NYT in the ICU - why?

Readers of Henry Blodget's (yes, that Blodget) articles for Silicon Valley Insider know that the NYT is on its deathbed.

What we don't get is an explanation of why the New York Times, and most other large papers, are so ill.

We know that many media owners carry a lot of debt unrelated to newspapers, but in that case healthy newspapers would face sale -- not extinction.

We know that the internet killed the classified business, but no-one's suggesting that was huge for the Times.

We know subscribers have left paid print for free online reading, but online circulation has vastly lowered the average cost of delivering product while also increasing the pool of readers. In theory subscription losses should be outweighed by advertising revenues.

Ahh, but there's the rub. If I'm reading this VentureBeat article correctly, the problem is that the advertising model isn't working, either because online ads in newspapers don't seem to work and thus aren't worth much, or because there are a huge number of equally useful (or useless) routes to reader eyeballs. No one route can reach readers ...

If the New York Times dies, does the news die? VentureBeat

The death of an institution isn’t far off, writes the Atlantic in an article titled End Times, and with it an entire industry may be preparing to slip underwater. Low on cash, high in debt, the legendary New York Times is reeling from the recession. There’s no guarantee that it, or many others of our best newspapers, will survive the next year.

The immediate effect of the Times ending its storied run (or degrading to a lesser entity) will no doubt be the journalistic equivalent of a nuclear explosion...

... The New York Times has done an excellent job of growing its web property. ComScore says the company’s pageviews are approaching 200 million a month; that’s a lot for any website... 

... Getting a New York Times-caliber feature article requires paying a Times-caliber writer for a week or more of research and writing. That will set you back between $1,000 and $10,000, depending on who is doing the work. That figure doesn’t include the editing and expenses, by the way.

For most sites, that means they need 100,000 to a million pageviews to break even, for a single article...

If the NYT does die, I think it will take decades to replace it. I keep returning to the death of BYTE in the 1990s -- we still don't have anything like it on the web.

I'm optimistic an escape route will appear. It is a rough spot though ...

Kurzweil - not so good at prediction after all

Kurzweil, to his credit, has kept his 1999 predictions for 2009 online.

He doesn't do very well, though I give him credit for trying. Most of the things he mentions seem credible, but the hardware items are more 2018 and the software items 2028 or later.

Last September Scott Aaronson critiqued Kurzweil's prediction of a 2045 Singularity. Aaronson voted for 2300. I worried then about 2100.

After seeing how far we are from Kurzweil's 1999 predictions 2045 looks extremely unlikely and I'm feeling better about 2100 (meaning it will be later than 2100).

So not in my lifetime, or, and this is rather a problem for him, not in Kurzweil's lifetime either.

GD II: How large is the unused economic capacity?

I must be up to at least 30 Crackpot points in my recent economics threads, but I just can't help myself.

I swear, I'm going to stop soon, just not quite yet.

In past recessions, and even recently, I've read of estimates of the unused capacity of the US economy, and how much must be done to move us closer to using all of our capacity.

So today's question is whether the US economy is the right denominator.

What if we're now so entangled economically with China that the right denominator is not the US workforce, but rather the US and Chinese (and perhaps Indian) workforce? That's a rather bigger number; it could absorb a lot of stimulus ...

Crank roll:

1. Lewis and Einhorn: repairing the financial world
2. The role of the deadbeats
3. Complexity collapse
4. Disintermediating Wall Street
5. The future of the publicly traded company
6. Marked!
   
7. Mass disability and income skew
8. The occult inflation of shrinking quality
   

Dyer - the last articles of 2008

It's been a while, but Dyer has 5 new 2008 articles:

• November 27 Terrorism is Marginal
• December 2 Four Harsh Truths about Climate Change: it's too late. We're in big trouble, climate engineering better work.
• December 6 Small Earthquake in Canada, Not Many Hurt: the political crisis is small stuff, Canada is in good shape
• December 9 Global Zero: eliminating nuclear weapons
• December 14 The Old Thailand Returns (this has a bad link, should be fixed soon. Go to the site to find it.)
  

If he follows past practices he'll have a 2009 page up soon -- there's nothing there yet. I'll have to edit my Page2RSS monitor to track that new page.

Apple preps for a year of living dangerously?

Does this mean Apple figures nobody will have any money to spend on anything?

Live from Apple’s last Macworld - Apple 2.0

... There was no Steve Jobs cameo, no Mac mini, no new iMac, no Snow Leopard ship date, no memory upgrades for iPhone or iPod touch, no new iPod shuffle, no revamped Apple TV or Time Capsule. There was a new unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro with an impressive (if non user-removable) battery...

and ... no iPhone 3.0 hints, no MobileMe fixes ... in other words, pretty much nothing.

Apple is supposed to be brilliant at forecasting consumer spend.

They may be settling in for a very tough year ...

The less we use cash, the easier counterfeiting is

Modern counterfeiters don't bother with the fancy stuff (like Iran's alleged scheme ). They often desperate sorts who use cheap ink jet printers. Nobody cares enough to prosecute. The interesting bit is that they can do quite well ...

Schneier on Security: Trends in Counterfeit Currency 

... Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police officers don't know what they're supposed to look like.

Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.

The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent...

Today my vending machine rejected my $5 bill -- because it's a modern design. I barely recognized it myself. Paper money is going the way of the telegram .

The Onion loves the Mac

The Onion's “MacBook Wheel” cannot be missed.

Firstly, it's flat out brilliant -- full of fine touches that only a geek could catch. Secondly, it must have taken an immense amount of work to put it all together. Thirdly, at least for a Mac geek, it's teary-eyed funny.

It's a labor of love.

Steve Jobs is an intensely private person

Until I read the letter Jobs released on his health, I didn't fully understand what a contradiction he is ...

Letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs

... I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this...

Jobs is an unparalleled showman and salesman, the ultimate control freak, a world class celebrity, a notorious trickster who's often cruel to others, and yet he's also an intensely private person who is appears to have been personally hurt by doubts of his probity and dedication.

A fascinating example of the contradictions that can live in one person, albeit a most unusual person.

Update: Incidentally, his statement makes no medical sense. Another Jobs contradiction is that he's simultaneously a technologist and a fan of alternative medicine. He famously attempted to treat his cancer with diet. So his description of his condition isn't to be relied on.

WSJ Editorial pages fuming about Franken

Heh, heh, heh: Funny Business in Minnesota - WSJ.com.

I love the smell of the WSJ editorial pages fuming.

Now if the WSJ news pages were concerned I'd pay attention. But the editorial pages?

That's just delightful in a wickedly funny sort of way.

Senator Franken. Ahhhh.

I voted for him of course, but when the Minneapolis Star Tribune double-crossed the state and endorsed Coleman (a notorious weasel) I figured he was toast. Despite working very hard and despite the state going strongly to Obama he didn't seem to be getting a lot of traction -- so I wasn't optimistic.

Happily I was wrong. This is a very good day, though the lawsuits may go on. (Some insiders seem to think Coleman will give up rather than incur large legal bills in pursuit of a lost cause, but my native pessimism assumes a long hard battle.)

Update 1/5/09: 538 dismantles the WSJ OpEd. Wow. I knew the WSJ editors were slimeballs, but they really outdid themselves this time. Murdoch is famous for calibrating to power. How longer before some of those scum join the breadlines?

Lewis and Einhorn - repairing the financial world

Michael Lewis's Portfolio.com essay remains best summary to date of the Collapse of '08.

Today he returns, joined by David Einhorn, with a prescription for change published in the NYT OpEd page. It's an extraordinarily long editorial, here I excerpt the key ideas. Emphases mine.

The End of the Financial World as We Know It - NYTimes.com

Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of “Liar’s Poker,” is writing a book about the collapse of Wall Street. David Einhorn is the president of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund, and the author of “Fooling Some of the People All of the Time.”

... “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many...

... OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest...

... Everyone now knows that Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s botched their analyses of bonds backed by home mortgages. But their most costly mistake — one that deserves a lot more attention than it has received — lies in their area of putative expertise: measuring corporate risk.

Over the last 20 years American financial institutions have taken on more and more risk, with the blessing of regulators, with hardly a word from the rating agencies, which, incidentally, are paid by the issuers of the bonds they rate... [jg: Of course this is no secret, but it's still astounding. I have to laugh when I consider the conflict of interest rules applied to physicians -- and we do need them. At a more familiar level, consider the "home inspector" scam related to home sales.]

... The American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Electric and the municipal bond guarantors Ambac Financial and MBIA all had triple-A ratings. (G.E. still does!) Large investment banks like Lehman and Merrill Lynch all had solid investment grade ratings. It’s almost as if the higher the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it...

... As far back as 2002, a hedge fund called Gotham Partners published a persuasive report, widely circulated, entitled: “Is MBIA Triple A?” (The answer was obviously no.)

At the same time, almost everyone believed that the rating agencies would never downgrade MBIA, because doing so was not in their short-term financial interest. A downgrade of MBIA would force the rating agencies to go through the costly and cumbersome process of re-rating tens of thousands of credits that bore triple-A ratings simply by virtue of MBIA’s guarantee. It would stick a wrench in the machine that enriched them...

The S.E.C. now promises modest new measures to contain the damage that the rating agencies can do — measures that fail to address the central problem: that the raters are paid by the issuers.

But this should come as no surprise, for the S.E.C. itself is plagued by similarly wacky incentives. Indeed, one of the great social benefits of the Madoff scandal may be to finally reveal the S.E.C. for what it has become.

Created to protect investors from financial predators, the commission has somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors...

... IT’S not hard to see why the S.E.C. behaves as it does. If you work for the enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it.

The commission’s most recent director of enforcement is the general counsel at JPMorgan Chase; the enforcement chief before him became general counsel at Deutsche Bank; and one of his predecessors became a managing director for Credit Suisse before moving on to Morgan Stanley. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the whole point of landing the job as the S.E.C.’s director of enforcement is to position oneself for the better paying one on Wall Street...

... Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. persuaded Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy distressed assets from banks — telling the senators and representatives that if they didn’t give him the money the stock market would collapse. Once handed the money, he abandoned his promised strategy, and instead of buying assets at market prices, began to overpay for preferred stocks in the banks themselves. Which is to say that he essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and a few others unnaturally selected for survival...

.. the banks took the taxpayer money and just sat on it...

... Weeks after receiving its first $25 billion taxpayer investment, Citigroup returned to the Treasury to confess that — lo! — the markets still didn’t trust Citigroup to survive. In response, on Nov. 24, the Treasury handed Citigroup another $20 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and then simply guaranteed $306 billion of Citigroup’s assets. The Treasury didn’t ask for its fair share of the action, or management changes, or for that matter anything much at all beyond a teaspoon of warrants and a sliver of preferred stock. The $306 billion guarantee was an undisguised gift...

... THERE are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail.

Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets...

... If we are going to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, it makes more sense to focus less on the failed institutions at the top of the financial system and more on the individuals at the bottom. Instead of buying dodgy assets and guaranteeing deals that should never have been made in the first place, we should use our money to A) repair the social safety net, now badly rent in ways that cause perfectly rational people to be terrified; and B) transform the bailout of the banks into a rescue of homeowners.

We should begin by breaking the cycle of deteriorating housing values and resulting foreclosures ... Congress seems to have understood this problem, which is why last year it created a program under the Federal Housing Authority to issue homeowners new government loans based on the current appraised value of their homes.

And yet the program, called Hope Now, seems to have become one more excellent example of the unhappy political influence of Wall Street. As it now stands, banks must initiate any new loan; and they are loath to do so because it requires them to recognize an immediate loss. They prefer to “work with borrowers” through loan modifications and payment plans that present fewer accounting and earnings problems but fail to resolve and, thereby, prolong the underlying issues...

... There are also a handful of other perfectly obvious changes in the financial system to be made, to prevent some version of what has happened from happening all over again. A short list:

Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices...

... End the official status of the rating agencies. Given their performance it’s hard to believe credit rating agencies are still around. There’s no question that the world is worse off for the existence of companies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. There should be a rule against issuers paying for ratings. Either investors should pay for them privately or, if public ratings are deemed essential, they should be publicly provided.

Regulate credit-default swaps. ...

... Credit-default swaps may not be Exhibit No. 1 in the case against financial complexity, but they are useful evidence..... The most critical role for regulation is to make sure that the sellers of risk have the capital to support their bets.

Impose new capital requirements on banks... require banks to hold less capital in bad times and more capital in good times.

Another good solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to break up any institution that becomes too big to fail.

Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street. At every turn we keep coming back to an enormous barrier to reform: Wall Street’s political influence. Its influence over the S.E.C. is further compromised by its ability to enrich the people who work for it. Realistically, there is only so much that can be done to fix the problem, but one measure is obvious: forbid regulators, for some meaningful amount of time after they have left the S.E.C., from accepting high-paying jobs with Wall Street firms.

But keep the door open the other way. If the S.E.C. is to restore its credibility as an investor protection agency, it should have some experienced, respected investors (which is not the same thing as investment bankers) as commissioners. President-elect Barack Obama should nominate at least one with a notable career investing capital, and another with experience uncovering corporate misconduct. As it happens, the most critical job, chief of enforcement, now has a perfect candidate, a civic-minded former investor with firsthand experience of the S.E.C.’s ineptitude: Harry Markopolos.

It's a long essay, and I think it suffers a bit from having had two authors. Still, the recommendations are fairly simple:

1. Get rid of the rating agencies.
2. Break up institutions that are too big to fail
3. Block SEC regulators from going to the firms they regulate. (This general problem is bigger than the SEC, a recent head of HHS took a very high paying pharma job when he left office.)
4. Regulate credit-default swaps.
5. Provide direct help to home owners.
6. Stop giving money to Wall Street, nationalize then liquidate instead.

See also:

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
4. The role of the deadbeats
5. Marked!

Update 5/31/10: I happened across this old post, and, somewhat to my surprise, I note that the current Senate financial reform bill includes several of the reforms mentioned above. Of course it's not law yet ...

The NYT's summary of the the anthrax case

The NYT has assembled a summary of the case against Bruce Ivins, the bioweapons scientist accused by the FBI of being the serial anthrax killer.

The case is entirely circumstantial, no more or less strong than the case against another scientist previously fingered by the New York Times who was later declared innocent. Mr. Ivins seems to have been a fairly unhappy man with some deep flaws, but I'm beginning to think that's not unusual in the bioweapons community.

The strongest evidence in the case was a claim that the FBI could trace the anthrax to a water source localized to Mr Ivins lab. Given the FBI's established record of incompetence and pseudo-science a good lawyer would shred that claim.

Based on what we know so far, I doubt the FBI could have gotten a conviction. If I were on the jury, I would not have been able to vote for conviction on the relevant charges.

I would not be surprised to discover that Mr. Ivins was a murderer. I would not be surprised to learn he was innocent of these charges.

Homebrew life forms - oh joy

Those playful primates are at it again ...

Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home - Yahoo! News

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online ... hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering...

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly...

Truly, a heartwarming tale of the creative impulse at work. It brings back fond memories of those days of "Homebrew computing", or, in my case, the Delta DOS User Group [1]. It's the sort of science experiment my daughter would particularly enjoy.

If history repeats itself, which it's somewhat prone to do, we'll see all manner of creativity. We may expect some "worms and viruses" of course -- girls will be girls after all.

That's no big problem. We'll just plug in the biological equivalent of, say, Norton antivirus. Hmm, come to think of it, Norton didn't work too well. Much better to switch operating systems; really, OS X has many advantages.

Oh, wait. We really don't know how to change our genetic operating systems.

This could be a problem ...

[1] Or was it the Delta DOS Users Group? Memory fails alas. Those were the BBS days, when we used Telnet at night to visit distant modems. Hmm. it appears I have just created just created what will be forever more be the preeminent "hit" on searches for the DDUG. RIP DDUG.

The horrible price of the War on Science - lessons from AIDS denialists

Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has caused millions of deaths through his carnal stupidity. He was a dupe of Peter Duesberg, a genuinely evil man who also influenced Christine Maggiore. The Guardian has just published Maggiore's obituary (emphases mine)...

Bad science: Thanks to HIV/Aids denialists like Christine Maggiore more will die | Comment is free | The Guardian

... What if everything you thought you knew about Aids was wrong? That was the title of a book by Christine Maggiore, an HIV/Aids-denialist lauded in the American media. She is now dead.

Maggiore decided that HIV does not cause Aids, and that antiretroviral drugs do not treat it. She was HIV positive, which the media loved. She declined to take ARV drugs and specifically decided not to take HIV drugs during her pregnancy, despite the strong evidence that they massively lower the risk of maternal transmission. She insisted on breastfeeding her children, even though it has been shown that this increases the risk of maternal transmission. She also refused to have her children tested for HIV. Her daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, died three years ago. The coroner attributed the death to Aids and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. She was three years old.

Last Saturday, two days after Christmas, Maggiore died of pneumonia, aged 52. She was an extremely effective advocate. She set up successful campaigning organisations and counselled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure from medics to use azidothymidine (AZT) during pregnancy to prevent maternal transmission of the virus. She appeared on the cover of Mothering magazine, with a "No AZT" sign painted on her pregnant tummy.

However, as always, this is about far more than one person. Maggiore's views on HIV were driven by the work of Peter Duesberg, a well-known Aids denier. He was unable to persuade other scientists that his views on HIV were correct, but he did very well with journalists, most notably Neville Hodgkinson, former science correspondent of the Sunday Times.

Over two years in the early 1990s the paper published a series of lengthy articles rejecting the role of HIV in causing Aids, calling the African Aids epidemic a myth. It was all a scam to make money and defend reputations, they said....

... Duesberg went on to great things, including South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki's disastrous presidential advisory panel on Aids. It was here that the country's Aids-denialist policies were set into play, with tragic consequences. One demographic modelling study estimates that if the South African government had used antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape, around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007...

Given the stakes, if Duesberg was sure that HIV did not cause AIDS, why did he not inoculate himself with HIV like Robert Wilner claimed to have done? (Wilner died 6 months later of an unrelated MI.) Duesberg once said he would do so, but he never has.

Wilner and Maggiore were tragedies, but Duesberg and Hodkinson are evil.

The era of AIDS denialism is passing, but we still struggle against global climate change denialism. The shattered remnant of the GOP is still at war against science and reason, indeed what's left is ever more the party of Limbaugh.

Remember the lessons of the Maggiore family. Denying reality has consequences.

The inanities of conservative pundits: volume XXXXXXXXIV

Sometimes it's worth quoting these loons just to remind us that they are completely hopeless -- and yet were once very powerful...

FDR and the New Deal: Did it prolong the Great Depression? | Salon

... During a Christmas Eve appearance on Fox News, I pointed out that most mainstream economists believe the government must boost the economy with deficit spending. That's when conservative pundit Monica Crowley said we should instead limit such spending because President Franklin Roosevelt's 'massive government intervention actually prolonged the Great Depression.' Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett eagerly concurred, saying 'historians pretty much agree on that.'...

Of course historians don't "agree on that". Surely there must be one or two semi-serious historians who would argue the point, but they're the lonely exception.

Never forget -- these people caused grievous harm to America and the world. They are still around. They will try to return.

Disruption: Laptop, batteries not included

Yesterday I wrote about how laptops were finally going to track the price collapse of calculators. I figured we’d see $200 netbooks later this year.

Wrong.

Belco Alpha 400 Netbook | Gear Live

Belco is the latest company to unveil their netbook, the full-flash Alpha 400. It certainly is basic with its 7-inch display, 128MB RAM, 1GB internal memory, a 400MHz MIPS processor, a 10/100 MB Ethernet interface, and WiFi connectivity. It also has a SDHC memory card slot for another 32GB of storage and runs on Linux. Let’s not forget it works as an e-book, MP3 and game player and has installed business software. You can get the netbook for way-cheap. Try $169.95.

My prediction of Netbooks being sold by 2011 for under $75 (albeit with an exclusive install of “Chromestellation”) is starting to look a wee bit conservative.

So why is the price so low? The Belco Alpha 400 requires a power outlet.

Now, I realize this is hard to believe, but the reason I found the Belco was that it occurred to me that the most expensive component of a Netbook is not the crummy screen, it’s the hopefully non-exploding rechargeable LiOn battery. So I was searching on “Netbook” and “batteries not included”.

Some days the Singularity feels closer than other days.

A Netbook with a plug is silly, but watch for the Netbooks that are sold without a battery and without a charger. They’ll use either disposable batteries or standard rechargeables.

That will be the final sign of the big disruption.

Incidentally, there are rumors afoot of huge layoffs at Microsoft. If true those cannot possibly be justified by their current business situation – which is excellent. They could only be justified if Balmer et al believe the price of personal computing is going to collapse.

Update: So if Microsoft sells MSN and Live, can they get away with buying Comcast? Just an idle thought.