The restless mind.

Oh Bernie—what hath thou done?

Corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. That makes the publishers backing SOPA the Bernie Bernbaum’s of their industry.

Remember Bernie? He was the sleazy maladroit who lied and cheated his way to an ignoble end in Miller’s Crossing. 

Here are 13 of the world’s biggest publishers supporting a bill that cripples the internet and installs legislation on par with Syria and China.

On one hand, they built their fortunes promoting the IP of authors. On the other, they back a bill that undermines basic civil freedoms. This isn’t irony. It’s sociopathy.

Bernie knew he was a wretch. I wonder if the management who signed onto this are equally self-aware.

When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators, understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities.

— Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA « Steve Blank

Genius. via Lamebook.

Nobody understands debt

Here’s the 101 from Krugman:

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves. [Emphasis mine]

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

The problem isn’t the debt. The problem is that no one in Congress actually understands how debt works. They unnecessarily rail against it or foolishly blame it on the incumbent President.

How will they back the right policies if they don’t know how the fundamentals work? (Hint: they won’t. See SOPA.)

Here’s his windup:

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Monsanto, creating shareholder value since 1901

From the Guardian:

The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any Euroxpean Union country which opposed genetically modified crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.

State-sponsored rough-housing at the behest of private corporations. What else is new?

The choice bit:

The cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto.

Really, the invisible hand of the market just likes to punch people in the face.

My wife once admitted she fell for me because I reminded her of David Bowie. For the record, I would never use magenta.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm.

— I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping… :: rogerebert.com :: News & comment

“Think of PBS as premium television on the honors system.”

PBS wants to be HBO but without forcing you to pay for an upfront subscription. As Federal funding continues to drop, and by asking for money “some of the time” from viewers, that makes freemium the broadcaster’s business model of choice.

The challenge of freemium is scale. You need a lot of members if you can only depend on 2-3% of them to pay for the entire service. That’s a tough racket for a niche programmer like PBS who won’t (and can’t) sell sex and violence like HBO.

The silver lining—and what they appear to be betting the farm on—are the baby boomers. There’s lots of them and they’re rich. And the older they get, the more the want sophisticated shows like Downton Abbey.

I was introduced to Galella’s photos while staying at the Roosevelt in LA. They litter the hallways and rooms. His immediate, candid style had a nasty side-effect: celebs frequently punched him in the face.

(via Celebrities by Ron Galella | Retronaut)