Should newspapers charge for online content?

Yes, if they're major national/international newspapers with high quality original content.

And if the pricing is appropriate to the online world rather than the old physical newspaper delivered to your doorstep world.

The Washington Post is planning to implement what's called a "paywall" this summer, and they've floated the idea of charging $180/year for online subscriptions, requiring them for readers who want to access more than 20 articles per month.

Here's what I wrote their ombudsman-equivalent:

There are 2 ways of looking at a paywall: improving the newspaper's revenue & improving the reader's experience.

1. Improving the newspaper's revenue

Looks like the Washington Post is thinking of pricing access compared to getting home delivery--hence the idea floated by WaPo of charging $180/year. However, most of the WaPo's potential online subscribers are not considering this as an alternative to home delivery--we're all over the country & already have local newspapers.

We are not going to pay $180/year for just the national content of the WaPo. I doubt most of us would pay more than a tenth of that. I predict the WaPo will wind up stepping over dollars to pick up nickels if it pursues such an ill-considered pricing policy. It will make far, far more money off cheap per-user pricing than by limiting its online active readership to a relative handful of affluent local subscribers.

At the very least you should consider a low price for potential subscribers who live outside the physical newspaper's distribution area, & therefore have no need or use for its local content.

Another group excluded by high pricing is retired people living on a fixed income.

2. Improving the reader's experience

News/opinion consumption has become an interactive phenomenon. Readers want to have their say, and so the comment threads of articles have become significant in a way that old-school newspapermen might not realize.

The problem is that the comment threads on topics that affect corporate profits or major political advantage have been rendered useless because they're infested by paid shills using persona management software, with one shill having up to 70 online identities. These shills would not have to pay a subscription fee because they could just manipulate their identities. You can read about it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing

Find a solution that blocks astroturfers or pricing becomes irrelevant....See More

 

The New York Times refutes "self deportation"--they think

Today's featured editorial in the New York Times is titled "Do-It-Yourself Deportation." Next to the illustration--a drawing of a Sensitive Boy weeping blue Doves of Peace, you get to read the teenager's sad tale of how his parents self-deported. Actually, you aren't reading what he wrote, because he isn't fluent in English. You got to read a translation of him telling us that America must give him and his parents and his brother citizenship because they work hard, and, well, gosh darn it, they want it. Reeeely bad.

I want a million bucks. Reeeely bad. I want free airlines tickets for the rest of my life so I can travel more. I want a Ferrari. In green please. Red is so yesterday. I've worked hard. I keep my nose clean. I'm a devoted husband. So gimme.

No? Why not?

Well, here's why. Because America could spare the minuscule percentage of our national budget to do all those things for me. But it can't afford to do so for every single nice, hardworking person who wants these things.

That's the principle of universal application, as opposed to special pleading, which is what Antonio and I were doing. 

And the universal application of Antonio's special pleading is to let anyone come here and get citizenship if they reeeely want it and they're willing to work hard and keep their noses clean. I'm sure Antonio's down with us deporting violent felons. Just not the 10-20 million nice guys like him.

But nearly all those nice guys have less than the equivalent of an American high school education. Guess what the unemployment rate is for American high school dropouts? I believe it's around 25% or thereabouts.

OK, suppose we limited it to high school grads plus kids who haven't dropped out? Yet?

Then what do we tell all the people from all over the world who've applied to come here? "Sorry, we've changed our minds. You should have come here illegally, then said "Hey, I'm here, so gimme.""

Of course it's not Antonio's fault. He's underage, after all. But it's not our fault either. It's his parents fault. And it's Mexico's fault for its national policies that favor unlimited reproduction without worrying about how to provide work and food and water and housing for all those people. 

Well, why worry? Just encourage them to come here. Because somehow it's our fault. And if we don't give them citizenship we're insensitive. And isn't being insensitive the worst thing we could be?

The New York Times believes our nation's immigration policy should be handed over to the government and citizens of Mexico.

Doesn't that sound, well...insane?

Self-deportation

NYTimes liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, writing about Mitt Romney, alluded to his "inane suggestion that illegal aliens engage in 'self-deportation'.”

And here, in one phrase, is the essence of how the Democratic Party has thrust so many American working stiffs into the eager embrace of the Republicans.

"Self deport" just means "going home" if your home is in another country. Why would anyone do that? Dowd, by calling the idea "inane" is saying nobody would.

Well, they would if they couldn't get work or social services. They couldn't get those things if we adopted India's cheap, highly workable national biometric ID system, using iris patterns instead of counterfitable cards. We can use it as a virtual border fence to prevent trespassers from cashing in.

This idea is only "inane" if it's impossible. So a 3rd world country can do it but we can't? I find that assumption to be the inane one. Every single illegal doesn't have to self-deport for it to work. If a quarter of 12 million people went home, that would still be a huge improvement. And the knowledge that it was so difficult to get by here without being here legally would help dissuade others from coming, while amnesty has had the opposite effect every time we've tried it.

And the idea that America is preferable to, say, Mexico, is soft jingoism. Mexicans love many things about Mexico--it's their culture, their people, their language, their village. Very few say they came here because they reject any of those things. Many say, actually, that they don't like American culture, people, or language. They only come because they have trouble getting ahead back home (mainly due to Mexico's extreme overpopulation crisis overwhelming the Mexican economy's ability to provide jobs for all those people).

And Dowd is summarily dismissing one of the very few ideas Romney advances that aren't bogus, when he presents so there are so many fat targets presented by him every time he opens his mouth--why? Dowd doesn't realize how out of touch this makes her look, not him.

Here in the Southwest we're drowning in illegals who don't even have a high school education. Dowd's job is safe. So's her neighborhood. Her wages aren't being driven down. Her union isn't being busted. And she wonders why blue collar Americans are voting Republican?

I'm voting for Obama because the GOP is even more delusional than the Dems. But it's not because of illegal immigration, where Romney's right and Obama's wrong. It's because of the GOP being so destructive to our economy and our civilization in nearly every other regard--and it won't really act on illegal immigration anyway, as the Bush era proved. They just talk about it when they're out of office--because the GOP's billionaire patrons love illegal immigration.

New York Times sez bring back the A10s and AC130s to Libya

The New York Times' Friday editorial duplicates what I said a week ago: that no one else has these specialized craft, which would be uniquely useful and cost-effective in the Libyan engagement. President Obama's making a big mistake by keeping these out of the fray, though his seeking consensus about Libya was a great idea overall.

The problem is big government! Really?

A commentor on a NYTimes forum said:

Government creates nothing, produces nothing. Controlling deficits ought to start with a radical reduction in government programs and government workers. The government (federal and state in particular) is full of redundancy, inefficienct [sic] and waste. Worse yet, government oftens [sic] creates dependence on government - the opposite of self-reliance and innovation. Government makes us poorer and weaker.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the libertarian mantra.

So let's start by firing the Minerals Management bureaucracy, which oversees oil rig safety. After all, the oil companies have told us they'll self-regulate, because it's not in their own interest to have massive oil rig failures that will pollute the shorelines and fisheries of half a dozen states for generations, because that would mean they're short-sighted and mindlessly greedy. Which is just Communist propaganda. Everyone knows that Fortune 500 boardrooms are bastions of Chri$tianity. Er, I mean Christianity.

Now you might say Well, that particular bureaucracy was incompetent, weren't they? After all, they didn't prevent the most massive oil rig failure in American history.

To which I'd say we're looking at the consequences of the most thorough deregulatory pogram since the Robber Baron era. Bush II gutted the regulatory bureaucracy, starving them of funds, staffing them with cronies, having the industries write their own regulations, and removing the government's internal controls--you know, the ones designed to prevent regulators from being bribed or otherwise suborned by the industries they're tasked with regulating.

And it's not like President Obama can fire all those Republican cronies. For one thing, it's not easy to fire federal employees other than direct political appointees. The supposed nonpartisan, permanent jobs Bush filled with people whose qualifications were rock-ribbed Republican credentials such as opposition to abortion--you can't just fire those people.

And it's a lot easier and quicker to kick over a castle made of wooden blocks than to rebuild it.

Now let's go back to our libertarian's opening salvo: "Government creates nothing, produces nothing."

You could say the same of Wall Street. Once created to provide a source of capital for manufacturers, it now exists for the profit of the Masters of the Universe through manipulating money, while companies large and small desperately seek funding sources once supplied by Wall Street.

And the companies themselves, absent regulation, have used the quickest road to profits: fire the American workers and move the manufacturing to China and elsewhere. They're still manufacturers, but they aren't American manufacturers. They're foreign manufacturers with American headquarters. Such companies "create nothing, produce nothing" that benefits Americans.

Sure, you pay less for goods you buy by buying Chinese ones at Walmart...out of your unemployment check.

Woo hoo.

The libertarians can't face the fact that business not controlled by government (that is, us) comes to control government (witness the Bush II years). Whoever gains the upper hand in a competitive environment uses that upper hand to destroy his competitors. The natural outcome of all unregulated business environments is monopoly, followed by ruthless exploitation of ordinary citizens.

Now it's equally true that unchecked government becomes the monopoly, turning to self-dealing and a singular focus on preservation of incumbency.

The only hope the little guy has is government strong enough to keep business in check, and business strong enough to keep government in check, with transparency enough to let us keep both in check.

You can't abolish power. There is always power. The only question is who has it. Taking power away from government, by itself, just hands it over to anything-but-free enterprise.

That is, the real enemy of capitalism isn't communism--it's crony capitalism. Pickpockets work in teams, with a distractor and a lifter. Communist governments and crony capitalist "governments" each acts as each other's distractor, while the lifter--be it the crony capitalist or the communist--rummages around in citzens' wallets while we stare in horror at the proffered boogeyman. Soviet-era Russians were just as horrified about the Capitalist Menace as we were by the Red Menace.

I can't believe I have to say all this after the Bush II reign and its disastrous consequences, but the Billionaire's Club's propaganda machine has convinced at least a third of the voters that up is down, black is white, and the only problem with the Bush II era is that they didn't completely destroy government instead of just crippling it.

The NY Times weighs in on illegal immigration again

Good grief, another New York Times' shortsighted editorial pandering to every special interest group but working class American citizens. See it at:

http://www.nytimes
.com/2008/04/17/
opinion/17thu1.html
?ref=opinion

My comment:

The NYT editorial board members surely don't think they dwell in an ivory tower, spooling out lofty proposals utterly divorced from gritty reality. No ivory tower thinker does, after all. They all imagine themselves veritable cynosures of sound thinking.

Yet nowhere in this anti-anti-immigration screed did they note the havoc being wrought in the Social Security Administration by illegals' rampant identity theft. People retiring today are discovering they can't start collecting until the SSA figures out who they are when there are several--sometimes many--people claiming to be you.

I can assure you that for people ensnarled by others' theft of their identity, this isn't a problem that can wait for endless committee meetings to hash things out. Meanwhile a MILLION illegal aliens flood across our borders every year--in part because our gummint has given them hope of yet another amnesty, like the one in 1986.

Imperfect as things are, doing nothing while we strive for perfection has a huge downside for the American workers the NYT board puports to adore: Chamber of Commerce types are using the availability of innumerable illegals to drive down blue-collar wages and strangle the unions.

The NYT board usse Orwellian GoodSpeak throughout, of course, referring to illegal aliens as "undocumented workers," and all opponents of illegal immigration as "Minutemen."

In their tower, I suppose they think that these illegals just dropped out of the sky, and that every single one of them is a worker.

Neither is true, but it's effective propaganda, hiding the indisputable fact that every single person in the United States is a citizen of a country. I'm a citizen of the United States. The vast majority of illegal aliens are perfectly documented citizens of Mexico, with smaller but still substantial numbers from parts south, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras etc.

And for every hard-working person there's a passel of relatives collecting welfare, stuffing the schools with children who aren't even literate in Spanish, and stuffing the ERs with patients, since they don't have doctors...all on the taxpayers' dime. Meanwhile they send much of what they make out of the country--which also hurts our economy.

The only people who profit from their presence are the bosses and the Catholic Church, which brazenly interferes with our society and our laws in order to fill its churches with far more doctrinaire, obedient members than most American Catholics have proven to be.

Of course these illegals aren't stuffing the schools or hospitals or churches that the NYT editorial board member use.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And the board dismisses out of hand the supposed argument that illegal aliens will self-deport en masse if they can't find work here. This is a hyperbolic straw man argument, since nobody has said they would. We've said that if they can't work here they'll leave our country no faster than they came, one by one, very reluctantly.

Of course it would go a lot faster if we adopted a universal biometric ID, as one advanced country after another is discovering it must do.

Underlying the NYT editboard aguments seems to be the philosophy that if it's hard to enforce a law you should just surrender. It would sure simplify our burdened court system if we applied that principle to a raft of crimes.

Anyone liking that school of thought needs to spend some quality time in a country with little or no rule of law. Nigeria, perhaps. Or Somalia.

Worse yet, the NYT editboard seems to live purely in the now. It wants amnesty for the illegals already here. Many claim that's 10 or 12 million people. But nobody knows, since we don't have a universal biometric ID yet. It could be 20 million, as some are now estimating.

And then what? Same as in 1986--millions upon millions of Mexicans and others will start moving to El Norte. That's how America's Latino population zoomed from .5% in 1940 to over 14% today: through illegal immigration and a succession of amnesties, along with a stunning birthrate--highest by unmarried teens of any ethnic group BTW.

And once more, with the NYT's help, Mexico's ruling elites will continue to dictate America's demographic composition and overall population size, as well as continuing to outsource their home-grown population crisis to America, along with outsourcing their social services infrastructure to us.

So how did a left-wing outfit like the NYT edit board become a tool of America's and Mexico's ruling classes?

I look forward to an editorial on THAT subject.

New York Times immigration editorial+my response

Here's the editorial:

The Road to Dystopia

New York Times Editorial March 13, 2008

The search for a silver bullet to slay illegal immigration continues. Hard-liners are turning the country upside down looking for it.

They are looking in Washington, where Senate Republicans last week offered more than a dozen bills to further enshrine mass deportation as the national immigration strategy. It is a grab bag of enforcement measures that will be useful for tough-talking campaign commercials, but will not actually solve anything.

Republicans and some Democrats in the House are trying to force a vote on a bad bill called the SAVE Act, which among other things would force all workers, including citizens, to prove they have a right to earn a living — a bad idea compounded by the notoriously bad state of federal government records.

The error rate in just one database, the Social Security Administration’s, is believed to be more than 4 percent, making it likely that many thousands of Americans would face unjust firings and discrimination, and waste a lot of time and effort trying to clear their names.

The harsh-enforcement virus has spread far beyond the Capitol. In states like Oklahoma, laws have been enacted to force illegal immigrants further underground, off official registries and into anonymity, by denying them identification like driver’s licenses. In a growing number of states and counties, politicians are offering up police officers to the federal government for immigration posses. From Prince William County, Va., to Maricopa County, Ariz., officers who pull people over for minor traffic infractions are checking immigration papers, too.

Many law-enforcement professionals say this is reckless and self-defeating, because it sends a deep, silencing chill into immigrant communities. Citizens and legal residents will inevitably be hassled for looking Latino. And it is expensive; Prince William’s new law is expected to cost $26 million over five years, plus a few million more to outfit police cars with cameras, as a hedge against lawsuits.

Maybe some people do not mind that immigration zealotry is sending the country down a path of far greater intrusion into citizens’ lives, into a world of ingrained suspicion, routine discrimination and economic disruption. Is that what we want — to make the immigration system tougher without fixing it? To make illegal immigrants suffer without any hope of ever becoming legal, because that is amnesty?

Could it be that tightening the screws relentlessly on illegal immigrants, even if some citizens suffer in the process, is all for the greater good?

Which is — what exactly? To drive a large cohort of workers out of a sputtering economy? To take more people off the books? To prop up the under-the-table businesses that inevitably evade such crackdowns? To worsen wages and working conditions for all Americans, since nobody works more cheaply and takes more abuse than a terrified, desperate immigrant?

This is a country that runs on routine amnesties. Where would the courts be without plea bargains, or state budgets without periodic tax forgiveness? Are illegal immigrants the one class of undesirables for whom common sense, proportionality, discernment, good judgment and compassion are unthinkable?

It is frightening to think that this country’s answer could be an emphatic yes.

Here's my response:

Actually what's frightening is to think that this country's leading newspaper could produce an editorial as hostile to our own country—especially its most vulnerable citizens—as this one. It's not that the New York Times editorial board members are false to my principles. It's that they're false to their own principles.

I'm certain they agree with H.L. Mencken's mission statement for good journalism (beyond a commitment to factuality): "To comfort the afflicted—and afflict the comfortable." Yet in their tunnel-visioned advocacy for illegal aliens (that's the legal term, folks—look it up), they comfort the wealthiest 1/2% of Americans and Mexicans, who profit most from illegal aliens' scab labor, and afflict the most afflicted Americans—the poor Blacks, Whites, Asians and Latinos with just high school diplomas or less. Those are the ones whose wages have been driven down by 8-20% (depending on industry and region) by being forced to compete with illegal alien labor. And there's not a single labor category where Americans won't work for a living wage. Moreover, it's the schools those blue-collar Americans attend that are being flooded with semiliterate peasants who can't even speak Spanish grammatically, much less English. It's the ERs those blue-collar Americans can't get into now because they're flooded with illegal aliens who use them for primary care. It's the neighborhoods poor Blacks in LA live in that are being ethnically "cleansed" of Blacks by Mexican and Salvadorean gangbangers. It's the Southwest that's being turned into a homogeneous Mexican barrio, not Greater Manhattan where the NYTimes editorial writers live and work.

Fact is, the New York Times' staffers and their families and friends aren't affected by this massive invasion. Which makes their patronizing contempt for those who are understandable, albeit despicable. Unfortunately it also confirms everything the right wingnuts say about the "MSM," exemplified by the NYTimes. Which is especially unfortunate for the 40% of Democrats who, like me, do have some sympathy for blue collar Americans.

A few specifics:

"mass deportation as the national immigration strategy"

No one is advocating mass deportation--certainly no one in the U.S. Senate. So the New York Times is knowingly lying when they say this...and in doing so they cross the line from advocacy to propaganda of the sort they decry when right wingers do it.

"force all workers, including citizens, to prove they have a right to earn a living"

I had to prove my citizenship the last time I applied for a job, back in 1999. How is this onerous? Illegal aliens don't have a right to earn a living in the country they're in illegally. By what sort of cracked logic is it wrong for wrong to be wrong? If I moved to any other country I'd have to prove I had a right to earn a living there before I could earn a living. Any. Other. Country. Why should the U.S. be an exception to an otherwise universal feature of sovereign nations?

"bad state of federal government records"

The New York Times' logic is that if the Social Security Administration's records err by, as they claim, 4%, then you can't use those records for anything. By that logic we should abandon federal recordkeeping since it isn't perfect. So when someone applies for Social Security the application should be accepted without a confirmation in the records? That's insane. Remember what happened when FEMA doled out payments to Katrina victims without checks? Literally billions of taxpayer dollars went into the pockets of con artists. Moreover, one reason why Social Security records are imperfect is identity theft by illegal aliens that hasn't been tracked down--largely because the federal government hasn't enforced rules regarding ID theft and hasn't required government agencies to cooperate in order to track this down. Talk about getting it backwards.

"driver’s licenses"

The New York Times wants us to give illegal aliens drivers' licenses, or we'll "force them further underground." Well, yes, any crime you prosecute drives the criminals "further underground." By the NYTimes' logic we should then legalize all crimes--otherwise we're driving the criminals underground. And communities with high crime rates won't want to cooperate with police. Of course if we legalize everything we won't need police. Then everyone can come out and play in the sunlight--rapists, con artists, drug dealers, bank robbers...don't you with the NYTimes were running the government?

Isn't is wonderful how privileged, isolated pundits issue prescriptions for the common good from their towers? I could take the rest of this editorial apart, but isn't it obvious how intellectually lazy and hypocritical it is?

Response to yet another NYTmes diatribe about immigration

For the editorial board of the New York Times, illegal immigration is an ideological issue. For those of us who live in the border states it's an everyday in-your-face reality. My state--California--now ranks 48th among states educationally, as a direct result of our schools being flooded with the children of Mexican peasants, a majority of whom drop out before graduation. Our ERs are stuffed with same. Transnational criminal gangs have turned California's prisons into a battleground, while their compadres out on the streets are racially cleansing mixed neighborhoods of blacks.

You call us nativist and restrictionist. I call you isolated, arrogant, full of condescending advice about a reality you've never dealt with. Manhattan is a melting pot where "immigration" means great restaurants with cuisines from all over the world. In the border states it means the formation of a monolithic ethnic enclave comparable to Canada's thorn-in-its side Quebec. Today the most-watched TV station in LA broadcasts only in Spanish, and the Mexican flag decorates innumerable bumpers and back windows.

Nowhere in your hyperbolic editorial did you address the fact that business interests have exploited illegal aliens' labor to drive down blue-collar wages for everyone 15-25%. But I suppose poor whites and blacks--and Hispanic citizens, for that matter--are yesterday's news.

Worst of all, your editorial radiates a smug moral certainty also characteristic of the pronouncements of, say, fundamentalist Christians here or Wahhabist Muslims in the Middle East.

You treat our defense of our society, our culture, our very safety as so contemptible you need to do little more than label us "nativist" and get back to your morning latte.

There are positions that don't deserve respectful disagreement, to be sure. Creationism, for example. All the Creationists' anti-evolution arguments are complete nonsense, and the more scientific terms they use the more nonsensical they get.

So I'm not saying you should treat the two-thirds of Americans who oppose illegal immigration with respect just because. But your arguments and refutations demonstrate the shallowness of your approach. In this you exemplify Saul Steinberg's famous cartoon of the USA as seen though New Yorkers' eyes. You are parochials pretending to be sophisticates.

And the Democrats' candidates all say exactly the same thing as you do. Didn't you notice Barack Obama's extended refutation of the "deport them all" stance that no one has taken (that's called a Straw Man argument)? Didn't you notice Senator Clinton stating "No woman is illegal," then adding that no man is either? Is that what you'd say about the Saudi airplane bombers who were here illegally?

What you dismiss as "restrictionist" works just fine. If I have ants in my kitchen, I have to not leave food out. Then they go away. A majority of illegal aliens will self-deport if we make it impossible for them to earn money here--and to send money back to Mexico.

In your exegesis you failed to mention that you want America to pay for the Mexican government's exploitation of its people and the Catholic Church's domination of social policy there, resulting in Mexico's population exploding from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million today--vastly more people than its economy can absorb.

How is America at fault for this? It's Mexico's kleptocracy and the 14th century attitude of its dominant religion that produced the population bomb Mexico desperately wants to deposit on our doorstep.

Meanwhile we erect a near-endless wait for the grad students and skilled professionals who want to live and work here, and the million Iraqi Christians our policies have deprived of home and country. Them we could use. More peasants we don't need. All they help is big business in its endless war on the working class--abetted by Volvo liberals like yourselves.

"We" didn't invite these illegal aliens here. Wealthy corporatists did, then outsourced their massive social burden to the taxpayer, while insourcing the profits of their cheap, uncomplaining labor to themselves.

How can you shill for the greedy plutocrats you oppose in every other editorial? How can you urge the Democratic Party to further alienate itself from its traditional base of working-class Americans of every race and ethnicity in your passion for Mexico's citizenry?

I could be like you. Heck, I speak Spanish. I've lived in Mexico. I'm comfortable in that culture. And I live in an affluent college town that isn't being inundated by illegals. What's happening affects me very little--just like you. But unlike you I care about Americans who don't have my advantages.

The New York Times publishing a science section article showing how partisans of the left and right don't process political information with the reasoning part of their brains. You should look up that article, then do some serious introspection.