Month: February 2013

Benjamin Lennett sees trouble on the horizon for streaming services like Netflix and Pandora:

First, they came for unlimited data on our smartphones. Now capped plans and usage-based pricing are likely coming to a cable provider near you (and indeed, they’re already here for some). The cable industry claims the move is about fairness: a fair return on their investment and fair pricing. But the egalitarian rhetoric is designed to obscure their more self-interested aims: increasing profits and thwarting competition from online video. …

The large cable companies are determined to prevent mass movement to cord-cutting, in which users give up their cable TV subscriptions and substitute with services like Netflix. How do you prevent this from happening? Data caps and usage-based pricing.

He puts the proposed caps in perspective:

How many hours of online video per month could a user watch with Time Warner’s 5 GB capped plan? About five for a high-quality stream, barely two for HD. By comparison, Nielsen estimated that in 2010, the average household watched 143 hours of television a month. Cord cutting families might be in for some very interesting dinner table conversations regarding dividing up the cable data plan.

Robin Sloan laments the lack of translation in web culture:

Consider a webcomic like xkcd. It’s a touchstone of internet culture, and yet it’s presented only in English. (There are a handful of unofficial translation sites, but they seem to be spotty at best, abandoned at worst.) You could argue that xkcd’s core audience of programmers, scientists, and students all speak English, wherever they are… but I don’t know. I think there must be a few hundred thousand internet users out of China’s half-billion who would absolutely love the comic—who would feel, as so many xkcd readers do, that it’s somehow speaking to them directly—but whose English isn’t up to snuff. What a thing that would be, to make this bit of culture available to them!

We, the internet culture makers: we don’t translate enough. We don’t push hard enough against these linguistic and social borders. Instead, we pat each other on the back for our elegant file-format choices. Instead, we talk mostly to ourselves.

(Above: Map of the Twitter languages of Manhattan, captured in 8.5 million tweets, between January 2010 and February 2013 by Ed Manley. Interactive version here.)

This pioneering journalist has apparently been ominously threatened by the White House for daring to disagree with them. It must have been a harrowing experience. Last night he complained to his fellow stenographers, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, about living under this horrifying intimidation:

Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade [from a White House official] was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’”

Woodward has called the president guilty of “madness” and of moving the goal-posts by suggesting that the threat of the sequester was designed to facilitate a grand bargain – tax hikes, entitlement and defense cuts combined with tax reform. But that was the point of the sequester; it was a deadly instrument designed to force both parties to compromise – one on taxes, the other on spending cuts. Woodward’s op-ed was untrue, it seems to me, plainly untrue. More to the point he accused the president of madness, even though he has offered a compromise that includes cuts to Medicare as serious as those in Bowles-Simpson, while the Republicans insist on only spending cuts.

Yes, the sequester idea originated with Jack Lew in the Obama administration but was quickly embraced by the GOP and became a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, after the brinksmanship of the debt ceiling battle in 2011. Odd, isn’t it, that Woodward did not, to my knowledge, describe the GOP’s successful and completely unnecessary downgrade of this country’s credit rating as “madness.”

Still the accusation of a threat against Woodward was troubling enough that I was eager to see it substantiated. And here – in the midst of a heated but completely conventional back-and-forth between source and journalist – it is:

I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

This is what Woodward was claiming was a chilling threat to press freedom! I mean, seriously. What exactly is the threat? This is the final email Woodward sent to Sperling:

Gene: You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance. I also welcome your personal advice. I am listening. I know you lived all this.

Does this read like a man writing to someone threatening him with anything? He even says: “I for one welcome a little heat.” He describes Sperling’s “threat” as “personal advice” as a friend, which it plainly was. Then he goes whining to CNN and Politico that he is victim of government threats for his reporting. That’s a lie, and Woodward has now been exposed as a liar.

Excuse me, but given his reputation as a journalist, that is “madness.”

Mike Riggs finds one:

The automatic budget cuts set to take place this Friday might have government contractors on edge, but they could also bring sweet relief for medical marijuana dispensary owners fearful of government crackdowns. According to the OMB’s report to Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration will lose $166 million from its $2.02 billion staffing and appropriations budget, reducing its funding to 2002-2003 levels, when the DEA first began coordinated crackdowns on medical marijuana dispensaries.

But the DEA arguably has other, bigger priorities now, such as cartels and prescription pill mills. With $166 million less to work with, will the DEA finally have to prioritize its resources?

But:

To be fair: the state-by-state fact sheets the White House released did emphasize decreased funding for drug treatment, which means we’ll find out really quickly whether states and local governments are still interested in diverting addicts from prison to treatment only if the federal government pays them to do so.

A. Barton Hinkle covers anti-panhandling laws:

[T]he restrictions on soliciting never seem to apply to teen-agers in bikini tops waving car-wash signs. Or to campaign canvassers seeking petition signatures to get political candidates on the ballot. Or to firemen passing the boot for a local charity. Somehow it’s only the homeless who aren’t supposed to pester anybody.

Courts have struck down panhandling ordinances time and again. In 2011, an Arizona appeals court ruled that Phoenix could not ban panhandling after dark. Last March, a federal judge ruled against Utah’s anti-panhandling law. In August, a federal judge ruled against Michigan’s state law against panhandling in public places. Time and again the courts have found, as the 4th Circuit did last week, that “begging constitutes protected speech.” But cities across the country keep passing anti-panhandling ordinances anyway.