The satel­lite pho­tos used by Google Earth are around five years old, at least for the LA area, which makes it pos­si­ble to see some inter­est­ing build­ings which no longer exist. Here is a photo of the Ambas­sador Hotel, a famous LA land­mark which was destroyed last year to make room for a low secu­rity prison gov­ern­ment school complex.

Why Google will stay in China, despite “evil­ness”.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blog­ger]

I ques­tion the entire notion that doing busi­ness in China is “evil” because the gov­ern­ment of China is evil. Of course it is; it’s a gov­ern­ment, and all gov­ern­ments are evil! Focus­ing on that over­looks two very impor­tant things:

1. The Chi­nese peo­ple aren’t evil, they’re ordi­nary peo­ple liv­ing in a coun­try which is rapidly becom­ing more capitalistic–more so, in fact, than many of the so-called “free” countries.
2. None of the peo­ple com­plain­ing about doing busi­ness with China ever crit­i­cize Google or other com­pa­nies for doing busi­ness with the gov­ern­ment of the United States. Sure, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has done some really hor­ri­ble things in the past, but in the present, the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ably more evil, and Google is one of the very few com­pa­nies which has even tried to stand up to them.

New Hamp­shire Man Will Shoot Tax Col­lec­tors; Calls Come for Sup­port­ers.

Ed Brown has received mul­ti­ple felony con­vic­tions for income tax eva­sion. After try­ing to take up his case in court, he and his wife believe that fed­eral agents will storm their 110 acre home, which is like a fortress com­plete with watch tow­ers and its own sup­ply of elec­tric­ity should the gov­ern­ment try to cut off the Browns’ power.

Accord­ing to Lau­ren Canario,

“In speech Ed Brown takes his ideals seri­ously. He explains his con­cepts of good and evil in a con­fi­dent and patient tone, as if teach­ing an appren­tice. He showed me the real­is­tic paint­ings dec­o­rat­ing his spa­cious home: a shin­ing medieval knight bow­ing to be dubbed by a princess; a 19^th cen­tury man and woman walk­ing together; a mother and child that seemed illu­mi­nated by emo­tion rather than light. He seems to have lived his life believ­ing chivalry, love and honor were pos­si­ble, but now events have con­vinced him that he may have to die to uphold his ideals, and he accepts his pos­si­ble vio­lent fate with composure.”

Oth­ers are com­ing to sup­port Brown. Some with guns, oth­ers with cam­eras or signs in the event of another Waco mas­sacre. Still oth­ers are send­ing let­ters of sup­port, flags, and are writ­ing the sheriff’s office to ask the local police not to harm him.

It could be months before gov­ern­ment agents try to enter his com­pound, since Brown is deter­mined not to be taken to jail alive.

Here’s a link to the story, which also has infor­ma­tion on how to sup­port Brown.

Here’s a link to other devel­op­ments as they occur.

Let’s hope this all ends non-violently, and that the crim­i­nal invaders come to their senses before attack­ing an old man and his wife who ques­tion the legal­ity of the income tax.

[Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

This post tends to con­firm my ini­tial impres­sion, that Ed Brown is a modern-day Don Quixote. I can’t imag­ine that there’s any chance he’ll be left in peace, so I can only hope that he man­ages to die quickly. Nobody deserves to be taken alive by the Evil Empire, but it would be a par­tic­u­larly hor­ri­ble fate for such an ide­al­is­tic man.

Buy­ing Songs From Other Coun­tries On iTMS. It’s no secret that record com­pa­nies like to sell dif­fer­ent mate­r­ial in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. A quick com­par­i­son of var­i­ous global Ama­zon sites ver­sus the import sec­tion of your favorite local record store will give you a taste of what you’re miss­ing. Slate has an inter­est­ing, Japan-focused arti­cle detail­ing some of the cool tunes you haven’t had a chance to hear. They also post an inno­v­a­tive work-around used by iTMS cus­tomers for instant gratification:

While iTunes Japan pegs for­eign unde­sir­ables from their credit card num­bers, it can’t screen fake Japan­ese addresses pro­vided by pre­paid iTunes Card users. There’s a small but ardent under­ground econ­omy among Amer­i­cans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japan­ese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo con­ve­nience stores or openly sold online.

[Mac­Slash]

It’s an inter­est­ing workaround, but not ter­ri­bly prac­ti­cal for the gen­eral pub­lic. It’s ironic that the idiocy of the record labels in try­ing to restrict peo­ple from buy­ing music based on where they live can eas­ily be defeated by sim­ply down­load­ing the music with­out pay­ing from one of the many pirate site.

Ever wanted to get away from it all? I spot­ted this eBay list­ing for a 160 acre lot in Panamint Val­ley, Cal­i­for­nia. This isn’t even the mid­dle of nowhere–it’s more like a for­got­ten back cor­ner of nowhere. It’s the next val­ley west of the (much bet­ter known) Death Val­ley, and has a cur­rent pop­u­la­tion of (as near as I can tell) twelve. I gather nearby Panamint City does still attract tourists, though, so the tran­sient pop­u­la­tion might go up by a dozen or two at var­i­ous times.

I have to admit, if I wasn’t sure the price will be boosted into the stratos­phere by the real estate bub­ble, I’d be tempted.

Human­ity many times has had sad expe­ri­ence of super­pow­er­ful police forces.… As soon as [the police] slip out from under the firm thumb of a sus­pi­cious local tri­bune, they become arbi­trary, mer­ci­less, a law unto them­selves. They think no more of jus­tice, but only of estab­lish­ing them­selves as a priv­i­leged and envied élite. They mis­take the atti­tude of nat­ural cau­tion and uncer­tainty of the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion as admi­ra­tion and respect, and presently they start to swag­ger back and forth, jin­gling their weapons in mega­lo­ma­niac eupho­ria. Peo­ple there­upon become not mas­ters, but ser­vants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggre­gate of uni­formed crim­i­nals, the more bane­ful in that their posi­tion is unchal­lenged and sanc­tioned by law. The police men­tal­ity can­not regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expe­di­tiously as pos­si­ble. Pub­lic con­ve­nience or dig­nity means noth­ing; police pre­rog­a­tives assume the sta­tus of divine law. Sub­mis­sive­ness is demanded. If a police offi­cer kills a civil­ian, it is a regret­table cir­cum­stance: the offi­cer was pos­si­bly overzeal­ous. If a civil­ian kills a police offi­cer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other busi­ness comes to a stand­still until the per­pe­tra­tor of this most das­tardly act is found out. Inevitably, when appre­hended, he is beaten or oth­er­wise tor­tured for his intol­er­a­ble pre­sump­tion. The police com­plain that they can­not func­tion effi­ciently, that crim­i­nals escape them. Bet­ter a hun­dred unchecked crim­i­nals than the despo­tism of one unbri­dled police force.

Jack Vance, The Star King, 1964 (later included in The Demon Princes)

I just bought a Sony ICF-SW7600GR short­wave receiver. It’s very small and light, about the size of a paper­back book. It runs on four AA bat­ter­ies, or an optional power adapter that wasn’t included.

I’ve only had it for a day, but so far it seems to work pretty well. There’s no recep­tion inside my apart­ment, between the con­struc­tion of the build­ing and all the elec­tron­ics, so I took it up to the roof for a quick test. Using just the built-in tele­scop­ing antenna (with­out the clip-on wire that comes with it) I was able to pick up KBS World Radio on 9560 kHz, which is broad­cast from Sackville, Canada. That’s clear on the other side of North America–not bad for a three foot antenna!

The Impact of Immi­grant Inno­va­tors. Ramakr­ish­nan writes “The Wall Street Jour­nal is car­ry­ing a report on immi­grant inno­va­tors and entre­pre­neurs. Accord­ing to the piece, nearly a quar­ter of all Cal­i­for­nia star­tups which went into busi­ness between 1995 and 2005 had an immi­grant as a found­ing mem­ber. These busi­nesses, together, employ almost half a mil­lion work­ers and gen­er­ated about $50 bil­lion in sales in the year 2005. The study seems quite top­i­cal, given recent dis­cus­sions in the U.S. cap­i­tal. From the arti­cle: ‘Sup­port­ers of an immi­gra­tion bill are likely to use the study to argue the impor­tance of foreign-born work­ers to the U.S. econ­omy. An immi­gra­tion bill passed by the last Con­gress and heav­ily lob­bied by busi­ness groups would have greatly increased the num­ber of green cards avail­able to skilled work­ers. Busi­ness has long argued that the U.S. schools aren’t turn­ing out enough sci­en­tists, math­e­mati­cians and engi­neers, and that the econ­omy will lose its com­pet­i­tive edge with­out more skilled for­eign workers.’”

[Slash­dot]

I can believe it. There are many small busi­nesses in LA, espe­cially here in Kore­atown where few large chain stores exist, and I’d say around 95% of the ones I’ve been to are owned by immigrants.

RIAA Admits 70 Cent Price is ‘In the Range’. NewYork­Coun­try­Lawyer writes “In its pro­fessed bat­tle to pro­tect the ‘con­fi­den­tial­ity’ of its 70-cents-per-download whole­sale price, the RIAA has now pub­licly filed papers in UMG v. Lin­dor in which it admits that the 70-cents-per-download price claimed by the defen­dant is ‘in the range’.(pdf) From the arti­cle: ‘The pric­ing data really may not be all that secret. Late in 2005, for­mer New York Attor­ney Gen­eral (and cur­rent Gov­er­nor) Eliot Spitzer launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into price fix­ing by the record labels, alleg­ing col­lu­sion between the major labels in their deal­ings with the online music indus­try. Gabriel believes that mak­ing the pric­ing infor­ma­tion pub­lic would ‘impli­cate [sic] very real antitrust con­cerns’ as the labels are not sup­posed to share con­tract infor­ma­tion with one another … Beck­er­man argues in a let­ter to the judge that the only rea­son the labels want to keep this infor­ma­tion con­fi­den­tial is to ‘serve their strate­gic objec­tives for other cases,’ which he says does not rise to the legal thresh­old nec­es­sary for a pro­tec­tive order. The pro­posed order would force the labels to turn over con­tracts with their 12 largest cus­tomers. Most details–such as the iden­ti­ties of the parties–would be kept con­fi­den­tial, but pric­ing infor­ma­tion and vol­ume would not.’”

[Slash­dot]

I’d done some exten­sive research on the iTunes Music Store a few years ago for a musi­cian friend. At the time, 60 cents of the 99 cent per-track charge went to the label and the artist. Exactly how that got split up depended on the label. For music sold via CD Baby, the artist got 54 cents and CD Baby got 6 cents. At the time that was the best deal avail­able for the artists, and no doubt has a lot to do with the fact that most of the inde­pen­dent artists I know uses them. No doubt the split for major labels is much, much worse for the artist.

Are Cops Con­sti­tu­tional? The United States of Amer­ica was founded with­out pro­fes­sional police. Its ear­li­est tra­di­tions and found­ing doc­u­ments evi­denced no con­tem­pla­tion that the power of the state would be imple­mented by omnipresent police forces. On the con­trary, America’s con­sti­tu­tional Framers expressed hos­til­ity and con­tempt for the stand­ing armies of the late eigh­teenth cen­tury, which func­tioned as law enforce­ment units in Amer­i­can cities. The advent of mod­ern polic­ing has greatly altered the bal­ance of power between the cit­i­zen and the state in a way that would have been seen as con­sti­tu­tion­ally invalid by the Framers. The impli­ca­tions of this altered bal­ance of power are far-reaching, and should invite con­sid­er­a­tion by judges and leg­is­la­tors who con­cern them­selves with con­sti­tu­tional ques­tions. [Con­sti­tu­tion Soci­ety]

An inter­est­ing, if long-winded, arti­cle ques­tion­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of mod­ern police. From the hun­dreds of foot­notes, I’d guess that this started out as some kind of aca­d­e­mic paper.