I recently helped my colleagues Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka on a short essay rebutting the misguided notion that the government should grant postal subsidies to "old media" enterprises to help them survive. One of the arguments, of course, is that the state should perhaps not be propping up an old way of doing things (i.e., printing news on dead trees and spending physical and environmental resources shipping it around the country), when new and better ways are emerging. In the course of working on that paper, it occurred to me that maybe the time has come to scrap the entire U.S. Postal Service, but the thought was too far removed from the focus of the essay, and I let the idea go.

Recently, however, I've been forced to return to it. Although I am admitted to practice law in Pennsylvania and D.C., I am not admitted in my new home state of California. As I have become more involved in my small mountain community, I have been approached on more than one occasion to help a friend or associate in some way that could conceivably be regarded as the "practice of law." My wife, who is a California lawyer, has also recently opened a solo practice in town, and it would be nice if I could assist her from time to time, as the need arises. The only thing to do, it seemed to me, was to take the California Bar exam and become a member here as well.

With another income tax day behind us, this year's penance may be the last "simple," "unfettered" return we file in a while.

The CBO projects that with current policies in place, addled by a wave of retiring Americans, our tax burden as a nation (in terms of revenues received through income, payroll and excise taxes) will rise 1.5%, to nearly 20% in 2020. That growth aside, revenues will still fall nearly 5% less than Uncle Sam will be spending at that time.

Thus, according to a growing coterie of pundits and officials, more taxes are on the way (spending cuts would be nice, but I digress).

Working in the IT industry, it's heretical to suggest, "Step away from the IT." But, sometimes, maybe we should.

I am not alone. Recently, the American Thinker ran a nice piece by Matt Patterson, entitled, Step Away from the Computer. In it he suggests:

...I do not advocate entirely forsaking the conveniences and necessities of the Digital Age. We need them for work and play, and I love my iPhone as much as the next person. But we need to learn how to turn it all off if we are to reclaim the noble soul that humanity has heretofore held but which is now rapidly slipping away. This technology, any technology, must be our servant, not our master. Prometheus brought fire to Man to assist us in life, not as a replacement for it.

Not as a replacement. Good advice.

When you read a "business magazine" edited by persons with at least a GRE-level grasp of modern economics, you will not encounter headlines like "Walmart Whines That It Would Be Richer If Poor People Didn't Shoplift," or "DirectTV Whines That Signal Theft Keeps 'The NFL Sunday Ticket' from Raking In More Cash," or even "Capitalist Stooge Steve Jobs Whines That iPod Counterfeiting Keeps Him from Becoming Even Richer."

Predictably, real business magazines and journalists don't publish such quasi-Marxist drool because it is so vacuous. As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, profits enrich particularly thoughtful, creative capitalists because market economies drive producers to innovate. Instead of engaging in a Punch-and-Judy battle to "perfect" competition against non-innovative producers of fungible goods, smart producers can make risky investments in order to innovate and differentiate their products so they can--if consumers really love their work--earn significant profits, (some of which must be re-invested in the next round of risky innovation).

Consequently, real business journalists know that stealing from today's "rich" innovators merely punishes and deters the risky, costly innovation that drives the American economy and creates American jobs. Competent "business magazines" thus reject the economics of dictator Robert Mugabe: they do not smirk and sneer that whenever capitalists innovate successfully and get "rich," then they should not "whine" if others steal from the investors who made the risky investments that let them get rich by innovating.

But Business Insider is not a real business magazine. It has seemingly embraced "Mugabenomics." It appears that Business Insider would thus condemn Steve Jobs if he "whines" about the counterfeiting or shoplifting of iPods. Surely Jobs is now rich enough that stealing from Apple is OK with Business Insider--even though, from the perspective of Apple's investors, the vast sums paid to Jobs are a cost of doing business that reduces their potential profits and their ability to re-invest in more new innovations.

John Schwartz of The New York Times called me two weeks ago and asked for comment about a potential controversy involving mobile phone provider Sprint and the charitable organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The facts were pretty sketchy at the time, but Schwartz told me that CRS was accusing Sprint of blocking Mobile Commons, the company that connects CRS and 100 other nonprofit organizations with text messaging networks, from getting a short code to create a charitable mobile donation program in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. Here's the basic background that appeared in Schwartz's March 24th article, "Catholic Charity and Sprint Tangle Over Texting":

[CRS] wanted to try a twist on the technology: when people sent a text message to donate, they got a reply offering to connect them via phone to the charity's call center. The group hoped that the calls could build a stronger bond with donors, and garner larger contributions as well. But just three days into the effort after the Jan. 12 earthquake, the charity got word that Sprint Nextel was demanding that the "text-to-call" effort be shut down. The charity had 40 days to abandon the feature or lose access to millions of Sprint customers. Sprint's original motivations are murky; it said that an intermediary company had failed to properly fill out a form to verify that it was dealing with a legitimate charity.

It didn't take long for the regulatory activists at Free Press and Public Knowledge to pounce and claim the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had to intervene to save our souls from the nefarious scum at Sprint. After all, you do know that Sprint hates Haitians, right? The company obviously wanted to see Haitians starve and not receive any support from charitable organizations.

No, seriously, come on! How asinine is this storyline?!

The recession has been many things to many people. For most of us, these are trying times, to say the least. But like a newscaster or mortician who profits from some of life's worst experiences, the states see the recession somewhat more optimistically than the rest of us.

Sure, in the next fiscal year states face nearly $180 billion in budget deficits, with many in dire straits (as this somewhat hyperbolic article touches upon). Yet, letting no crisis go to waste, this has honed where many of those cash-strapped states are looking for their next meal.

The Wall Street Journal recently noted that the slump has brought back to life an idea that many of us thought had died - requiring e-retailers to collect sales tax from out-of-state customers. The state's new tool of choice? The so-called "Amazon.com tax."

It works like this.

Remote / online merchants that have "local marketing affiliates" (i.e., entities essentially operating website pointers to remote merchants) in a given state, must collect state sales taxes for customer purchases of their products - all because the "local affiliate" in that given state pointed any sale (not even the specific sale) to the out-of-state retailer. This controversial tool (now being contemplated by 6 states, and in effect in 3 others) allows states to get around constitutional requirements of physical presence in a state to collect sales taxes. It also gets around the inconvenient fact that in most states with sales taxes, customers largely ignore their obligations to pay that tax (e.g., use tax) if it isn't collected by the Internet / remote merchant.

I've always viewed web traffic numbers with great suspicion, if for no other reason than they are all over the board. But the amazing Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy," does us another great service today in his latest column, "The Trouble With Web-Traffic Numbers," by walking us through exactly how big of a mess these numbers really are. Carl is the closest thing we have to a statistical ombudsman for the Internet as he repeatedly illustrates in his column how numbers can deceive and distort.

In terms of bogus web traffic numbers, there's plenty of distortion going on. He quotes Erin Pettigrew, marketing director for Gawker Media, as saying that "For an industry that relies so heavily on accurate data and numerical accountability, relying on an estimate is embarrassing, antiquated." Too true. Of course, with so many people frequently deleting their cookies and now accessing websites from different machines, it's not surprising that the numbers are such a jumble.

One of the reasons it's so important to try to improve web traffic metrics is because it is essential to the advertising business, which powers the web and all the great content and services we consume online. More accurate web traffic metrics can help better direct and target ads across the web. But it won't be easy.

Anyway, read Carl's piece for all the details. And thank you Carl for always reminding us that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Most of you have probably already seen this but Pingdom recently aggregated and posted some amazing stats about "Internet 2009 In Numbers." Worth checking them all out, but here are some highlights:

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year.


• 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET & 7.8 million .ORG


• 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.


• 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009; 1.4 billion email users worldwide.


• 26 million blogs on the Internet.


• 27.3 million tweets on Twitter per day as of Nov 2009.


• 350 million people on Facebook; 50% of them log in every day; + 500,000 active Facebook applications.


• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009; 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook.


• 1 billion videos served by YouTube each day; 12.2 billion videos viewed per month; 924 million videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US as of Nov 2009; + the average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos each month.

And yet some people claim that digital generativity and online innovation are dead! Things have never been better.

A philosopher of my misspent youth, one Mr. William Idol, opined that it is best to be British because you can get away with more than the citizens of other English-speaking nations. While I cannot disclose the best proofs of Mr. Idol's theorem, (naming names is rude), its second-best proof is surely the always-interesting and often-funny British technology-news website The Register. An example: Only by actually writing with a British accent can you get away with calling those who brainlessly but militantly oppose the enforcement of copyrights "freetards."

I thus note that today, The Register bravely reported on the shocking results of some media research conducted by some Canadian sociologists:

Research by the University of Alberta has chillingly revealed that kids' TV show Thomas and Friends may be engendering a "conservative political ideology" in future generations--a repressive mindset which "punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change, and relegates females to supportive roles."

Shauna Wilton and friends from the uni's Department of Social Sciences analyzed 23 episodes of the programme, and noted that while it "conveys a number of positive political values...", there is a dark side to Thomas the Tank Engine.

Were Professor Wilton's work A Very Useful Engine: The Politics of Thomas and Friends correct, then it would represent a frightening discovery. After all, we parents all know that children's television is already awash in "conservative political ideology." The Barry-Goldwater-like messages of Sesame Street and Barney the Dinosaur are inescapable. Sociologists also warn that it is no coincidence that the baby-faced sun that shines upon the Teletubbies looks a lot like Rush Limbaugh.

Fortunately, in this case, the learned sociologists from the University of Alberta are dead wrong. If leftist ideologies fail, it will not be because Thomas the Tank Engine brainwashed Canadian tots into adopting a "conservative political ideology."

The Internet is massive. That's the 'no-duh' statement of the year, right? But seriously, the sheer volume of transactions (both economic and non-economic) is simply staggering. Consider a few factoids to give you a flavor of just how much is going on out there:

• In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.


• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.


• Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its over 300 million users upload more than 2 billion photos, 14 million videos, and create over 3 million events. More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also roughly 45 million active user groups on the site.


• YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute.


• Amazon reported that on December 15, 2008, 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide, a rate of 72.9 items per second.


• Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia.

Now, let's think about how some of our lawmakers and media personalities talk about the Internet. If we were to judge the Internet based upon the daily headlines in various media outlets or from the titles of various Congressional or regulatory agency hearings, then we'd be led to believe that the Internet is a scary, dangerous place. That 's especially the case when it comes to concerns about online privacy and child safety. Everywhere you turn there's a bogeyman story about the supposed dangers of cyberspace.

But let's go back to the numbers. While I certainly understand the concerns many folks have about their personal privacy or their child's safety online, the fact is the vast majority of online transactions that take place online each and every second of the day are of an entirely harmless, even socially beneficial nature. I refer to this disconnect as the "problem of proportionality" in debates about online safety and privacy. People are not just making mountains out of molehills, in many cases they are just making the molehills up or blowing them massively out of proportion.