On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, lbo-talk-digest wrote:
>
> lbo-talk-digest Thursday, September 21 2000 Volume 01 : Number 3376
>
>
>
> In this issue:
> ==============
>
> TheStreet.com: crunching sounds
> Re: geeks
> Re: geeks
> Fwd: Klein column: Oil
> Re: guilds?
> Re: geeks
> Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #3370
> Re: geeks
> Re: Exorcist
> Re: geeks
> Re: Exorcist
> Re: Exorcist
> RE: Exorcist
> RE: newspapers
> Re: geeks
> RE: geeks
> Re: Exorcist
> Re: geeks
> This is cool...
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:08:26 -0400
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: TheStreet.com: crunching sounds
>
> AtNewYork.com - September 20, 2000
>
> == TheStreet.com Hit Hard by Ad-Spending Decline ==
>
> The sharp drop in advertiser spending has left another dot-com content play
> facing the financial crunch.
>
> TheStreet.com (Nasdaq: TSCM), which provides financial news and commentary,
> warned yesterday it wouldn't meet revenue projections for the fiscal third
> quarter, blaming the downturn in ad spending and the snail-paced
> implementation of news distribution deals.
>
> Chief Executive Officer Tom Clarke is again throwing out word that he would
> consider selling the online financial news provider. "I think there are a
> lot of different combinations out there. If the right one is there and that
> gets us bigger faster and handles the shareholder value equation, it would
> be foolish for us not to (consider it)," Clarke told the Reuters news
> agency.
>
> Back in February, TheStreet.com retained investment bank Wasserstein Perella
> to explore a possible sale opportunity.
>
> Following last night's warning, investors seemed to be shunning the site's
> stock. And, this morning, bad vibes spread when First Union Sec downgraded
> TheStreet's stock from "Buy" to "Hold", furthering depressing the share
> price almost 15 percent. At press time, the stock was trading for $5.25, off
> 77 percent from the year-high of $22.50.
>
> It is the second such stumble for a Silicon Alley company that is dependent
> on advertisements for the bulk of its revenue. Recently, e-mail marketing
> specialists NetCreations (Nasdaq: NTCR) was forced to trim its third quarter
> profit outlook because of the reduction in online ad spending.
>
> TheStreet.com, a pay-for-content site which is moving towards a
> subscription-free format, maintains it will meet third quarter earnings
> expectations, but it did not provide a revised forecast. It expects to earn
> $8.6 million in sales.
>
> Clarke expressed his frustration with the company's financial standing:
> "From a revenue standpoint, this is a disappointing quarter for
> TheStreet.com. Unfortunately, our projections didn't account for the
> slower-than-anticipated implementation of our news distribution deals, and
> the impact of seasonality on advertising sales. These factors hampered our
> aggressive plans for page view and revenue growth."
>
> Last month, in a strategic play, TheStreet sold a 5 percent stake to Paul
> Allen's Vulcan Ventures and Web-site operator Go2Net (NASDAQ: GNET) for $7.5
> million in cash. As a part of the deal, Vulcan and Go2Net each took an
> option to buy 7.45% of TheStreet.com stock within six months.
>
> Immediately after that deal, the site dissolved its analyst-ranking
> division, resulting in the layoffs of five employees.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:49:52 -0400
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: geeks
>
> Matt Cramer wrote:
>
> >Ya know, I really think that the left hasn't a CLUE about why people are
> >libertarians, and what a libertarian is (and Kelley aptly pointed out
> >that many on the other side don't fully understand the differences within
> >the left and between liberalism).
> >
> >Many geeks are libertarians because we believe that a highly centralised
> >and powerful State leads inevitably to tyranny. That people think it has
> >dick to do with paying less taxes shows how clueless about it all they
> >really are.
> >
> >If many and most of your friends were being harassed and investigated by
> >the Feds how much of a fan of the .gov would you be?
> >
> >Most of the cyberlibertarians care about RKBA, privacy, and cryptography.
> >How many secrets would the .gov let me keep in the Socialist Utopia? The
> >Socialist Utopia may look great on paper but it ain't gonna fly when
> >you've got the Klintons and the Algores usurping power.
> >
> >THAT's why geeks are [market-besotted] libertarians.
>
> Actually I know quite a bit about libertarianism and libertarians. I
> used to be one, in fact
> <http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/36/henwood.html>. I am still
> pretty much a libertarian on matters of personal behavior and freedom
> of speech. I even think the feds committed mass murder in Waco. But
> (you knew that was coming), the kind of technolibertarianism that
> Paulina Borsook writes about in Cyberselfish just seems like childish
> entitlement and stubborness elevated into a political philosophy. The
> computer industry wouldn't exist in its present form without what you
> folks charmingly call the .gov - nor would the Internet. Private
> industry had no interest in funding it in its first decades - too
> much risk for uncertain reward. Silicon Valley wouldn't exist in its
> present form without the Pentagon and Stanford University, and
> Stanford, like all big universities, would be hard-pressed to keep
> the doors open without all kinds of public subsidy. And most
> libertarians are completely indifferent to private concentrations of
> wealth and power: marketers do as much to spy on people as do
> governments these days, not that that's the worst thing about
> concentrations of w&p. Wealth and power run the state most of the
> time, but unlike corporations, states are somewhat contested terrain,
> and politicians have to face elections, as flawed as they are.
>
> I'm not sure if you're implying that "the Klintons and the Algores,"
> which is almost as charming a spelling style as MIM's "Amerika," are
> some kind of socialists, but if you are, please schedule a return to
> planet earth sometime soon.
>
> Doug
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:01:54 +0100 (BST)
> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Daniel=20Davies?= <d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: geeks
>
> - --- Matt Cramer <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com> wrote: >
> >
>
> > (being a libertarian
> > != being a laissez
> > faire capitalist!),
>
> Surely to God, yes it freaking does! If you think
> that "initiation of force" (in the bizarre libertarian
> sense) is wrong, then you think it's wrong. You don't
> make exceptions for "trade regulation". You'll have
> to come up with quite a bit of fancy footwork to say
> why you think that the government should "defend our
> borders" unless you have some bizarre libertarian
> theory of the nation state.
>
> And that != thing is a bit pretentious too.
>
> > In Matt's Libertarian Utopia there is a Fed .gov
> > doing only its authorised
> > duties according to the COTUS,
>
> errrrm .... is it possible for non-Americans to be
> libertarians under your definition? Or only if they
> agree to drop their own constitutions and take up the
> American. What about countries like France which
> don't have a federal structure -- do they need to
> create one? How about countries like Austria and
> Portugal which are about the same size as a US state?
>
> Surely it's a defect in a political theory if its
> tenets depend on a single historical document. What
> if a few different amendments had been passed; would
> your Libertarian Utopia be different?
>
> [snip]
>
> > I object
> > to the concentration
> > of power in a centralised .gov, not the notion of
> > .gov as a social
> > contract.
>
> Then you're not a libertarian. You're a federalist of
> some sort. Libertarianism, surely to Christ, can't be
> a simple belief that something the size of, say
> Austria is the optimal administrative unit. If that
> were all it was, nobody would care about it.
>
> >I wouldn't mind paying the taxes I pay if
> > they went into either
> > programs I could choose (like say, the Space
> > program) or into my local
> > community. It isn't the level of taxation per se,
> > but how the money is
> > handled ($200 toilet seats, flood relief for people
> > in far away states
> > that choose to live on flood plains, random bombings
> > of nations that annoy
> > Klinton, corporate welfare, welfare for politicians,
> > War on [some] Drugs,
> > slaughters in places like Waco, etc.).
> >
>
> Hate to be the one to break the news to you -- you're
> not anything quite as exciting as a libertarian.
> You're a Reaganite. You seem to have no problem with
> taxation being forcibly extracted from the population
> in principle, but you have technical disagreements
> with the Clinton administration over fiscal policy.
>
> > I don't speak for all geeks, since we aren't all
> > libertarians, and I don't
> > speak for all geek-libertarians, but there are a
> > fair amount that share
> > these sentiments.
>
> Matt, have you ever read a book on libertarianism?
> This is only partly a flame. You don't seem to
> understand what you believe, or what libertarianism
> means, or both. Without wanting to be unduly
> offensive, there doesn't seem to be a theory of any
> sort beneath the grab-bag of radio platitudes which
> seem to make up your libertarianism.
>
> dd
>
> ____________________________________________________________
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 14:16:42 -0400
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Fwd: Klein column: Oil
>
> Globe and Mail (Toronto) - September 20, 2000
>
> Why Big Oil backed the fuel protests in Europe
> By Naomi Klein
>
> When I arrived in London on Sunday, the city was like a jittery
> heroin junkie who had just shot up. The panic that gripped Britain
> when a coalition of truckers and farmers blockaded the nation's oil
> refineries had been replaced with an unreal calm. The gas was flowing
> again and, at the stations, dazed customers injected their tanks with
> rivers of unleaded.
>
> As is the case with any powerful addiction, the fuel crisis hasn't
> disappeared; it has been, momentarily, sated. Protests against oil
> taxes are cropping up across Europe and they may well return to
> Britain after the moratorium called by the truck drivers expires in
> two months. Canadian truckers are even threatening to mount copycat
> actions.
>
> Watched from a distance, the oil blockades in Britain look like
> spontaneous popular uprisings: regular working folk, frightened for
> their livelihoods, getting together to say, "Enough's enough." But
> before this David and Goliath story goes any further, it deserves a
> closer reading.
>
> There's no doubt that the fuel protests began when a couple hundred
> farmers and truckers formed blockades outside the oil refineries. But
> the protests became effective only when the multinational oil
> companies that run those refineries decided to treat those rather
> small barricades as immovable obstacles, preventing them from
> delivering oil to gas stations.
>
> The companies -- Shell, BP, Texaco et al. -- claimed they wouldn't
> ask their tanker drivers to drive past the blockades because they
> feared for their "safety." The claim is bizarre. First, no violence
> was reported. Second, these oil companies have no problem drilling
> pipelines through contested lands in Colombia and political revolts
> directed against them in Nigeria. When it comes to extracting oil
> from the earth, there seems to be no danger, including warfare, that
> oil multinationals are unwilling to risk. Third, the truckers'
> "pickets" were illegal blockades since the protesters were not
> members of trade unions -- unlike the cases in which union members
> form legal pickets and companies hire scabs to cross them anyway.
>
> So why would the oil companies tacitly co-operate with anti-oil
> protesters? Easy. So long as attention is focused on high oil taxes,
> rather than on soaring oil prices, the pressure is off the
> multinationals and the OPEC cartel. The focus is also on access to
> oil -- as opposed to the more threatening issue of access to less
> polluting, more sustainable energy sources than oil.
>
> Furthermore, the oil companies know that, if the truckers get their
> tax cut, as they did in France, oil will be cheaper for consumers to
> buy, which will mean more oil will be sold. In other words, Big Oil
> stands to increase its profits by taking money out of the public
> purse -- money now spent, in part, on dealing with the problems
> created by Big Oil.
>
> More mysterious has been the government response to the illegal
> trucker protests. While Tony Blair has not caved in to demands for
> lower taxes (yet), he didn't clear the roads either, a fact all the
> more striking considering the swift police crackdowns against other
> direct-action protests in Britain and around the world.
>
> The oil blockades in Britain and France were enormously costly. Final
> figures aren't in, but the protests likely caused more real economic
> damage than every Earth First!, Greenpeace and anti-free trade
> protest combined. And yet, on Britain's roads last week, there was
> none of the pepper spray, batons or rubber bullets now used when
> labour, human-rights and environmental activists stage roadblocks
> that cause only a small fraction of the fuel protest's disruption.
> "We need to maintain the rule of law," the police invariably say as
> they clear the roadways, stifling the protesters' messages while
> painting them as threats to our collective safety.
>
> Not this time. William Hague, leader of Britain's Conservative Party,
> characterized the men who closed Britain's rural schools and
> partially immobilized its hospitals as "fine upstanding citizens."
> Perhaps the only "upstanding" way to protest these days is not out of
> concern for the broader good but out of pure self-interest.
>
> What happened last week was a tax revolt on the roadway. The
> participants wanted a break on their taxes and happened to park big
> pieces of machinery in the middle of the road. That's not political
> activism. It's vigilante capitalism.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 14:18:37 -0400
> From: kelley <kwalker2 at gte.net>
> Subject: Re: guilds?
>
> william bridges was big on this about 1993ish in his _Jobshift_. not the
> worst book in the world, drew on a fairly standard labor history account of
> changes in work over the centuries. actually dealt with the problems
> associated with the "breakdown of the social contract": inequality, loss
> of free time, family and community disruptions, etc
>
> dorothy sue cobble, still at rutgers i think, was actually promoting
> something similar. she's looked at unions in the service sector,
> waitresses, showing how they differed significantly from the the craft
> union model that influenced labor organizing in the 20th c. she suggests
> that some of the problems that we see with unions might be better addressed
> had we looked at the history of waitress unions (at one point 25% of all
> waitresses were unionized)
>
>
> The Prospects for Unions in a Service Society
> http://www.cpn.org/sections/topics/work/civic_perspectives/unionism_service1.html
>
>
> Midway through teaching one of my first Douglass College undergraduate
> courses -- a 1990 honors seminar on "The Future of Work" to first-year
> women -- the question of the relevancy of unions surfaced. "So, how many of
> you have ever belonged to a union?" I queried, knowing that many of them
> had extensive work histories and that close to a quarter of the New Jersey
> work force was still unionized (Johnson 1995). The class giggled at such a
> far-fetched notion. "What? Unions for babysitters?" someone finally said as
> I looked at them quizzically, unable to interpret their laughter. The rest
> of the class was now emboldened. "Yeah, that's ridiculous." "Of course, we
> haven't belonged to a union. There aren't any unions for waitresses or
> salesclerks or fileclerks." "Part-timers can't join unions. Can they?" "And
> what exactly do unions do for people who don't work in factories anyway?"
> The objections and skeptical questioning continued at a torrential pace for
> the rest of the session.
> <P>
> About a month later, we moved into the "policy section" of the
> course and returned once more to unions. But this time the discussion was
> shockingly different. "We've looked at legal and legislative remedies," I
> began, "and the reforms initiated by employers. But what about the need for
> employee organizations -- you know, groups like unions that are organized
> independently of the employer and whose representatives meet with employers
> to discuss problems, resolve grievances, and make suggestions for workplace
> reform?" The response was swift and pointed. "Why, of course, employees
> need a collective and independent voice. We don't want to have to beg," one
> student asserted indignantly. To a woman, their heads nodded in militant
> agreement.
> <P>
> These two class sessions, I later came to understand, laid out in a
> simple yet powerful way the challenges unions must face if they are to
> represent the twenty-first century work force. Women comprise 39 percent of
> all union members, and manufacturing employees represent less than a third
> of the unionized work force (USDL 1994; Spalter-Roth, Hartmann, and Collins
> 1994b; Johnson 1995), but many still perceive unions as organizations whose
> primary and even sole constituency is the blue-collar male worker. Of equal
> importance, although slightly less than half of American workers would vote
> for a "union" at their workplace, 60 percent "approve" of unions and 90
> percent approve of "employee organizations" (Freeman and Rogers 1993: 33).
> In other words, although many workers perceive today's union institutions
> as not meeting their needs, the central premise of unionism, that is, the
> notion that collective representation is necessary for the protection and
> advancement of the interests of employees, is still widely accepted. The
> new work force does not reject unionism per se; it rejects the particular
> form of unionism that is dominant today.
> <P>
> This chapter is in part what I would have liked to have said to my
> students. It is also a continuation of my on-going research on the
> transformations in the world of work and the implications of those changes
> for employee representation. I will look first at the relationship between
> unions and women, focusing in particular on women service workers. The
> labor movement, historically and in the present, has been quite diverse --
> both in terms of who it has represented and the forms that unionism has
> taken. Babysitters may not have organized, but waitresses, flight
> attendants, nurses, teachers, and even Playboy bunnies did. In the past,
> unions successfully represented women and service workers -- two major
> components of today's new work force [1] --- and they are still doing so
> today, despite the increased power of capital and the outmoded public
> policy governing labor-management relations.
> <P>
> Nevertheless, if the labor movement is to organize the vast
> numbers of women and service workers now outside its ranks, it must reform
> not only its agenda but its institutional practice. The old-style factory
> unionism of the 1930s is no longer appropriate for many sectors of today's
> work force. [2] The second part of this chapter will analyze this mismatch
> between the current work force and the inherited models of unionism. How
> does the new work force differ from the work force of the 1930s? What are
> the implications of these changes for employee representation? I will
> conclude by describing some of the new models of unionism that are
> struggling to be born and the changes in public policy that would nurture
> their progress.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 21:28:26 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Matt Cramer <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com>
> Subject: Re: geeks
>
> How can I be a libertarian and support anti-trust legislation against M$?
> Well, first of all, M$ is not a person, so it has no rights. Second, this
> non-corporeal entity is directly causing harm. Etc..
The point that Microsoft is not a real person is a good one, which I really wish that more libertarians would recognize.
However...
The stockholders of Microsoft are using their property to advance their intersests. This does cause harm to others (ask a long-term Apple stockholder about this).
So what? The competition under capitalism inevitably involves some people being harmed. Software writers who wrote competing applications are harmed when Microsoft moves into their markets.
This is allowable by any and every definition of libertarianism which I've ever heard asserted anywhere, except for you.
If Microsoft uses it's market power to get ahead, what's wrong with this?
Or rather, what's wrong with this that's not wrong with anybody else using their market power?
Now, liberals feel that there is a certain point at which the sheer amount of power in one company's hands is dangerous, and that the government should intervene, but I've never heard anybody claiming to be libertarian assert this.
> From: JKSCHW at aol.com
>
> In a message dated 9/20/00 7:03:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:
>
> << This must be an instance of libertarianism harming the self interest
> of libertarians. Unorganized, programmers don't get compensation
> that they could command. >>
>
> Yeah, I used to try to argue this line with professors, with about the same
> results. Raises the eternal questionof the left, why do so many people so
> vehemently reject what is so obviously in their own self interest? --jks
I can see two points of view:
1) That people simply aren't always rational optimizers. They frequently do things which don't advance their sefl-interest.
2) A more economic viewpoint: parasitism. People try to maximize their expected utility functions, just as economics suggests. However, other parties which conflicting goals attempt to prevent this. One good way to prevent somebody from doing something which would hurt you is to persuade him not to. Even if not doing so harms the other person.
Barry