Death of Blockbuster, Ascent of Netflix

Is this related to this?

Has Cringely Sold Out or Just Lost His Mind?

A few months ago, Robert X. Cringely shook off the editorial chains of PBS to operate independently. Since that time, he has insistently pushed a number of new sites or technologies:

* Home Account, a mortgage management site Cringely personally helped create (described by one commenter as "a huge dissapointment")
* Parrot Secrets, a $70 book for parrot owners (described by many commenters as an outright scam)
* Neokast, a media distribution service that sounded revolutionary, but never got off the ground.

Cringely can't be expected to get everything right, and sometimes his claims are unpopular at one time but appear brilliant years later, so I might be willing to forgive these three endorsements.

It's in his latest column where he reaches the apex of absurdity. He claims that Antek Metal Foil Drives could give Google an 85% gain in power efficiency, and that they know this, but that they are choosing not to pursue the technology because they secretly hate him. It started out as a really well informed, rational column, but somewhere towards the end it simply slips off the moorings.

Please, Cringely, go back to PBS, or just hire someone to tell you to rewrite a third of your columns. We really need your perspective, but you really need an editor.

Experimental Gaming

The Guardian lists the hottest Experimental Games in a recent article. Interesting list. Many focus on letting the player interact with the very sequence of events, like changing the course of time, or becoming the storyteller.

So far, gaming has occasionally tried to emulate the storytelling power of films and novels. This level of empowerment might provide a storytelling direction gaming can explore that no other media can follow.

Alternatives to Patents

Intellectual property law involves extending monopolies to individuals to reward them for creative effort. Monopolies are notoriously inefficient, but they are considered a Hobson's Choice for the development of new pharamaceuticals: you can get results with monopolies or not at all. (Patent monopolies sometimes lead to startling ethical results, like when genetic researchers shut down cancer-screening nonprofits).

Finally, however, economists have tested an old model for incenting solutions to complex problems without patents.

Indeed, in the market setting more people solved the problem on average [than in a patent based system]. There are two possible explanations. First, the winner-take-all nature of the patent system may have deterred some of the weaker participants from exerting effort. Second, and more interesting, is that the prices in the market system did in fact incorporate information about the optimal solution - thus market prices may have given people hints about the optimal solution, much like seeing a partial solution to a jigsaw puzzle.

-Bossaerts et al. via Marginal Revolution Click through to see how it all worked.

My worry is how the WTO is exporting IP regimes by tying IP protections to development opportunities for poor nations. These nations have to develop complex IP protection infrastructures that often besiege their local foundling judicial systems, pushing ordinary justice to the side to protect the desires of multinational corporations. This global assumption that strong IP is the only way forward prevents different countries from even experimenting with other medical research systems. Even if the patent system proves to be the best system there is, it's unfortunate that we must completely trample any experimentation in this area.

For a "patents aren't so bad, at least not in pharma" counterpoint, consider this piece from Reason on The Tragedy of the Anticommons.

Carbon Regulation Skepticism, Variations One and Two

There are two major threads of climate change skepticism. The first argues that climate change is not real, while the second just argues that it's not worth preventing. (Considering the second thread, carbon regulation skepticism might be a more accurate label for these two positions.)

The first thread, hard climate change skepticism, raises scientific objections which are mostly laughed at. The CATO Institute recently put out a full page ad in the New York Times, the the Los Angeles Times, and a few other papers, arguing that the science behind climate change is largely exaggerated.

Politifact raises some problems with this argument. For starters, the ad's citations do not support the ad's claims.

Defending the ad, we have the NRO explaining how sometimes biased minority positions are actually correct. As a post on The New Republic notes, this was not the most persuasive followup.

Ryan Avent describes this as an existential crisis for libertarianism. Libertarians look like fundamentalists when, forced to choose between science and their beliefs, they begin attacking the science. It appears as dogmatic and absurd as, say, suggesting that condoms should not be used in the fight against AIDS.

The soft climate change skeptics aren't necessarily committed to a rejection of global warming at all. Inspired by the Chicago-school libertarians, this group is just interested in the full cost-benefit analysis.

These economics minded individuals realize that cheap, abundant energy is currently pulling most of the world out of poverty and despair (also recommended: Hans Rosling on how industrialization and high populations can be wonderful things). Cheap energy powers everything we aspire to do, whether it be feeding the poor, distributing life saving drugs, or even researching and developing cleaner energy sources.

Because of these benefits to cheap energy, and because fossil fuels still have an extremely high energy return on investment (despite the warning cries from the peak oil/peak coal communities), there are real economic costs to carbon regulation. These are costs climate scientists are not accustomed to evaluating. If we want to approach climate change by changing our energy portfolio, these costs must be scrutinized, weighed against the benefits. Now, as that NRO article points out, people operating outside their discipline can sometimes get things right, but it's still nice to involve the econometricians at this stage, just as we involved the climatologists earlier.

For instance, ask an econometrician if green energy investments might actually help the economy, and they will tell you that this is basically the broken window fallacy. They might also tell you that increasing energy costs primarily affect the poor, and they might ask how many people should we be ready to starve to keep temperatures more stable.

If you believe climate change will lead to irreversible apocalypse, your answer should be "as many as it takes." If that's the ultimate implication of a position, one would hope it was open to a thorough debate regardless of the apparent consensus.

This "soft skepticism" has proven persuasive. I would be surprised if CATO's tack persuaded anyone.

Airline Safety Controls are Laughable

"No electronics on airplanes" is a worthless reg; Tech dirt has the details.

With all the needlessly aggressive and often ineffectual security measures, I had wondered for a long time about that ban. That article crosses off a few plausible explanations.

I do not buy the ban as a courtesy to annoyed passengers. It's a security reg, not a reg from a customer satisfaction council. I do not buy the ban to keep people attentive during takeoffs and landings, or alcohol would be more aggressively regulated. Maybe the FAA can't ban alcohol because airlines thrive on its sales. And maybe bans phones to encourage use of the skyphones. In other words, maybe the FAA isn't completely incompetent, just subject to regulatory capture.

That's probably too conspiratorial. Perhaps it is just historical baggage from Pan Am 103, where the terrorists utilized a radio cassette to disguise a detonator.

I really think the cell phone ban serves a far more direct and contemporary purpose. This purpose might be shared with the aggressive security inspections and bans on innocuous items like nail clippers. Loud but useless regs are an easy way to put "drugs on the table", to crib a phrase from The Wire. It's a way to look busy. This agency has had some practice at that game, much as Kasparov has played a game or two of chess.

The Board Gaming Subculture (NY Times)

The New York Times has a profile of a gaming group from out in Long Island. It mentions some staples of the Bloc, including my current favorite, Dominion.

The Times piece is essentially fluff, but board gaming is one of those hobbies that can always use more press. All the lowest quality examples seem to have the highest popularity in the general US population (Monopoly, Sorry? Those aren't even in the same class as Klaus Teuber's worst games). The general public is basically ignorant of the value of the pastime, so any sympathetic nod is good.

Economist Bryan Caplan knows what I'm talking about.