Jason's Log

Too damned hot.

Well, it's just after midnight on 5/29/2003, and it's still 69 degrees farenheit out. That's just crazy for the Bay Area. According to Weather Plotter, the average high temperature in Sunnyvale, CA for this month in 2002 was 69. And in 2001, the average high for May was 75.

Paying for software redux

There are a few points that Dave Winer has overlooked in his Who Will Pay? essay series.

1. Software is becoming a service, not a product.

This can be seen in almost every aspect of the software industry. In game software, the trend is towards subscription-based massively multiplayer games where the initial software cost is minimal, but you lose access when you stop paying the monthly fees. Even business software is seeing this trend. Look at salesforce.com. They're being successful selling their salesforce management tools in a subscription service model over the web. The enterprise software market has been gradually moving in this direction, now reaping much of their income from yearly maintenance contracts that give you access to updates and support.

The same can be seen in personal productivity software, which has been transformed into services like Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Mail, etc. Even Intuit allows you to file your taxes using a for-pay web-based service. This is the trend.

2. Even when software is a product, it's the service that is most valuable.

In the minds of software consumers, they have communally decided that the cost of software distribution is approximately zero. Which to them means that using a copy of a piece of software is not as bad a form of stealing as it would be considered in the physical world. However, people do understand that software developers (the people, not the products) require money to live. When a person makes a support phone call and a friendly, knowledgable person on the other end answers the phone and fixes the problem, there is an expectation of cost on both parties.

3. This is the open source business model, duh!

I'm surprised Dave didn't figure this out. Take a look at jboss.org. They give away a fully functional application server. They charge money for documentation and support. Nearly all open source projects that have full time staff are now using this model. The reason: software is becoming progressively cheaper to produce, but people are not becoming progressively cheaper to sustain, and even software pirating consumers understand this. People will pay for other people's time.

The open source folks figured this out a long time ago. Microsoft is moving towards this model with their activation/subscription licensing model. Does it mean lower margins for software developers? You bet. The days of rolling in fat profits are over. Get used to it.

As quoted by Friedman

This quote, from page 95-96 of Friedman's "Free to Choose", by W. Allen Wallis really helps put into perspective the change in socialist economic forces that has occured over the last 50 years. He wrote that modern socialist economic movements are:

"intellectually bankrupt after more than a century of seeing one after another of its arguments for socializing the means of production demolished - now seeks to socialize the results of production."

Which means this: Since the fall of the USSR, China's movement towards free markets, and other obvious failures of nationalized industries (the means of production), socialists have given up trying to make industries government owned. Instead, they are left with trying to use governmental force to manipulate various industries in hopes of achieveing their original socialist results.

This again brings me back to Nozick's Entitlement Theory of Justice: The socialists want to assess an economic system by the outcome- has it achieved the goal of distributing wealth amongst the people in the desired way? Whereas the libertarians want to judge an economic system based on the process- was force used to manipulate any of the exchanges between private individuals along the way towards the resulting distribution of wealth?

Friedmans' Free to Choose

I'm now about a third of the way through the Friedmans' "Free to Choose, A Personal Statement". As Friedman did in less detail in "Capitalism and Freedom", he covers the many good reasons to keep governmental influence out of economic markets. What I found odd is that Friedman so far hasn't used the following argument:

1. Nearly all the major atrocities that have been carried out against humankind have been carried out by strong central governments. Although some of these atrocities may have been instigated by specific individual personalities or leaders, the means for carrying them out have always been found in dauntingly powerful central governments.

2. If powerful central governments are a prerequisite for large scale acts of destruction, then limiting the power of the central government would be an effective means of preventing future large scale malevolent acts.

3. The most effective method of limiting the power of a central government is to retain the largest possible amount of economic freedom for people governed.

4. Ergo, free market capitalism and economic freedom for individuals is the best method for preventing future atrocities against humankind.

Although Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom"makes specific arguments on why economic freedoms are a necessary prerequisite to all other forms of freedom, he doesn't make the same specific argument as what I mentioned above. Hayek's reasoning regarding the evils of centrally planned economies goes something like this:

1. In order for a centrall planned (socialist) economy to even be marginally effective, it requires unanimous agreement on a large range of issues, both economic and political (what industries should be developed, how much people will be paid, etc.)

2. Unanimity on such a large scale across so many issues can not be brought about through normal political processes.

3. Only those leaders willing to resort to the use of force will be able to bring about a full-fledged centrally planned economy.

4. Ergo, the governmental leaders of all centrally planned economies must be ruthless tyrants in order to have won their position.

We'll see how the rest of the book goes.

Tax Cut: Good or Bad?

It now appears that the Feds have more or less agreed to a $350 billion tax cut. The part that I am struggling with is trying to determine what the real outcome of this will be, and it appears that I'm not the only person in this bucket. Journalistic opinion is widely scattered across the spectrum, with very little in the way of specific critique.

This arrticle by Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity.org highlights the crux of the problem that I have with the proposed tax cuts: The reductions in governmental income are not matched by concomitant decreases in government spending. Thus, the national defecit will increase as a result of this tax plan.

Now, I am a big fan of lower taxes, but I am an even bigger fan of reduced government spending. The debt that will be incurred by this tax cut will only have to be repaid in the future (i.e. my future), and is likely to increase inflation a bit in the process. If the GOP is such a boisterous supporter of 'smaller government', why aren't they also proposing the spending cuts to go along with their tax cut plan?

Spam statistics now available

I decided the scripts were in good enough shape to make the data available. The graphs show the number of spam messages received per day by each of the buberel.org email addresses.

See the cool graphs here.

The spamtrap@buberel.org address is my honeypot email address. It is a fake email address that is never used for any legitemate communications. So I know that any messages received by that address are Spam. It's a good way to keep tabs on how tenacious the mail address crawlers have been lately.

The plots are updated every day at 11:15am PST.

Support Lawrence Lessig!

Have you written your letters to your federal representatives yet? If not, first read Professor Lessig's proposal, then write a letter! His proposal for the yearly renewal of copyrights older than 50 years is brilliant. He needs our support.

If you live in Santa Clara County California, it would mean writing letters to the following addresses:

Senator Barbara Boxer
United States Senate
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Senator Dianne Feinstein
United States Senate
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Representative Anna Eshoo
698 Emerson Street
Palo Alto, CA 94301

If you don't know what to write, use what I wrote: in OpenOffice.org Writer format, in MS Word format, and in RTF format. You don't even need to ask permission, as everything posted on this site is covered by a Creative Commons License!

Voices of Reason

An interesting interview at Salon.com with Khaled Al-Maeena, Editor in Chief of Arab News, based in Saudi Arabia. It discusses the short and long term effects of the Riyhad bombings on the political and journalism institutions in Saudi Arabia. Worth the read.

Just saw Matrix: Reloaded

Although the movie was enjoyable to look at, it really falls apart upon further inspection in ways that didn't effect the original Matrix. Warning, minor spoilers ahead.

1. After the first fight scene, you learn that basically nobody ever really gets hurt, and certainly nobody dies. When then was so much of the film footage spent on watching seemingly pointless fight footage?

2. If Neo was able to mostly kill Agent Smith at the end of the first film, why is he completely unable to even hurt him in this film? If Neo is so powerful, why is it that he martial arts skills have apparently no effect on any his matrix-dwelling foes?

3. Instead of dropping hints regarding the philosophical twists throughout the movie, why did they resort to a single, extended expository scene to try to explain everything? The first Matrix film was terriffic for it's incremental ability to peel back the layers gradually, pulling you along. In this film, you get fight, fight, fight, talk about the nature of the matrix, fight, end.

4. The Zion speech and rave scenes were quite lame. Lawrence Fishburne does not make for an effective rally speaker, and the content of his speech seemed contrived in some unnatural way.

Of the trailers that appeared before the film (Terminator 3, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Finding Nemo, Freddy vs. Jason, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), only Finding Nemo really got me interested. Oh well. We still have The Return of the King to look forward to.

The Amazon Credit Card offer

I just received an email offer for the Amazon.com VISA card. The promotion goes like this: For every $2500 you spend, you receive a $25 gift certificate good towards the purchase of (non-auction) items as Amazon.com. Sounded good to me, until I did the math.

Notice that 25/2500 = 0.01. In other words, Amazon.com will give you 1.0 cent back for every dollar you spend.

Now contrast that with a typical frequent-flyer linked credit card, like the United Mileage Plus VISA. For every dollar you spend, you earn 1 mile of credit. With 25000 miles, you can purchase one round trip ticket for any domestic flight in the continental US. Granted the airline only makes a limited number of seats available for free travel. But according to Orbitz this morning, I could get a non-stop flight on United from San Francisco to Chicago O'Hare for $423.

Doing the math this time, you get 423/25000 = 0.017. Or for the $25000 I spent to accrue 25000 frequent flier miles gives me a yield of 1.7 cents for every dollar I spent.

So the question then becomes: Are the relatively obtrusive limitations placed on the use of frequent flier miles (limited seating, limited number of airlines) enough to account for the 0.7 cent increase in value over the Amazon.com credit card, which can be used on many more items?

For now, we're sticking with the frequent flyer credit card. But we'll see.