On Div­i­dends and Agency Prob­lems. The invest­ing public’s dis­dain for div­i­dends and fas­ci­na­tion with cap­i­tal growth has a prece­dent. In our last great bub­ble, the 1920s, the same thing hap­pened. Why should com­pa­nies pay out div­i­dends? It is a way for the man­age­ment to prove… [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog: Aus­trian Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­tar­ian Polit­i­cal The­ory]

I’ve com­mented on stock prices and div­i­dends before, and this sup­ports my conclusions.

Aris­tide Flees Haiti; Bush Sends Marines [AP World News]

Just what we need–yet another bunch of troops sent to a for­eign coun­try that is none of our business.

GDP, Mea­sured in Gold. Econ­o­mist Paul Kas­riel looks at the GDP mea­sured not in dol­lars but in gold and finds that it peaked in 2001 has been declin­ing since. Kas­riel says “‘real’ GDP peaked in 2001, and has declined for two suc­ces­sive years since.… [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog: Aus­trian Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­tar­ian Polit­i­cal The­ory]

On this day six years ago Apple can­celled the New­ton. I’m still using the same Mes­sagePad 2100 that I was on that day (although I do have spares, just in case).

Pub­lish­ers Face Prison For Edit­ing Arti­cles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya or Cuba. The U.S. Trea­sury Department’s Office of For­eign Assets Con­trol recently declared that Amer­i­can pub­lish­ers can­not edit works authored in nations under trade embar­goes which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba.

Although pub­lish­ing the arti­cles is legal, edit­ing is a “ser­vice” and the trea­sury depart­ment says it is ille­gal to per­form ser­vices for embar­goed nations. It can be pun­ish­able by fines of up to a half-million dol­lars or jail terms as long as 10 years. (link)

So ren­der­ing any kind of ser­vice to cit­i­zens of cer­tain coun­tries (and that’s what we’re talk­ing about here, not their gov­ern­ments) is now a crime. Laa hawla wa laa quwwata illa bil­lah. What is the world com­ing to? Kudos to the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety and every other group that is stand­ing up against this abhor­rent rule. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

In other words, any­one in the Depart­ment of Defense who edits a report sent by sol­diers or colo­nial bureau­crats in Iraq maybe be impris­oned for up to 10 years because the works are authored in a nation under trade embargo. But of course laws don’t apply to the gov­ern­ment, so I won’t hold my breath wait­ing for it to happen.

Give Me A Break, and Another Break, and Another. New at Rea­son: You paid for John Stossel’s beach house. The well-heeled ABC news­man explains how he and other plu­to­crats game the gov­ern­ment for free money, price sup­ports and other good­ies. [Hit & Run]

Mr. Pres­i­dent, An Aster­oid Impact Is Immi­nent…. As reported by Dr. David White­house of BBC: Some sci­en­tists believed on 13 Jan­u­ary that a 30m object, later des­ig­nated 2004 AS1 [SciS­coop aside — also known as AL00667], had a one-in-four chance of hit­ting the planet within 36 hours. It could have caused local dev­as­ta­tion and the researchers con­tem­plated a call to Pres­i­dent Bush before new data finally showed there was no dan­ger. The pro­ce­dures for rais­ing the alarm in such cir­cum­stances are now being revised. At the time, the president’s team would have been putting the final touches to a speech he was due to make the fol­low­ing day at the head­quar­ters of Nasa, the US space agency. In it he planned to reset the course of manned space­flight, send­ing it back to the Moon and on to Mars, but he could have had some­thing very dif­fer­ent to say. He could have begun by warn­ing the world it was about to be hit by a space rock. Bush would not have known where it would impact — only some­where in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. Experts would have been bounc­ing radar sig­nals off the huge rock as he spoke in order to get more infor­ma­tion about its tra­jec­tory. At about 30m wide, the aster­oid was cos­mic small fry, not the type of thing to wipe out the dinosaurs or threaten our species, but still big enough to cause con­sid­er­able dam­age after explod­ing in the atmos­phere. Poten­tially, the loss of life could have been much worse than 11 Sep­tem­ber. In the end, Bush made no such announce­ment, but astronomers have admit­ted they were on the verge of mak­ing the call. In a paper pre­sented at this week’s Plan­e­tary Pro­tec­tion con­fer­ence in Cal­i­for­nia, vet­eran aster­oid researcher Clark Chap­man calls it a “nine-hour cri­sis”. He explains how word reached the astro­nom­i­cal com­mu­nity of an aster­oid that had just been dis­cov­ered by the twin opti­cal tele­scopes of the Lin­ear auto­mated sky sur­vey in New Mex­ico. [SciS­coop]

I’m not so con­cerned about the pos­si­bil­ity of almost giv­ing a false alarm. What I’d like to know is, if a rock really was going to hit us, would the astronomers at some point tell ordi­nary peo­ple, or would they just tell the President?

Patriot Act Thiev­ery. My wife recently trans­ferred funds from a mutual fund to her bank account to buy a new car (BMW 330 XI). When she checked her bank account to see if the trans­fer had occurred, she noticed that only 55% of… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

The Feds have appar­ently found a new way to vio­late the Fourth Amend­ment. This one looks like a muta­tion of the “civil for­fei­ture” con­cept, where the gov­ern­ment steals your prop­erty with­out ever charg­ing you with a crime.

REAL­ba­sic 5.5 adds Linux, enhances Mac sup­port. REAL Soft­ware Inc. on Wednes­day released REAL­ba­sic 5.5, the lat­est ver­sion of their cross-platform devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment. The addi­tion of Linux to the list of sup­ported plat­forms is a major addi­tion in this release but is by no means the only change, accord­ing to com­pany pres­i­dent and CEO Geoff Perl­man, who recently spoke with Mac­Cen­tral about the new ver­sion. [Mac­Cen­tral]

I’ve been using REAL­ba­sic in var­i­ous small work-related projects for years now, and I’m pleased to see how well it’s developed–and that they still sup­port the MacOS, and not just OS X.

Haiti Rebels: Aris­tide Made Error on Guns [AP World News]

bq. Sit­ting pool­side and fin­ger­ing assault rifles, rebel lead­ers bent on oust­ing Haiti’s pres­i­dent said Mon­day his big mis­take was send­ing them home years ear­lier with their guns. All three have a vendetta against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“We don’t want any more blood­shed. We just want Aris­tide to leave,” Guy Philippe told The Asso­ci­ated Press in an inter­view. He used to be the police chief in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city of 500,000 that rebels seized with lit­tle resis­tance on Sun­day, the biggest prize in their 18-day revolt.

It takes a pretty incom­pe­tent dic­ta­tor to over­look impos­ing gun con­trol. Unfor­tu­nately what­ever dic­ta­tor the rebels install will prob­a­bly not miss the lesson.