Sex, Lies, and Video Games

Friday, October 5th, 2007

In Sex, Lies, and Video Games, Jonathan Rauch explains Façade, the avant-garde video game by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern:

Conventional games create vast, immersive physical environments. The new game would all take place in a single indoor space, like a black-box theater stage. Instead of taking fifty hours to play, their game would take twenty minutes. Instead of advancing through levels without telling a story, the game would provide a compact, complete dramatic experience, like a one-act play. “We envisioned something where you could come home from work and play it from beginning to end, just like you come home from work and watch a half-hour television show,” said Mateas. “You could come home and have a half-hour interactive-drama experience. It’s complete in itself, it takes you on an arc. It entertains. But then the next day, you could come home from work and play it again and make something different happen.” Instead of offering the player menus of quests or options, their game would seem to flow as naturally as life.

When Mateas, still a graduate student, told his adviser what they intended, the adviser replied that such a game would take a team of ten people ten years to build. The technology didn’t exist. Commercial game design often employs teams of dozens, and here were two guys, one a grad student and the other self-employed (Stern eventually quit his job to work on the game full-time), expecting to build a whole new kind of game with their own four hands and no budget to speak of.

Before they could build the game, they had to build a new programming language:

They spent more than two years constructing what they called ABL (for “A Behavior Language”), which encodes and controls virtual actors. “The actors’ minds are written in ABL,” Mateas explains. ABL itself has a sort of mind: enough artificial intelligence to decide how a particular character might, for example, simultaneously mix a drink, walk across the room, and yell at her husband, as a human actor could do.

That done, they built, again from scratch, another piece of AI, which they call a drama manager. It is a sort of artificial dramaturge and director, which looks at what the player and characters are doing and makes plot and dialogue choices intended to ratchet up and then release dramatic tension. Then they built a natural-language engine, which “listens” to what the player types in, looking for emotional and dramatic cues that the in-game characters can react to.

Influenced by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, they decided to drop the player into a marital crisis:

They hired actors to record five hours of dialogue, raw material from which the drama manager would build twenty minutes of game play.

In the end, they accomplished, they reckon, about 30 percent of what they had hoped to do. “We shot for the stars in hopes of getting to the moon,” says Stern, “and we made it into orbit.” In July 2005, standing together over Stern’s computer in Portland, they pressed the button that “shipped,” over the Internet, a new game called Façade.

After watching the trailer, I’m not sure they needed video — or even audio — to pull off the concept:

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Fortress of the Assassins

Friday, October 5th, 2007

The Fortress of the Assassins seems like something out of a bad fantasy story:

The Hashshashin were formed by Hassan-i-Sabah, a follower of the Isma’ili sect of Shi’ite Islam. Hassan left his home in Cairo over a succession dispute between two heirs to the Fatimid Caliphate. After choosing the wrong heir to support, Hassan found himself escaping to Persia after spending a short period in a political prison. Determined to avenge himself upon the Fatimids while also wiping out his traditional Sunni enemies, Hassan sought and found the ideal stronghold: the fortress of Alamut, also known as “The Eagle’s Nest.” Located northwest of Tehran, just south of the Caspian Sea, Alamut was an imposing sight. Nestled atop a 2,100m mountain with only one near-vertical approach to the fortress, the Eagle’s Nest was nearly impregnable.

Perhaps you’ve heard that the assassins earned their name by consuming hashish:

Only conjecture and myth remain to explain the origins of the Assassins’ name. Some theories link the name to the drug hashish, supposedly taken before battle or as initiation into the cult. A more probable competing theory is that the name is derived from the name of their leader Hassan-i-Sabah, since “Hashshashin” literally means “followers of Hassan.” The name itself was a derogatory term used by Europeans to describe the supposedly hashish-using sect. The term “assassin” most likely comes from a pet name Hassan had for his followers: Assassiyun, or “people who are faithful to the foundation of the faith.” The Assassins preferred to call themselves fedayeen. The word, Arabic for “one who is ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause,” was co-opted by groups in Palestine, Armenia, Iraq and Iran for their own organizations during numerous conflicts in the 20th century.

Plus ça change…

This story should be familiar to anyone who’s seen Conan the Barbarian:

Two men in the year 1092 stood on the ramparts of a medieval castle — the Eagle’s Nest — perched high upon the crags of the Persian mountains: the personal representative of the Emperor and the veiled figure who claimed to be the incarnation of God on earth. Hasan, son of Sabah, Sheikh of the Mountains and leader of the Assassins, spoke: “You see that devotee standing guard on yonder turret-top? Watch!”

He made a signal. Instantly the white-robed figure threw up his hands in salutation, and cast himself two thousand feet into the foaming torrent which surrounded the fortress.

“I have seventy thousand men — and women — throughout Asia, each one of them ready to do my bidding. Can your master, Malik Shah, say the same? And he asks me to surrender to his sovereignty! This is your answer. Go!”

The historical assassins were fanatical terrorists, not super-stealthy proto-ninjas:

Eschewing weapons that allowed possible escape, the Hashshashin preferred to kill up close, with a dagger, and preferably in public. Many targets were assassinated inside a mosque during Friday prayer. Like the modern terrorist, much of the mystique of the Assassins was the fear they instilled in their enemies, and their seemingly endless pursuit of their marks. By murdering in public, they assured the story would travel quickly. It mattered little that the assassin himself, exposed and vulnerable after the attack, usually died at the hands of nearby guards; his mission was accomplished and his place in heaven sealed.

Posted in Media, War | No Comments »

Hello, My Name Is Bob, and I Check My Email While on the Toilet

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Ken Yarmosh notes that in many recovery programs, one of the first steps to overcoming an addiction is to admit there is a problem — “Hello, My Name Is Bob, and I Check My Email While on the Toilet”:

The Internet seems like an infinite source of information and knowledge, yet we often allow it and other digital technology to be infinitely distracting. Cell phones, e-mail, and IM are tried and true digital distractions. Today, that’s advanced to satellite television, social networks, and text messaging. These technologies create a sense of urgency due to their instantaneous or mobile natures. We’ve allowed the dings, buzzes, and chimes to interrupt everything from meals, meetings, and movies. We’ve yielded to urgency or perhaps better put, been fooled into believing that next e-mail, phone call, headline update, or text message is indeed urgent.

In 1967, Charles Hummel wrote an essay about the “tyranny of the urgent,” where his point was not that we have insufficient time to accomplish tasks but rather that we prioritize the urgent over the important:

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

Since his essay was written in a less digital world, Hummel references the impact of the telephone on the urgent, “A man’s home is no longer his castle; it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because the telephone breaches the walls with imperious demands.” The latter part of the sentence could now read, “it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because cable, satellite, Internet, cell phones, etc. breach the walls with imperious demands.”

The urgent is synonymous with the now. It relates to the “What are you doing?” question of Twitter, ostensibly the most egregious of urgency offenders. In the always-on always-connected urgent world, so much time can be spent “keeping up” with new stories, new e-mails, new text messages, and new updates of various types that “keeping up” becomes a task itself. In fact, it teeters on becoming the task of the day; the news of our lives never stops.

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New plastic is strong as steel, transparent

Friday, October 5th, 2007

New plastic is strong as steel, transparent:

It’s made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue.

Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it “plastic steel,” but the new material isn’t quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft.

Kotov and other U-M faculty members are authors of a paper on this composite material, “Ultrastrong and Stiff Layered Polymer Nanocomposites,” published in the Oct. 5 edition of Science.

The scientists solved a problem that has confounded engineers and scientists for decades: Individual nano-size building blocks such as nanotubes, nanosheets and nanorods are ultrastrong. But larger materials made out of bonded nano-size building blocks were comparatively weak. Until now.

“When you tried to build something you can hold in your arms, scientists had difficulties transferring the strength of individual nanosheets or nanotubes to the entire material,” Kotov said. “We’ve demonstrated that one can achieve almost ideal transfer of stress between nanosheets and a polymer matrix.”

The researchers created this new composite plastic with a machine they developed that builds materials one nanoscale layer after another.

The robotic machine consists of an arm that hovers over a wheel of vials of different liquids. In this case, the arm held a piece of glass about the size of a stick of gum on which it built the new material.

The arm dipped the glass into the glue-like polymer solution and then into a liquid that was a dispersion of clay nanosheets. After those layers dried, the process repeated. It took 300 layers of each the glue-like polymer and the clay nanosheets to create a piece of this material as thick as a piece of plastic wrap.

Mother of pearl, the iridescent lining of mussel and oyster shells, is built layer-by-layer like this. It’s one of the toughest natural mineral-based materials.

The glue-like polymer used in this experiment, which is polyvinyl alcohol, was as important as the layer-by-layer assembly process. The structure of the “nanoglue” and the clay nanosheets allowed the layers to form cooperative hydrogen bonds, which gives rise to what Kotov called “the Velcro effect.” Such bonds, if broken, can reform easily in a new place.

The Velcro effect is one reason the material is so strong. Another is the arrangement of the nanosheets. They’re stacked like bricks, in an alternating pattern.

“When you have a brick-and-mortar structure, any cracks are blunted by each interface,” Kotov explained. “It’s hard to replicate with nanoscale building blocks on a large scale, but that’s what we’ve achieved.”

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Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience

Friday, October 5th, 2007

In Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience, David Pogue raves about the XO:

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200.

The computer, if you hadn’t already guessed, is the fabled “$100 laptop” that’s been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.

The marketing is equally clever:

O.L.P.C. slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

Let’s look at the technology:

In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges — versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.

The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That’s one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.

Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO’s color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it’s almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.

The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup — even when there’s no Internet connection.

With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos — color-coded to differentiate them — represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO’s visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)

This feature has some astonishing utility. If only one laptop has an Internet connection, for example, the others can get online, too, thanks to the mesh network. And when O.L.P.C. releases software upgrades, one laptop can broadcast them to other nearby laptops.

Some other clever bits:

The built-in programs are equally clever. There’s a word processor, Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games (clones of Tetris and Connect 4), three music programs, a painting application, a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents.

There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)

There’s real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the computer itself. Many nations in XO’s market have few natural resources, and the global need for information workers grows with every passing day.

Most of the XO’s programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you’re word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you’re doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You’ve never seen anything like it.

The article includes a short video.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Server farms go solar

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Server farms go solar:

Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

That’s why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for “affordable Internet services online”) has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation.

To slash energy consumption, AISO.net switched from 120 individual servers to four IBM blades running virtualization software that lets one computer do the work of multiple machines. The cooling system cranks up for only about 10 minutes an hour, and when the outside temperature drops to 60 degrees, air is sucked into the building to cool the servers. Solar tubes built into the roof illuminate the facility’s interior.

The service is attracting plenty of eco-conscious clients. Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts were webcast on AISO.net’s servers in July. And San Diego startup GreenestHost is reselling AISO.net’s services to mom-and-pop website operators who want to go carbon-neutral. “Small data centers could easily start to adapt and make changes like this,” says AISO.net co-founder Phil Nail, who claims the project cost about $100,000.

His monthly electric bills, once as high as $3,000, have dropped to zero. Larger data centers can’t match that. But Sun Microsystems did recently slash power consumption 61 percent by consolidating its Silicon Valley servers into a single state-of-the-art facility. And IBM BladeCenter VP Alex Yost sees growing demand for energy-efficient servers like the ones AISO.net uses. “It’s an enormous economic opportunity,” he says.

The project cost $100,000, but the real question is, How much more did this data center cost than the alternative? That’s the number we need to compare against saving $3,000 per month.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

The kopy kat kids

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Robert Levine of Business 2.0 calls them the kopy kat kids:

The Samwer brothers never been shy about borrowing ideas. The first company the Cologne-born trio founded was a German-language version of eBay. Later, as venture capitalists, they invested in European startups that were direct knockoffs of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The brothers Samwer (Alexander, 36; Oliver, 34; and Mark, 32) are unapologetic about their fast-follower tactics — mostly because they work. Alando.de, the eBay clone they launched in January 1999, was snapped up five months later by eBay itself — for a cool $50 million. And they had early money in StudiVZ, a two-year-old European Facebook clone that reportedly fetched more than $100 million when it sold to publishing company Holtzbrinck earlier this year.

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Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets

Friday, October 5th, 2007

The biological parallels are startling. Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets:

Old style worms — Sasser, Slammer, Nimda — were written by hackers looking for fame. They spread as quickly as possible (Slammer infected 75,000 computers in 10 minutes) and garnered a lot of notice in the process. The onslaught made it easier for security experts to detect the attack, but required a quick response by antivirus companies, sysadmins and users hoping to contain it. Think of this type of worm as an infectious disease that shows immediate symptoms.

Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

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Why do lions appear on coats of arms even though Europe didn’t have any?

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Why do lions appear on coats of arms even though Europe didn’t have any?

Lions once ranged more widely than any other land mammal. While there were none in Europe during the middle ages (they had become extinct in Greece, their last European outpost, by 100 AD), they survived in considerable numbers in the Middle East and North Africa. Medieval Europeans had regular contact with these areas, and presumably with lions, via trade and (in the middle east) via pilgrimages and the crusades. The last middle eastern and north African lions weren’t wiped out until this century.

But even if medieval Europeans had had no contact with the big cats at all, they’d probably still have had a thing about lions. Lions show up in the art of China, after all, even though none has ever roamed there. Lions early on attained mythic stature and became embedded in the culture, after which point it didn’t much matter if the real thing was around or not. No animal has been given more attention in art and literature. C.A.W. Guggisberg, in his classic book Simba, says the lion is referred to 130 times in the Bible. The lion can be found in stone-age cave drawings and no doubt has been considered king of beasts since the dawn of man.

The high regard in which lions traditionally have been held to a large extent accounts for their greatly reduced numbers today. They have always been considered the premier game beast and men have slaughtered them in vast numbers to prove their manliness. But it seems certain lions would survive in human recollection as a symbol of nobility and courage even if, as may well happen, all living specimens were destroyed.

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UC Berkeley on YouTube

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

UC Berkeley has put courses up on YouTube. I may have to watch Physics 10 – Physics for Future Presidents:

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U.S. labs mishandling deadly germs

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

U.S. labs mishandling deadly germs:

American laboratories handling the world’s deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing steadily as more labs across the country are approved to do the work.

At least the mishaps get reported — and they’re darkly comical:

In Rockville, Md., ferret No. 992, inoculated with bird flu virus, bit a technician at Bioqual Inc. on the right thumb in July. The worker was placed on home quarantine for five days and directed to wear a mask to protect others.

An Oklahoma State University lab in Stillwater in December could not account for a dead mouse inoculated with bacteria that causes joint pain, weakness, lymph node swelling and pneumonia. The rodent — one of 30 to be incinerated — was never found, but the lab said an employee “must have forgotten to remove the dead mouse from the cage” before the cage was sterilized.

In Albuquerque, N.M., an employee at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute was bitten on the left hand by an infected monkey in September 2006. The animal was ill from an infection of bacteria that causes plague. “When the gloves were removed, the skin appeared to be broken in 2 or 3 places,” the report said. The worker was referred to a doctor, but nothing more was disclosed.

In Fort Collins, Colo., a worker at a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility found, in January 2004, three broken vials of Russian spring-summer encephalitis virus. Wearing only a laboratory coat and gloves, he used tweezers to remove broken glass and moved the materials to a special container. The virus, a potential bio-warfare agent, could cause brain inflammation and is supposed to be handled in a lab requiring pressure suits that resemble space suits. The report did not say whether the worker became ill.

Other reports describe leaks of contaminated waste, dropped containers with cultures of bacteria and viruses, and defective seals on airtight containers. Some recount missing or lost shipments, including plague bacteria that was supposed to be delivered to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 2003. The wayward shipment was discovered eventually in Belgium and incinerated safely.

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Life can be sweeter if you cut out the sugar

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

Life can be sweeter if you cut out the sugar — and the vitamins:

The German team used a chemical that blocked the worms’ ability to process glucose in a treatment that extended their life span by up to 25 percent, the equivalent of 15 years in humans.

The worms unable to depend on glucose increased energy power sources in certain cells for fuel. That activity produced more free radicals, which in turn generated enzymes that strengthened long-time protection against the harmful molecules, Ristow said.

However, antioxidants and vitamins given to some worms erased these benefits by neutralizing free radicals and preventing the body from generating the defenses, Ristow said.

“These latter findings tentatively suggest that the widespread use of antioxidants as human food supplements may exert undesirable effects,” the researchers wrote.

Living organisms are complex systems.

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World’s Fastest Way to Kill Yourself

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

I’ve been wondering why no one has introduced an electric street bike, like a two-wheeled Tesla. Now it looks like someone has developed a ludicrously fast electric drag-racing bike, and Christopher Null calls it the World’s Fastest Way to Kill Yourself:

I’m a big proponent of electric vehicles, and I lust after the Tesla Roadster as much as anyone else. But lately, new battery and ultracapacitor technology has gotten inventors a little greedy. Enter Bill Dube, a scientist who devised an electric motorcycle he calls the KillaCycle… which can go from 0 to 60 in 0.97 seconds. Just how “killa” is it? So killa it smashed Dube into a minivan when he tried to demonstrate its awesome speed at this week’s Wired NextFest.

A little part of me wonders, Is this a brilliant marketing ploy?

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The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Bryan Caplan once again discusses The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters — the anti-market bias, the anti-foreign bias, the make-work bias, and the pessimistic bias:

People tend, for example, to see profits as a gift to the rich. So unless you perversely pity the rich more than the poor, limiting profits seems like common sense.

Yet profits are not a handout but a quid pro quo: If you want to get rich, you have to do something people will pay for. Profits give incentives to reduce production costs, move resources from less-valued to more-valued industries, and dream up new products. This is the central lesson of The Wealth of Nations: The “invisible hand” quietly persuades selfish businessmen to serve the public good. For modern economists, these are truisms, yet teachers of economics keep quoting and requoting this passage. Why? Because Adam Smith’s thesis was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and it remains counterintuitive today.

A prejudice similar to the one against profit has dogged interest, from ancient Athens to modern Islamabad. Like profit, interest is not a gift but a quid pro quo: The lender earns interest in exchange for delaying his consumption. A government that successfully stamped out interest payments would be no friend to those in need of credit, since that policy would crush lending as well.

Anti-market biases lead people to misunderstand and reject even policies they should, given their preferences for end results, support. For example, the Princeton economist Alan Blinder blames opposition to tradable pollution permits on anti-market bias. Why let people “pay to pollute,” when we can force them to cease and desist?

The textbook answer is that tradable permits get you more pollution abatement for the same cost. The firms able to cut their emissions cheaply do so, selling their excess pollution quotas to less flexible polluters. End result: more abatement bang for your buck. But noneconomists, including relatively sophisticated policy insiders, disagree. In his 1987 book Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, Blinder discusses a fascinating survey of 63 environmentalists, congressional staffers, and industry lobbyists. Not one could explain economists’ standard rationale for tradable permits.

The second most prominent avatar of anti-market bias is monopoly theories of price. Economists acknowledge that monopolies exist. But the public habitually makes monopoly a scapegoat for scarcity. The idea that supply and demand usually control prices is hard to accept. Even in industries with many firms, noneconomists treat prices as a function of CEO intentions and conspiracies.

Historically, it has been especially common for the public to pick out middlemen as uniquely vicious “monopolists.” Look at these parasites: They buy products, “mark them up,” and then resell us the “exact same thing.” Economists have a standard response. Transportation, storage, and distribution are valuable services—a fact that becomes obvious whenever you need a cold drink in the middle of nowhere. Like most valuable services, they are not costless. The most that is reasonable to ask, then, is not that middlemen work for free, but that they face the daily test of competition.

One specific price, the price for labor, is often thought to be the result of conspiracy: capitalists joining forces to keep wages at the subsistence level. More literate defenders of this fallacy point out that Adam Smith himself worried about employer conspiracies, overlooking the fact that in Smith’s time high transportation and communication costs left workers with far fewer alternative employers.

In the Third World, of course, the number of employment options is often substantially lower than in developed countries. But if there really were a vast employer conspiracy to hold down wages, the Third World would be an especially profitable place to invest. Query: Does investing your life savings in poor countries seem like a painless way to get rich quick? If not, you at least tacitly accept economists’ sad-but-true theory of Third World poverty: Its workers earn low wages because their productivity is low, due partly to lower skill levels and partly to anti-growth public policies.

Collusion aside, the public’s implicit model of price determination is that businesses are monopolists of variable altruism. If a CEO feels greedy when he wakes up, he raises his price—or puts low-quality merchandise on the shelves. Nice guys charge fair prices for good products; greedy scoundrels gouge with impunity for junk. It is only a short step for market skeptics to add “…and nice guys finish last.”

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GOP Is Losing Grip On Core Business Vote

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

The GOP is losing its grip on the core business vote:

In an interview, Mr. Greenspan noted: “I was brought up in the Republican Party of [Barry] Goldwater. He was for fiscal restraint and for deregulation, for open markets, for trade. Social issues were not a critical factor.” Today’s Republican party, he added, has “fundamentally been focusing on how to maintain political power, and my question is, for what purpose?”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lost some Republican Party support because of his socially liberal stands and his proposals on global warming and universal health care. But those stands have made him more popular generally in the state, while his party is less so. Last month, at the state Republicans’ convention, he sounded an alarm. Noting that California Republicans have lost 370,000 registered voters since 2005, the former actor said, “We are dying at the box office.” The voters that Republicans need, Mr. Schwarzenegger argued, “often hold conservative views on fiscal policy and law-and-order issues, while taking more liberal stands on social and environmental issues.”

I don’t expect to see Greenspan in an “Exhume Goldwater” t-shirt anytime soon.

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