Sunday, July 7, 2002

RAVE Act: RIP Live Electronic Music. The RAVE Act, whose acronym stands for "Reducing Americans' Vunerability to Ecstacy", would fine people or companies that organize or host events "featuring loud, pounding dance music" up to $2,000,000, and allows promoters to be jailed for up to 20 years, without requiring officials to prove that any of the attendees actually possessed drugs. This law not only is a danger to civil liberties, but also would effectively eliminate live electronic music in the US, given the enormous risks now associated with it. [kuro5hin.org] 3:06:21 PM

The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc. [Daypop Top 40] Here's a perfect example of why the so-called war on drugs can never be won, in any meaningful sense. As long as there is a "war," the enforcement folks will be on the losing side. In a way, it's terribly ironic. Government enforcement of illegal drug traffic can't win, for the same reason that Communism was eventually bankrupted by Capitalism: the free market is vastly more efficient than imposing central control. There is huge Demand for drugs like cocaine and marijuana. That guarantees there will be Supply. The only thing that criminalizing drugs does is put money -- huge, huge sums of money -- into the hands of criminals. Legalize it and regulate it, and suddenly the US government could be running a surplus...as well as ensuring that there was more than adequate funding for treatment and assistance programs for addicts. IMHO. 3:03:32 PM

MSNBC: Labels to Net Radio: Die Now. Steven Levy. Instead of instating the kind of royalty already paid to songwriters by both broadcast and Web radio--about 3 percent of revenues--the tariff on digital music is based on the number of listeners . So it's possible for the fee to exceed revenues, especially in a fledgling business where ads are scarce. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:49:09 PM

All the President's Enrons "It is now more than six months since the president promised "a lot of government inquiry into Enron." Since then, Playboy has done a better job of exposing the women of Enron than the Bush administration has done at exposing its men. Just as the Justice Department rounded up some 1,000 alleged Sept. 11 suspects and failed to indict a single one of them for terrorist activity, so it has made a big show of its shaky Andersen conviction while failing to indict a single Enron executive or individual Andersen accountant." [New York Times] 2:46:11 PM

Succeeding In Business "The administration hopes that a narrow focus on the reporting lapses will divert attention from the larger point: Mr. Bush profited personally from aggressive accounting identical to the recent scams that have shocked the nation." [New York Times] 2:22:14 PM

© Copyright 2002 Michael Alderete.