Felix Salmon

Sheltering Suburban Mom — Quickmeme

Nicholas Stern: I suspect that I underdid the costs of the impact of unabated climate change — Technology Review

Jon Ronson’s documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s boxes — Galletly

Chicago neurosurgeons pay $4500/wk in medical malpractice premiums — Medill

HDMI cable stupidity — /.

News of the World final crossword has a message for ‘catastrophe’ Rebekah Brooks — Telegraph

News of the World leader, July 12 2009 — NotW

All of Modern Politics in One Chart — MoJo

‘How I Met Your Mother’: Why are ads for new movies in old reruns? — EW

“A 2nd Ave bike lane is next to the Israeli Consulate,” CBS warns. “Imagine if the man on the bike was a terrorist!” — Gothamist

Okonjo-Iweala quits World Bank to become Nigerian finance minister — Reuters

Wherein Rebekah Brooks feels the need to say that the police “are entirely independent” from News Intl — Guardian

The NYT’s new-look Sunday Review led this weekend with a big essay by Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac. But for all its length and detail, it’s very hard to read — at many points, doing so feels like listening to one half of a telephone conversation. Which makes sense when you consider Kramer’s opening paragraphs:

In terms of perception, these are hard times for antidepressants. A number of articles have suggested that the drugs are no more effective than placebos.

Last month brought an especially high-profile debunking. In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, favorably entertained the premise that “psychoactive drugs are useless.” Earlier, a USA Today piece about a study done by the psychologist Robert DeRubeis had the headline, “Antidepressant lift may be all in your head,” and shortly after, a Newsweek cover piece discussed research by the psychologist Irving Kirsch arguing that the drugs were no more effective than a placebo.

I’ve included, here, all of the links that Kramer provides. Which is exactly one, to the NYT topic page on antidepressants. If you want to find Angell’s article, or the USA Today piece, or the Newsweek cover story, you’re on your own: Kramer and the NYT won’t help you. And Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, takes care not to even mention part two of Angell’s two-part series, where she talks at length about how psychiatry has been captured by drug companies, who “are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers”. (After reading Angell’s second essay, you’ll certainly wonder why Kramer doesn’t disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies.)

In any case, if you read Kramer’s piece and wondered what on earth he was talking about, then I would highly recommend you now read Angell, both part 1 and part 2. In general, the NYRB is a bit harder to read than the NYT, but not in this case — Angell’s essays are models of clear and powerful empirically-based argument, while Kramer’s looks positively messy and incoherent in comparison.

Here, for instance, is Angell:

For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.

And here’s Kramer:

Not long ago, I received disturbing news: a friend had had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. Hoping to be of use, I searched the Web for a study I vaguely remembered. There it was: a group in France had worked with more than 100 people with the kind of stroke that affected my friend. Along with physiotherapy, half received Prozac, and half a placebo. Members of the Prozac group recovered more of their mobility…

Surprised that my friend had not been offered a highly effective treatment, I phoned Robert G. Robinson at the University of Iowa’s department of psychiatry, a leading researcher in this field.

Kramer knows Angell’s argument, of course — his essay is a direct response to hers. Yet he still feels comfortable cherry-picking a single obscure French study — which, again, he doesn’t link to — in order to prove that Prozac is “highly effective” in stroke victims. I would love to know what Kramer thinks of this xkcd strip; for all that Kramer complains about “the news media’s uncritical embrace of debunking studies”, the fact is that it’s the outlier studies that never get replicated which tend to get the most press.

Angell’s main argument, expounded at book length by Irving Kirsch, is that antidepressants are, amazingly, even worse than placebos; the main evidence for this is a massive database of FDA trials, which was obtained by Kirsch and his colleagues via the Freedom of Information Act. Kramer’s response to this is to say that the FDA trials are flawed, and that some large number of the subjects weren’t depressed at all.

Or, to put it another way, lots of people were diagnosed with depression and put onto a trial of antidepressant drugs, even when they were perfectly healthy. Which sounds very much like the kind of thing that Angell is complaining about: the way in which, for instance, the number of children so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) was 35 times higher in 2007 than it was in 1987.

And it’s getting worse: the editors of DSM-V, to be published in 2013, have written that “in primary care settings, approximately 30 percent to 50 percent of patients have prominent mental health symptoms or identifiable mental disorders, which have significant adverse consequences if left untreated.”

Those who would defend psychopharmacology, then, seem to want to have their cake and eat it: on the one hand it seems that serious mental health disorders have reached pandemic proportions, but on the other hand we’re told that a lot of people diagnosed with those disorders never really had them in the first place.

To a first approximation, I know nothing at all about psychiatry, psychopharmacology or the optimal treatment of depression. But as a lay reader with a decent understanding of statistics and as someone whose sister is one of those very rare people whose PhD was a negative thesis, I can tell you that Angell’s articles are vastly more compelling than Kramer’s attempt at a rebuttal.

Does that mean I now believe that antidepressants do no good at all? No — as a good Bayesian, I’m not going to let a single article do that. But I was looking forward to a strong response to Angell. And the weakness of Kramer’s essay only serves to confirm my suspicions that Angell and the anti-antidepressant crowd really are onto something.

The implosion of the News of the World, and of News Corp’s bluster surrounding hacking and bribery allegations, comes less than a week after the Bribery Act of 2010 finally became law in the UK. The Bribery Act had an unbelievably long gestation — a distant relation of mine, Cyril Salmon, headed up the Salmon Commission on Standards in Public Life and put forward recommendations on the subject as long ago as 1976.

Today, the Bribery Act — which finally came into force on July 1 — is considered the toughest anti-corruption legislation in the world. And it’s one of the few pieces of UK legislation under which a company itself can be convicted of criminal activity, as opposed merely to its executives individually. There’s a new corporate offense now, of failure to prevent bribery, which is relatively easy to prove. If News International executives are ever found approving bribes to the UK police, then a conviction under the Bribery Act would be extremely easy.

For the purposes of the current investigation, however, News International looks as though it’s in the clear. The alleged bribes all happened long before July 1 of this year, and the act isn’t retroactive. The UK doesn’t have an equivalent to RICO, in the US, where a corporation’s very existence can hang in the balance if it’s convicted of corporate criminal acts. And even the tough new Bribery Act is relatively toothless in that regard: the worst that can happen is generally that the company in question has to pay a fine. (Many thanks to Barry Vitou of Pinsent Masons for helping me to understand the Bribery Act; I should emphasize that the speculation you’re about to read about News International is very much mine and not his.)

News International, then, is extremely unlikely itself to be convicted of any crime, and if it is convicted, then News Corporation will surely be able to afford any fine. Which in its own way gives News International the leeway to continue acting as a criminal corporation would — not in terms of bribing police officers, perhaps, but more in terms of protecting the people who know where the bodies are buried.

One thing that’s undeniably true about the troika of Les Hinton, Rebekah Brooks, and James Murdoch — and Rupert Murdoch himself, for that matter — is that all of them are extremely smart and capable executives. I personally believe that all of them knew about the hacking and the bribery — and it’s also fair to assume that if Hinton or Brooks were fired and decided to tell everything to the police, they could do enough damage to the Murdochs that News Corp might easily be declared not fit and proper to own a media company in the UK. (There is some precedent for former Murdoch editors telling expensive tales out of school; think of Judith Regan.)

In the grand scheme of things, News International is a very small part of the News Corp conglomerate; it could disappear entirely and the financial impact on News Corp would be small. The political clout which News International gives News Corp in the UK, however, is extremely valuable. And if malfeasance at News International ends up poisoning News Corp’s ambitions with respect to BSkyB, or results in criminal charges against either of the Murdochs, then at that point this scandal really could do serious damage to one of the world’s most powerful and notorious media organizations.

So it’s easy to see one reason why Rebekah Brooks might still have her job: News wants her on the inside, working for them, rather than on the outside, turning witness against them. And the same goes for Les Hinton, too. I still can’t really believe that Brooks is going to survive this scandal. But I can easily believe that the Murdochs will fight very hard indeed to try to keep her in her current position, at least until the police investigation is over.

It’s incredibly difficult to work out what is the most depressing part of today’s truly gruesome jobs report. The shrinking number of people in the labor force? The rise in U-6, broad underemployment, to 16.2%? The sharp spike in the newly unemployed? The downward revisions to April and May? The downtick in total hours worked? Maybe it’s the way that people leaving government jobs, for whatever reason, are finding it impossible to find new jobs in the private sector.

For me, it’s none of these things — it’s not, in fact, anything inside the report at all. Instead, it’s the reaction to the report from John Boehner:

“The American people are still asking the question: where are the jobs? Today’s report is more evidence that the misguided ‘stimulus’ spending binge, excessive regulations, and an overwhelming national debt continue to hold back private-sector job creation in our country. Legislation that raises taxes on small business job creators, fails to cut spending by a larger amount than a debt limit hike, or fails to restrain future spending will only make things worse – and won’t pass the House. Republicans are focused on jobs, and are ready to stop Washington from spending money it doesn’t have and make serious changes to the way we spend taxpayer dollars. We hope our Democratic counterparts will join us and seize this opportunity to do something big for our economy and our future, and help get Americans back to work.”

Opinions of the budget deficit and the national debt differ — some people think they’re a huge and important issue which needs to be dealt with in an urgent and serious way, while others think that the whole issue is overblown and that the debt is doing little if any harm at all to the US economy. But whichever side you stand on that debate, it’s downright bonkers to think that, at the margin, government spending reduces job creation, while pushing for ever-larger spending cuts is the way to be “focused on jobs”.

As Paul Krugman has explained extremely well, the economics of the deficit are not entirely obvious, and the president is no natural Keynsian.

The president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterintuitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployment is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administration or are leaving soon…

To commenters saying that I need to have dinner with the president, or vice versa — been there, done that, didn’t help.

But if Krugman’s Keynsianism is unintuitive, the Republican stance on jobs is downright incomprehensible. Paychecks are made of money: they’re spending. If you spend less, you get fewer and smaller paychecks.

“Spend less money, create more jobs” is the kind of world one normally finds only in Woody Allen movies, and it’s a profoundly unserious stance for any politician to take. Spending cuts, whether they’re implemented by the public sector or the private sector, are never going to create jobs. And there’s simply no magical ju-jitsu whereby government spending cuts get reversed and amplified, becoming larger private-sector spending increases.

Boehner’s rhetoric, here, is a cynical play on our nation’s economic illiteracy. But the jobs crisis is far too big and too important to become a tactical political football. Now more than ever, it’s the job of government to come together and to do something constructive to create high-quality, long-term employment. Fast. Instead, the House majority is giving us aggressively harmful stupidity. Today’s a bad day in the annals of job statistics. But it’s equally bad in the annals of public service.

Namibia strikes black gold, in massive amounts — Opalo

Emanuel Derman: “often, funnily enough, business life can be more collegial than college life” — Reuters

Ken Auletta: Rupert isn’t firing Brooks ‘cos he’s only got 2 friends, and she’s one of them — TNY

Why do I get the feeling this ain’t one of those movies which initially gets released only in NY and LA? — TBI

In which I talk debt ceiling negotiations with Chuck Scarborough, legendary NY anchor — NBC

Jailed for cashing Chase check at Chase bank — Consumerist

If you work at AP and express public joy about the NY gay-marriage bill, you’ll get disciplined — Poynter

A fascinating post on why Japan’s economy is much better than you think — Fingleton

My Ten-Point Action Plan for Spending One Million Dollars at Tiffany — Awl

Greg Allen is a true polymath: he’s a filmmaker, curator, art collector, web entrepreneur and a philanthropist. He’s an artist in his own right: he likes to play with conceptual art-about-art-about-art works. He even has an MBA in finance from Wharton. And now he’s set up the Jetty Foundation, which has made a bid to lease from the state of Utah the site of Robert Smithson’s most iconic work. (And, according to Tyler Green, the Greatest Post-War Artwork in the world.)

The backstory is here; basically, the land used to be leased by the Dia Foundation, but that lease expired and now everything is up in the air. Greg explains:

In the simplest terms, I’m bidding for the lease because it seems irresponsible not to…

When I called the Department to ask to be notified if the State decided to open the lease for competitive bidding, I was told I’d be added to the list. At that moment, it occurred to me that parties other than Dia were expressing interest in the lease.

As weeks passed, with no resolution, the possibility that Dia might not automatically get a new lease grew, along with the uncertainty of Spiral Jetty‘s fate.

At the core of Greg’s bid is a pretty mind-bending three-way distinction between the artwork itself, the intellectual property it represents and the land it is made of. Here’s Greg trying to explain things to Tyler:

“I made very clear in my application letter that by creating this foundation and by pursuing this lease, we are acknowledging fully the artist’s estate as the owner of the intellectual property of the artwork and Dia as the owner of the title of the artwork (as donated by the estate). I was making no claims on any of those items. I think that’s a distinction that the state itself had not really thought through in its own process.”

Greg dryly says in his own post that he “will not speculate” on “no-doubt invigorating conceptual implications” of this idea — but I’m pretty sure that very few people other than Greg Allen would have come up with the idea that they could somehow own the Spiral Jetty without actually owning Spiral Jetty. I particularly like the way he talks in his post about “Dia’s undisputed ownership of the Spiral Jetty artwork”, as though it’s self-evidently obvious that you can separate the land comprising the object, on the one hand, and the object itself — and that they could be owned by two different entities.

Indeed, if Greg’s bid is accepted, there will be no fewer than four entities with ownership claims here: the Jetty Foundation, with the lease to the land; the state of Utah, which owns the land; the Dia Foundation, which owns the artwork; and the Smithson Estate, which owns the intellectual property rights associated with the artwork. Clear? I didn’t think so.

With more conventional art, these kinds of distinctions make no sense at all. For instance, I own William Powhida’s drawing of the market oligopoly system; he, however, owns the intellectual property and so I need his permission if I want to reproduce or sell images of it. My ownership is of the object, not the intellectual property. The object is the artwork: I could never sell the paper that the drawing sits on without selling the artwork itself.

In the case of Spiral Jetty, however, Greg seems to be asserting that what we have here is something closer to architecture, where a building can be owned by one person and the land underneath it by another. (Unsurprisingly, this is not good news when it comes to property values.)

But in the case of lend-lease buildings, the lease on the land is, as a rule, held by the owner of the building. It takes a former investment banker like Greg Allen to come up with the idea that the leaseholder could be different from the owner of the building, with all the “invigorating conceptual implications” that implies.

And of course there are big differences between Spiral Jetty and a piece of architecture. Spiral Jetty is the land: it doesn’t just sit atop the land. (Indeed, right now, it’s under water.) When Smithson made the work, what he was doing was pretty simple, conceptually speaking: he took a piece of Utah, and made it art.

Today, Spiral Jetty is still art and it’s still a part of Utah. But art is big business and big money now and Spiral Jetty has become both valuable and politicized. A large part of the subtext to Greg’s bid is that the Dia Foundation has done a bad job of handling local Utah politics and that a Jetty Foundation would be significantly better at that kind of thing than Dia is.

But the Jetty Foundation’s interests are not fully aligned with Dia’s. For one thing, of course, they’re bidding against each other to lease the land. And then there’s this, from Greg’s post:

Should the State decide to award Dia a new lease on the site, I would hope that the Foundation’s role will be constructive and catalytic in bringing the importance of site and local engagement to the fore for the decades ahead.

This is a clear statement that the Jetty Foundation will continue to exist even if it doesn’t get the lease and ends up with no right to anything. Greg has created a pressure group, basically, and one of the entities that the group exists to pressure is the Dia Foundation.

I can’t imagine that Dia will be overjoyed by Greg’s arrival on the scene, or thanking him profusely for taking on the burden of dealing with local Utah politics. Instead, I’m quite sure they’re hoping fervently that they will be re-awarded the lease to the site and that the Jetty Foundation will then wither quietly away. That solution is still the easiest and most obvious one. And it would surely create fewer tensions on the site than awarding the land to a foundation which Dia neither controls nor approves of.

For a man who’s spent his entire life in the media business and understands it as well as anybody who’s ever lived, Rupert Murdoch is quite astonishingly inept at crisis management.

The News of the World hacking scandal was broken by the Guardian two years ago, and has been getting worse for him ever since; he’s had all the time in the world to do what every crisis-management professional has at the very top of their list: get out in front of the story, take full control of the situation and full responsibility for all mistakes made, and demonstrate in as public and visible a manner as possible that such things can and will never happen again.

Instead, what we’ve seen from Murdoch and his top executives is lies, obfuscation, pushback, bluster, dissembling, and generally the unedifying spectacle of extremely rich and powerful people doing their very best to never be called to account.

Today’s decision to shutter the News of the World in no way means that Murdoch is finally in control of the story. It’s a business decision, mainly: the NotW brand was fatally tarnished, to the point at which it would have been more expensive to keep it going than to shutter it. The advertising dynamics were poisonous and inescapable: there was little upside and significant downside for any brand which continued to advertise in the paper. On top of that, there would probably have been a reader boycott, too. The newspaper business is all about selling readers to advertisers, and the NotW suddenly had many fewer of the former and almost none of the latter. It was toast.

Murdoch’s axe is falling, tragically, on a group of journalists almost entirely unconnected to the scandal which brought down their paper. None of this is their fault, they don’t deserve this at all, and they didn’t get so much as a “sorry” from James Murdoch, in his official statement, who talked only of how unfair the decision “may feel” and how he intended to “communicate next steps in detail and begin appropriate consultations”.

And as if to prove that he still Doesn’t Get It, Murdoch is — for the time being — standing by Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, a former editor of the News of the World, and someone whose position is clearly untenable.

Murdoch, then, is being sensibly ruthless when it comes to the News of the World brand. Yes, it’s venerable — 168 years old — but it’s also a liability, and there’s literally nothing he could do to resuscitate the newspaper’s reputation. That explains what happened to the NotW journalists: like it or not, brands still matter, a lot, in media. Think how much more likely you are to get any given call returned if you’re working for the New York Times. Murdoch knows from first-hand experience that once a newspaper brand is sullied, it’s sullied for decades: The Sun’s Liverpool circulation never recovered from the boycott following its atrocious coverage of the Hillsborough disaster. In media, one dreadful mistake really can redound for generations.

And while the NotW’s journalists are sadly necessary collateral damage from the closure of the newspaper, Murdoch is being self-defeatingly sentimental when it comes to Brooks in particular and his News International executives in general. In contrast to the seemingly heartless treatment of the frontline hacks, Murdoch is extremely loyal to his most senior executives, and especially to Brooks. And it’s also worth noting that if James Murdoch weren’t Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir apparent, his job would be on the line as well.

The moral of this story, for anybody observing from the outside, is that it’s very, very bad idea for a company to circle the wagons and try to protect its senior executives when they get into trouble. If a handful of senior heads had rolled two years ago, and if News International had volunteered information about how far over the line the NotW had transgressed, then the newspaper would still be a cash cow for Murdoch. Instead, the closing of the NotW, plus the inevitable launch of the Sun on Sunday, is surely going to cost him a significant nine-figure sum.

As for the idea that the Sun on Sunday is just going to be the News of the World under a different name, I’m not sure I buy it. The name of a newspaper is the single most important part of its identity: it can’t simply be changed at will while maintaining its identity, in the way that Rebekah Brooks used to be Rebekah Wade. The Sun on Sunday will perforce be a very different beast from the News of the World, and the staffing will look very different too.

What’s more, insofar as the Sun on Sunday is similar to the News of the World circa 2011, remember that the NotW’s current staff are the innocent victims in this story. If many of them can get their jobs back, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Is the NotW in its current incarnation purer than the driven snow? Of course not — and neither are most of the other newspapers in the UK. The NotW was not the only newspaper to hack into telephones. Unless you want to see pretty much every UK tabloid shuttered, the Sun on Sunday rising like a Phoenix is something all newspaper lovers should welcome. Even if they shudder to think that Rebekah Brooks could yet keep her job and be the person in charge of launching it.

Steven Davidoff has published two recent columns on l’affaire Skype. The first takes a familiar position: that Silver Lake isn’t evil, it’s just a private-equity shop. I would however take issue with this:

The easy lesson here is the need to carefully read contracts before you agree to them and hire a lawyer if you don’t understand them. The language Mr. Lee complains about was certainly legalese but heralded caution.

Remember the language he’s talking about here. It’s one sentence of an 11-page stock option grant agreement, buried in a paragraph about IPOs:

If, in connection with the termination of a Participant’s Employment, the Ordinary Shares issued to such Participant pursuant to the exercise of the Option or issuable to such Participant pursuant to any portion of the Option that is then vested are to be repurchased, the Participant shall be required to exercise his or her vested Option and any Ordinary Shares issued in connection with such exercise shall be subject to the repurchase and other provisions in the Management Partnership agreement.

Yes, this is legalese. And what’s more, it doesn’t actually explain what Skype is doing; it just refers to some other, presumably equally unreadable, agreement. But here’s the thing: if you did read this sentence carefully, it still wouldn’t raise any red flags. Because it looks very much like something which is standard practice in Silicon Valley: when you leave a company, you need to exercise your vested options very quickly — normally within three months. If you don’t, then the company can claw them back.

So when Davidoff says that Lee’s failure to carefully read his contract is “baffling,” he’s being too harsh. Even a careful reader would have missed this one. And that’s why Skype was evil. If they’re going to have aggressive clawback provisions in their contract, they shouldn’t bury them in incomprehensible legalese: they should be open about what they’re doing.

Davidoff followed up his first column with a second one which only served to make everything worse. The headline: “Skype Not Alone When It Comes to Options.” And here’s the little summary you get in your RSS feed:

Silver Lake may have imposed a greater penalty, but LinkedIn, Google and others in Silicon Valley have similar requirements for vested options.

Um, what? This is simply not true. Silicon Valley standard practice is clear: you have every opportunity to exercise your vested options when you leave a company. Skype took that opportunity away. That’s not “similar” at all. Being able to exercise your options when you leave is always better than not being able to exercise your options when you leave. It has, if you’ll excuse me, option value. But Davidoff contrives to believe that standard Silicon Valley options language “is no worse than the legalese in the Skype documents that Mr. Lee complained about”.

He’s doubly wrong here. For one thing, standard Silicon Valley options language, while not exactly plain English, is still vaguely comprehensible. It gives a clear deadline of three months after you stop being employed at a company, and says that options expire at that point. On the saying-what-they-mean front alone, Silicon Valley companies win here.

And more substantively, those companies are giving exiting employees the opportunity to share in some of the growth they’ve helped to achieve.

Davidoff is underwhelmed:

This provision forces former employees to exercise their options while the company is still private and the true value unknown. In addition, the fair market value of the option may be very low and at or near the exercise price. It certainly isn’t at the initial public offering price.

Given the risks involved, employees are likely not to want to pay the exercise price out of their own pocket.

It’s hard to know where to start here. Silicon Valley companies might be private, but that doesn’t mean they’re unvalued. They tend to raise multiple rounds of capital at steadily increasing valuations; if you’ve stayed at the company long enough to see a new fundraising round, then automatically your options are in the money. And increasingly equity in these companies is priced on private markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. It’s true that the price of the equity isn’t the IPO price, but then again the price of a company’s equity is almost never the IPO price. (Employees in Pandora, for instance, are unlikely to get the IPO price for their options, even after it has gone public.)

And certainly options are risky assets. Everybody in Silicon Valley knows that. When you leave a company, you have a 3-month-long opportunity to buy stock in a private company at a level which is probably a very good price. Many people in Silicon Valley would jump at that opportunity, especially if they’re senior enough that they have a bunch of cash lying around. Certainly some employees will pass. But that’s the employee’s choice. It’s clearly better to have the choice than to not have the choice.

Yee Lee thought he had the choice — and decided he wanted to exercise his options. He knew the rules, knew he had to make his choice quickly, and made that choice. He informed Skype’s HR department of what he wanted to do, in a more than timely manner — and then spent a month going back and forth with them, before learning that Skype was refusing to let him exercise his options at all.

Davidoff’s second column seems to be aimed at unnamed “commentators” who don’t understand Silicon Valley standard practice, and who think that vested options can be held in perpetuity after you’ve left the company. That’s not the case. But that hardly makes Google as bad as Skype. Not even close.

Jonah Weiner’s rave review of Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest — Slate

Hugh Grant: “You should try real journalism. Because you’re not an idiot, Paul. You could probably do it!” — BBC

Rebekah Brooks’s 2009 letter to John Whittingdale: ‘The Guardian has misled the British public’ — Guardian, see also

American Homeowner Preservation Acquires 6.6MM of Non-Performing Mortgages in June — AHP

Savage attack on Strunk & White! — Chronicle

Sorkin corrects his patents column — Tumblr

How Gore Vidal persuaded Michele Bachmann to become a Republican — Tumblr

Michele Bachmann is (married to) a homophobic fundamentalist — WaPo

Samuel Beckett’s famous phrase “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is a pretty good summation of what will face Treasury come August 3 if there’s no deal on the debt limit. Reuters has a fantastic story this evening on the impossible quandary facing Treasury officials should the unthinkable come to pass; purely as a practical matter, it’s far from clear that it’s even possible to stop making the 3 million payments that Treasury makes automatically every day. Doing so involves a massive computer-reprogramming effort which I’m sure could not be implemented overnight — and for political reasons nobody is going to get started on such an effort until after all hope is lost for a deal in Congress.

Realistically, then, the government is likely to breach the current debt ceiling no matter what Congress agrees. A failure to lift it would be a bit like an edict to a steaming supertanker that it had to stop dead: no matter how much force of law that edict has, sheer momentum is going force many basic operations of the public fisc to continue for some period of days or weeks.

At that point — and no earlier — there would be enormous pressure on the White House to pull out the 14th Amendment and declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional, if only for practical reasons: doing so would be a lot easier than trying to reprogram the computers which are set to send out $49 billion of Social Security checks on August 3. Not to mention that no president ever wants to be the person who stiffed America’s seniors on their guaranteed monthly income: a greater failure of leadership can hardly be imagined. On the other hand, saying “enough of you bickering legislators, I’m sworn to uphold the Constitution and do what’s in the best interest of the country” is much more presidential.

That said, it’s easy to see why the official Treasury position is about as hardline as it gets:

“Our plan is for Congress to pass the debt limit,” Geithner said late in May. “Our fall-back plan is for Congress to pass the debt limit, and our fall-back plan to the fall-back plan is for Congress to pass the debt limit.”

The August 2 deadline is real, and no responsible legislator would risk letting it pass. Beyond that date is uncharted territory: Here Be Dragons stuff. Real uncertainty, as opposed to risk: anything could happen, including some extremely catastrophic outcomes related to payment default on maturing Treasury securities.

For the time being, the markets are buying it. The latest Treasury auction of four-week bills came in at 0.000% — Treasury is getting the money, literally, for free. And the maturity? August 4 — two days after the August 2 deadline. It’s entirely possible that Treasury simply won’t have the money to repay this principal. And yet that possibility clearly isn’t priced in — partly because it can’t be priced in, and partly because of auction dynamics: the bidders who won the auction are precisely the people who aren’t worried about the debt ceiling.

According to the Reuters report, a “small team of Treasury officials” is trying to work out what might happen come August 3 — can payments be delayed? Can the Constitution be invoked? Can the government prioritize payments? (It seems to me that if the debt ceiling is real, it would have to, it wouldn’t have any choice.)

The really depressing thing is that even if a deal does get done this month, the planning won’t have been in vain. Now that the Republicans can see how much leverage the debt ceiling gives them, they’re going to pull this stunt every time it gets near. The best-case scenario, with a big $2 trillion increase, would mean that we’re going to go through the exact same thing late in 2012; a more modest increase in the debt limit would set up a reprise of the current fiasco much sooner.

And that’s the invidious thing about low-probability events. Repeat the experiment often enough, and eventually they’ll happen. We’ll get a deal done this time. But one day, we won’t. And that day is not going to be a happy one.

In today’s Twitter town hall, President Obama answered a question from Dexter Smith about the constitutionality of the debt ceiling. It’s a good question for Obama, not least because he used to be a professor of constitutional law: he knows this stuff.

Obama ducked the question, saying that “I don’t think we should even get to the Constitutional issue.” Certainly that’s the first-best solution. But he left it there, saying that he expected “that Congress makes sure that our full faith and credit is protected.”

But clearly Obama is not happy with the way this Congressional debate is evolving: later on, in response to Nick Kristof, he said that “never in our history has the United States defaulted on its debt. The debt ceiling should not be used as a gun against the head of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners.”

I’m not sure Obama’s right about the “never in our history” bit — I think he’s forgotten about 1933. But his bigger point is clearly right: the full faith and credit of the United States is not kind of political football to be kicked around in the pursuit of tactical gains for some special interest or other. If Republicans and Democrats can ever agree on anything, they should surely agree that keeping Treasury bonds risk-free is the easiest no-brainer of all: the country derives trillions of dollars of value from that risk-free status, in the form of international capital flows and decreased borrowing rates, and it costs us nothing at all. Artificially inserting politically-driven credit risk into Treasury bonds is the legislative equivalent of poisoning a crucial reservoir.

Giving bondholders a constitutional guarantee that they’re going to be paid in full and on time makes a fair amount of sense. But that doesn’t mean that the president, if push comes to shove, should invoke the Constitution and override a recalcitrant Congress. Personally, I’d be more inclined to keep on paying Treasury coupons out of tax revenue — there’s more than enough money coming in to do that — and to immediately cut back on everything else, including Congressional salaries, so violently that the Republicans end up crying uncle pretty quickly.

Treasury’s position is that such actions would constitute a default, since the US government is just as obliged to pay salaries as it is to pay bond coupons. I don’t believe that for a second — cutting back the primary budget is the standard way to avoid default, it’s not “default by another name.” Yes, it could trigger another recession, if it went on for too long. But it wouldn’t have the catastrophic consequences of a payment default on Treasury securities. And, for better or for worse, there’s no need to invoke the Constitution in order to make immediate drastic spending cuts.

Back in September 2009, I got very excited about dimmable LED bulbs. They cost $40 apiece, they were only 7W — a 40W equivalent, in terms of brightness — and it wasn’t obvious how dimmable they were. But back then and for a long time afterwards it seemed as though Philips were the only real player in the dimmable-LED-bulbs game.

But now Farhad Manjoo has found something even better, from a startup called Switch Lighting. Its brighter: Switch offers both 60W and 75W equivalents in the warm-white color of incandescents. And they’re only $20 apiece, compared to $45 for something similar from Philips. What’s more, that price is falling: it should come down to $15 next year. For a bulb with a lifespan of 20,000 hours, as Manjoo says, that’s a great deal.

These bulbs are perfect replacements for any incandescents, even ones on dimmer switches:

Switch bulbs work beautifully with any dimmer, and they dim without flicker. The powerful driver enables instant-on lighting, so there’s no lag as the bulb warms up.

I’m now officially not in the slightest bit worried about the fact that old-fashioned incandescents are going to be outlawed by 2014. Better, cheaper replacements are already here — just as you’d expect. Laws like this are a bit like laws governing fuel economy or NOx emissions: you set an ambitious target, the industry says it can’t be done, you stick to it, and then it turns out it’s eminently possible after all.

I just stocked up on a large number of reflectors, which contribute enormously to my massive electricity bill. By the time this bunch of bulbs runs out, I’m confident that dimmable LEDs will be plentiful and cheap — and quite possibly available in reflector format, too. The age of the incandescent bulb is coming to an end, and I for one won’t mourn it.

Seeking Alpha’s Peter David Jackson has given David Kaplan some hard numbers on how its pay-per-pageview program is getting along after six months in operation. In total, 550 paid contributors have written 8,985 premium articles, and have been paid $517,585 in total.

That works out to $157 per author per month, or $58 per published article; it also means that the typical paid contributor comes up with 2.7 premium articles per month, on average.

All these numbers are likely to rise modestly over time, but they’re very much in line with the pessimistic projections I made when the program launched. For the kind of investment professionals that Seeking Alpha seeks as contributors, $157 per month or $58 per article simply does not constitute what Jackson calls “significant income.” Nor does an average of 2.7 articles per month come anywhere near the stated aim of Seeking Alpha that premium contributors will “park their financial identity” on the site.

And if my own stats are any indication, there’s a huge amount of sheer luck in terms of which articles end up getting pageviews. Over the past 12 months — that’s the 12 months from July 2010 to date — my most popular article is this one, from March 2008. That’s entirely a function of SEO, I’m sure: my old headline happened to coincide with something that people were searching on over the past year.

Jackson didn’t tell Kaplan how much the top contributors ended up making from the program, but it’s fair to assume that the median numbers are significantly lower than the mean. And even at the top of the league table, I suspect that Seeking Alpha’s best-paid contributor is still making less money than its worst-paid employee.

From Seeking Alpha’s perspective, the premium-post program has delivered 8.6 million pageviews per month on average. That compares to total monthly pageviews of 51 million per month, down from 63 million in April. An important part of the whole, to be sure, but still pretty marginal, considering that without the program, most of those posts and pageviews would have appeared in any case. And in terms of marginal extra unique visitors, the numbers are surely minuscule: very few people will have visited SA as a result of the premium program who would not have visited otherwise.

Jackson told Kaplan that “word is getting out that a growing number of people are making serious money from the program.” I follow this stuff pretty closely, and that word hasn’t reached me; what’s more, there’s nothing in the numbers Jackson provided which gives any evidence of this — or even that anyone at all is making serious money from this program. Here’s a question for Jackson: give me a number you consider to be “serious money,” and then tell me how many people are making that much money. If that’s your metric for success, go ahead and make it public!

The IMF, quite rightly, is putting a tough ethics clause into Christine Lagarde’s employment contract:

Her terms of employment were made public as she arrived at the International Monetary Fund’s Washington headquarters…

Lagarde’s contract holds her to “highest standards of ethical conduct consistent with the values of integrity, impartiality and discretion.”

It also requires her to avoid “even the appearance of impropriety.” Further, it states that “in the performance of your duties as managing director, you have an exclusive duty of loyalty to the fund and shall avoid any conflict of interest or the appearance of such a conflict.”

This is all welcome stuff, although it could conceivably cause a kerfuffle if the French Court of Justice breaks against her in its investigation over her involvement in a dispute involving Bernard Tapie.

But what does it mean, exactly, to say that Lagarde’s “terms of employment were made public”? I spent a bunch of time burrowing around the IMF website this morning trying to find them, without success. Eventually the Guardian came along to solve the problem: its article on Lagarde’s contract links the phrase “terms of appointment” here.

As you might expect when a URL has the term “protected” in it not once but twice, clicking on that link will get you just as far as a big green box with a padlock on it and the words “secure area” in all caps.

I do understand why it makes sense for the IMF to have a secure media briefing center apart from the press-release area on its website: such things come in handy for embargoed content, and the IMF releases a lot of that. But there’s no reason why Lagarde’s terms of employment should have been embargoed, and even if there was, there’s no reason for them still to be missing from the main IMF website.

This isn’t in itself an ethics issue — it’s a transparency issue, which is related but not identical. I do think that the IMF and the World Bank tend to be a bit sheepish about their pay levels, not least because if you’re not a US citizen, all that money — $467,940 a year, in Lagarde’s case, plus an allowance of $84,000 — comes to you tax-free.

Lagarde was almost certainly earning more, even on an after-tax basis, when she was at Baker & McKenzie, but she’s still being paid substantially more than any elected head of state in the world. If the job of IMF managing director is a public-service one, one wonders why her salary needs to be so high.

The managing editor of Seattle Weekly weighs in on VVM vs Ashton Kutcher — Reuters

“Paying for Web content is fairly rare; customers willing to do so should be treasured, not treated like garbage.” — Useit

The maid’s complaint against the NY Post, in full — Scribd

Looks like I’m going to have to find time to go back to Dulwich this summer, pay respects to Cy Twombly — Guardian

I want to be Swiss, just so I can vote for the Anti Power Point Party — CNet

1776 Declaration of Independence, yours for $1.6 million at the NYT store — NYT store

Rebekah Brooks says it’s inconceivable she knew about her newspaper’s hacking of missing girl’s phone — Guardian

The Mother of All No-Brainers — Brooks/NYT