Category: The Dish

While I Was Sleeping

A huge thank you to Peter, Reihan, Hilary, Jim, and Patrick. Peter, Reihan and Jim often blog at The American Scene; Hilzoy, whose reported, and trenchant posts graced the Dish all week, writes just as well at Obsidian Wings; Patrick, as you now realize fully, keeps me and the Dish abreast of all sorts of web goodies every day every week. I’m really really grateful. It’s not easy occupying someone else’s blog for seven days, especially this one that has an eight-year daily – even hourly – relationship with many readers. Thanks to all of you.

I had a mellow week off. I stayed a while in LA and hung with friends, then back to DC for slumber with beagles and blu-rays with husband. Sometimes, home is the best vacation. Glad to be back. What the heck happened?

Oscar Night

[Patrick Appel]

From Raymond Chandler’s 1948 article on the Oscars and motion pictures:

The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

The Market for Privacy

[Jim Manzi]

MIT’s flagship magazine, Technology Review, produces a an annual list of the year’s 10 most exciting technologies (as with any of these lists, of course it is really more like “the 10 most exciting technologies developed by researchers who are one degree of separation from the editors, are quotable and are, ideally, photogenic”).  Nonetheless, one striking aspect of this year’s list is that two of the ten technologies are algorithmic methods of using the large datasets created by digital transaction records to generate economically valuable insights.

The erosion of historical notions of privacy at the hands of commerce is almost inexorable, ultimately because of Moore’s Law.  You don’t need eavesdropping or other surveillance techniques when the infrastructure by which you communicate, travel, and buy things generates data as a by-product of each of these activities.  This, much more than government spies, is the primary driver of lack of privacy.

It seems to me that the logical method to protect such information is to codify and create a tangible property right in it.  When the choices are (1) opt out of modern life, or (2) implicitly surrender all of this info, pretty much everybody picks door #2.  But what if I had the practical ability to charge commercial entities for access to or use of information of this sort?  It would, first, go from a free good to a scarcer resource, and second, I could protect those parts of my transaction history that I feel to be most sensitive.  In effect, we need a functioning market into which I can sell my transaction history.

Thinking About Embargos

[Patrick Appel]

Stephen Hugh-Jones discusses the Cuban embargo and  how the EU is "making the same mistake" with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus:

In sum, since the 1980s the EU has been trying, like the United States since the 1960s, to get rid of a regime it disapproves of through impoverishment; a regime, moreover, which, unlike Castro’s, practises a tolerable version of democracy, and has never posed any threat to the EU’s interests, let alone offered to install the nuclear missiles of its enemies. Like the US, the EU has failed. Yet, like the US, it persists.

Clinton Agonistes

[Andrew]

The staffers are turning to drink:

After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.

Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues. In a much-reported incident, Mr. Penn and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy recently that prompted another senior aide, Guy Cecil, to leave the room. “I have work to do — you’re acting like kids,” Mr. Cecil said, according to three people in the room.

This was precious from Susan Thomases:

"This is no woe-is-me woman."

Ooookaaay. Has Thomases been in a coma for the past two months? But there’s the usual Clinton brazenness as well. Her entire message since Iowa has been a constant cooptation of Obama’s message – yet he‘s the plagiarist? And she and her husband clearly played the racial card – and yet Obama is using Karl Rove tactics? If I worked for her, I would have hit the Cabernet hard a while ago.