What the cat dragged in

Iraq is already the West’s new Vietnam – opinions in the street and at the dinner table are deeply polarized, but both sides are following agendas no deeper than about five dot points; all of which everyone has already heard (and on both sides), ad infinitum.

So here’s my take.

The “five dot points deep” syndrome is fed and sustained by an asymmetry of rogues. The enemy is variously personal (Saddam) and also a nation, variously unfinished Gulf War business and also the post September 11 new-Realpolitik, variously a proxy war to test and tame another country (Saudi Arabia) and also an annihilation by proxy of just one human being (Bin Laden).

I could go on – not least by going through the gallery of innocents, just as asymmetric as that of the rogues. Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter, because they are inseparable – rogues and innocents, individual nutcases and whole countries. Both sides of dot pointers are nonetheless right, if only because they share the same defect of rationality, done to a high school debate lukewarmness.

Try instead to get inside the head of a suicide bomber - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15979. It’s not a pretty picture – nor is it even a clear picture. It’s not much to do with leaders (Saddam, Bin Laden) nor ideology and nationalism. It’s intellectually soft – soft as its targets – and as easily spread and mass-marketed as any other brand of pop-nihilism. Use of videotape by suicide bombers places them simultaneously at the crassest outlier of reality TV, and yet crowns them as maker-connoisseurs of sophisticated cinematic irony, a la Network (1976; Dir. Sidney Lumet, Wr. Paddy Chayefsky).

Just one referent somewhat grounds all this explosive, uncontrollable periphery – family. In an appropriately asymmetric gesture, Saddam/Iraq (as well as the other usual suspects) give a large sum of money to the families of dead suicide bombers. This makes him/them variously a go-getter production company of admirable flint-hardness, and also – just – a weeping spiral of pathos and self-righteous hypocrisy. Ah, family!

There may be no “smoking gun” in Iraq, then, but there sure are smoking nostrils - everywhere.

Brainstorming the world in six days

Media reporting of top-tier globalisation conferences (TTGCs), such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), currently on in Davos, Switzerland, will usually to be inadequate, tangential, or hagiographic, or a combination of all three. Unlike, say, an “exclusive” Hollywood A-list party, where the media will naturally be be present in small force (if only because the A-list itself includes a fair number of writers and photographers), a TTGC can manage no such fudging - the sheep and the goats must be counted and separated .

In the micro-scheduled (270 seminars in six days) WEF, every delegate is concomitantly micro-managed, in terms of their level of access and accreditation. Involving not just multi-hued lanyards and laminates (now standard at just about every large-scale walk-around event, whether a conference or rock concert), but "smart" name tags, the WEF and its TTGC ilk are wrapped up in as much deadly-serious yet arcane protocol as an Elizabethan royal court.

Even for a journalist with high-level access, then, there is no mood-on-the-street “pulse” that can be taken at a TTGC – everything and everyone is much too stratified for this. The near-inevitable protests outside any TTGC, of course, may represent an attractive, alternative angle of coverage – despite the hugely wasteful misallocation of media resources in a privileged insider choosing to cover the outside, and so jostle alongside everyone else in the broadcast commons.

Today’s The Age/AFP report -
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/24/1042911529968.html - of the start of the WEF certainly doesn’t digress to things on the outside. Indeed, the report is so tame and context-less, it could almost cynically be dismissed as being just direct regurgitation of WEF PR guff. Only the mistakes it makes have me wondering – maybe there is at least one real journalist holed up in Davos; with the excuse for his/her terrible copy being their low level of access and accreditation – so low in fact, that they can’t even come up with a factually correct simulacra of a WEF media release.

So for the record, the mistakes: (i) Accenture is NOT, in January 2003, fairly describable as “formerly Arthur Andersen” with the former (consulting) firm being spun out of the latter (accounting) firm in 1989, and severing any remaining all ties in October 2000 - www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_992000/992946.stm
(ii) there is apparently a six-day “brainstorming session” at WEF, a session that in fact runs the entire length of the Forum itself. One’s mind boggles at the amount of butcher’s paper being drawn upon on sturdy easels for this session. Okay, this one is probably not so much a “mistake”, as the infelicitous use of ambiguous term. One fairly senses, however, that the poor hack who wrote these words, has never directly experienced a corporate “brainstorming session”. For this reason alone, the WEF appears to have chosen their leading wire journalist well - from the streets of Davos, the mood is that of the office junior when he/she is locked in a cupboard for six days.

This is a re-posting of a post from Monday, January 06, 2003 [re-posted coz it's fallen of the bottom of the running order]

The Last of the dot-com Big Spenders is Alive and Well, and Living in Burwood

As current or sometime owner of several domain names myself, I was interested to read and ponder the (belatedly-breaking) crikey.com vs crikey.com.au story: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/06/1041566353425.html

With its main players being a Microsoft head office exec, a mysterious Melbourne-based interloper, and a prominent Australian political/corporate commentator-cum-gadfly, the “Crikey” domain name ownership dispute is of more interest than the familiar celebrity-takes-on-cybername-jacker stories.

Stephen Mayne, the said commentator-cum-gadfly, apparently registered the name crikey.com.au in 1998 or 1999. The name chosen was a cleanskin one; apart from its general association with the Australian vernacular, the word had no prior commercial connotations. Conversely, Mayne has developed the crikey.com.au website from scratch into a significant media outlet, certainly as far as independent media outlets in Australia go. The common law brand “Crikey” is thus rightly Mayne’s - in Australia, and wherever the website is read in the rest of the world, unless someone can show that they were a prior user of the name (very unlikely), or that there is no possibility of consumer confusion between Mayne’s and the subsequent “Crikey”.

Into this unambiguous statement of rights, comes the small irritant – the dot.com “mirror” domain name of a dot.com.XX national suffix. There are ironies aplenty in the dual domain name game. The sparer suffix “dot.com” wins against the equivalent national suffix on almost all grounds, and most especially, price. Not only are dot.com.au names ludicrously expensive in comparison to their more elegant and memorable siblings, the high cost of the Australian national suffix (which also entails artificial business name-obtaining hoops) deters cybername speculators in the first place. Thus, apart from some vague sense of good old digging-deep patriotism, there is no commercial reason for an Australian concern to bother registering the national suffix “mirror” to their dot.com domain name. In the event of a customer choosing the wrong (.au) suffix, the resultant blank page, together with a modicum of customer common sense, will soon see them on their way.

That dot.com-only wins is on the proviso, of course, that the Australian outfit can register their domain name in the preferred, dot.com form. In Mayne’s case, Seattle-based Microsoft executive Mike Smith had earlier (1997) registered the crikey.com name. For many Australian businesses, this was, at the time, a depressingly familiar scenario. Tens of millions of dot.com suffixes, most presumably randomly sourced from a dictionary, were acquired in the mid-to-late 1990’s, mainly by American speculators and hobbyists. While non-Americans were always free to join this mass name-grab, few seemed to have done so with any enthusiasm. For Australians contemplating domain name speculation, the downsides would have been the low Australian dollar (making the playing field quite unlevel), and probably also a gut feeling – quite right, as it turned out – that the speculation would almost always be in vain, ultimately. Since 2001, millions of dot.com suffixes have fallen available, through not being renewed. For most brand-new Australian businesses then, the domain name game may be looking up.

For many of those established a few years, however, the decision they made to go with a dot.com.au national suffix – with the full-knowledge that the dot.com “mirror” name was already taken, most likely by a speculator, will be a cause for regret. Perversely, a likely reason that many American speculators would have renewed a dot.com domain name in the last two years is the chance to, after having trawled the dot.com.XX national suffix databases and found a “mirror” match, become a sort of cyber-squatter in retrospect (and so in a legally sanctioned way).

The risks here (and worst-case buy-out costs) for Australian businesses can be overstated. With the benefit of hindsight, Stephen Mayne, was particularly vulnerable to a malignant form of retrospective cyber-squatting because of the investigative and linen-airing nature of his website. With it being fair to assume that Mayne has a few enemies, who are also quite possibly cashed-up, it is credible – if also very troubling – that one or more of these has coughed up what is possibly a record amount, post-2001, to take over a dot.com name ($US 7,500). Any ordinary American speculator would have been chuffed with far less, I suspect.

Whoever he/she/they are, they have taken some care to not identify themselves, with the “Who Is” records showing that the proud new owner of crikey.com (paid up to 2006) is Martin Hallier of 19 Main Street, Burwood, Victoria 3125; phone +61-3-9555-2002; email martinhallier@hotmail.com. There is no such street, and the phone number operates as a redirect to a stranger’s phone.

Moral of the story?

While nothing may unite disparate people more than having a common enemy, Microsoft may be more than just a hated leviathan, the proverbial brick wall. Small, throwaway gestures are sometimes the way one enemy communicates to, does business with another.

The more discrete the scale of such a gesture, however, the bigger may be the ultimate public impact and stench.

Thousands of school leavers miss out on 4WDs – are aspirational cars the only option?

With first-round offers being made to school leavers all around Australia this week, the familiar annual outcry has begun. Thousands of aspirational young Australians, who had their sights set on the drivers seat in a new 4WD, will miss out entirely, and so will be forced to now consider their options. Jemma Barwick, 18, from Sydney’s north shore spoke for many of the disappointed when she said: “It’s so completely so not fair. I mean, I so know that I wasn’t going to get into the new top-of-the-line Landcruiser, but to miss out on even an ‘as new’ two-door Suzuki soft top in Bathurst? Whatever!”.

Experts point out, however, that people such as Jemma may be thinking too narrowly in their choice of aspirational vehicles, with so-called Transport, Alcohol & Fucking Ennabler (TAFE) cars being a viable option for many school leavers, particularly those from less aspirational backgrounds. While TAFE cars are typically smaller, older and less reliable than their 4WD counterparts, they are also much cheaper – a TAFE car lasting one year typically costs only about $600, compared to the large loans – ranging from $12,000 to $100,000 – that are the total price of a 4WD drivers seat.

For those with their hearts still firmly set on an aspirational – rather than a merely vocational and utilitarian – vehicle, experts suggest articulation as being the best option for those who have missed out, such as Jemma. Articulation involves driving a small TAFE car, typically for one year only, and then wrapping this up inside the oncoming vehicle, a new 4WD.

Other commentators have made even more radical suggestions. One person has gone so far as to suggest that young Australians think beyond vehicle ownership as the necessary, formal foundation for the rest of their lives.

But is the self-moving person option – which frees up the money and time saved from not owning a vehicle for immediate “real world” use, such as on education – still viable for today’s younger Australians? Prime Minister John Howard strikes a note of caution here, warning that aspirational 4WDs are still the key to lifelong success and happiness for most people, however traditional and stuffy they may be derided for being, among some inner-city circles. Even if you don’t get into the car of your choice first-off, Mr Howard sagely advised one disappointed young man, keep trying – in the end, aspiration will always win out over education.

Okay Dennis Shanahan (The Australian, 20 January 2003, no URL available) – the Canberra firestorm means that the rest of Australia should give up, once and for all, the “fat cats” thing about your home town.

Whatever ABS income stats and Bermuda triangle-esque roundabouts have long suggested to the contrary, the near-biblical level of destruction wrought by the Canberra fires shows that your much-maligned city was never much more than a softwood plantation - cheap, sappy and straight.

Unemployment is the multi-faceted result of a calculated, secretive distortion of the employee/employer market. Just when you thought that Marxism was dead, along comes the parable below. Don’t ask me who “the owner” really is – “capital” is a woefully anachronistic, as well as semantically vague term. All I know is that the tenth tenant and the tenth room are real enough.


The tenth tenant

Imagine if, on a small island, there was only one large house - long since subdivided into the owner’s quarters plus ten small, self-contained apartments. The island also now has ten single, adult residents, in addition to the owner.

Before letting out any of her apartments, the owner thought long and hard about how to maximise her rental return. Due to unique island factors, she could predict with near-certainty that ten people – no more, no less – would come to live there. Knowing this, she consciously decided to board up and hide the existence of one of her ten apartments.

Why did she do this? In economic terms, she was cornering the market, creating an artificial shortage/sell-out, one that would drive up the prices paid by those “lucky” enough to be buyers. Where an amount of product can be physically stockpiled at an economic storage rate, this cornering stratagem is impeccable. But given that a boarded-up room both continuously “leaks” forgone income, and eventually perishes as a capital asset, can it be that the collective rental scarcity premiums paid by the nine “lucky” tenants add up to at least equal this loss?

It would seem so, at least as long as the boarded-up room is kept a secret from them. For the unlucky tenth tenant, homelessness is his/her main option. Homelessness, of course, comes with an extreme visibility that handily compounds – psychologically, if not monetarily – the upward pressure on the rents of the other nine. Note that all ten tenants are dupes in this closed loop – the tenth tenant, homeless only because of a shortage of rooms; and the other nine, who unknowingly pay to prop-up and directly subsidise this shortage, while also shelling-out some small change on the homeless tenth tenant-cum-beggar, on a regular basis.

Is there a way out? Can the secret apartment be found out (or volunteered up) and un-boarded for occupancy? If so, the most likely resolution is not the obvious, equilibrium one – ten apartments for ten tenants. By cutting a grey-market, cheap rent deal with the homeless tenth tenant, the owner should be able to finally successfully exploit the empty room (albeit for half-market rent only), and yet at the same time retain the shortage-era, surcharged rent-levels for the other nine tenants.

The owner, then, is able to (almost) double-dip, by renting the room out an effective one-and-a-half times. The opprobrium directed forcefully and personally by the nine original tenants against their new neighbour (“bludger”!) forecloses any rational consideration of the situation. Monetarily, they are slightly better off by the homeless tenth tenant’s being taken in and therefore no longer begging, but psychologically, they feel utterly cheated. As they should, of course, only not looking at the tenth tenant. Even if it is accepted that they subsidise half the tenth tenant’s rent, double this amount is concomitantly being paid over to the owner, as a spurious shortage subsidy. But this latter subsidy remains effectively invisible, with none of the nine ever really questioning the “shortage” status quo.

As the nine original tenants get angrier and angrier over time with the “bludging” tenth tenant, the “shortage” seems to become more acute. The nine’s rents start to spiral up exponentially, even though underlying supply and demand on the island have not changed a jot. The owner becomes immensely rich. The social outcast tenth tenant, eventually tiring of fruitless pleading with the owner to be able to pay full-rent, one day boards themself in their room, from the inside – and dies, at least until the next one comes along.

That is the end of the story, really, and yet it is also just the very beginning. It is only when the existence of the tenth tenant no longer matters, so that the person seems to merge with the physical existence of a boarded-up room, about which … well, who really cares? The nine original tenants would themselves agree that they are better off not knowing about any of this, in the first place. “Nine rooms for nine tenants” – it sounds neat, tidy, and means that they all get on so-o-o well with the owner.

Haven’t seen any one else blogging on it, so I thought I might as well. Call me crazy, but I kind of like those “too hot to handle (or blog about)” stories.

This difficulty of this story, from a media commentary POV – a story which has been aggressively pumped by Melbourne tabloid, the Herald-Sun, over the last two days – is that there are really only one-and-a-bit positions that can be taken on the story. Condemning tabloid muckraking/invasion-of-privacy etc – the typical high-horse option – seems a much shakier proposition because of the specifics of this story. It really is – drum roll, please – a (rare) case where the application of the Herald-Sun’s harshest tabloid spotlight can be argued to be fair and reasonable.

The facts concern a cheating student, Kevin Sze Wong, who paid his private tutor to sit one of his exams at RMIT, a Melbourne university. Today’s (latest) developments are at:
http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5819409%255E2862,00.html

Yesterday, the story was Herald-Sun front page news, with a big banner headline screaming “Uni cheat gets off”. A story of a Magistrates' Court conviction would not normally be newsworthy at all, without a celebrity or novelty aspect; while a guilty plea followed by verdict of a good behaviour bond without a conviction recorded – as was the case here – would tend to put police prosecutors on the defensive, for having surely too-zealously pursued a trivial offence. Conversely, the accused in such a case, although morally vindicated rather than technically acquitted, would have little to fear from any media attention.

In the Kevin Sze Wong story, however, the case for police prosecution – on a charge of making a false document – hardly seems an over-reaction. In an unusual (and ordinarily, rather undesirable) case of the criminal law taking over from where traditional academic standards and sanctions have simply dropped the ball, there are no winners. The police pursued a case where a good behaviour bond was a forgone conclusion, due to RMIT’s opposition to criminal, or (it seems) any other form of substantive action against Kevin Sze Wong. RMIT’s decision here is baffling, to put it mildly, even from the mindset of a deeply dysfunctional institution acting to protect a secure cash flow (overseas student income), at any price.

I make the latter point particularly because it was Kevin Sze Wong himself who was most harmed by RMIT’s decision to go for the extreme light touch over his cheating. Given the brazenness of his cheating modus operandi, and its difficulty of detection (I query whether photo ID cards do really make that much of a difference here), RMIT made a serious misjudgment in trying to sweep the whole affair under the rug.

Sometimes, publicity alone can be the most devastating form of punishment. While RMIT itself is/was not on trial, the short-cut that it took here has come at an immense cost - the “cheat gets off scot-free” banner headline was that was always bound to come out, sooner or later.

Bit of comedy controversy happening across the North Atlantic at the moment, re "Bowling for Columbine"'s Michael Moore.

For veritable catalogue of charges against Moore:

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30367

For a review of the show:

http://www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk/reviews/michaelmoore02.htm

For a defence to the above:

http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com

All I'll add, as my own commentary, is my sense of wonderment at the critic, who found that "About 25% of [Moore's show] is offensive, without being witty or fun, about 25% is annoying, and the rest is just plain dull".

Assuming that this critic is entitled to his relentlessly negative opinions of Moore's show, I still had no idea that bad comedy had so many shades of unfunnyness - the critic's percentage breakdowns reminds me of the fruitier end of wine writing.

Or maybe it’s just a Pommy thing - maybe they really DO enjoy their bad comedy over there, right down to the last percentile of raspberry bouquet, or whatever.

The Kirby Files (1st of an intermittent series)

Justice Michael Kirby was yesterday once again embroiled in controversy, this time over breaches of air safety regulations, as well as alleged misuse of a Commonwealth government marker pen.

In the first allegation, Sydney lawyer Gordon “Rose” Bay, whom Justice Kirby describes as an “old friend”, told The Australian newspaper that, in mid-2002, he witnessed Justice Kirby undo his seat-belt buckle, and then move to stand up, before the aircraft they were both travelling on had come to a complete stop at the Sydney Airport airbridge, in direct defiance of government regulations on the topic, as well as raising questions of future conflict of interest should the High Court be called upon to adjudicate a civil aviation safety matter. When questioned, Justice Kirby said that, to the best of his recollection, he was the last person to stand up on the plane in question, and that on the conflict of interest issue, he was happy for to declare his seat-belt and disembarkation preferences and habits at the start of any trial during which they may in any way become an issue. Constitutional law experts contacted last night generally concurred with Justice Kirby. One expert went further, doubting that the relevant air safety regulations would even stand up to a High Court test, and saying that they merely codified the common law, which was to the effect that actual time of personal unbuckling (and standing up, should space permit) was irrelevant – the only rule was that one could not, under any circumstance “jump the gun” by disembarking before one or more persons from a more-forward seat row had reached the airbridge.

Justice Kirby’s alleged misuse of a marker pen belonging to the Commonwealth was a focus of proceedings in today’s unusual Federal parliamentary “summer session”. Midway into a speech on Australian family values, NSW senator Bill Heffernan paused and had a tipstaff bring in a graffiti-covered toilet door, said to be from a Darlinghurst hotel. In the middle of this door, Senator Heffernan described for the benefit of the Hansard reporters, was an inscription written by a black marker pen, saying “For a good time, ring Michael on …”. The phone number itself could not be deciphered, Senator Heffernan explained, because it had at some stage been covered by an “I Shoot and I Vote” sticker, which proved impossible to remove without also removing the key layer of paintwork on which “Michael’s” phone number had been written.

Nonetheless, Senator Heffernan stated, there was conclusive, firm evidence to link “Michael’s” toilet door graffito to Justice Kirby. Brandishing a High Court stationery order docket, Senator Heffernan read from it – “Black marker pen, Darlinghurst dunny-trawling strength”.

Following uproar in the House over this allegation, an investigation yesterday afternoon was quickly able to establish that the stationery order docket was a crude forgery. In the face of this evidence, Senator Heffernan apologised unreservedly to Justice Kirby.

Justice Kirby’s problem were still not quite over for the day, however, when he jocularly suggested at a media conference that the newly-infamous toilet door be acquired by the Parliament House art collection, and put on public display. Late yesterday evening, privacy advocates leapt upon Justice Kirby’s suggestion for the toilet door, with one calling it “an outrageous breach of civil liberties”. For his part, Senator Heffernan issued a midnight media release, calling for a independent inquiry into the purposes for which Justice Kirby wanted the toilet door placed on public display, and whether, “in particular, these purposes may have included Justice Kirby’s own need for unnatural personal gratification from fresh sources”.

Does www.andrewsullivan.com make a profit, and if so, how? The answer matters a great deal because, of course, the site has consistently been held up as an example – albeit a rare one – of a weblog being profitable. “Profit” here may mean something more than reasonable fiscal compensation, at least for Andrew Sullivan and other right-wing bloggers – if unfettered capitalism doesn’t work for Internet publishing, then preaching it down the same wires is a hollow gospel indeed.

Based on what I’d read in early/mid 2002, I’d pretty much accepted that www.andrewsullivan.com made a profit – a tidy profit (from where I’m standing) – and not only that, made in a manner both impeccably hyper-capitalist New Economy as well as a little bit genteel, to boot – a “book club” pushing titles, tied to an amazon.com affiliate agency.

Thus, in an Australian Financial Review article "The quiet new invaders in media" (early March 2002), Sullivan was said to earn website income from several sources, but mainly from amazon.com click-through commissions, supposedly at a rate of 15% per book sold. (Sullivan’s own site states the amazon.com commission as being 5%). In another Australian Financial Review article (Susan Owens “Blogging to keep the media honest”, 25 May 2002), there isn’t a breakdown of Sullivan’s site’s profitability, but just the confirming mantra that Sullivan’s blog “is the only one said to make a profit”.

Then came the last piece of necessary info to lock in my www.andrewsullivan.com making a rosy profit, fair’n’square view:

Even Mr Sullivan says his weblog brings in only $6,000 a month from such sources [i.e. commissions and donations].
Source: “Rise of the blog shakes up media” (The Australian July 2002, originally in The Economist).

Here, it is unclear whether the reference is to $US6,000 a month or $AU6,000 a month (does someone or something at The Australian auto-sub these things?). Even giving Sullivan the benefit (?) of the doubt, $AU6,000 a month would not be sneezed at, certainly down in these parts. Plus, Mr Sullivan informs us on his blog that his specific labour input into his website is two to three hours per day.

Now, to return to the present. So what if Sullivan does “only” earn $6,000 for 30 days part-time blogging a month, which, at worst, translates to $AU80 per hour? Good on him – or so I had thought until the other day. Strangely enough, it was Australian right-wing blogger Tim Blair who alerted me to the contrary [okay, I recently promised I was only ever going to mention Tim Blair once, but I forgot to make a (necessary and fair?) exception for using Blair merely as a secondary source, which is the case here:]

MYTHS and folktales – such as UFOs, vampires and the greenhouse effect – exert a mighty hold on modern society, so much so that we continually invent new myths, hoping perhaps that they, too, will become part of our global consciousness.

……

Myth four: Nobody can make money on the internet unless they're selling porn.
Washington-based blogger Andrew Sullivan launched a pledge drive in December to fund his commentary website http://www. andrewsullivan.com. Total donations: about $US80,000 ($142,450) in just one week. His site carries no pictures at all.

Source: Tim Blair “I'm afraid you must be myth taken, mate” The Australian 2 January 2003
http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5784737%255E7583,00.html

As the Blair’s tone suggests, he is not writing intentionally to overturn the www.andrewsullivan.com making-a profit-orthodoxy, but if anything, to trump it. The enormous weekly income figure, of $US80,000 (or $AU1,900 per hour) doesn’t mince with any “only’s”.

If the impressive figure is accepted, my first instinct is to just again say “good onya, Andrew”. However, it wasn’t really the size of the figure that caused me to entirely revise my previous www.andrewsullivan.com making-a-profit view, but its breakdown. In particular, those good, old-fashioned capitalist book-club commissions trickling in seem to have dropped off the radar, with the funding model now being as aggressive (and successful) as it is mono-focused – charity, charity, charity.

Not that Sullivan exactly behaves like an importuning windscreen-washer at a cyber-intersection, mind you. You can read his own explanation of his site’s economics, which ends with a minimalist begging pitch, at: www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20021013

Personally – and maybe this is simply my Scotch blood showing – I think that if Sullivan or his acolytes (here I include Tim Blair*) want to genuinely boast about the profitability of www.andrewsullivan.com, they should go straight back to the “old” orthodoxy. $AU80 per hour, earned mainly from commissions, fair’n’square. Fuck the unduly-modest “only”, Sullivan could legitimately flaunt this income at the salivating masses in the rest of the blogosphere.

Charity, especially when layered with charity and then more charity, on the other hand, has a particularly unfortunate history when it comes to the financing of right-wing publications (quite apart from its raft of the usual negative connotations). Such escapades have proved, incidentally, that there is indeed a lower form of letters than vanity publishing by the rich and talentless. My advice to Mr Sullivan, then, is to watch his claque – once one forms, even vigorous flossing may be too late.

* http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5727247%255E7582,00.html

The Last of the dot-com Big Spenders is Alive and Well, and Living in Burwood

As current or sometime owner of several domain names myself, I was interested to read and ponder the (belatedly-breaking) crikey.com vs crikey.com.au story: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/06/1041566353425.html

With its main players being a Microsoft head office exec, a mysterious Melbourne-based interloper, and a prominent Australian political/corporate commentator-cum-gadfly, the “Crikey” domain name ownership dispute is of more interest than the familiar celebrity-takes-on-cybername-jacker stories.

Stephen Mayne, the said commentator-cum-gadfly, apparently registered the name crikey.com.au in 1998 or 1999. The name chosen was a cleanskin one; apart from its general association with the Australian vernacular, the word had no prior commercial connotations. Conversely, Mayne has developed the crikey.com.au website from scratch into a significant media outlet, certainly as far as independent media outlets in Australia go. The common law brand “Crikey” is thus rightly Mayne’s - in Australia, and wherever the website is read in the rest of the world, unless someone can show that they were a prior user of the name (very unlikely), or that there is no possibility of consumer confusion between Mayne’s and the subsequent “Crikey”.

Into this unambiguous statement of rights, comes the small irritant – the dot.com “mirror” domain name of a dot.com.XX national suffix. There are ironies aplenty in the dual domain name game. The sparer suffix “dot.com” wins against the equivalent national suffix on almost all grounds, and most especially, price. Not only are dot.com.au names ludicrously expensive in comparison to their more elegant and memorable siblings, the high cost of the Australian national suffix (which also entails artificial business name-obtaining hoops) deters cybername speculators in the first place. Thus, apart from some vague sense of good old digging-deep patriotism, there is no commercial reason for an Australian concern to bother registering the national suffix “mirror” to their dot.com domain name. In the event of a customer choosing the wrong (.au) suffix, the resultant blank page, together with a modicum of customer common sense, will soon see them on their way.

That dot.com-only wins is on the proviso, of course, that the Australian outfit can register their domain name in the preferred, dot.com form. In Mayne’s case, Seattle-based Microsoft executive Mike Smith had earlier (1997) registered the crikey.com name. For many Australian businesses, this was, at the time, a depressingly familiar scenario. Tens of millions of dot.com suffixes, most presumably randomly sourced from a dictionary, were acquired in the mid-to-late 1990’s, mainly by American speculators and hobbyists. While non-Americans were always free to join this mass name-grab, few seemed to have done so with any enthusiasm. For Australians contemplating domain name speculation, the downsides would have been the low Australian dollar (making the playing field quite unlevel), and probably also a gut feeling – quite right, as it turned out – that the speculation would almost always be in vain, ultimately. Since 2001, millions of dot.com suffixes have fallen available, through not being renewed. For most brand-new Australian businesses then, the domain name game may be looking up.

For many of those established a few years, however, the decision they made to go with a dot.com.au national suffix – with the full-knowledge that the dot.com “mirror” name was already taken, most likely by a speculator, will be a cause for regret. Perversely, a likely reason that many American speculators would have renewed a dot.com domain name in the last two years is the chance to, after having trawled the dot.com.XX national suffix databases and found a “mirror” match, become a sort of cyber-squatter in retrospect (and so in a legally sanctioned way).

The risks here (and worst-case buy-out costs) for Australian businesses can be overstated. With the benefit of hindsight, Stephen Mayne, was particularly vulnerable to a malignant form of retrospective cyber-squatting because of the investigative and linen-airing nature of his website. With it being fair to assume that Mayne has a few enemies, who are also quite possibly cashed-up, it is credible – if also very troubling – that one or more of these has coughed up what is possibly a record amount, post-2001, to take over a dot.com name ($US 7,500). Any ordinary American speculator would have been chuffed with far less, I suspect.

Whoever he/she/they are, they have taken some care to not identify themselves, with the “Who Is” records showing that the proud new owner of crikey.com (paid up to 2006) is Martin Hallier of 19 Main Street, Burwood, Victoria 3125; phone +61-3-9555-2002; email martinhallier@hotmail.com. There is no such street, and the phone number operates as a redirect to a stranger’s phone.

Moral of the story?

While nothing may unite disparate people more than having a common enemy, Microsoft may be more than just a hated leviathan, the proverbial brick wall. Small, throwaway gestures are sometimes the way one enemy communicates to, does business with another.
The more discrete the scale of such a gesture, however, the bigger may be the ultimate public impact and stench.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Media-wise, is it the silly-season or not? After a busy day of catching-up on things - a backlog from a mere three days away from any form of outside communication, 'cept music - I feel that I've got to the pulse of things urban, again.

Very early on, the two-o-three zeitgeist thus is one seasonally lashed with portions of Journalism Lite, but, on balance, it is surprisingly – nay, unexpectedly, even – nutritious.

Silly-season wise, the best lightweight articles are, for a change, unintentionally so. A still-breaking news story about two giant US aerospace companies being accused of passing secrets to China (The Age January 2 2003)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/02/1041196726959.html
is almost just like the old novelty news items that used to be so loved by Australia’s broadsheets every January.

The comic premise here is a classic one indeed. First, a US aerospace company chooses to cut costs by launching satellites in China and using Chinese rockets. Secondly, the cheap Chinese rockets are laughable, consistent fizzers. So far, so medium-to-good – this sort of payback, by Newtonian forces being applied to economic rationalism, is but a mere “mild” on the comedy-ometer.

Thirdly, and bringing-on the punchline, then, is the killer development. Pressured by its insurers to apply some greater diligence to the Chinese end of things, the hapless aerospace company throws the How to Launch a Rocket manual over to the Chinese, who were no doubt prostrate (for real) with apologitis for their incompetence (feigned?) by this stage. Oops and double oops.

Memo to Yanks: next time you want to outsource your hi-tech needs at third-world prices, come to Australia. We’re not quite as cheap as China (yet), but you can be re-assured that it is deeply etched into our national character to never ever read, nor pathetically but slyly consent to receive, the operating manual for any gadget whatsoever.

Two other notable unintentionally Lite new items are British through and through. One draws a bizarre link between paedophilia and taking one’s offspring to see Peter Pan (the play): http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/12/29/1040511254669.htm
Have the Brits really just woken up to the aesthetic dubiousness (in high-art terms) of pantomimes? What’s next: the “shock-horror, they’re perverts, Nigel” revelation that drag queens are really men dressed-up?

Finally, on the Lite front is a gushing BBC news item, presumably sourced almost wholly from a corporate press release, that mainly gets a mention because of its implacably bad timing – the sad, Miss-Havisham-esque BBC ran with the tech-wonder fluff (remember the fin-de-mille!), just as a real news story was breaking, about the same Australian corporation (one of the world’s largest casinos), and featuring the same, highly-casualised cast of employees, whose wages have slowly, but inexorably, been heading into the direction of China in recent years:
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2614669.stm
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/12/27/1040511175687.htm

And as for the “nutritious” bit – well you can’t go past a good cops’n’robbers (turned murderers) story, especially a long and thoroughly-researched one that appears on New Years Day. Okay, the story was obviously pre-written for release as soon as the jury reached a verdict (which in the event was New Years Eve). Nonetheless, it is a welcome, sobering mountain of facts, marred by only one egregious lapse into the absurd (but unfunny) hyperbole of copspeak PR:

Seeing police attending a road accident on the Eastern Freeway, Roberts also seemed to offer an insight into an intense hatred of police. As he passed the scene, Roberts yelled "Bang! Bang! Suck on that c---s," before breaking into a laugh, his taunt clearly caught on the Commodore's bugging device. But to some investigators this shout was more than a statement of hatred - some reckoned it was a re-enactment of what had gone before.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/12/31/1041196643603.htm
('Do you think our phone's tapped?' The Age January 1 2003)

For one topical issue NOT explored in the above article – the criminal culpability of boys/very-young men acting in concert with a much-older man – you may also want to check out my comment on a strikingly similar (in its inter-generational dynamics, and their seeming lack of judicial consideration) American case (still to go to trial) – that of Malvo the boy and John Muhammad, posted on Tim Dunlop’s blog:
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/000557.php