Reading things like this on Wikipedia make me wonder about what the configuration of the US will look like after the inevitable break-up at some point in the future:
New Jersey is sandwiched between two large cities: New York City in the northeast and Philadelphia in the southwest; Benjamin Franklin called her "a barrel tapped at both ends". South Jersey is the area within the Philadelphia sphere of influence, whereas North Jersey is the area within New York City's influence.
Google has recently launced a campaign to lobby the FCC to free up radio spectrum currently used as whitespace between channels. The main opponents of the move seem to be high-end audio equipment manufacturers, who say that interference would be much more common and difficult to deal with if the space were free to be used by any device.
Ultimately, though, the problem is not insurmountable – technological solutions do exist:
Meanwhile, companies are preparing for the worst. For instance, Lectrosonics is now offering a wider range of frequencies for its wireless microphones.
Until last year, the company's wireless microphones spanned a range of 537 MHz to 768 MHz. Now that a part of that band has been auctioned off, the company has reworked its devices to operate in the 470 MHz to 691 MHz spectrum. It has also added another band, the 944 MHz to 952 MHz spectrum, to the mix.
Those changes haven’t been easy. Over the course of a year, Lectrosonics reallocated engineering resources and spent "several thousand dollars" getting each new product certified by the FCC.
"We have a limited amount of engineering resources and there are hard costs such as FCC licenses that we have had to get," says Winkler.
It's interesting how one of the big costs – FCC licenses – are not reflective of inherent technological issues, but rather the bureaucratic process for allocating spectrum.
Of course, the spectrum itself has no hard limit on use, and can theoretically be divided infinitely. Someone at Intel rebuts broadcasters' claims that allowing the whitespace between channels to be used would damage reception of existing channels by pointing out that the aforementioned audio devices already use the spectrum in question (though broadcasters obviously have bigger reasons to fear competition). The infinite divisibility argument and the idea that individuals can successfully defend their airspace using technology without resorting to top-down allocation are the rationales behind the open spectrum movement.
Google has reason to advocate such a policy, since they are very strong on content but are choked by the monopoly on wireless delivery in America and abroad. Obviously they believe that small amounts of the existing bandwidth, if left free to anyone to use, could be successfully developed and eventually used by Google to push content to consumers while bypassing the traditional wireless gatekeepers. Many hardware companies supports open spectrum, as increasing the ubiquity of wireless communications would increase demand for wireless devices and software.
Normally I wouldn't waste time trying to debunk Naomi Klein, but her use of the term "capitalism" to describe decidedly statist policies has really been getting to me lately. In an article for The Nation called "Disaster Capitalism, State of Extortion" she again pulls what I like to call "pulling a Naomi Klein" – she berates the Bush administration for its obeisance to markets, admits that it's interfering with markets, and concludes capitalism is therefore the problem. The article is a bit schizophrenic (but then again, when are here thoughts not?), but focuses on three main issues: oil in Iraq, oil in Anwar, and the food crisis.
On Iraqi oil, apparently she thinks that no-bid contracts are the paragon of capitalism, and even that these uncompetitive contracts "will raise more money" – but how handing over concessions to a company without looking for higher bidders will raise more money, she never explains. Furthermore, she never explains why a capitalist – that is, someone with a single-minded drive for profit – wouldn't put a contract out for competitive bidding. On Anwar she makes a little more sense, saying that the resources up there are miniscule compared to the global market for oil.
But on food prices, she again loses it. Despite a leaked report by the World Bank that says the rises in food prices are largely due to pro-ethanol, anti-capitalist state intervention in agriculture, she conveniently ignores the fact that capitalism is obviously the solution to the food crisis, not the problem (Raționalitate on food here). She goes on a little rant about genetically modified crops, saying "there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them." This might be true (though I kind of doubt it), but if it were, then what's the problem? Has the Bush administration been forcing farmers to use GM crops? If they're so ineffective, then wouldn't those greedy profit seekers not use them? And in the same breath that she deprecates GM crops, she berates corporations for patenting those oh-so-ineffective crops and depriving others of their use. Although attacking intellectual property as it relates to food genetics is certainly justified, she implicitly associates intellectual property with a free market agenda, despite the divide among libertarians on whether IP is justified (and, hence, whether or not it qualifies as "capitalist"). Those who come out (to some degree or another) against IP range from the traditionally libertarian to the hard-core anarcho-capitalists (not to mention myself), though you'd have no way of knowing that from her article.
Naomi Klein almost always has legitimate points, but she's often profoundly confused about the difference between capitalism and statism. What she calls "disaster capitalism" (a favorite topic of hers – she even wrote a book about it) is more accurately termed state capitalism, but don't count on Naomi to be able to discern distinctions so subtle.
Edit: Cato actually has a takedown of Klein's aforementioned book here if you're interested – I haven't read her book, and I've only skimmed this article, but from what I've read of Klein's, debunking her is a job that anyone with half a brain could do pretty well.
There's an excellent article in this coming weekend's NY Times Magazine in which a reporter follows around a "human-behavior researcher" or "user anthropologist" at Nokia. Basically, he travels around the world to discover how people use their phones and what Nokia could do to make them sell better. His work mainly is focused on the Third World, it being the place with the largest untapped market for cell phones. It's full of fascinating anecdotes, and reminds you of the power of something that seems as benign as a cell phone. There's a lot that's fascinating about this article, but this is what I found the most intriguing:
One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”
The fact that one would be surprised at the spending habit's of another seems obvious: human desire and exchange is complex, so complex that we cannot hope to possibly be able to understand it all. This is precisely the reason that communism could never work even under the most helpful conditions: no one can possibly allocate goods as well as the market. And yet, in development, people are so often focused on introducing certain things into people's lives, be it safe drinking water of access to healthcare. And yet, when people make decisions with their own money, they spend it on cell phone minutes!
Also, this makes me feel more optimistic about Somalia, because despite its so-often derided status as a stateless wasteland, it has some of the cheapest calling rates and competitive telecom markets in Africa.
In continuing with my favorite topic, Somalia, I noticed a story on the nytimes.com about Somalia. Normally stories about Somalia are about some failed initiative or outbreak of violence between government/non-government troops, but they don't really do justice to the smallness of the the power of the "government." This story does – it says that the government lives on $19 million per annum (the rest siphoned away from corruption). And it alludes to the fact that the Transitional Federal Government doesn't control much land, but doesn't do justice to the situation by stating that "in many ways, Somalia is not a state at all, but more a lawless space between its neighbors and the sea." That's a gross simplification – much of the land (especially the produce urban areas) are under the control of governments, just not the federal government. Nomadic Somalis follow the xeer, the same code they've followed since before the Europeans. Northern Somalia is divided among the governments of Somaliland and Puntland, with weak albeit present reach. They are much less violent than the south, and for the most part have been since the start of anarchy around 1990. And anyway, the conflict is not among the traditional nomads of Somalia, but rather between invading forces and their reactions, the Islamists.
Correctly, the Times points out the failed policies of American intervention, UN intervention, and American-backed Ethiopian intervention (the current demon). However, it's reflecting only its own ignorance when it declares that "[t]he looming failure is making many people here and abroad question the strategy of installing the transitional government by force." The implication is that there was some doubt in Somalis' minds as to what any form of government, imposed by locals or foreigners, would be like for them. Somali businessmen don't have ideological commitments and consistently side with whoever will protect their business, and would be impossible to capture in the form of a permanent tax base. Somalis haven't supported the colonial powers, diaspora-backed political democracy, American-backed dictatorship, Soviet-backed dictatorship, UN-backed political democracy, or American/Ethiopian-backed political democracy. At the moment the Islamists have sway, but that seems to be a reaction to the Ethiopian invasion. Given the history and the relative mildness of Somali Islam, the Somalis would likely chafe under the Islamists if the Ethiopians withdrew.
Finally, the Times makes the eternal Somali gaffe, when it implies that anarchy in Somalia has been brutally worse than under Siad Barre and scientific socialism in the decades before: "Sometimes it seems that if anything binds this country together, it is scar tissue." This is nonsense – the Somalis have an incredibly rich culture and civilization, with a functioning and unique justice system and generally growing wealth. According to a paper called "Better off Stateless" by Peter Leeson published in 2006, key indicators of welfare in Somali have largely risen in the period since the collapse of Siad Barre's state. Infant mortality is down, underweight births per capita declined 80%, extreme poverty is down more than 15 percentage points, and access to sanitation and healthcare is up significantly. Somalia has cheap, accessible, and competitive internet and mobile phone markets as well as competitive private low-cost air carriers. Education is relatively well-provisioned by the private market, and Somalia now has a higher university enrollment than under the Barre regime.
The Times and the media in general must emerge from their paradigmatic shell of always looking to governments for indicators of society. While this might work okay in Western countries where much of the civil and social discourse is in some way filtered through government, the model breaks down for countries like Somalia where foreign and non-governmental entities and institutions are much more important to ordinary Somalis than the supposed central government.
