claim, so I would have to guess he was telling the truth.

So this is asinine on too many levels to count. Frankly, one of the reasons I like living in New England, despite the high costs, is because we can get fresh seafood. I eat fresh fish maybe twice a week. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what the results of this will be… increased imports from Canada? Black markets for illegally harvested fish? I don’t know. What I do know is that that fisherman on the air had $400k in loans out to support his business, and he’ll no longer be able to catch the fish to support those loans. He’s done for.

I also know that despite having an all Democrat delegation in a Democratically controlled congress for the last 5 years, nobody has seen fit to do anything about this other than offer some words of condolence. It’s like the health care bill, where nobody in the congressional delegation tried to stop this stupid tax on medical devices, a tax that will adversely impact the Massachusetts economy disproportionately. Yet none of our supposedly powerful democrats tried to do squat to stop it. Scott Brown campaigned against it and got elected, but by then it was too late.

So I feel bad for the Gloucester fishermen, but I also have to wonder how they’ve been voting all these years.

In any event, the local paper has a decent editorial about the issue:

Remember those promises to get the economy moving again?

Forget it. Not here. Not in Gloucester — not in any New England community that’s economically tied to the proud fishing industry; not anywhere in the nation where small-boat fishermen go about their trade to supply the nation and the world with seafood — and protein.

Around here, and across Ocean Nation, the Obama administration, through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is all about destroying jobs and driving small business into bankruptcy in the name of protecting fish stocks that, in many cases, no longer need protection.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Found the WBUR article.

So I caught this Nova episode on television last night. They were basically trying to use science to make a political point, namely that since people aren’t always rational, particularly in making business decisions, then capitalism can’t possibly be right, or at least unregulated capitalism can’t. Left implied (I think, I didn’t watch through all the way to the end) is the idea that the better approach is to let the calm, rational philosopher kings intervene in the market to stop people from behaving emotionally and non-logically.

To prove their point, they showed lots of lab experiments of people being induced to act “irrationally”. I put that in quotes since some of the experiments were a bit silly. One asked people if they would accept $100 one year from now, or $102 one year and a day from now. Everyone took the $102. Then they asked if they would prefer $100 today, vs. $102 tomorrow, and everyone took the $100. But that’s not irrational. Is the extra $2 worth the risk that the money won’t in fact be there tomorrow? Of course it is.

Regardless, they were able to show lots of experiments where people made financial decisions that did not maximize their wealth. There are three points to be made regarding these experiments:

1. All of these experiments were one-offs. Nobody was given the opportunity to learn from their errors. But in the real world, people DO learn from their errors. Which is why it’s easy to find people who exhibit bouts of irrationality. But over the long term, the market tends to correct and behave rationally.
2. People who don’t learn, ought to be relieved of their wealth according to a rational market theory. Wealth sitting in the hands of morons is wealth that is not working to generate more wealth. So just because some very small minority of people cannot learn from their economic mistakes does not mean that the system is flawed. It may mean that such a person isn’t suited to live an independent life, but from an efficient markets perspective, everything is working according to plan. Megan McArdle writes about this today.
3. Irrationality can overcome a group in a herd mentality for a period of time, but there is a limit as to how long that can last. The fact that it happens is precisely why technical analysis can be good at predicting stock moves over the short term. But technical analysis fails over the long term. Conversely, value investing works extremely well over the long term, but rarely works over short periods of time. The evidence that most people eventually behave rationally is in all the wealth that has been created in the free world since the writing of Wealth Of Nations. Meanwhile, no planned economy ever came close to producing such wealth.

That is all.

So I decided to wade back into the swamp and attempt to order FIOS from Verizon again. Last time they wouldn’t accept my order because I refused to give them my social security number. This time they accepted a workaround.

I got on the Verizon chat line with someone named “Upton,” who directed me through the sign-up process. The most interesting thing he said was that I shouldn’t spend too much time reading the legal agreement because the sign-up process would time out if I did. I roughly skimmed it in time, but it’s interesting to note that Verizon instructs their representatives and evidently designs their software to hurry you past the contract you’re agreeing to (that in addition to putting it in an unnaturally small window).

So this time, the sign-up process again said I didn’t need to give my social, and I could also decline to have them look at my credit report. They offered to have me answer questions about myself gleaned from somewhere, but I declined, as I suspected it was from my father’s credit report as mine was locked down and I already told them I didn’t want them looking at my credit report.

This was followed by an email from Verizon instructing me to send in one piece of photo identification and one piece of non-photo identification to a fax number along with a form. The funny thing is that the form had one fax number on it and the email had another. Genius. So I sent in a photocopy of my drivers license and a paper copy of my electric bill to both fax numbers. A few days passed and I heard nothing.

So I called the number on the Verizon email to follow up. It turns out that they had indeed received my paperwork, everything was in order. And the woman on the phone asked me if I was aware that a deposit was required because I hadn’t given them access to my credit report. I informed her no, and she told me that it was $125 deposit for Internet, but had I ordered television service, it would have been $400. Unbelievable.

This, after they claimed that the purpose of looking at my credit report was to determine if I actually lived there.

Now I can see why they want a credit report/deposit if they’re putting a cable box in your home, but for Internet service it’s just silly. Besides, they’re requiring me to pay with a credit card, so they’re not really extending me any credit which needs to be secured with a deposit!!! Extending credit is what the credit card company does. Whatever. I told them fine since it’s not much money. I just think it’s interesting that the apparent price for your privacy is the carried interest on $125.

So they come out to install on May 1, which I realized is when I’m throwing a Cinquo de Mayo party that evidently nobody is coming to. Whatever. If people are there I’ll send Verizon man into the basement to do the install while we eat burritos and stuff.

UPDATE: So one of the ancillary benefits of this FIOS Internet service is I supposedly get access to Verizon’s wi-fi hot spots. Unfortunately, their hotspots are rather useless to me:

Verizon Wi-Fi is not available for PDAs, phones, desktop PCs or Macs.

Uh huh, so forget about using your shiny new iPad with Verizon’s hotspots. Should I assume that it works with Linux though, since they don’t say otherwise?

Previously:
Switching to Fios
Ordering Verizon FIOS, Part II
No Fios For Me

Rob Sama, in a blog post that originated in a letter to Bob Cringely, back in July 2005:

Apple is clearly coming out with their own office suite. But the question is why? I had originally made nothing of this, thinking that it was just a gap in their product lineup that they were looking to fill, that they couldn’t afford to be reliant on MS for an office suite as they had been in the past. Now I think that they may be doing two things: enlarging the halo and kicking the box.[...]

As I mentioned at the start, MS gets 1/2 of their bottom line from Office. Microsoft has been harvesting profits from a product that they basically have 100% of the market for, and which has been around long enough that it should be something of a commodity. And MS has been way too reliant on this source of income for far too long, with nothing new to replace it. I can almost imagine a guy standing on a rickety old box, reaching for a jar on a shelf, only to have someone walk by and kick the box. That’s what Apple needs to do. If they came out with a version of iWork for Windows (Ok, that’s a sentence, so maybe they’d call it something else), at a low price point of say $99, they may not take the market, but they would force the price of office suites down. That’s kicking the box, destroying the 1/2 of MS’s bottom line, and opening the way for other companies, the MacTel alliance included, to better compete.

Point being, Apple is trying to destroy Microsoft’s ability to charge what they do for MS Office. Doing this grinds down Microsoft’s cash reserves and will eventually turn them into roadkill.

Now here‘s Bob Cringely today:

What Bill Gates didn’t count on when he declared Jobs a loser back in 1998, was the Californian’s tenacity. It took 12 years to do it, but Apple is well positioned now to take Microsoft’s crown.

I mean it. Look at the downward price erosion of Microsoft Office caused by a combination of Open Office and iWork, which is down to $30 on the iPad.

How long will it be until Apple is giving iWork away to sell hardware — an option Microsoft doesn’t have? Not long. By then a bit more of Redmond’s goose will have been cooked.

Digital market leadership is now Apple’s — not Microsoft’s — to lose.

I’m 5 years ahead of the big name pundits. Don’t you forget it.

The central problem with movie pricing today is that it’s buy before you try. This is probably unavoidable in the pre-online world of visiting theaters and buying and renting discs. But in the online world, this is entirely unnecessary.

Because you can not try before you buy, people are inclined to pirate content in order to try it out. But once they’ve pirated it, they have no incentive to go back and pay for what they already got for free. What’s needed is an easy and convenient way to try a movie and get sucked in (assuming it’s good).

So here’s what I propose: Online services such as iTunes should make watching the first 20 minutes of any movie free. Sort of like how listening to the first 30 seconds of a song is a free sample on iTunes. If you like what you’re watching, go ahead and continue watching, uninterrupted, and you’ll automatically be billed for a rental. If you like it a lot, upgrade your rental to a purchase and keep a downloaded copy.

That’s a billion dollar idea right there, given away for free. SJ can thank me later.

So I finally worked my way through John Gruber’s 7,300 word review of the iPad. What interested me most is that in all his lead-ups to the iPad, touting how it was a revolution in personal computing, the one thing that really stood out was that Apple had dispensed with the file manager. Managing files in the background was the wave of the future, Gruber proclaimed.

So isn’t it interesting that his principle complaint regarding the iPad in his review is… FILE MANAGEMENT! Basically, it would appear that the iWork suite of applications requires you to manually move files back and forth between your iPad and your Mac, mostly by means of syncing through the dock connector. Gruber is right that this is madness, and that the correct model is for the iPad to wirelessly keep documents up to date on iWork.com and even on your Mac at home, kind of like how Google Docs works today. Gruber also links to this good essay on the subject which is worth reading.

I just think at the end of the day that my original assessment of the iPad was right. It’s still suckling at the teat of iTunes, and for the iPad to grow up, it really needs to learn how to live in the cloud.

BTW, none of this means I won’t be getting one. I will be, as my old 12″ iBook is on its deathbed. I’m just waiting for the 3g versions as I think that that new data plan is pretty hard to beat, and will be a killer app on vacations and the like. Moreover, my wife had a co worker who brought one in to work and even my Android using wife was extremely impressed with the device. I’ll be sure to post my own review when I get mine.

So I canceled my Wall Street Journal subscription some time ago, shortly after they redesigned their website, which was shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought it. Canceling is probably the wrong word. Really, I just let my subscription lapse; I didn’t renew. I did this for the following reasons:

• I HATED the new layout of the Wall Street Journal, a layout that was so complex and loony that it would regularly crash my iPhone.
• They started giving their editorial page away for free, which was a major reason why I bought in.
• I would only ever really read 5-6 articles a day in the WSJ, and I could get those by searching through Google while paying nothing.
• NONE of the content I received, including the editorial page, was so unique as to be worth paying for. Generally speaking, I could get content of equal or superior quality that was free on blogs or advertiser supported on other websites.

Now I hadn’t specifically been proud of canceling my subscription until now, simply because it was something I’d given little thought to. I stopped subscribing to something, and reallocated those dollars in my budget. No big deal, certainly not anything to make a public deal about.

But lately, I’ve been feeling differently. To begin with, Rupert Murdoch has been making a giant public stink about how he wants to put all his content behind pay walls, how Google is supposedly stealing all his revenues, and other such nonsense. Frankly, I don’t feel comfortable financially supporting such silliness, but one could conceivably take the position that he’s just an old coot, and that when he passes on or retires his media properties will wind up in saner hands.

Also, word is that the Wall Street Journal is trying to charge something close to the paper subscription price for the iPad version of their publication. I’ve written before about why that approach is folly. So I feel good about not sending my money to people whose thinking about digital media is so badly clouded.

But then there’s this net neutrality thing that the Journal keeps harping on. Now I don’t mind honest disagreement on an issue, but I do mind demagoguery. And the Journal seems to have taken the position that Net Neutrality is some lefty Google hippie sort of conspiracy, and that right thinking people ought to oppose it on that basis alone. Hence wild and weird misstatements as to what Net Neutrality is by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. They also engage in name calling, referring to the proposals as “Network Neutering” or “Net Neut” for short. All in all, it’s disgusting, stupid, and particularly short sighted for conservatives.

So I’m going to fisk Holman Jenkins column in the Journal today. It will take some time, but it’s well deserved, and frankly, somebody has to do it.

Jenkins writes, in a column obnoxiously titled, “End of the Net Neut Fetish?” :

Hooray. We live in a nation of laws and elected leaders, not a nation of unelected leaders making up rules for the rest of us as they go along, whether in response to besieging lobbyists or the latest bandwagon circling the block hauled by Washington’s permanent “public interest” community.

Look, even proponents of Net Neutrality like Techdirt and yours truly think that giving the FCC free reign to regulate the Internet, particularly when congress never gave such authority to the FCC to begin with, is a bad idea. It is good to live in a nation of laws, and procedure matters. But that isn’t to say this battle is over, not by a long shot. Congress clearly has the right to regulate the Internet as it is almost by definition interstate commerce. What is required is what I believe was always required here, for congress to pass a law.

This was the reassuring message yesterday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals aimed at the Federal Communications Commission. Bottom line: The FCC can abandon its ideological pursuit of the “net neutrality” bogeyman, and get on with making the world safe for the iPad.

This is Jenkins’ basic thesis: that the FCC should spend its time on wireless spectrum issues. Frankly, I think the FCC should be disbanded or otherwise scaled back by quite a bit, but it’s a different issue to me.

The court ruled in considerable detail that there’s no statutory basis for the FCC’s ambition to annex the Internet, which has grown and thrived under nobody’s control.

Correct. A law would need to be passed.

Winning was Comcast, which transgressed the commission’s arbitrary “net neutrality” boundaries when it—oh, about a thousand years ago—slowed a certain bandwidth-hogging application used by a handful of antisocial customers.

It seems like ancient history now, but BitTorrent—a program used to exchange everything from TV shows to motorcycle shop manuals, often in violation of copyright laws—gave rise to one of the two episodes hugged to the breast of the net neut campaigners. The other was the now-thoroughly forgotten Madison River episode of 2004.

Shorn of these two incidents, the dread behind the net neut campaign would lack a single talking point from the real world. As it is, these exceptional cases actually prove the rule: Competition is more than enough to keep providers honest in delivering consumers access to the content they want. An iron curtain of Internet censorship at the hands of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon et al. is not about to descend.

He’s talking about Bit Torrent here, which isn’t so much an application as a protocol (there are many Bit Torrent clients out there). To call Bit Torrent users “antisocial” only reveals the extent of Jenkins ignorance and contempt for learning about his subject matter.

Bit Torrent works by taking a very large file, such as a video file, and breaking it up into millions of tiny pieces, and spreading them around to thousands of clients. Each client then exchanges the various pieces they received with each other, until everyone has a complete copy. You can read a more detailed description here.

The point being, Bit Torrent only works in a social atmosphere. In fact, it works better the more people are using it. Which is precisely why it works so well for downloading popular pieces of content, but is terrible for finding esoteric content enjoyed only by a few. Bit Torrent is the precise opposite of antisocial. It is, in fact, hypersocial.

But let’s take Jenkins at what he really meant, that it’s an activity engaged in by people who dislike the current social order with respect to copyright. By that measure, using Bit Torrent is a form of protest, of civil disobedience. Yes, I know that most people think of the civil rights movement when they think of civil disobedience, but that was well before my time. I think of violating the speed limits, particularly when they were 55 MPH everywhere we went. NOBODY obeyed those limits. Highways were a scene of mass civil disobedience. But back then, Republicans and conservatives didn’t call those people “antisocial”. They called those people “voters” and courted them with a provision in the Contract with America.

Today, copyright laws are an unreasonable length. Effectively, there is no free content that was made in the age of recorded audio and video. As a result, prices are driven up in the world of paid content, since there isn’t anything but paid content. Consequently, entertainers and those who work in the industry make obscene amounts of money. There is absolutely no historical precedent for the highest paid people in a society to be its entertainers but that is what we have today. The use of tools like Bit Torrent constitutes a massive protest against the entire industry and the laws they purchased, particularly the Sonny Bono act and the DMCA.

A better approach for the likes of Jenkins and other conservatives to take would be to propose 20 year copyrights, and an immediate revocation of any copyright for a work published over 20 years ago. Such a law would still leave plenty of room for great artists to grow plenty rich, but would end such absurdities as “Bowie Bonds” and companies like Disney re-releasing for “limited” times movies that were made generations ago, movies that have long since been part of our common cultural heritage, movies that were paid for and generated profits for their true creators well before most of our births.

It may seem like a digression, but these things are all interconnected. And besides which, that isn’t where it started, “oh, about a thousand years ago”. Net Neutrality as a movement started when Ivan Seidenberg accused companies like Google and Vonage of “chewing up his bandwidth” calling them “freeloaders” and the like. He implied that he may have to start blocking or impeding certain websites that didn’t pay Verizon for an “enhanced” delivery service. Vonage replied at the time correctly, “They want to charge us for the bandwidth the customer has already paid for.” Yep, that’s exactly what they wanted to do. Read my analysis at the time, back in January of 2006 here.

The primary issue is and always was that Comcast, Verizon, and their brethren, want to sell “unlimited” Internet access, but don’t want to have to charge for it. They want to be able to sell a false bill of goods. So rather than do what wireless companies do and charge differently for peak and off peak, rather than metering their customers or capping their usage and selling their plans as such, they’d like to sell you unlimited service that isn’t really unlimited. Anyone with a normal sense of justice would be offended by that, a group that evidently excludes Holman Jenkins.

But secondarily, Comcast, Verizon, and others are also in the business of selling content, or rather, access to content. They benefit from the jerry rigging of our copyright laws, the precise laws that so enrage so many people, who go online to engage in civil disobedience and hypersocial activity by using tools such as Bit Torrent. They fear people ditching their cable TV, as I have done, and acquiring content over the Internet alone, whether legally or illegally. This is precisely why they are colluding, illegally I believe, to prevent cable tv shows from being sold to people online who have not already subscribed to cable or satellite service, a scheme euphemistically called “TV Everywhere“.

If Jenkins wants to argue that these laws are a good thing, then he should by all means do so. But to argue that supporters of Net Neutrality are just a bunch of antisocial conspiracy theorists who have no cause to be worried about what their ISPs are up to is in plain contravention of the facts.

Back to Jenkins:

And here’s the really good news: The decision comes just as the FCC, at a cost of $50,000 per page, has put the finishing touches on its vaunted “broadband plan,” which inevitably discovers that only the FCC’s strong arm can save us from falling behind Albania in the race to a wired future.

That plan will now need rethinking (indeed, needs to be rethought in the direction of the circular receptacle). The agency should be thankful, because it actually has much more important work to do.

Laws such as a Net Neutrality law ought to be written by congress, not an unelected body. Here we agree.

We make no predictions about iPad sales, but the device surely heralds two things for the overlapping, archaically defined worlds where the FCC’s regulatory edict still prevails. First, it promises a flood of new demand for mobile and fixed broadband capacity. Second, it presages the utter obliteration of the distinction between print and electronic media.

The iPad does not portend the obliteration of the distinction between print and electronic media. It portends the destruction of print media alone, in much the same way that the lightbulb portended the destruction of the candle. See here for detail.

To both ends, the last thing the FCC needs to do is regulate the prices and services of network providers, since competition is doing a fine job of that, thank you. Faster than anybody might have expected, fixed and mobile are becoming competitive substitutes for each other. Ask any iPhone user who goes back and forth between WiFi and AT&T’s 3G network. Ask Abilene Christian University, which gives every student an iPhone and is building Wifi hotspots all over town and campus to share the load. Ask Line2, whose voice app lets iPhone callers bypass AT&T’s cellular network.

For that matter, ask Sprint, which apparently isn’t going down without a fight—it’s rolling out the nation’s first WiMax phone, on a network originally conceived as an alternative to fixed broadband.

I hate to descend into name calling, but after reading that one has to assume that Jenkins is either joking or a technological ignoramus. 3G maxes out at a speed of 14 megabits per second download, which is about the slowest speed available on a cable modem today. But good luck actually getting that speed on any cellular network today. Moreover, and this really shouldn’t have to be said, simple physics puts a cap on the amount of bandwidth that is available in any area for any given amount of spectrum. But there is no such limit using cable or fiber, because one can always lay more cable or fiber. One cannot lay more spectrum.

Again, the problem here is not that the FCC is needed to regulate prices and services, but rather that cable companies engage in truth in advertising. If they want to sell unlimited service, then it had better actually be unlimited. If they wish to sell a capped service, then by all means do so. But don’t sell a capped service as unlimited, and don’t sell something that attempts to modify Internet Protocol as if it’s the Internet.

So rather than focusing on new excuses to mess with network providers, the FCC should tackle two duties unambiguously before it: Figure out how to liberate the nation’s wireless spectrum (over which it has clear statutory authority) to flow to more market-oriented uses, whether broadband or broadcast, while also making sure taxpayers get adequately paid as the current system of licensed TV and radio spectrum inevitably evolves into something else.

I don’t disagree that freeing up more spectrum is a good thing. The best thing would be to stop regulating it at all, allow owners to buy and sell it like property, remove restrictions on what it can be used for, while reserving a large chunk for average citizens to use in their homes for wireless networking and the like.

Second: Under its media ownership hat, admit that such regulation, which inhibits the merger of TV stations with each other and with newspapers, is disastrously hindering our nation’s news-reporting resources and brands from reshaping themselves to meet the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. (Willy nilly, this would also help solve the spectrum problem as broadcasters voluntarily redeployed theirs to more profitable uses.)

This is utter uselessness. They’re old broken business models. It’s all moving to the Internet and devices like the iPad. And increasingly, writers will become freelance anyway, because who the hell needs Rupert Murdoch to be their publisher? I certainly don’t. And if columns like this one from Holman Jenkins are what results from “editorial discretion” then I can certainly do without that as well.

Now let’s get to the best part [emphasis mine]:

Alas, like all federal agencies that pretend to be brave when they aren’t, there’s a reason the FCC beats up on Comcast—because it’s easier than taking on the entrenched political interests (i.e., members of Congress) who never tire of having a foot on the neck of broadcasters and publishers back home in order to extort favorable coverage. This week was not the first time—or the second time, or third time—that the courts have rebuked the FCC for inventing authority over the Internet out of its hookah. Maybe now the agency will get the message and turn its attention to the regulatory morasses it actually has jurisdiction over.

See, now THERE IT IS, at least from a conservative perspective. For years, media ownership was limited by making spectrum artificially scarce to broadcasters. This artificial scarcity gave the government all the excuse it needed to impose “fairness” upon broadcast media to ensure that alternative opinions went unheard. This benefited politicians, who could use the gatekeepers of news and information to the public to work for them. The exchange was that congress would keep the medium scarce, limiting competition and in exchange broadcasters would give the government and those in power glowing coverage. It basically worked well for about 40 years. During that time, Democrats held congress pretty consistently.

With the repeal of the fairness doctrine, that edifice began to crack. Now the likes of Rush Limbaugh could bring to the forefront news that was buried on the back pages and was not being covered by the more prominent mainstream media. Cable TV provided another crack in the edifice, giving people a choice in news channels. It should be no surprise that during that time congressional elections became competitive once again.

But the genie was really let out of the bottle with the advent of the Internet. Now, we have a vibrant diversity of opinion again, and people question their government from the left and the right. Voter turnout is up, and people are more engaged in current affairs. None of this suits politicians, of course, who would like nothing more than to put the genie back in that bottle. Which means, of course, having a gatekeeper to influence.

Like it or not, that gatekeeper is your broadband provider, your cable company (DSL does NOT count as broadband in any colloquial or modern sense of the term). Your cable company got to be a gatekeeper by bribing local officials into giving theme exclusive deals. In other words, they’re coercive monopolies. That’s why Comcast is changing their name to Xfinity. Because their customers LOATHE them. And the only reason why customers buy from a company they loathe is that they are in a coercive relationship.

If you want to avoid Net Neutrality type regulations, bust up the coercive monopolies, starting with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. In the meantime, congress should enforce Net Neutrality the way they enforce GAAP, by saying in essence, “The IETF decides what Internet Protocol is, and if you’re not in compliance you’re not selling Internet, and you can’t say you are.” End of story.