Silence for there is too much to do. Silence because there is nothing to do. Silence in the face of grave danger. Silence in the routine clockwork of a complacent life. Silence out of being speechless. Silence out of being completely predictable.

Silence must be broken.

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, has published an essay on Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that Apple uses to sell music on its online music store, iTunes. The songs purchased from iTunes are DRM-protected and only play on Apple's iPods. He makes a neat back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the fraction of DRM-protected songs people carry in their iPods:

Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.

He argues that 3% is hardly enough to lock people in to iPods and iTunes for their music.

There is also a piece toward the end where he states that the biggest obstacle for doing away with DRM are the four big music companies. This, however, he argues is not rational, since

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves.

This means that 10% of the music sold has been DRM-protected. This is 7 percentage points higher than the earlier estimate of the DRM-protected content carried by people in their music players (iPods). This may be a real effect: people carry a larger fraction of DRM-free music than is sold because they share them more easily. But the "share effect" is clearly very limited: less than 10% of the DRM-free music sold seems to have been shared.

One might expect that with online purchases this effect might be bigger due to the greater ease of sharing already digital music and the relative hassle of digitizing audio CDs. But this must only lead to a rather small increase of the "share effect". Even a factor-of-two increase stands no chance of disturbing the profits of the music industry compared to the boost getting rid of DRM would bring to the market.

See also: The phantom menace arguing against the use of "piracy" and "theft" for software (and by extension, any digital content) duplication.

Which is more interesting: the electrons' behaviour, or humans'? Which is more important? Which is easier to understand?

مهدی ِ ژرف یک نقد ِ جالب درباره یِ نوع ِ نگاه و نوشته ها ی ِ سیما یِ فرنگوپولیس نوشته. من هم یک کامنت زیر ِ نوشته یِ مهدی نوشتم که برا یِ ثبت در تاریخ :) با کم ی ویرایش اینجا هم می نویسم:

به نظر ِ من یه چیز ی که منتقدان ِ جامعه یِ آمریکا از نوع ِ فرنگوپولیس نفهمیدن این ه که «مسئله» داشتن و حل کردن در واقع وضعیت ِ طبیعی ِ زندگی ِ فردی و جامعه است و شرط ِ پیشرفت. مهدی میگه این که «چه» مسئله ای نوع ِ جامعه و درجه یِ پیشرفت ش رو تعیین می کنه که من هم موافقم. ولی یک چیز ِ جدی تر هم هست: من فکر می کنم این آدم ها به دنبال ِ جامعه یِ «بی مسئله» (شاید مشابه ِ آرمان ِ کلاسیک ِ جامعه یِ بی طبقه) هستند و تنها اون رو شایسته یِ ستایش می دونن. این دید ِ فلسفی نادرست، آگاهانه یا ناآگاهانه، باعث می شه که نتونن این دستاورد ِ بزرگ بشری رو درک کنن که مسئله داشتن مشکل ِ ما (آدم ها، جامعه، ...) نیست بلکه روش ی که آدم ها برا یِ حل ِ این مسئله ها در پیش میگیرن. این فرق ِ تعریف کننده یِ جامعه یِ آزاد و غیر ِ آزاد ه.

• The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran has 177 Articles and 14 Chapters. It establishes an authocratic Islamic order in all aspects of life.
• The Constitution of the Republic of Cuba has 137 Articles and 15 Chapters. It establishes a communist order in all aspects of life.
• The Constitution of Japan has 103 Articles and 11 Chapters. It establishes a democartic constitutional empire.
• The Russian Constitution has 137 Articles and 9 Chapters. It establishes a federal democratic order.
• The German Constitution has 146 Articles and 11 Sections. It establishes a federal democracy.
• The French Constitution has 78 Articles and 16 Titles. It establishes a secular, democratic and social Republic.
• The Constitution of Canada is an amalgam of codified acts and uncodified traditions and conventions. It establishes a federal democracy. It Includes a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 34 Articles.
• The Constitution of the United States of America has 7 Articles and 27 Amendments. It establishes a federal democracy. It includes a Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10).
• The United Kingdom has no written constituion. It is a democratic constitutional monarchy.
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Jew (singular) is a word that has come to be used in a somewhat derogatory sense. That is Google's explanation of anti-semitic sites showing up in its search results for a query on jew. This post is part of a google bomb effort to prevent this irrational linguistic mutation. (Through Curiosity.)

بعضی از دوست‌ها یِ من متوجه نیستند که تا زمان ی که ایده‌ها و گفته‌ها شون درباره یِ مسایل دنیا دانسته یا نادانسته نسخه یِ گرته‌برداری و تمیز شده یِ ایده‌ها و گفته‌ها یِ کیهان و رسالت و ذوب‌شده‌گان ِولایت و جنتی و رفسنجانی و خامنه‌ای و این قبیل آدم‌ها ست همین قدری هم که به احترام ِ دوستی حاضر می‌شم این‌ها رو دوباره بشنوم از حد ِتحمل ِ عمومی ِمن برای ِحرف ِمفت بیشتره.

Adam Smith Institute Blog has an intersting post on the new statsitics emerging from the UK Equal Opportunity Commission which carry the news headline, Women in private sector paid 45% less than men, says equality watchdog. But in actual fact they compare part-time female workers with full-time male workers. If they do the more sensible comparison of part-time female workers with part-time male workers, the conclusion will be a complete reversal of the fact and numbers: the part-time pay gap is actually 28% in the public sector and 10.9% in the private.

This of course does not mean that the gaps do not exist, and also not that these data tell the whole story. As Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute puts it:

Quite the most horrible thing about this is that there is indeed a gender gap in wages and we'd rather like to know why. Is it because employers discriminate against women? Or against part-timers, the majority of whom are women? When that part of the Government concerned with such issues deliberately conflates the two for propaganda reasons we'll never find out.

The New York Transit Worker Union's illegal strike is going to cost their union $1m a day in fines, and the individual workers two workday wages for every day of the strike. But it is estimated to cost the NY economy even more—$400m a day. This economic cost will be levied on millions of ordinary people with ordinary jobs, many of them much less-paid than the strikers'.

If the transit workers were unhappy with their wages, and could find a better-paying job, they would take it, right? So that means that there are no such job offers. Instead they are demanding that their wages be raised by the management of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But where do they expect the raise in their wages and benefits should come from? It should come from somewhere at any given time. Since the MTA is state-owned, it is the state that should provide the extra dough. The MTA itself has a huge surplus. That surplus has investment value. Does raising the wages with that money represent an investment? Perhaps if the workers work more efficiently at higher wages it will. In fact if they worked more efficiently there would be no need to that extra cash: the more efficient the transit, the more efficient the economy, the higher the real income of the people in the economy, and the higher the taxes that finance the MTA. But that is not what the workers want; they want more money, all else remaining the same as before. In fact, "Transit workers are tired of being underappreciated and disrespected," TWU chief Roger Toussaint says. TWU signs say "We move NY. Respect Us!" That is, they consider their demands to be their rights.

In terms of its economic effects, the 34,000 strikers' action is equivalent to each of them setting a $10 bill on fire about every minute. Those bills mostly come out of the pockets of ordinary people. Of course if one person actually does that he is likely to end up in jail. But when 34,000 persons in a union do that, they justify it as a "right" and as a demand for "respect."

But wages are not matters of right. They are matters of economy. They are prices of labour; like prices of other goods. That labour is provided by human beings does not change the economic role of its price, i.e. wages.

On the other hand, if the MTA was privately-owned, perhaps by shareholders, a raise (or decrease for that matter) in the wages and benefits of its workers would manifest itself in a change in the share prices, as the present value of the future consequences of that move. It would be then easy to determine whether the wage raise (or decrease) was economically sensible or not.

But with the existing state-ownership of the MTA and their workers unionized in TWU, it is inevitable that such economic decisions are eventually made by political wranglings and bullyings (from both sides) that amount to sending billions of dollars up in smokes in a matter of days.

Follow-up I wrote a piece over at FToI on the parallels and anti-parallels between Transit Workers Strike: Tehran and New York.

Now, all ‘thank you’s seem to be coming from a trash bin!