I've Moved

After watching blogspot fall over plenty of times, I have installed MovableType on my own machine and have moved the blog back to http://www.hoffmang.com/. Please update your links. This page should auto-redirect you anyway.

Boxer Supports Armed Pilots

In a rare twist of irony, Barbara Boxer is supporting an armed pilots bill in the Senate.

Can I say that I am pleasantly surprised. Maybe the rumors of her concealed carry permit are true and now that the political climate has shifted toward gun ownership she may be moving back to center? Nah - she probably just flies a lot.

EMusic Adds UMG Music

EMusic has become the first company to make legal MP3 files available from a major label. Somewhat vindicating. Here is one of the first articles out. Hits Magazine has a bit better article, but you may have to register.

Stepping Back From Ideology

There is a car that parks down the street from my house. I see it when I walk my dogs. It is clearly owned by a person who is classically liberal as the person is wearing her ideology on her bumper. I notice it because as I step back from the positions and the ingrained liberal/conservative meme it points out a very funny correlation.

The bumper stickers are:
"Love Animals, don't eat them" and
"If your against abortion, don't have one"

Why is it that the destruction of warm and fuzzy animals for food is bad while the destruction of (soon to be) warm and (not so) fuzzy babies is ok? Don't get me wrong here - I support choice wholeheartedly. I don't however support animal rights vegetarian/veganism though I do support attempts to stop needless animal cruelty... No matter. It just seems ironic to me that those two ideologies are so often found together.

The Two Great Pyramids of the Late 1990's

An excellent article pair on Beyondvalueinvesting.com talks about the telecom and digital media pyramid schemes that came into being. I would even argue that some of the VCs actually recognized this factor and tacitly kept it moving.

This is one set of retrospective criticisms that I fully agree with. I used to argue with a lot of folks who said that B2B was the only place to be. My argument was that those businesses often were not really businesses. At least at EMusic, the dollars we made from real end users were from real end users.

The International Criminal Court

Steven Den Beste has said it far better than I could have. Anyone who questions why the US is unwilling to join the criminal court and would be willing to boycott UN Peacekeeping is willing to suspend both the constitution and the bill of rights.

They kicked us off the human rights council and put Syria on for gosh sakes. We want to trust that entity to mete out justice to American statesmen, soldiers and politicians? I can see Qhadaffi's war crimes complaint about the 1984 F-111 attack now... Does America want to see senile Ronald Reagan stand trial? How about George Bush senior or Clinton for his destruction of an actual pharmaceuticals plant...

The Ecological Restoration

Recently in the news are reports of a study by Mathis Wackernagel that states that humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Reason has a rebuttal showing the impact of technology over time on the efficiency of the use of natural resources. The rebuttal points out both that in the fully industrialized nations, forest are re-growing as moderate to poor farm land is phased out (no thanks to the Bush administration farm bill) based on far more efficient production. It then goes on to show that much of the "problem" is actually based on the assumption that carbon dioxide release is a major cause of global warming, etc.

The conclusion is that most botanists see technology in the form of a bulldozer and not in the form of efficiency. In a nice parallel to the post below, what is happening in the economy is directly seen in the economy's impact on the environment.

Update: A related article in the Spectator which raises the real risk of an ice age and queries that increased CO₂ may be warding it off.

Update II: H.D. Miller has a wonderful fisking of all the Malthusian predictions.