REASON Express
February 7, 2000
Vol. 3 No. 6
1) Private Sector Solutions to a Made-Up Problem
2) Navy Officer Abandons Ship on the Drug War
3) Finally! Fatty, Salty Snacks That Are Free of Gene-Altered Corn!
4) Is a Tax-Free Net a Good Idea?
5) Quick Hits
- - Hot Wired - -
The contrast was exquisite. Politicians yakking about a supposed problem while real people in the real world make the yakking moot.
Days after President Clinton identified a dangerous "digital divide" that only the federal government could bridge, up step two businesses that--for quite selfish reasons--announce they are going to hand out computers and Internet access to employees like parking spaces.
Ford Motor and Delta Air Lines have concluded that a computer literate workforce is worth the investment. For Ford it will take $300 million to equip 350,000 workers worldwide. Delta will spend something less than $100 million for 72,000 workers.
And if big, slow-moving companies like Ford and Delta are moving in this direction, you have to believe that small, nimble, under-the-radar outfits are long down the same path.
"We're committed to serving consumers better by understanding how they think and act. Having a computer and Internet access in the home will accelerate development of these skills, provide information across our businesses, and offer opportunities to streamline our processes," said Jacques Nasser, Ford's president and chief executive.
So Ford clearly thinks it is going to get its money back and then some. It also has some specific goals in mind, ways to track whether it is meeting them, and most of all, accountability. Ford managers won't long be able to claim ignorance about spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations.
Best of all, no toothy politician will turn up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony as Delta and Ford go about wiring up their workforces.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/05/015l-020500-idx.html
See the Reason Online Breaking Issue "What Digital Divide?" at http://reason.com/bi/d-divide.html
- - Drug War Defector - -
Here's hoping we see and hear a lot more of retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Sylvester L. Salcedo in the coming weeks. Salcedo, 42, plans to drop off his Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal in person at the White House in order to protest the ongoing drug war.
Salcedo's three years as an intelligence officer with Joint Task Force Six, a Pentagon umbrella group that works with law enforcement, left him convinced that the current policy of trying to stop and interdict overseas drug barons is hopeless. By the time he retired in April 1999, Salcedo thought the U.S. was repeating some of the same mistakes it made in Vietnam 30 years before.
"I don't think we can make any progress on the drug issue by escalating our military presence in Colombia. As in Vietnam, the policy is designed to fail. All we're doing is making body counts, although instead of bodies, we're counting seizures--tons of cocaine, kilos of heroin," Salcedo said.
Yet there remain many in Congress who believe that if only a few more helicopters were sent to Colombia, everything would be all right. At a minimum Congress should ask Salcedo to testify about his experiences and conclusions before committing to further escalation.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/06/130l-020600-idx.html
Jacob Sullum argues that the real anti-drug scandal is that the truth is no where to be found at http://www.reason.com/sullum/012600.html
- - Gene Scream - -
And so it begins: the great bid up to rid the marketplace of genetically modified foods.
Pepsi's Frito-Lay unit has asked farmers it contracts with not to grow genetically modified corn for use in Fritos or Doritos chips.
In doing so, Frito-Lay breaks ranks with a food industry which thinks that genetic modification could hold the keys to developing foods with health-boosting properties, like less bad cholesterol or more key vitamins.
The Food and Drug Administration has already cleared genetically modified foods once, but is now under pressure to revisit the issue. Mandatory labeling for gene-altered ingredients may pop out of the FDA. That, of course, would be a huge victory for the anti-genetic-modification lobby, as consumers would quite rationally take the label to be a warning and steer clear of the stuff.
And should such a labeling regime come about, Frito-Lay could rush to market "gene-free" snacks.
But other big brand names like Kellogg and General Mills are sticking with gene-altered crops despite attacks from activist groups. Greenpeace accused Kellogg of conducting an experiment on its customers by using gene-altered corn in Frosted Flakes.
Still, activists are ecstatic about the Frito-Lay move.
"I think it's absolutely the beginning of a trend," said Charles Margulis, a genetic-engineering wonk for Greenpeace.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/06/061l-020600-idx.html
Check out the Reason Online Breaking Issue on the "Frankenfood" Frenzy at http://reason.com/bi/bi-gmf.html
- - The Net Net of Taxation - -
It is getting to the endgame of the Internet taxation debate. Hearings on Capitol Hill last week again saw two totally divergent views on how to handle it.
"We must not build a toll on the information superhighway," Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci (R) observed correctly. Michigan Gov. John Engler (R) noted that exempting the Internet from tax puts a tremendous burden on brick-and-mortar entities that do pay tax. That too is true.
The Internet Tax Commission that is supposed to iron out such differences will likely do little more than recommend that the current moratorium on Net taxes--which expires October of next year--be extended.
In the meantime, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) have introduced a new version of their original Net moratorium bill that changes one line of text to make the Net-tax ban permanent.
In a vacuum, a tax-free Internet sounds like a great idea. The problem is state and local officials are not going to go away. Confronted with an e-commerce system they cannot tax and which they are convinced is getting a free ride, they will turn to their vast array of regulatory tools to combat it.
Already some governors have suggested using state troopers to pull over UPS trucks to check for untaxed shipments. Local officials have also complained about the increase in delivery trucks in residential neighborhoods. What regulatory "remedy" might that spawn?
Web-based ways of doing business can be stymied at the statehouse in other ways, too. The Texas case of state officials conspiring with auto dealers to thwart Ford's plans for a direct manufacturer-to-customer business model is an obvious one. More obscure are the growing conflicts between buying-power pools and professional licensing laws.
The real estate world cries out for some consumer-friendly Net-facilitated bundling of services and information. But in several states, real estate lobbies are pressing to make arrangements which give groups of consumers breaks on fees or commissions illegal. The rationale is that such arrangements amount to splitting real estate commissions among those unlicensed by the state.
It should be clear that taxes are just one bite states and localities can take out of e-commerce. So, it might be worth exploring turning e-commerce enemies into unabashed e-commerce boosters. How?
Let them have most of what they think they want: a piece of the e-commerce retail trade. In exchange for setting a single, flat-rate Net sales tax, states and localities would have to give up something. Like pledging not to come after business-to-business transactions or gains realized in something other than U.S. currency. Also, fees or levies of any kind on the cost of Net services would be strictly forbidden. And no transaction would be taxed by more than two jurisdictions--the state and locality where the buyer resides.
Further, to get their cut the governments would have to make the leap to the 21st century. Give the states and localities three years to get their revenue systems Web-ready. That means able to accept e-payments while generating absolutely no paperwork in the process. Plus, this would have to be done in house, no farming the job out to what would become a new layer of government.
The end result could be something quite remarkable: states and localities with a stake in seeing e-commerce thrive, a big chunk of the nation's tax system on a modern, low compliance-cost track, and massive pressure against parochial, entrenched lobbies to jump onboard or be left behind.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/03/235l-020300-idx.html
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/05/004l-020500-idx.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34075,00.html
- - Quote of the Week - -
"I'm going to kill everyone," Erick Ramirez Fuentes moments before he was shot dead by handgun owner Bricie Tribble, 28. Fuentes had broken into Tribble's Apache Junction, Arizona, home. An hour earlier Fuentes, 25, raped and shot another woman he abducted in a nearby Wal-Mart parking lot. Tribble's husband and nine-year-old nephew were also in the home.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/0202kidnap.shtml
- - Quote of the Week, Guru Speaks Division - -
"This is a perfect case of companies that want to screw their customers over. DVD companies want to control the market, and not by offering a good technical solution, but by suing their own customers," Linux creator Linus Torvalds during the keynote speech at LinuxWorld, on Hollywood's move to sue Web sites and programmers who disseminated and built a DVD-player for the Linux operating system.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/4/ns-13090.html
- - Kid's Court - -
A nine-year-old girl has been called for jury duty in Brooklyn. Fourth-grader Alyson Fuchs is expected at Room 303 of Brooklyn Criminal Court at 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 22. Court officials said Alyson's name was likely culled from tax records because she owns a mutual fund.
http://www.foxnews.com/etcetera/020600/juryduty.sml
For the latest on media appearances by Reason writers, visit http://www.reason.com/press.html.
REGISTER NOW for Reason's 2nd Annual Dynamic Visions Conference, featuring cutting-edge speakers from the worlds of technology, design, public policy, history, science, and more! The conference is February 19-21 in Santa Clara, California, and the deadline for pre-conference registration is FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11. After that, the price goes up. For more information and secure online registration, see http://www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html
"On the Verge: Creative Mixing on the Frontiers of Business, Society, Art, and Technology," takes place February 19 - 21, 2000 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Silicon Valley.
Confirmed speakers and their topics include:
Jhane Barnes, designer - "Mathematics, Computers, and the Art of Textile Design"
Gregory Benford, UC-Irvine astrophysicist and author of Timescape, Deep Time, and Cosm - "Thinking Long in the Millennium"
Daniel Botkin, UC-Santa Barbara ecologist, president, Center for the Study of the Environment, author of Discordant Harmonies - "The Future of Nature: How to Have Both Civilization and Nature in the 21st Century"
Charles Paul Freund, senior editor, Reason, "Dark Verge? The Case of Vienna 1900"
Neil Gershenfeld, leader, physics and media group, MIT Media Lab, author, When Things Start to Think - "Things that Think"
Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief, Reason - "Popular Culture on the Verge"
Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction - "Innovations in Education"
Grant McCracken, Harvard Business School, author, Plenitude and Culture and Consumption - "Verge of Verges: Sir Francis Bacon at the Gates of Gibraltar"
Christena Nippert-Eng, sociologist, Illinois Institute of Technology, author, Home and Work - "Home and Work: Drawing the Boundaries"
Dan Pink, Fast Company contributor - "Free Agent Nation"
Steven Postrel, UC-Irvine Graduate School of Management -"The Geek and the Dilettante: Sharing Knowledge Across Specialities"
Virginia Postrel, editor, Reason, author, The Future and Its Enemies, - "On the Verge: Exploring the Frontiers of Creative Encounter"
Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president, technology and programs, The Freedom Forum - "Culture and Collision"
Richard Rodriguez, author, Days of Obligation and Hunger of Memory - "Some Thoughts on the Burrito and the Browning of America"
Lynn Scarlett, executive director, Reason Public Policy Institute - "Can Industry Save the Planet? The Rise of Industrial Ecology"
Michael Schrage, columnist, Fortune, senior associate, MIT Media Lab, author, No More Teams! and Serious Play - "Serious Play"
Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars - "Mars Direct: Humans to the Red Planet within a Decade"
For full descriptions and speaker information, see http://www.reason.com/dynamic/speakers.html
On 24 February Wade Hudson, RPPI Economic Policy Analyst, and Adrian Moore, RPPI's Privatization Center Director, will be in Orlando, Florida, speaking at an all day session on managing employee transitions during privatization. The session is part of the 2000 World Outsourcing Summit.
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