Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.

Mr. Bass hit the nail on the head. Too bad nobody in Washington is listening. Here is an eye-opening video interview before the testimony. Your patience with the advertisement at the beginning will be rewarded by keen insights into what is coming next, including possible sovereign default.

[R]ecently I hosted a meeting of the advisors to one of my portfolio companies. It was an impressive group of tech veterans. Each of them had been involved in the building of multi-million dollar high tech companies. Yet, what struck me about this summit was how many of these computer gurus carried with him a good, old fashioned notebook… I was surprised to see so much scribbling and so little typing. Since that meeting, I have kept my eyes out for this notebook phenomenon and have been amazed by how many startup CEOs, Venture Capitalists, attorneys, etc. have forsaken the digital world for the analog.

Acknowledging that paper isn’t perfect, the article cites problems of exposure to elements and lack of backup. Yet such problems have never troubled me. In 25 years of carrying notebooks, I’ve never lost or ruined one, while during that same period I’ve been grateful for computer backups dozens of times. You’ve heard of notebook computers bursting into flame, but not my trusty book. I consider paper notebooks stable, durable, and unobtrusive.

Folks in Mr. Hornik’s circle prefer the classic leather-bound Moleskine and the pocket-sized graph paper Rhodia, but my choice is more prosaic: the WilsonJones S300-3R Record Ruled. The Rhodia does bring back memories of my college days in France. I must admit a twinge of Moleskine envy and I’ve considered giving the awesome Livescribe Pulse pen a try. Still I can’t imagine why anyone would risk annoying colleagues by tapping on a phone or computer during a meeting.

Let’s drop in on Senate hearings in 1994, to find out what happened to that toilet seat from 1983:

Senator GRASSLEY: The Defense Department wants you to believe that they are making dramatic changes in the way things are purchased, particularly spare parts. I think the most outstanding example is the $600 toilet seat of 1983. And we thought that we had that problem taken care of and, 16 [sic] years later, the $600 toilet seat was costing $1800.

Today InfoWorld reported that federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled a new General Services Administration (GSA) initiative called Apps.gov. That initiative is supposed to solve a common problem of federal IT procurement:

Kundra said that the government could save a lot of money by using many of the Web-based and cloud technologies that are already available to consumers. It costs the U.S. Transport Safety Administration (TSA) $600,000 to set up a blog, he said. By contrast, consumers can get a Blogger account free.

“If in our lives, we can go online and provision Webmail within a matter of minutes, why must the government spend billions and billions of dollars on information that may not be sensitive in nature?” he said.

Good question. I sure hope this TSA blog, which DOES run on Blogger, cost taxpayers a lot less than $600,000 to set up. The TSA blog could be a showcase of how government agencies use inexpensive consumer technology to accomplish their mission.

But will any savings materialize? How much, do you think, will the government pay to set up a blog in 2020?

Update: The InfoWorld article quoted above doesn’t quite convey the full context of Mr. Kundra’s remarks. His speech, starting at 4:15 in the video (with the quoted passage at 9:11), is worth watching.

Mr. Malamud isn’t just talk: he pioneered the publication of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) data on the Web. Should he make headway in opening up our court records, my hat is off to him. Bravo, Mr. Malamud.

Consider the Free economic paradigm:

[S]omebody’s paying, but it’s probably not you; indeed the costs may be so distributed that we individually don’t feel them at all.

I tend not to prize goods I don’t pay for. After spending $80 to rent a seat at the concert hall, I cherish every second of undivided attention to music. Had I invested over 10,000 hours of blood, sweat, and tears to master the cello – as Slava did – I’d appreciate Dvořák’s brilliant Cello Concerto even more. Downloading a free song, on the other hand, gets no skin in the game. If the first few seconds fail to entertain, the song drops with a thunk into the digital trash bin. Music appreciation degrades to sound bites instead of deep contemplation. No investment, no engagement, no feeling, no value.

Free hypes the glittering generality that a near-zero marginal cost of distributing information will lead to an era of abundance, using the sci-fi term “post-scarcity economics.” This ridiculous oxymoron ought to remain in the realm of fantasy because allocating scarce resources is precisely the point of economics. For pirated songs, photos of inebriated teens on Facebook, or silly tweets on Twitter, there is no scarcity, so economics does not rule. Readers might overlook one nugget of fool’s gold like “post-scarcity economics,” but Free is a mother lode of contradictions and tautologies.

Mr. Anderson does a yeoman’s job surveying the societal, technological, financial, and marketing basis of free goods. He recites many familiar anecdotes, quotes, and history lessons. Insights on trends in the computer, network, and media industries seem apt and even farsighted. I’d rate the book’s distillation of the Free business models a paragon of clarity.

Yet Free is no outlier. Unlike Mr. Gladwell, who starts with a premise that resonates, Mr. Anderson fights an uphill battle, ultimately failing to convince that a free lunch is on the path to success.

LOL!

Susan Pfund
Oakdale, Minn.

That whole letter clocks in below Twitter’s 140 character limit. Why pay $155 for an annual WSJ subscription when you can browse any random Twitter stream and get LOLs, with a few bonus OMGs thrown in, all for free?

Both sides said they settled in large part to avoid legal fees that already totaled roughly $40 million apiece…

Why didn’t either side recognize sooner that $80 million could have been better spent on education? Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman’s depiction of this episode as “a tragedy” hits the bullseye.