OneMind

Interesting dust-up between NBC Universal and Apple. In a test of wills to see who needs whom more, Apple has announced it will not sell the network’s 2007-08 TV series to its 10 million iTunes subscribers.

As usual, the driving factor is money. Apparently, NBC wanted to more than double its fees for content, which would have required Apple to up the per-show price to $4.99 instead of the $1.99 at which it sells everyone else’s content. Network officials denied that charge but carefully worded their response so it was less a denial than a “sort of” denial.

Apple is giving up about 40% of the revenue its iTunes stores generates by cutting NBC loose. But NBC, the fourth-place network, may suffer more from the split because the move effectively reduces any potential buzz shows might generate to a faint whisper.

I got a particular kick out of one NBC statement. “It is clear that Apple’s retail pricing strategy for its iTunes service is designed to drive sales of Apple devices, at the expense of those who create the content that makes these devices worth buying,” said NBC Universal spokesman Cory Shields. Duh. Oh, and Mr. Shields, how much of the bucketloads of money your shows make do you share with the writers and producers and actors? Thought so.

(Disclaimer: I hold Apple stock.)

The Valley Transportation Authority up in Silicon Valley where a couple of my daughters live held a big public hearing last night on their plans to slash bus service on “unprofitable” lines. More than 100 people showed up to object. The VTA gave 25 of them 2 minutes each. Not one person spoke in support.

So the board voted to allow the changes. The only reason they have public hearings is because the politicians get paid for attending them. They don’t really listen to or give a crap about what anyone at the hearing says. The decision was made behind closed doors a long time ago.

This notion that government programs have to be profitable or pay their own way is insidious. One big reason we have government around to do stuff is because there are a lot of social needs to be met that private enterprise wouldn’t meet precisely because of its need to be profitable. Providing public transportation so that those who either cannot afford their own vehicles or who choose to reduce their negative impact on the environment can get around to the places they need to go is a legitimate function of the government. It is not one that needs to be profitable.

You can bet your sweet patootie that if the folks riding those buses were rich people or even upper middle class folks, service wouldn’t get cut. This is a tax policy decision, pure and simple. The government can’t figure out how to make ends meet with its tax base so it cuts services. But it cuts those that affect the lower socio-economic groups every single time. The municipalities that make up the VTA have in recent months voted millions and millions of dollars in art subsidies and park maintenance but they can’t scrape together a few bucks so that poor folks can get from Point A to Point B without having to walk most of the way.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. You can judge the moral uprightness of any society by the way it treats its least fortunate. By that standard, governments broadly in the U.S. get failing grades.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is cracking down on employers whose workers’ Social Security records don’t match up in an effort to reduce the employment of illegal aliens. Gong after the employers who make illegal immigration an attractive option is an important part of any reasonable immigration reform and one that the Republican Party too often declines to attempt.

In a column in the L. A. Times this week, Manhattan Institute’s Tamar Jacoby took the GOP side of the street on this issue, screeching about how the loss of immigrant workers will cripple the economies of states like California (where I live) because there won’t be workers to harvest the crops. These rotting, unharvested crops will presumably result in shortages that will cost American consumers millions and millions of dollars. Or so say Jacoby and her ilk.

“Not even the least skilled, least educated Americans want to work in agriculture these days. More than 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are estimaed to be illegal immigrants,” Ms. Jacoby wrote. While that statement is accurate as far as it goes, it is symptomatic of a deeper belief that is a cancer eating away at the American body politic. I’m talking about the belief that American corporations have absolute rights to unlimited profits at the expense of the middle and lower classes.

If agribusiness were to begin to pay a living wage for crop harvesting, do you really think there wouldn’t be lines of American citizens willing to do those jobs? Sure, they’re hard work. Sure they have a low status perspective. But the real problem is that they pay below-poverty, near-slave wages and offer no benefits to workers who are undocumented and therefore unable and unwilling to report the abuse they suffer at the hands of the farm industry.

The Federal government could solve this problem fairly easily and at zero net cost. How? Cancel subsidies now paid to agribusiness enterprises to keep prices on selected commodities (those with large, well-funded lobbies) artificially high, transferring those funds to tax incentives to encourage agribusiness to hire local American citizens at minimum or even living wage rates.

Big agribusiness, in turn, can find a way to live with less than double-digit profit margins.

Click on “Read More” to get my rationale for this suggestion.

This approach would affect almost entirely the large agribusiness enterprises who, despite comprising only 10 percent of the total number of farms in the country, control so much of the land that they produce a whopping 75% of the total value of farm production. (Source: Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: Family Farm Report, 2007 Edition, June 2007, Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Contrary to popular belief, small farmers in this country are not the major segment of the food-producing core of the nation. Agribusiness — large farms with $250,000 or more in sales — is the true source.

Millionaires benefit from farm subsidies while small farmers are generally stuck raising low-profit-margin crops disdained by the larger businesses, in large part because of the lack of government subsidies. This vicious cycle can be broken and illegal immigration dealt with at its secondary source with a little smart thinking in Washington.

I know. That’s a lot to expect.

I’m no fan of Sen. Hillary Clinton. If she’s the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2008, I will reluctantly vote for her but not give her open support. I’ve expressed my reasons elsewhere on this blog.

At the same time, FactCheck is one of my favorite outfits. They catch lies and misstatements by candidates from all parties and set the record straight in an objective manner I find refreshing in the era of Fox Noise.

This time, though, the folks at FactCheck picked a stupid thing for which to pick on Hillary. Sen. Clinton said in a speech that “I believe” 500,000 women die every year from cervical cancer. In fact, that’s the number that are diagnosed; about half of them die.

OK, first of all, she said, “I believe.” That’s less a statement of fact than of recollection. Second, it’s not like she pulled a number out of the air like so many other candidates do in boldfaced lies; she confused diagnoses with deaths. Not an unimportant distinction, but not worth spending an entire email on, either.

Perhaps they did this because they’re frustrated trying to catch her in an error. From their own site: “In past debates and forums, we have found Clinton to be a human encyclopedia in her recitation of facts and figures. While other candidates from both parties occasionally have stumbled on statistics, using inflated or flat-out wrong numbers, Clinton has proven to be accurate even on some we initially thought were questionable.”

So they had to pounce while they had her, eh? Sorry, that was a gratuitous attack and FactCheck should be ashamed. There are lots bigger fish to fry.

Update 8/29…I removed this gadget from my blog. It clearly is not yet ready for prime time.

I just added a new feature to my blog. it’s over there on the left. It’s a Google Talk gadget that lets my logged-in friends chat with me while they’re on my blog.

I’m just testing this right now because my friend Laurence Rozier is working on some very cool technology that builds off this sucker.

Stay tuned.

I spent a good bit of time this morning removing a bunch of horrible spam trackbacks from this blog. I turned trackbacking on a few weeks ago in a fit of openness and community-mindedness but that was clearly a mistake. More than 16,000 spams were attached to my blog via that mechanism before I noticed it.

As I investigated the situation, I also found that hundreds of people had signed up for memberships on my site but never visited it after signup. All of them had randomly generated user IDs. Many of them were the source of spam comments over the past few months as well. I had thought that by requiring email validation of signups I’d get rid of spammers because of the time cost associated with responding to such requests. Obviously, the spammers are ahead of me on that point.

So this morning I turned off trackbacks and I tightened security so that all new membership signups here require my personal approval. I hated to do this, but I just don’t see that I have much choice. I could bemoan the fact that those who are willing to break the law, trespass on other peoples’ properties, exploit other peoples’ hard work and otherwise run roughshod over others’ rights always win in the near term because they force the rest of us to be more closed, isolated, distrusting and withdrawn. But that’s just a waste of energy. You who are not of that ilk can only shake your head and sympathize. They who are of that ilk probably won’t read this and if they do, they will simply laugh at my naivete.

It’s a sad commentary.

If this trend continues and catches on, and if as a consequence the youth vote in America turns out in the numbers it actually represents, watch for all of the pollsters to be dead wrong about the outcomes of key national and state races this election season.

We learned it last time around the hard way. Young people — those who hang out at MTV and MySpace — eschew listed land line phones. They carry cells which are not easy to find and very easy to ignore. This means that the big polling companies’ traditional means of predicting election outcomes will not work.

And I suspect that the youth of this country are far more liberal than the generations that preceded them. This could bode very well for Democrats and Green candidates.

My colleague and friend Scott Herndon today pointed me at the latest discussion of the proper use of the term “open source” that has broken out recently. This argument started in June on the blog, though it goes back much farther in the real world outside the blogosphere.

The arguments are mildly interesting, though largely academic. But it seemed to me after I read a good many of the comments and thought about it a bit that open source vendors arguing about the proper definition of open source is a little like a pissing contest where nobody’s buying the beer.

While I sympathize with Michael Tiemann in his role with the Open Source Initiative (OSI), his attempt to preserve the brand “Open Source” is fruitless. It’s not a brand. Never was. Never will be. It’s not protectible. At best he’s got a decent meme to protect and I might even agree it deserves protection. But open source will always mean different things to different people.

Scott and I were discussing it today in terms of the need we have on one project. We don’t intend to use the source code of an Open Source project in our work. What we’re looking for are some ideas about issues to be covered, approaches that have been tried, etc. We’re not likely to use any actual code from any Open Source app we choose to download and look at. The last two words are key to us: we want to look at source to get ideas about alternative ways of doing things anyone doing a particular type of app needs to do.

So we don’t really care what license is being used; our concern is, “Can we read the source?” If we can, it’s open source enough for our needs.

Maybe the problem is that the broad range of Open Source needs is too big to be covered by one brand or meme.

I caught Sen. Barack Obama on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show tonight. I know he’s said this before but for some reason it really registered with me tonight. Talking about his “lack of experience,” he made two great points.

First, “Nobody had a longer resume than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. That didn’t work out too well for us, did it?

Second, “When people ask about experience, they’re really asking about the life experience to make good, common-sense decisions.”

On both points, Obama gets high marks.

Holy Toledo! (Does anyone say that any more?) I received four — count ‘em! Four! — spams this morning. That’s a new one-day high in the past 60 days.

You just gotta love Google Mail for the outstanding job it does of spam filtering. I have been constantly amazed at how good it is and just figured it was time I stopped once again and said so.

It’s nice when this tech stuff just works.