An Economic Third Way

The Center for Economic and Social Justice recently emailed me about a book the organization has republished. The book, The Four Winners, was written by Knute Rockne. While it is aimed at young adults and is centered on football, this book sounds interesting and edifying even if you're a not-so-young adult or have no interest in sports. It certainly looks interesting to me, so I'm adding it to my wish list.

In addition to the book, I wanted to mention that I found the aims of the CESJ very interesting. As I've said on this site before, while I believe in free enterprise, I believe it should be tempered by morality. What the CESJ proposes is an economic "just third way". This third way rejects both socialism (which represses personal and economic freedom) and laissez-faire capitalism (which excuses any abuse or exploitation as long as someone makes a buck).

I find the whole concept of this third way intriguing. I would be interested in hearing what others think of this "Just Third Way", so feel free to post your thoughts on this in the comments. I would especially be interested in hearing what libertarians and liberals think of this.

iTunes

I've just started using iTunes, recently. (In fact, when I get a little free time, I find myself more interested in browsing the iTunes store than blogging -- so you can partially blame my lack of blogging on iTunes.) iTunes has just sold 100 million songs.

The P2P services seem to be in decline. The free P2P clients are packed with spyware and adware -- and people are getting more aware of the danger that poses. Also, my understanding is that the RIAA is jamming the P2P services with bad copies of popular songs. I think the success of iTunes bears out my contention that if you give people a good legal alternative that allows them to purchase songs in an electronic format, they will be willing to pay.

BTW, the above linked article has one statement that I know is false:

Tracks cost 99 cents each and can only be played on Apple's popular iPod and iPod mini digital music players.

The bolded part is simply not true. I don't even own an iPod...yet. I play my purchased songs on both my iBook and my Windows PC. You can authorize up to five computers (not including iPods) to play your songs.

Update: Reuters has corrected the error in their story.

Buying American

Are you tired of buying clothes made in China? If so, Anne Wilson offers some alternatives.

Not Guilty By Association?

John Kerry and his wife have made me want to renounce my Heinz 57 sauce. However, there may be no need for that:

"It's just crazy," [company spokeswoman Debbie] Foster said. "We haven't been involved in politics since Morris the Cat ran for president in 1988" — when the company ran a spoof campaign with Morris, the face of Heinz 9 Lives cat food, as the finicky candidate.

Heinz Kerry, who was married to Republican Senator H. John Heinz III when he was killed in a 1991 plane crash, is not on Heinz's board and is in no way involved with company management, Foster said.

Collectively, Heinz Kerry, along with her children with John Heinz and The Heinz Endowments which she chairs, own less than 4 percent of outstanding company stock.

On Outsourcing

Amy Welborn brings up a subject that I've wanted to rant about for a while now: outsourcing. Particularly, outsourcing IT jobs to places like India.

Just to give you an idea where I'm coming from, I work in the IT field as an application developer. Could my job ever be outsourced? I don't know. I'm inclined to think not, since there are issues involved (issues I can't go into) that would make this unfavorable at this time. However, I can never be sure what might happen in the future. I don't like to get complacent about things like this.

Many conservatives and libertarians believe outsourcing is just wonderful...a whole new world of discovery in our global economy. These are the people who have told us, "Get an education. Be the best you can be. Build a better life." Okay you do that, and what do you get in return? Your job shipped overseas to people who will do it cheaper. And how do many conservatives and libertarians respond? "Tough! Go get a job flipping burgers or digging ditches, you whiner! You were overpaid and you probably sucked at your job anyway!"

And these corporations don't seem to care about the corporate knowledge they are throwing away. They don't seem to care about quality. You get what you pay for. I think that's true with employees as well as consumer goods.

Some people say, "People in India need jobs, too!" Well, that's not very helpful to an American who has lost his job and needs to pay his mortgage and feed his family. I'm sorry, but our own should take priority over people in other countries.

What will this do to America? Will we become a nation of low-paid, low-skilled service workers? Should anyone bother with getting an education anymore? I got my B.S. in Computer Science. That was the hot field in the late-eighties. I went into it because I enjoy working with computers and have a knack for it. However, I would now discourage any college-bound person from going into the IT field. Apparently, there is no future in it...unless you live in India.

When I commented about this on Amy's post, I was accused of being "elitist" and not respecting that there is honor in all work. Well, I do respect that. And I don't think someone wanting to acheive more in their life makes them an elitist.

My Dad was a letter carrier. He wanted to do more in his life, and he was capable of more, but he didn't have the education. I think this always frustrated him and gnawed at him. He wanted his children to get educated and have a better life. All parents with any sense want that...it's only natural. I don't think it's elitist to want things to be better for yourself and those you love.

More about that tiny guitar...

Last week, I posted about this nanoguitar. Well here's more about that guitar and the significance behind creating these tiny devices:

New York Times - Atomic Scales: Striking Notes of Progress on the World's Tiniest Guitar

If nanomanufacturing comes of age, something as tiny as a nanodrum or nanoharp might be mass-produced for use as extremely sensitive detectors for ultra high-frequency waves. Scientists have recently demonstrated infinitesimal nanotube thermometers and nanobalances capable of weighing a single virus. All this may foreshadow a day when doctors use nanocapsules to carry medicines, a few molecules at a time, to precise locations in the body, and nanorobots to crawl through the bloodstream and repair cells.

Okay, call me a geek, but I just think this stuff is fascinating!

(Via Rodent Regatta.)

The Record Industry Gets Aggressive

The record companies are exploring some rather questionable means to stop music downloads:

New York Times: Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy

The record companies are exploring options on new countermeasures, which some experts say have varying degrees of legality, to deter online theft: from attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of pirated music to overwhelming the distribution networks with potentially malicious programs that masquerade as music files.

The covert campaign, parts of which may never be carried out because they could be illegal under state and federal wiretap laws, is being developed and tested by a cadre of small technology companies, the executives said. [...]

Among the more benign approaches being developed is one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they tried to download.

A more malicious program, dubbed "freeze," locks up a computer system for a certain duration — minutes or possibly even hours — risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.

Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called "interdiction," to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others. [...]

"Some of this stuff is going to be illegal," said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in Internet copyright issues. "It depends on if they are doing a sufficient amount of damage. The law has ways to deal with copyright infringement. Freezing people's computers is not within the scope of the copyright laws."

Okay, I know I said this before, but I'm going to say it again -- if only the record companies would put all this effort into innovating and embracing music downloads instead of coming up with all these invasive schemes to stop downloads. Most of these approaches will never be used because they are just plain illegal. And any that are used are only going to make the consumer even angrier.

Incidentally, I've been reading a lot of good things about Apple's new music download store. Now, if they'd just let us PC users in on the fun...

High-Tech Shoplifting

This site has to be seen to be believed. From the site's about page:

At stores which rely heavily on the barcode for your bill total, printed bar code stickers from this site could be used to relabel and re-code expensive products with cheaper prices. Rather than our competitors that allow you to compare apples to apples, we allow you the consumer to relabel dvd's with apple prices.

Just awful. When people do things like this, it ends up hurting those of us who don't steal.

(Via Ipse Dixit.)

Update: At the bottom of the same about page, Re-Code.com says that their site is satire and does not endorse stealing. I didn't notice the disclaimer when I looked at it the first time. I have to say it's very good satire...

Update 2: There's much skepticism as to whether this is truly satire or if the disclaimer is just a cover. They sure are going to a lot of trouble collecting barcodes for a satire site.

Update 3: Here's a Salon article about Re-Code.com. (You'll have to sit through an ad to read the whole thing.) Apparently it's the work of some activist group who wants to stick it to The Man. Satire? Nah...

Update 4: Looks like they've been shut down.

Is the Music Industry Dead?

Ben Domenech believes so. I don't know if it's dead yet, but I don't think it can survive much longer in its present state -- something's got to give. Ben sums up the problem with the music industry very well:

The Music Industry...is not a free market at all. It's a back-scratching socialist economy. The radio stations play only select groups of songs, bought from labels, both of which simultaneously owned by companies that also happen to own concert venues and ticketselling groups. People don't hear the musical equivalent of indie films or low-budget flicks, because they can't. They can't drive into the city to see a different show. And music has a much more difficult time of gaining word-of-mouth momentum outside of local limits. It's called the socialist economy.

In the comments on Ben's post, Mark Byron described the music industry as an oligopoly, which is exactly what it is. When this current system finally does die, hopefully it will be replaced with a free market system and true competition. Then I'll be able to listen to music radio again.

The Record Industry - Unable to Learn or Adapt

Lynn Sislo has a great post about the RIAA's latest attempt to close the barn door after the horse is thousands of miles away. From Lynn's post:

The recording labels have only themselves to blame. They should have been the first to jump on new technologies and made their entire catalogs available for download for a reasonable fee per song before Napster ever appeared on the scene. Most people will not steal if they can get what they want at a reasonable price. Forget "reasonable price" for now; what most people want from the music industry isn't legally available at any price.

Exactly. The record companies could have been pioneers with digital music. They could have resurrected the single (Remember those?) in MP3 format for a reasonable price. They could have made out-of-print music available again for purchase and download. They could have allowed people to pay for and download selected songs from a CD as an alternative to buying the whole thing. CDs would still be available, since many (like myself) like to have a tangible copy of a favorite album (along with the artwork and liner notes). But it would be nice to legally download the two or three good songs off an otherwise mediocre album that you're not interested in buying.

But the record industry didn't innovate and adapt. Napster got the upper hand. Napster was shut down, but Kazaa and others sprung up in its place. And there will be others after they shut Kazaa down.

Oh, the record companies have tried to get with it, but...well...I'll let the Inquirer article explain:

Even their competing download services are a joke, with draconian requirements, high fees, and — my favorite — the ability to delete your music in the event you stop paying for the monthly service. Did I mention you can't burn any of your music library either? What a joke.

The record industry's idea of distributing digital music is treating their customers like children and giving them very little value for their money by crippling their downloads to the point of uselessness.

Will the record industry ever get a clue and start using the new technology instead of fighting it? If they want to survive, they'd better learn something from Napster and Kazaa and get into the 21st century. The band-aid of RIAA lawsuits will not stop the bleeding forever.

CDs vs. Files on a Hard Drive

I have to agree with InstaPundit about the idea of CDs becoming obsolete and being replaced by files on a hard drive:

...I still buy a lot of CDs. And I'm not thrilled with the idea of hard drives as the main residence of music: that kind of storage is too impermanent. I have CDs from almost 20 years ago. My mom has Louis Armstrong records from the 1920s, long before she was born....

...[W]hen I really like music, I want hardcopy, not just hard-drive copy.

Music in the form of a bunch of files on a hard drive is too ephemeral. I like MP3s, although they are not CD quality (yes, you can tell the difference). But if I enjoy an entire album, or if I'm a big fan of a particular artist, I want the CD. I want to hold the album in my hands. I want to see the artwork and liner notes. When I download an album that's out-of-print or is only available in MP3 form, I end up burning it to a CD and creating a label for it. That way, I know it's permanent...I can hold it in my hands and look at it.

It is for this reason that I don't believe files on a hard drive will replace some sort of permanent product. Will that product always be in the form of a CD? Probably not. CDs are bound to be replaced with some other medium in the future. But I believe that music fans will always want to have a permanent product available.

The Sorry State of Music Today

HappyFunPundit gets it right on why the music industry is in such pathetic shape. Hint: it's not file sharing. Some excerpts:

The problem today is that groups with real talent aren't being allowed to grow. Many classic artists started out slowly in record sales, and some never had big hits at all when they were making records. It took a large body of work to establish a fan base. [...]

As long as the record industry continues to favor focus groups and 'packaged' bands, it will continue to neglect real talent, and it will continue to decline. File sharing has nothing to do with it.

All I can add to that is an "Amen"!