Israel is a democracy, the only one in the Middle East. This fact is often used to as part of an explanation of US support for Israel, but is it a good reason?

For a democracy, Israel has a remarkably old fashioned way of dealing with the world. It seizes the land and property of another religo-ethnic group and confines them to ghettos in the name of its own survival and security. It brands many members of this group as criminals and administers justice by summary execution of the offender, and, for good measure has a policy of destroying the property, if not the bodies, of the offenders immediate and extended family. You might call this behavior “medieval,” but one could probably look further back to see it codified.

But, surely, it is a democracy, in which case, the majority of its citizens bare the responsibility for such barbaric policies.

Due Diligence:

“Call me naive – [Chorus: You’re a hopeless naif.] – but I’ve got this quaint idea that the idea of a business is to add value. And that the value is judged by the customer, not the seller. By its obstinate and culpably idiotic refusal to understand that technology has changed the way in which the value of music is delivered and understood by listeners, the RIAA and the labels it stands for have turned from value creators into value destroyers, in many different ways. They are well on the way to permanently damaging an industry that has been part of America’s cultural heritage, as well as a decent part of our exports to the rest of the world. The bill of particulars…”

need to remember to read this site

Ticketmaster Auction Will Let Highest Bidder Set Concert

bq. “Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com. With no official price ceiling on such tickets, Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and scalpers for the highest price a market will bear. ”

I find this very interesting. This is another step towards Rock, etc becoming something other than popular culture, another turn on a death-spiral that alienates it from its constituency and its vitality. Without making a value judgement by drawing the compairison, it is this much closer to becoming like opera, ballet, or the symphony orchestra.

This isn’t exactly new, ticket prices have seemed obscene to me since college, and it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people (artists, promoters, etc) have got it in their mind to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but I wonder how much this dynamic mirrors past cycles.

Certainly the trajectory is a familar one, if something isn’t heading up, it’s heading down, but doesn’t really get to the cultural “physics” of the phenomenon (And I don’t think I’m going to hit on any first principals in this posting).

It does seem to me though, that the music industrys pursuit of babyboomer pocket-books has some parallels with Clayton Christensen’s “innovators dillema.” Christensen hit upon a theory of why good businesses — businesses that do an excellent job of giving their best customers just what they want, companies that maximize their profit margins — often fail, by looking at a different sort of recording industry, the hard disk drive industry. I think the same dynamic could hold here.

In the disk drive industry, the major epoch’s were marked by patter size. The dominant manufacturer of each epoch would tend to flog the dominant form factor valiantly forward, delivering bigger, stronger, faster hard drives to their best customers. Meanwhile, they’d be ignoring smaller patter sizes, because the new tech wasn’t able to meet the needs of their best customers.

In time though, the product they were building was more than their customers wanted or were willing to pay for. Meanwhile, drives with smaller platters, made by another company, kept getting better and better, and was now the big thing.

It’s interesting that the music industry, which was obsessed with the next big thing long before the high tech industry was, seems prone to similar dynamics.

I just signed up for the national do-not-call list. I created a new e-mail address to process the registration, so an easy association isn’t available between my e-mail address and my phone number. Not that the feds couldn’t sopena such information, but bureacratic inneficiency is a friend of freedom, if you ask me, and so the more hurdles the better.

I did not, however, use an IP anonymizing service, or a public hot-spot, to submit my information. So now they can make an easy association between my static IP address and my phone numbers. If you are paranoid about such things as a matter of principal, don’t make the same mistake I did.

Bovine Beacon by OmniGlow | Accuracy:

“Field-tested for ‘Problem Cows’*, the BOVINE BEACON® eliminates costly missed opportunities for conception. Preliminary tests also indicate that the Beacon is also highly successful when used in a program with controlled estrus”

I had NO idea.