Yet movie companies threaten to put Netflix out of business by charging them huge amounts of money to have access to their content. Netflix is in the forefront of the war on piracy, and the studios don’t even seem to understand it. It’s incredible.
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11 February 2012
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1 February 2012
A study of coal’s effects on Kentucky’s budget in 2006 found that it contributed $528m in revenue, but its on-budget costs—training, support, repairs to the roads, R&D for the coal industry—totalled $643m. A study in West Virginia in 2009 also found the coal industry a net cost to the state.
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29 January 2012
If there is a major economic incentive encouraging people to do negative things (drive, accept plastic bags, buy food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup), is it easier to fight that behavior directly, or to change the incentive?
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27 January 2012
About Time: James Vacca Declares Traffic Safety a “Civil Rights Issue” | Streetsblog New York City
Gale Brewer’s bill is well intentioned but should be opposed by pedestrian and biking advocates. It raises the cost of installing and maintaining plazas and bike lanes without any demonstrable benefit commensurate with the cost? If textured pavement is such a lifesaver, why not also require textured sidewalks at all curb cuts and driveways? Cars coming out of a midblock parking garage are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the edges of pedestrian plazas. Why isn’t this being proposed? It’s because the real estate industry will crush a bill mandating costly retrofitting of thousands of driveways and curb cuts.
It is bad policy to make the cost of proven safety improvements more expensive while doing nothing about proven dangers. Brewer is usually smarter than this.
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7 June 2011
One in four US hackers 'is an FBI informer'
Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.
This tactic worked so well in stopping the drug trade, why not? It’s always a good idea to bring together police, accused criminals, and public cash in endlessly duplicitous schemes to take down irreplaceable (?) criminal kingpins.
Did we not have enough moral quandaries, dishonesty, and rank corruption in law enforcement before we decided to subsidize crime? I’ll have to ask my parents. But after all this criminal investment, the US must be totes okay when it comes to drugs, right? All sorted out?
Now we just need to spend a few billion chasing after every disgruntled computer-literate teenager, and once the FBI has “flipped” the millions of them, it will be safe to shop for mobility scooters from crap websites running FrontPage 98, as Jesus intended. That is, if you ignore the fact that most hacking these days originates in various parts of Asia, where they don’t actually care what the FBI does.
But yes let’s ignore that. Either we pay the moral and monetary cost of the FBI’s glorious new War On X, or we hold companies accountable for their security failures by fining them heavily for breaches that expose private citizens’ information—a hacked tax—which would create an incentive to invest in better security. And who wants that? Not the people paid to chase hackers, obv.
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24 May 2010
Quite simply, the market has to be structured (told you I wasn’t a libertarian) to provide incentives for bus operators to work safely.
