Other than reposting links on Facebook and the odd comment to friends, I haven't tried to consolidate my thinking on the "WikiLeaks" situation. It's a complex situation, but the general shape of the issues we should be aware of, as citizens of the U.S. and the European democracies, are becoming clear.

First, I do think it's important to start with a caveat. Whatever we individually believe about WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, "CableGate," and the reaction of governments and corporations, we can't simply dismiss the fact that the content being posted *matters*. I do believe that there are reasons to keep some information restricted. The world would not be a better place if, for example, someone decided to post exact and detailed instructions online for designing the "hard bits" of easily concealable, tactical nuclear weapons. I'm sure we can all think of similar examples of information that (a) once it's known, (b) needs to "not be free." Another way to say this is to make the distinction between the **right** to freedom of speech, and the **right to disclose** specific pieces of information. We can, and should, recognize that the former is an inalienable right in modern democracies, while recognizing that there are valid reasons to restrict the latter. This means, of course, that I've set up an inherent tension between our fundamental rights, and other interests.

With respect to WikiLeaks, the entire global conversation seems to revolve around (a) what other interests might be involved, (b) what responses are appropriate, and (c) for what actions we can hold different classes of individuals responsible. Let's take these in turn.

Interests Involved

There's really three issues here: (a) damage to the U.S. government's ability to project "soft power" through diplomacy, (b) concrete damage to human sources, and (c) disclosure of various corporate entanglements that everyone involved would prefer were less well understood. Clearly, in the initial days of CableGate, what we heard the most was that releasing internal State Department cables would "cripple American diplomacy," and there were even slightly hysterical predictions that Hillary Clinton would fall upon her sword and resign. After the media used that meme to keep ratings high for a day or two, it became clearer that no such thing was likely. It's simply untrue that our ability to negotiate with another country relies on something as trivial as our mutual embarrassment level. Sure, folks are probably going to be more careful about what they write down in the future, but that's about it. The ability of the U.S. to project "soft power" depends upon many things, and a good chunk of the time, it's about the power to affect global economic conditions. This has always been the case, incidentally. Hard power is about the ability of country X to blow you up, soft power is about their ability to be a good customer, supplier, creditor, or borrower. And only incidentally is it about the quality of rhetoric, or periodic bouts of "celebrity power" (as in the early days of Obama's administration when he traveled the world to Beatle-mania style responses). And arguably the only thing that CableGate has done is made public the situation which "insiders" already knew existed with respect to the global soft power distribution around the world. The long lists of "American interests" which include Congolese cobalt mines and Australian snake-venom antidote manufacturing plants underscores this basic truth.

With respect to the second issue, there are definitely going to be disclosures which cause damage to human sources. No amount of redacting will protect virtually everyone named in some of these cables. I'm not saying that every single source is in danger of losing their lives or being tortured, as would be more likely with document dumps from other "three letter acronym" agencies, but of course there's a chance of that. Mostly there's going to be people who can be traced back regardless of redaction who will no longer be trusted, who will lose jobs, who will spend hours being "interviewed" by security services, etc. The problem, from the public's perspective, is that we have no way to know about this, or to judge the true extent of such problems. It is in the interests of the State Department and U.S. government to exaggerate this problem no matter what the true level is, in order to enforce security. So as citizens, we simply need to understand that the problem exists, and make sure that we pressure folks like Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team to provide better and better protection for named individuals. Redaction isn't enough -- "pattern analysis" is going to identify many folks simply because only they could have been in certain places, with access to certain data. Folks who want to follow WikiLeaks and provide similar disclosure/whistleblowing services need to think long and hard about this. The FBI has a witness protection program for organized crime informants for a reason, and that reason applies quite directly to this situation.

The third issue is really a lot more straightforward, from my perspective. Corporations have intimate relationships with governments today, for a variety of purposes, not all of which they prefer to be generally known. The recent story about DynCorp, a defense contractor operating in Afghanistan, essentially "pimping out" young boys to Pushtun men is a case in point. This is precisely the kind of thing that companies, their lobbyists, and pliable government officials regularly sweep under the rug and cry "foul" when it's disclosed. But they cry foul and try to sweep it under the rug precisely because they **know** that it's wrong, and that the vast majority of people in the U.S. and globally will disapprove, and would "throw the bastards in jail" if they could. But leave aside truly criminal, immoral activity for a moment. Focus instead on things like the BP oil spill. Since corporate action resulted in damage to others, and to the public domain, and necessitated a public response, it's hard to see an argument that precise information about the event shouldn't be available to the general public. To my mind, there is frequently not a valid rationale for shutting down something like WikiLeaks simply because they disclose information about private companies and their activities. They cross the line only when disclosing confidential information for which there is no compelling public interest; an example would be disclosure of trade secrets or pre-release designs. That's just commercial espionage, it's not a public service.

Appropriateness of Response

A lot of the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks really has to do with the response of governments and corporations. Unlike previous leaks by Assange and crew, CableGate has triggered a massive and seemingly coordinated global response. Assange was hunted down, possibly on trumped-up charges, and is now in jail and I don't think anybody really expects him to get an impartial, fair trial anywhere on the planet. U.S. lawmakers have been heard calling for the death penalty, a Canadian official called for assassination, as if Assange had put himself well beyond the boundaries of national and international law. In a word, governments around the world moved promptly to classify Assange and his group as terrorists, whether they fit any classical definition of the term or not.

Corporations around the world have moved quickly, while claiming they were under no official coercion, to act as unofficial arms of the government and draw the circle tighter around WikiLeaks and Assange. In general, this has been the most disgusting and shocking part of the entire incident. Every single action here has been a violation of the most basic tenets of the rights guaranteed by the modern developed democracies. Forget for a moment whether Amazon had a legal right to kick out a client without notice or cause. Their action in isolation might be perfectly within their rights, but as part of the overall pattern it's undeniable that governments and corporations simply acted as if WikiLeaks and Assange had been tried and found guilty of specific criminal acts, or had actively declared war. When, in fact, nothing of the sort had occurred. Did the individual who stole the information from State Department computer networks commit a crime? Absolutely. The individual being held is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but the computer forensic evidence appears to be quite strong. If he's tried and convicted, he will deserve the sentence handed down. He broke the law, and quite a serious one.
Did Julian Assange and WikiLeaks break the law? That's a much tougher question, and one that clearly involves a number of loopholes. It's illegal to participate in the dissemination of classified information. But does U.S. law apply to WikiLeaks? Does U.S. law apply if they have servers in other countries and mirror sites in the U.S.? If their content is cached by CDN networks in the U.S.? These are only the beginning of the complexities involved in determining whether WikiLeaks is actually legally liable for posting the content.

Yet governments and corporations universally decided, without delving into these questions at all, that the answer had to be "WikiLeaks is a rogue organization, breaking the law, and thus we can go after them."

What we saw was a massive "immune response" which broke every tenet of justice upon which our societies have purportedly been based for hundreds of years.

It's one thing to go through a legal and judicial process and *then* issue a court order to have Amazon and other internet providers stop providing service. It's quite another for Joe Lieberman to make some calls, yell a bunch, and for everyone to quietly agree that WikiLeaks isn't innocent until proven guilty.

That's unamerican. And un-English, un-French, un-Swiss, etc etc. And we should all be deeply ashamed of ourselves for letting our governments get away with it.

Responsibility of Citizens

In the previous section I pretty much spelled out the responsibility issues for governments, corporations, the original leaker, and the WikiLeaks crew. Here I merely want to highlight one of the more hysterical and probably unconstitutional occurrences of the last couple of weeks. A few weeks back, a journalist friend noted that folks in the Columbia journalism program were being told by sources inside the State Department and U.S. government, that they shouldn't even *look* at the WikiLeaks content, post links about it on social networks, etc. If they did, they endangered their ability to ever work with or for the government.

Think about that. Merely by posting a link to a New York Times story which discussed the content, already freely available around the world, you might endanger your ability to ever work in particular industries or get particular jobs. You've broken no laws merely by **reading the newspaper**, and broken no laws by **sharing a link with friends**, but the government wants you to know that it's going to retaliate by ignoring administrative law governing the hiring of employees and awarding of contracts, etc. In other words, again our government vastly oversteps its authority and power, and ignores our basic freedoms.

Again, that's unamerican. And we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen. 

CableGate didn't teach us very much -- at least so far -- about the world that we didn't already know, if you read the news regularly and pay attention. Some, but not much. The government and corporate response to CableGate is the real story here. And it's a story about how fast, how ugly, and how illegal the **reaction** has been, when a government and corporate sector feel seriously threatened. When they sense that this is a new world that they can't control. We all ought to be thinking long and hard about the reaction to WikiLeaks. And although I disagree strongly with my libertarian friends concerning their understanding of macroeconomics, it's times like this when I realize that they always have a point when they talk about the dangers of concentrated power. WikiLeaks, and the folks who will inevitably follow them, may be the only tool we collectively have for balancing out that power, but only if we eventually take action.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/16/twitters-new-headquarters-as-shown-off-b...

In my status the comment was quoted as follows:

Mark Madsen Quote from the comments on an article about Twitter at Techcrunch (people sensitive to bad language, look away now): "We’ll look back at this era and wonder what the fuck was wrong with us when we praised this piece of shit as the future of tech."

This provoked a few further comments (the Mark Madsens are alternating):

Mike Harrop
That quote is lifted right out of the first articles written about electricity, morse code and the telephone. Granted Twitter is more complex than all three combined, but I'm sure we'll find a use for it.

Mark Madsen
Indeed. Twitter seems like what happens when a couple of geeks take a throw-away tech detail from a Cory Doctorow short story too seriously...

Mark Madsen
Well, I like Twitter, but I like to see the contrarian view expressed in the future historical :-)

And in some sense the comment is right, in that nearly all technology ends up on the scrapheap. Bronze swords, terylene shirts, and VAX-VMS, to name a representative sample.

Mark Madsen
Exactly. Technological development is very much like biological evolution in that respect; lots of variation is created, only a subset survives. Though the reasons why a given subset survives is often little to do with "performance criteria"...Twitter might survive less because it is competitively superior (a hard road, given the lack of business... Read more model) and more because it could "melt" into the infrastructure...

In other words, if we see Twitter as web-enabled asychronous IRC with tagging, persistent identity, and permalinks to posts, it could become the infrastructure for nearly everything "chat like".

 Here's what I've come up with. Without footnotes, paragraphs of justification, attempts to derive each from sound theoretical principles in economics, anthropology, or evolutionary theory. In other words, without any of the stuff I usually say, which tends to appeal only to people "like me" (overly nerdy, overly educated, academic obsessives).

 In other words, a simple platform. This is for people, perhaps like myself, who love liberty and freedom to do what we want with our lives, but expect government to play a role in ensuring a reasonably fair playing field, don't believe that unfettered markets have any way or mechanism for ensuring reasonably fair playing fields given incomplete information and incomplete contracts, but expect government to be kept firmly in check, reasonably efficient, and not squander our collective wealth. It's for people who expect that we'll provide a safety net against ultimate disaster for citizens, but not coddle them so they don't want to contribute to society.

 In other words, for those who want the best of what both American political parties have to offer, with some strongly libertarian views on rights and privacy added into the mix.

 So here goes.

 1. Competition is good because it forces everyone to try to do better, and thus improve the conditions of our lives. Competition doesn't have to be aggressive or socially combative, and often isn't. And it can be taken too far, both in our philosophies and in our actions.

 2. Competition, in the form of a market in which we match buyers and sellers of goods and services, is the best way we've figured out as a species to make sure things which require skills, or only occur in specific places, get distributed to the places and people that need them. With a reasonable degree of efficiency and while providing incentives to those who produce to keep making things we need.

 3. Markets work best when everyone has the information needed to make reasonable decisions about buying and selling. "Best", in this sense, means a roughly pareto-optimal outcome.

 4. Markets, however, are subject to manipulation behind the scenes and via the processes of governmental regulation. Some of these manipulations can be very, very bad, as when private companies make decisions which create hidden risk for everyone else in the marketplace, without disclosing those risks. To some extent, we've seen this in the financial system, credit card industry, and insurance industries.

 5. Some manipulations or interventions in the market can be good; since most of us cannot personally collect the data needed to ensure that a packaged food product is safe, we demand that someone do it on our behalf which is not overly manipulated or accountable to the manufacturers of the products being tested. This is what we expect the FDA to do for us, for example, and most of us would consider some version of such regulation to be a good use of taxation.

 6. Such regulation is key in any number of areas. A good example are public investment markets. Even if we had full, transparent, completely public access to the internal records of all public companies and investment funds, most citizens will lack the expertise along one or more dimensions -- financial, accounting, domain experience for what the company does -- to properly evaluate the veracity of what we're told. Nor do most citizens directly want this responsibility. Instead, we collectively insist that an independent, accountable group which is insulated legally, and if necessary constitutionally, be in charge of validating claims made by public companies, banks, and investment entities. Today we have the SEC and other agencies; these are worth funding and improving.

 7. In other words, markets and regulation are two sides of a coin. Markets should be preferred whenever there's a reasonable expectation that the participants will get a better deal by doing it privately, and if the market can exist without a lot of hidden manipulation. Markets + regulation should be the solution for situations where participants can get a better deal by doing it privately, but need some kind of structure to ensure that buyers get reliable information from sellers -- i.e., where it would be impractical or impossible for a buyer to verify information themselves.

 8. Public projects, used in lieu of markets, are useful primarily in situations where suitable incentives in the private sector don't exist to provide a social good or service that at least a good majority of us believes should be a social service, and that we're willing to be taxed to pay for. Maintaining roads, operating public universities to provide higher education at prices that smaller private schools can't match. And so on.

 9. Most importantly, as citizens I see us as both in competition with, and in cooperation with, each other. Neither predominates. Occasionally we pull together, as we did in WWII or in some of the Depression-era programs, and put aside the competitive impulse for very good reasons. Much of the time, though, it's alright to try to get ahead, and do better for yourself and your family, aim for the goals that will make your own life good. But that doesn't exclude the ability to want to help everyone else too -- through volunteering in our communities, at churches, running for office, or giving to charities.

 10. Being "in it together" means that we should all consider our taxes as the "membership fee" for citizenship and its privileges. We should actually feel good about paying our taxes, because we know we're building a place we want to live with them. That brings me to the next key point:

 11. Being "in it for ourselves" means that, at the same time, we should be concerned that our taxes be spent wisely, and that we control the costs of the public projects we undertake. To the extent that some independent entity, like the SEC is expected to do on Wall Street, would report back to the American people about how its money is truly being spent. Today we have no such independent agency. The OMB isn't it. The closest thing we have is the Congressional Budget Office, but although they report to Congress, they're part of Congress. Really, they report to the people *through* Congress. We need more independence than that, to account for what our elected officials do when we give them money to spend.

 12. Being "in it together" also means we should be willing to help those in need. For many reasons, each to our own. Some, because of religious belief. Some, because we fear that if we were in a similar position, we'd want a helping hand. Some, because we understand that we understand that the highest payoff of all in the Prisoner's Dilemma is for mutual cooperation, and we believe that it's worth trying to overcome the PD occasionally since it improves things for everyone including ourselves. Whatever the reason, we believe we should not leave anyone behind.

 13. At the same time, we accept that there's inequality built into the outcomes of any system which uses competition as a force for improvement and innovation. We can't, and aren't interested in, *eliminating* economic inequality. We're not egalitarians in this regard.

 14. But we also remember that income inequality used to be much less in this country, and that yielded more people going to college and becoming skilled, and that led to more innovation and opportunity, so there's good logic behind trying to find the right incentives and market regulations to keep income inequality under roughly stable conditions -- in other words, not levelling it but not letting it geometrically increase.

 15. Ways to do this are incredibly tricky and fraught with ways to "game the system," and thus our hardest thinking of all has to go into ways to design those incentives and regulations. And then, of course, they need to be monitored and reported by someone independent, someone we can trust, back directly to the people. Because THIS information, and their fiscal responsibility, is at the core of how we'll judge our elected officials come election time.

 16. And while business needs a voice in the deliberation process towards public policy, and while corporations are "fictitious persons" in our legal system, corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE, AND DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHTS OF CITIZENS. In practical terms, while we might make a public policy decision based on how it might affect investors and employees -- i.e., real citizens -- the welfare of a corporation itself is not the concern of government. People are.

 17. This means that when issues like personal privacy of information come up, government MUST set policy that benefits the greatest number of citizens possible. If this means that regulations can be made which benefit both ordinary citizens (i.e., holders of personal information), and allow companies to make money doing things with personal information that don't harm ordinary citizens, such regulations are preferable to regulations that only protect ordinary citizens and bar all business use of information. But if this ideal state can't be reached, personal privacy and individual citizens must win, every time.

 18. Governmental corruption must be a much, much bigger deal than it is considered today. The Founders lived in a world where the material rewards for corruption were much more obvious and detectable, and the channels for accomplishing it more easily detected. We live in a world of complex systems, money that never assumes material shape, legislation that is hundreds if not thousands of pages long, agencies that enforce, and a crushing load of governmental activity that citizens cannot adequately monitor for themselves, even if there were access. Thus, the Founder's remedies for corruption -- three branches of government, bicameral legislature, checks and balances -- are necessary but not sufficient to tackle corruption today. We need fresh ideas, and a determined citizenry that actually punishes politicians for malfeasance. Make no mistake, we don't need much more in the way of criminal law -- it's illegal to peddle influence -- but we need ways to detect and enforce it much, much more strictly.

 That's it for now. There's undoubtedly more, but this is the broad outlines of what I meant by "market-oriented-left-libertarian."

 I look forward to questions and comments.

 Mark Madsen
Started trying to watch the president's speech to students, but all I get is buffering, and then a couple of seconds of video. oh well, i'll settle for the canned version later.

 Lorraine T Pain
you can read it here. I like reading things so much better. I don't catch all of the stuff when it is spoken. Did I mention I hate getting older?

 http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

 Mark Madsen
Quicker to read it on whitehouse.gov :-)

 Summary: hard work, motherhood, and apple pie are all good things.

 Insert the word "socialist" as required....

 Stephen Speicher
For all the "socialist" talk -- I keep coming back to the same question; is it so wrong to teach young kids socialist values? Then, when they're older and understand the complexities of incentives, rewards, work, etc., then you can layer in the more realistic and appropriate values. Before kids can understand that empathy is more complex than merely giving to those who need, I'm ok with a little "we are all in this together propaganda."

 (and Mark can vouch for me. I'm no socialist)

 Mark Madsen
@Stephen, there is an interesting discussion to be had about how to take the best of different political positions and combine them. Therefore I don't mind if someone is a socialist.

 My wry attitude is because "socialist" has so often been used as a euphemism for something far less benign (vide, eg, Stalin). But even more amusing is that now it ... Read moreis being used as a cover for the word that can no longer be spoken (n*gga). Which shows that some progress has been made against racism, I suppose....

 Mark Madsen
Oh, I read it in text form yesterday, of course. I wanted to see the delivery style, how the audience reacted to various bits, cadence, all the stuff you don't get in text. I'm fascinated by all those aspects of oration.

 And yes, I vouch for Speicher's non-socialism. I tend to think of him as a moderate libertarian capitalist.

 And yes, ... Read moreof course we should teach kids all sorts of values. And here's the part I don't get. If the right, and in particular the religious right, is so convinced that they know the right answers and the correct way to live, why would it be dangerous to learn about other ways of thinking and living? Where does all this insecurity come from? :)

 Mark Madsen
@EuroMark - definitely we need to examine political positions that are "mixed strategies" instead of always looking at the extremes ("pure strategies"). It's highly likely that the *workable* equilibria are mixed strategies anyhow.

 I tend to think of myself as "market-oriented-left-libertarian": less skeptical about markets than typical left ... Read morelibertarians (another word for which is libertarian socialist), but believing strongly that we've tended to achieve the most democratic and economically optimal outcomes for the greatest number during times when economic inequality was less extreme than it is today or was prior to the Depression.

 To that end, I favor policies that encourage and subsidize education since that was a huge driver of the post-war drop in economic inequality (in concert with sustained economic growth, of course -- the two together is a potent combination that we currently lack).

 Andrew Edmond
@Stephen - From a friend: "My kids will go to school today and listen to Barack tell them to work hard... When they come home, I'll tell them not to work too hard or he'll take away their profits." Love it :)

 Andrew Edmond
Ohhh... another good one: "don't think our school district is showing the speech either. I personaly dont care if they show it or not. But, I would tell my kids NOT TO BOTHER TO WORK AT ALL. 'Cause the government will take care of you."

 Mark Madsen
Whether you meant to start a serious discussion on the disincentives provided by taxes, I'll start one anyway. I don't buy the logic. Oh, I buy the math, of course, and of course there can be a global effect across the entire economy, but local effects are so much more important. By "local effect" I mean the relative effects of my own efforts ... Read moretowards wealth creation.

 As an example. In starting a small company (which both of us have done), you're generally hoping to invest a small amount of your own money, a lot of your own effort, sometimes larger amounts of other people's money ("investors" in generic parlance, "bloodsucking venture capitalists" in more recent experience - heh), and result in a large return by selling the company etc.

 One of the last things we're thinking is whether we should work a little harder, if the capital gains rate is a few percentage points lower, or less hard, if the cap gains rate is higher. Right?

 Jerry Glomph Black
To me, the government pursuing fake Wars on Terorrism, Drugs, et al, to profit entrenched interests is evil Socialism. Building big sports stadiums is nasty Socialism. The term is meaningless as it appears in common usage. To the wingnuts it is their version of 'doody-head', or [add racist remark here about the incumbent President].

 Mark Madsen
For true entrepreneurship of this type, the disincentive effect doesn't exist because we're not concerned with the least significant digits of the return on our effort and capital.

 On the other hand, where the disincentive effect does make a difference is in overall portfolio management on the financial markets. Over the long-haul, the ... Read moredifference in tax rates does add up, and it can even change your asset mix and risk profile. For example, I live in a state without an income tax, and so muni bonds are virtually tax free to me. So I view them as a highly desirable asset class despite their reputation as a "boring, safe" investment.

 So *local* incentive effects are generally much more important than the predicted global effect of changing a marginal tax rate by a couple points. All I'm sayin'....

 Mark Gardner
Oohhh - love that "market-oriented-left-libertarian". Now I have a label for my view. Thanks Mark. And you're right on about the education driver; which we seeem to to be moving away from rapidly.

 I still don't get how the definition of "socialism" went from "the state (re: society) owns the means of production" to "we're all in this together... Read more". By the former definition - we are anything but in this country, and avery long way from it. By the latter definition, then inusrance companies are socialist (shudder, shudder). Go figure.

 Mark Madsen
@MarkGardner - yeah, the devolution of our political terminology is an interesting thing. In part, I think it's because globalized capitalism "won" with the collapse of the last fully "command" economies. Even China is viewed by most of us now as a politically autocratic but otherwise early capitalist economy. Maybe North Korea is an example, but it's an extreme outlier that nobody really thinks of as an "economy."

 So the old terms no longer have empirical referents, and are free to semantically "wander." Which means we can mutate and spin them to mean whatever we want. Which is what is happening on the right.

 Because yes, we're very very far away from socialism in any strict sense, despite the current rhetoric. ... Read more

 More later. gotta get some actual work done, but I do have some things to say about the balance between markets and public regulation of markets, contemporary economics, and game theory. Most of which will be nerdy and highly ignorable. :)

 Mark Gardner
It's too bad that the definition of words is so fluid. That makes real communication difficult. Although I suspect that those that semantically "wander" aren't really serious about communicating.

 And you're right - there must be a balance between the "game" and the "rules". But all good games have rules and referees. In a fit of boredom (very... Read more rare) I once wrote a satirical essay on what would happen to the game of basketball if the Democratic base wrote the rules and if the Republican base wrote the rules. With the former, the game became very boring, and with the latter, so many players got hurt that most stopped playing.

 Mark Madsen
Hah! that sounds about right. :) Nice.

 Mark Madsen
I can't help thinking that exchanges like this is why Mark and Mark started the Diablog - http://diablog.posterous.com/ - but that aside, all we know for sure is that pure socialism and pure capitalism have been tried over long periods of time on epic scales, and been shown to be unworkable.

 PS The War on Drugs and the War on Terror were both started by well-known arch-socialists (Nixon and Busĥ 2.0 respectively).

 Mark Madsen
@EuroMark - it is why we started a blog! Hmm...I sense an entry coming on. Stay tuned.

 Mark Madsen
It would be quite a god start to post the discussion here to the diablog, if no-one objects?

 Michael Pfeffer
And the most amazing part was Laura Bush supporting Obama....who would have thought?

 Mark Madsen
For "god" read "good" throughout, I definitely did NOT mean to intrude religion into the discussion!

 Mark Madsen
Mark - post away!

 I can see several fantastic things about the Kindle. Having so many books in a handy package is a great idea. But amazon has failed to make of the Kindle what it could have, and definitely should have.

 First off, unlike Mark, I live in Europe. Guess what? The Kindle isn't available in Europe, because it uses a proprietary wireless protocol that isn't available here. That's only one point against it, but it's a killer.

 Second, that proprietary protocol is a silly idea. Why not just have the Kindle use 3G protocols to download titles? The cost of download could be folded into the cost of the e-books themselves, or the pricing could depend upon location (from geolocation of the IP address or using the network location from the 3G network, which tends to be pretty accurate in Europe at least).

 Third, the Kindle is designed for e-books in Amazon's own format. It fails spectacularly at handling PDFs, which it cannot correctly zoom or navigate around. It is also pathetic at handling other e-book formats.

 Other e-book readers do a better job than the Kindle at handling multiple formats and at navigation. Unfortunately, they also tend to be very expensive and they are missing the ecosystem that Amazon has provided for North America.

 Overall, I can see how the Kindle is pretty neat if one lives in North America, and would be worth getting despite its obvious flaws. But what possessed Amazon to ignore (not to say insult) their customers on other continents? The result is that the rest of the world will go with the first e-book reader that does what the Kindle was supposed to do, but gets it right. Speaking for myself, I'm looking forward to that happening.

 Let's try it your way for a year, or maybe two - it's negotiable. We open the insurance market in each state to strong competition. We don't wait for state-by-state repeals of insurance laws, but instead just say states can regulate however they currently do, but we encourage everyone to offer insurance on a state-by-state basis, and compete within each state directly, and indirectly on a national level via their state-level competition like exists now.

 We add one restriction -- you can't deny anybody coverage based on health. The stated goal here is to get everyone covered by insurance, instead of directly tapping public funds at the emergency rooms of public hospitals.

 We see how the competition evolves. We implement tax credits as described in various proposals. Employer contributions in lieu of health plans, as described in H.R. 3200. We implement tax credits as described by Mackey in his recent WSJ editorial. We make sure high-deductible plans combined with health-savings accounts are available for whomever wants to try 'em.

 We experiment for two years.

 BUT.

 We set a metric for the target level of coverage and covered expenditure. We don't offer any "public" health insurance plans during the trial period. But if the direction that private competition goes doesn't meet Mackey's or Toim Price's or the GOP's expectations, then we AUTOMATICALLY institute a public health insurance option -- not single payer care, not "death panels," none of the hysteria, just health insurance like I have today but offered by the federal government -- for a two year period. With a sunset.

 If that two year period kicks off, and if we have to offer a public health insurance option, there's a clock ticking for private health insurance to figure out how to get everyone covered, with reasonable costs, and while keeping a reasonable profit margin, with reasonable competition in every state market. If private industry innovates, and rises to the challenge, each person covered under the interim public option gets to transition to one of the private plans, and the public plan dissolves automatically.

 If the industry can't make it work, the public plan is re-ratified AUTOMATICALLY, and becomes a permanent *option* in what will still be a largely private insurance market -- subject to supermajority repeal.

 Basically, we split the difference and see how it works out over the half-decade, giving economic liberals and economic conservatives a chance to demonstrate their point -- with the conservative/libertarians the chance to GO FIRST since their plan will have lesser effects on budgets and deficits.

 How is that not the fairest plan, given our deep differences of opinion about what might work best? We turn issues of philosophy, where we cannot convince each other with words, into issues of real-world performance, measurable and demonstrable, with the resulting plan of action dependent AHEAD of time on which position actually yields a better outcome?

 That's the risk I'm willing to take. As a liberal and democrat, but also as a scientist who's never quite sure we've figured out the perfect answer.

 So let's experiment. But in a way that protects the American people. And defuses the current rhetoric on the issue, and moves us past the shouting and acrimony. So we can get something done.

Dear readers - this post is a continuation of a very, very long comment thread with two friends on my Facebook page (Andrew Edmond and Jacob Thompson). My original post was simply a link to the four-page summary of H.R. 3200, the current bipartisan health reform bill before Congress, and a plea for people to read the summary and think about what it contained, as a way to get beyond the slogans and the lies and the "death panel" silliness that has become endemic in this debate.

 I didn't really have any hopes that GrandCentral would be different, but exploring Google Voice a bit more recently I'm impressed by the voice mail features. In particular, the ability to get an automatic text transcript of someone's voice mail is phenomenal. Finally, I can just READ my voicemail, processing my messages the same way whether they're emails, SMS, voicemail, etc. There are options for getting your voicemail text transcripts then texted to your phone, so instead of having to log in, navigate a phone tree, etc, the voicemail just appears there on the screen of my iPhone.

 Arguably, I shouldn't be looking at the screen of my iPhone while driving, but let's be honest, we all do. And it seems much safer to just glance, and not have to press buttons and make choices simply to get a message.

 I'll try more of the features soon, and am now giving out my Google Voice number to everyone I know (see http://markmadsen.tel for all my contact info in one place....).

 One thing I would love to see, however, is multiple incoming phone numbers for the Google Voice account. I have friends (and occasionally residences) in two different area codes, and I'd love to have a "local" number in each for the convenience of the locals in each place. Seems like it shouldn't be tough for Google to offer this, perhaps with an extra charge for additional numbers since they need to manage the namespace and not give out numbers indiscriminately.

 And, of course, it would rock to be able to include the Google numbers in porting (to and from), and to be able to port a physical number to Google Voice, to handle all those cases where you have long-established numbers, etc.

 Oh, and I'd *LOVE* to have my Google Voice number also be my fax number, and just receive the faxes as PDF attachments. Hint, hint....