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So The Pirate Bay has executed the Web 2.0 business plan to perfection: give someone else’s stuff away for free – then find a bigger idiot to buy the company.

It’s actually not so different from the potted history of every media company that rises to popularity on the back of a new medium – take radio, for example – then sells out at the top of the market. Only in the case of Web 2.0, companies go from “pre-revenue” to “post-revenue” without any revenue in between. That’s where you need a bigger idiot.

[..]

So don’t shed too many tears for Pirate Bay. Pirate Bay failed badly at technology, being lazy and unimaginative, and it also failed at business, lacking the courage or smarts to partner with the media owners. Instead, it tried to turn itself into a political crusade. But this ersatz political “movement” depended entirely on the entertainment business not providing us with us a good choice of services – in other words, by not treating us as customers.

No wonder it can’t attract more than a handful of cranks and self-publicists. It was never going to last.

But now can we have the real P2P deal?

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Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production.

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Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

Let’s use MJ’s tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That’s $12 million a year.

I’m deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels’ pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that’s how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

[..]

The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There’s no money left in anything else.

That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

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Workers were a little red-faced after painters misspelled the word “school” on the ground in front of Goulds Elementary in Miami-Dade County, Fla. Even young students pointed out that “scohol” doesn’t make any sense.

I’m pretty sure something ending in “cohol” was involved, but it wasn’t scohol.

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In the latest episode of the Canadian tech podcast Search Engine, Peter Van Loan, the new Public Safety minister, attempts to explain the Conservative government’s approach to privacy on the internet. It’s a remarkable piece of audio. It goes a little like this:

Search Engine: Here’s some audio of your predecessor promising, on behalf of your party and your government, never to ever allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant.

Minister (as though he had been off on another planet): We never promised not to do that.

Search Engine: What about all the personal information that you guys are now proposing to give to the cops without a warrant?

Minister (tragically unclear on the subject): We’re not requiring ISPs to give out any personal information without a warrant, just your real name, your home address, your IP address, your home and cell number…

Search Engine: Huh. Well there’s this really critical, high profile court ruling that calls all that stuff private information?

Minister (pretending he didn’t hear): The courts have ruled that this isn’t private information. Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet, not when it comes to your name, address, cell phone number, etc

Search Engine: Do the cops really need to get this information without a warrant?

Minister: Oh yes. There are MONSTROUS BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS WHO ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT A LIVE CHILD IN TEN MINUTES and we need to be able to run down their IPs without talking to a judge first.

Search Engine: But when a child is endangered, the law already allows you to get this information without a warrant, right?

Minister: Why are you still asking questions? Didn’t you hear me? BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS! Surely that settles the matter.

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The basic rules of the Ultimatum Game are simple. One person is given a stack of cash, and told to divide it between themselves and a second party. That second party is then given the chance to accept or reject the offer; if it’s rejected, neither of them get any money. Clearly, any of this free money should be better than nothing, so under assumptions of strictly rational behavior, you might expect all offers to be accepted.

They’re not. Things in the neighborhood of a 50/50 split are accepted, but as the proportions shift to where the person issuing the ultimatum tries to keep seventy percent of the total, rejections increase. By the time they hit an 80/20 split, nearly 70 percent of the offers are rejected, even though that 20 percent of the total cash would leave the recipient better off than where they started.

It’s still possible to interpret this behavior as being rational within a social context. A lot of human behavior, and that of other primates, seems to be focused on ensuring cooperative behavior within small groups. The rejection of offers within the Ultimatum Game can be viewed as a form of punishment for unfair behavior. In that light, the rejection may make sense to the degree that the immediate loss of money provides a long-term incentive for fair and cooperative behavior within a group. Rational economic behavior is restored.

The new paper pretty much blows that explanation out of the water by testing individuals using a couple of variations of the Ultimatum Game. In the first, which the authors term “the Impunity Game,” the person making the offer gets their share of the cash regardless of whether the offer is accepted or not. In this game, the only consequence is the potential for guilt caused by the knowledge that an offer was rejected. Rejection rates do drop, but they remain substantial—offers of an 80/20 split got rejected over 40 percent of the time (down from around 70 percent) despite the lack of real economic consequences.

To really nail things down, the authors conducted tests of a Private Impunity Game, in which the person who made the offer wasn’t even informed of whether it was rejected or not—they simply walked away with their share of the cash. Here, even the nebulous hope that the person making the offer would feel pangs of guilt from its rejection was removed. Rejection rates were essentially unchanged. People keep rejecting offers they perceived as unfair, even if, like the proverbial tree in the forest, no one will hear their rejection.

In another hint of the nature of this response, the authors describe how a similar study was performed in which the Impunity Game was explained to participants as a series of if/then statements: “if A chooses X and B chooses Y, then A receives $i and B receives $j.” Here, when subjects are forced to reason through the conditions to figure out that their rejections didn’t cause any sort of financial punishment on the ones making the offer, rates or rejection were about the same as they are in the Ultimatum Game. This suggests that people can’t even be bothered to perform a rational analysis when money is on the line, much less engage in rational actions.

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By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.

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General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks.

[..]

GE was watching closely. Though GE Capital owned an FDIC-insured savings and loan and an industrial loan company, they accounted for only 3 percent of GE’s assets. Company officials concluded that GE couldn’t meet the program’s eligibility requirements.

So the company requested that the program “be broadened,” GE’s Wilkerson said. GE’s main argument was fairness: The FDIC was trying to encourage lending, and GE Capital was one of the country’s largest business lenders.

GE deployed a team of executives and outside attorneys, including Rodgin Cohen, a banking expert with the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

“GE was among the parties that discussed this with the FDIC,” along with the Treasury and Fed, according to FDIC spokesman Andrew Gray. He said the details about eligibility “had not been specifically addressed” in the beginning.

Citigroup, the troubled banking giant, also was pressing for an expansion of the FDIC program. Though Citigroup was included in the debt guarantee program, its main finance arm, Citigroup Funding, appeared ineligible. Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn wrote to the FDIC’s Bair on Oct. 21, arguing that debt issued by Citigroup Funding should be covered “as if it were issued directly by Citigroup, Inc.”

Two days later, the FDIC announced a new category of eligible applicants — “affiliates” of an FDIC-insured institution. Bair explained that “there may be circumstances where the program should be extended” to keep credit markets flowing. That meant “certain otherwise ineligible holding companies or affiliates that issue debt” could apply, she said.

GE Capital now was eligible.

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If nothing else, it is becoming painfully obvious that the major players responsible for the economic debacle, the health insurance scam, the looming environmental disaster, and all the rest of the corporate agenda of the last 8 years have no intention of doing a damn thing different than they have been, and no apparent belief that anyone can make them.

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In his homily, broadcast live on Italian television, the Pope told the faithful that the tomb had been “…subject to a scientific investigation. A small hole was drilled in the sarcophagus, unopened for centuries, and a probe was introduced. It found traces of a valuable purple fabric, in linen and gold layer-laminated, and a blue fabric with linen threads. Red incense grains and substances containing proteins and limestone were also discovered. Small fragments of bone were found and radiocarbon dated by experts who did not know their place of origin. Results indicate that they belong to someone who lived between the 1st and 2nd century A.D. This seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition according to which these are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul. All this fills our soul with deep emotion.”

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What Pope Benedict XVI is actually saying is, “Hey! Check out these old bones that we think belong to St. Paul. We’ve scientifically shown that they could be enough to be St. Paul’s, so, of course, they must be his.”

First of all, the bones were dated to the first or second century CE, meaning any time between 1CE and 200 CE. Given that St. Paul is said to have been beheaded around 65CE, there is a greater chance than not that the person those bones belong to died after St. Paul. Secondly, unless St. Paul was the only person alive at the time, how can we be sure that the bones in the sarcophagus are definitely his?

Wishful thinking. That’s how!

Oh, and isn’t it funny how scientific evidence is soooo great when it helps, but when it doesn’t….