Sunday, November 23, 2003

Who Will Pay? Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change, and OtherLong-Term Fiscal Challenges: Bradford Delong writes Notes: Long-Term Budgeting Yet another book to add to the must-read-soon pile: Which links to an Economist article, In the long run we are all broke, How to stop governments going bust. ...Most countries' explicit net debt - issued as bonds and traded every day in financial markets - is at manageable levels, relative to GDP. However, embodied in current tax and expenditure policies are a lot of obligations for which governments have not yet had to make explicit provision. This implicit liability arises mainly from future increases in spending on pensions and health care. Include it, and total debt vaults to levels last seen (for explicit debt) in wartime. Governments often fall into bad habits when their debts are so high, usually by resorting to the printing press and using inflation to cut the real value of their liabilities.... So what is to be done? First, governments must look much farther ahead than they do now. An increasing number of western countries are planning their public finances on a basis of three to five years, but this is nowhere near enough, argues Mr Heller. They need to incorporate a long-range perspective (of at least 25 years and preferably more) into their budgets. Second, these projections should be vetted by independent agencies such as America's Congressional Budget Office, because of governments' tendency to see the silver lining and not the cloud.... That links to an IMF publication, Who Will Pay? Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change, and Other Long-Term Fiscal Challenges: 7:41:45 PM

	Saturday, November 1, 2003

A BUZZFLASH interview with Bill Moyers on today's news media. 6:17:44 PM

THE FUTURE OF NEWS Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News The Internet means now everyone is a journalist - or can be. Dale Peskin, Online Journalism Review, posted: 2002-03-26 Forty years ago Marshall McLuhan observed that we look at the future through a rear-view mirror. He foresaw a time when our small planet would become a connected, ever-changing global village that would immediately and inextricably be altered by the way it is observed and reported. McLuhan warned that few would notice. We would be changing and moving too fast, he predicted. Our vision for the future would be left to a backward glance through a small window of a moving vehicle.... 3:23:20 PM

MediaCon: Cooper's new book. Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America has published a new book, Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age. The book can be purchased at Amazon (link to come), or it can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons license. [Lessig Blog] 2:27:59 PM

Toward a paperless government When Congress passed the Government Paperwork Elimination Act in 1998, proponents talked about the remaking of an enormous paper-bound bureaucracy into the prototypical 21st century organization, complete with e-signatures and the electronic storage of documents. If you want an inkling of what this involves, consider that the federal government's computer systems stretch back some four decades, thus representing what may be the biggest IT petri dish in the world. The deadline for complying with the bill came and went last week with little of the fanfare that accompanied the start of the project. CNET News.com caught up with Ray Wells, IBM's top software executive in Washington, D.C., to gain some perspective on how close Uncle Sam is to realizing the ambition of a hard-copy-less system.... By Charles Cooper , Staff Writer, CNET News.com, October 27, 2003 2:16:50 PM

The New Road to the White House. The blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention. By Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 2:08:53 PM

The Fiscal Problem of the 21st Century. Charles Jones, Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, writes about the fiscal challenges ahead. The fiscal problem of the 21st century, then, is this: Under current policies, the fraction of resources society devotes to health care appears likely to rise substantially over the next 50 years. Reasonable projections suggest that spending on Medicare and Medicaid as a percentage of GDP may well rise from 3.4% in 2000 to nearly 15% by 2075. [Scott Loftesness] 2:03:25 PM

	Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Evolution, not revolution. Online: The dream of a borderless cyberspace is over. But the net is still rich and complex social place, says Steve Bowbrick. [Guardian Unlimited] 6:00:13 AM

	Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Jonathan Zittrain: Internet & Society - The Technologies and Politics of Control. Jonathan Zittrain is teaching a great course at Harvard Law School. This course examines current legal, political, and technical struggles for control/ownership of the global Internet and its content. The course will draw upon a growing body of cyberlaw cases and commentary, class members' research, and participation by invited guests, including lobbyists, politicians, journalists, and scholars from the HLS faculty and elsewhere. Course themes include the interaction between emerging Internet self-governance regimes and rule by traditional sovereigns; the expression of conflicting interests of commercial and individual Internet speakers/broadcasters; new modes of control over widely distributed intellectual property ("privication"); and the potential for market giants and other architects of Internet technologies to constrain behavior online in ways governments find difficult to assimilate. [Scott Loftesness] 4:46:54 AM

	Monday, January 13, 2003

eGovernment Maturity. Alan Mather writes frequently about eGovernment in general and particularly in the UK. Today he points to an article on eGovernment in the online section of the Guardian. The article also mentions Alan's blog. Alan has a pretty chart on eGovernment evolution that is analogous to the chart I use for talking about eGovernment maturity. The conclusion that I always make from the chart is that cross agency applications are the thing that governments have to start working on now to reach the next stage. This is the foundation of the message on web services that I'll be taking to the Universal Collaboration workshop tomorrow in DC (traveling today). [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] 2:59:09 PM

	Thursday, January 9, 2003

The Internet: One Way Street or Two Way Street The Read-Write Web. Dave Winer's First (DaveNet) Essay of the Year is about many things, but it may boil down best to what... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] and Defining Broadband in Only One Direction. Wall Street Journal: After Internet's Big Bust, Broadband Shift Went On. Much of the new content being developed for broadband... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 7:06:08 AM

Autograph (identifier) vs. Signature (identifier with intent) UETA and Digital Signatures. Many people have never heard of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, or UETA. Even so, if you engage in any kind of transaction on the Internet, even non-commercial ones like downloading open source software, it has affected you. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] "Most of us take our signature quite seriously. At some point in your life you probably practiced writing it so that it looked the way you wanted it to." Yes, most of us take our signature quite seriously. As Windley notes, at some point in our lives we usually practiced writing it so that it looked the way we wanted it to. Over time we come to intuit the fine grained distinctions of what a signing might imply. We gradually come to understanding that one might sign simply to identify your presence (a meeting sign-in sheet), or a mildly legal signing (accepting the package delivered), or a more serious signing (a car rental) or a really, really serious signing (a will). The level of identity needed and the level of intent implied can vary considerably. And all of this e-signing will evolve much as physical signing has evolved. One reason that notaries came into being was to have an "official" witness for those that could not sign, that could only make their mark with indicated intent without self-authenticating identity. 6:40:50 AM

	Tuesday, January 7, 2003

California disclosure law has national reach. Guarding against ID theft [The Register] 10:58:29 AM

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