Arvind Panagariya: "2. About rich-country protection and subsidies in agriculture. Contrary to the common belief, their removal will hurt the poorest countries.
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FT article, FT Editorial and the exchanges with Dr. William Cline and Professor Pranab Bardhan.
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Six fallacies associated with agricultural liberalization debunked (NEW full-length article: December 20, 2004) "
This seems weird to me. If you win the lottery, everyone knows that taxes come out of the face amount of the prize. If he was an employee (not really, because the payment went to a company, not him personally), then the check wouldn't say $1M."Hatch’s lawyer, Michael Minns, told AP Radio that under California law, Hatch should have been classified as a CBS employee and therefore CBS was responsible for withholding taxes from his winnings.
“He was under the impression that they were either going to withhold from the check or pay the tax, and apparently neither occurred,” Minns said."
My memory is that while Gates didn't have a PC, he did have access to his school' s minicomputer. There's a bit of truth in the article, Gates benefited by being on the borders when a new ecological niche was opened in the economy (like the land rush when Oklahoma was opened to settlement, or the oil rush when John D. Rockefeller set up his trust). To the extent that PC's and the Net are a more mature technology, there will be fewer opportunities in that field. But obsessive people will find ways to build things and access to the world's knowledge has got to help, not hurt, in finding what to build.
Little Billy Gates Benefited From Not Having a PC: "We're raising a generation of computer and computer game addicts who are doomed to fail in school, not because the system is obsolete but simply because it's a lot more fun, and a lot easier, to hang out on the computer than it is to read 'A Tale of Two Cities.'
If Gates had been brought up in this kind of environment, what are the chances he'd have had the focus and creativity to build a company like Microsoft?"
"The report concluded that CBS failed to hire appropriate experts to clearly verify its statements and did not establish a 'chain of custody' for the documents. CBS, according to the report, rushed to judgment on the basis of inadequate evidence, did not promptly acknowledge flaws in its program, and broadcast a false and misleading report.What bothers me is that there's no recognition that the documents are obvious fakes. The report may not be able to prove it, given the origin of the documents is fuzzy, but the overwhelming weight of evidence cries "fake".
CBS did rush to make inadequately verified allegations public and it was slow in responding to criticism. The report's conclusions on the other points are not, however, persuasive. Surprisingly, the panel was unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not. If the documents are not forgeries, what is the reason for the report?"
"The downside of the new ease with which citations can be found, Ms. McKean said, is that words sometimes enter the dictionary too quickly. 'We occasionally take words out,' she said. 'We thought they were working, and they just ended up not.' She cited the term 'information superhighway,' which was removed from the new edition of the O.A.D.[Oxford American Dictionary], explaining, 'People aren't using it as much, and if they are, they're using it in a jokey way.'"Issue: why do metaphors fade; why did "information superhighway" die? IMO the term has too many syllables, "net" and "web" are shorter terms. Ease of use is always vital. It was also used in the context of a vast construction project. That may have been true back in 1999, when every roadside in Reston was being cabled with fiber, but no longer. Finally "superhighway" is also, at least to an aging driver who never enjoyed the interstates, a slightly intimidating term, while that's not my experience of the web.
"equally troubling in a somewhat different way are p.r. campaigns by government agencies that seek to build support for those agencies' 'missions.' Subsidizing, say, a pro-drug war point of view through a government p.r. campaign (hardly a partisan issue, as the overwhelming majority of both Republican and Democratic politicians favor it) is the economic equivalent of taxing the anti-drug war point of view. Americans wouldn't tolerate the latter, and we shouldn't tolerate the government using our tax money to encourage us to give it even more of our money (and freedom), meanwhile drowning out other voices with a tidal wave of statist shilling. I'm not even fond of the idea of the government using its money to, say, discourage drug use, as this is still an untoward interference in the marketplace of ideas, subject to all sorts of abuse (such as the 'food pyramid' dictated for years by agricultural interest groups). But it strikes me that that sort of government noodging is a less dangerous animal than the government using money allocated to implement programs to propagandize in favor of those programs."Cohen says:
"Take, for instance, the government's smarmy practice of preparing video news releases and packaging them as actual television news. The New York Times recently detailed how government agencies prepare admiring reports on what they are doing and then send them off to local TV stations, which use them, sometimes pretending the reports are their own. Only a fool would expect the TV industry -- especially local TV news -- to grow up and embrace professional standards, but the government is a different story. It's ours. We fund it. It should not be using our money to propagandize us. "My comments:
