Andrew Sullivan posts a copy of this compilation of AT&T ads from 1993 predicting the future. They did a great job predicting what is today available to many. And remember, 1993 was the year when the first Windows-based browser was released helping along wide public access to the Web. But at that point little of this was obvious.

I wanted to find the video on YouTube directly. I didn’t realize you could just get to the specific YouTube page by clicking on the video window anywhere but the play button so I proceeded by searching for it on YouTube. I got one result (not the right one) for at&t 1993. A search for at&t ads didn’t give me this hit either.

At that point, I decided to just click on Share in the YouTube player (which annoyingly resizes my entire browser window) and tweak the URL from share to view to get to the page. That’s one way to do it (but again, clicking anywhere but the play button is probably the easiest if you already have the video of interest:). If you don’t have the specific video then it seems best to do a site-specific search for the video on Google as such: site:youtube.com at&t 1993. I wonder when YouTube search will be powered by Google given the acquisition.

UPDATE: I’m told by someone who seems to be a reliable source (but who wishes to remain anonymous) that this is something that they are, indeed, working on and it will be one of the first integrations as part of the acquisition.

‘Tis the season for buying gifts (lots of us have December birthdays*, you know). So I’m starting a discussion of various gift ideas. My plan is to post about items that I have bought myself and so can recommend with confidence. Alternatively, I may suggest some do-it-yourself projects on occasion.

I’ll start things off with the latter. Consider giving someone a personalized memory game made up of photos that would be of interest either because they portray people/places of interest to the person, or because they are simply great photos. More details on this here. Note, however, that creating multiple wallet-sized photos can get expensive quickly. If you’re short on cash, but have time, you may consider editing images that contain a pair of two images each and then simply getting the regular size photos of these. That way, you can get two pairs for 5-10c each instead of 99c each with a leftover pair.

Another idea is to use one of the many amusing tools from fd’s Flickr toys. You can create a funny motivation poster, a magazine cover, a movie poster, or lots of other things and get these printed out. Regular size photo print-outs are only about 10-20c so definitely on the cheap side. And note that despite the site’s name, these don’t require a Flickr account, you can upload a photo directly from your computer.

Photojojo has additional ideas. I am intrigued by their Fotoclips selling for $15 (including shipping), but I haven’t bought any of those nor have I ever tried them out so this is just a pointer, not a recommendation.

Of course, nowadays, you can get a photo printed on just about anything, but the above items are mainly do-it-yourself so fairly cheap and have that extra personal touch.

[*] No worries, I’m well aware of the comment “There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.” Nonetheless, if you care to contribute to my upcoming celebrations, I’m collecting photos of the number 3 from around the world. So email me one (or three for that matter) if you can. You could also post these on Flickr and just send me the link. (Yes, I know I can find tons of 3s on Flickr, but these would be from you to me.:)

This week I’m blogging only work-related things and from deep inside a hotel (which I’ve not left for days) on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. Sounds fun, eh?

ICANN staff are generally held to be defensive, secretive and to have a bunker mentality. So in a bid to be more open, or just to arouse some sympathy, we’re making an effort to blog our AGM. (Anyone can actually blog it, it’s just that staff are being encouraged to.) If you’re interested in how the meeting is going, e.g. issues, meeting reports, web references and local colour, please come to a site that lets people not in Sao Paulo to participate in the meeting. There are web chats, links to video, audio and real time transcription, and a blog. It’s called the ICANN Sao Paulo Participation Website.

It’s all been set up by journalist Kieren McCarthy, and the idea is for us to use this whole Internet thing a bit more to let people be part of how it’s actually run.

Although we’ve been on the same panel once before, Minnesota sociologist “Chris Uggen”:http://www.chrisuggen.com/ clearly travels on a “rougher conference circuit”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/12/mickey.html than me.

A quick question about the Social Security debate last year that CT readers may be able to help me with. I remember some newspaper somewhere publishing an article in which un-named Democrats thanked bloggers like Josh Marshall for helping corral the mavericks during the Social Security debate. Does anyone remember where that article is? More generally, actual evidence on whether bloggers did or didn’t influence this debate would be helpful (I’m pretty sure that they did, but hard evidence on this is difficult to come by).

MSNBC prints a puff piece from Forbes on Richard Branson’s approach to charity – he’s been for it since September, apparently. “At Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative in New York, Branson pledged all proceeds from Virgin Group’s transportation divisions be donated to develop alternative fuel sources and alleviate global warming. His pledge amounts to about $3 billion over ten years.”

But get this: “Branson didn’t even believe in global warming until five years ago. Then he read Bjorn Lomborg’s, The Skeptical Environmentalist.”

Just imagine if he had been reading Quiggin’s posts – on his own website back to August, 2001, and here and here and here and here, for example. On the other hand, could it be that Lomborg served as the thin edge of the wedge and that Branson allowed himself to be convinced by the evidence only because the “solution” Lomborg presents is pretty much to wait until technology solves the problem? Regardless, and not to quibble about the definition of “charity” at work in the article, it’s certainly good that Branson is putting money toward developing alternative fuel sources.

In yet another round of the controversy over discounting in the Stern Report, Megan McArdle refers to Stern’s use of “a zero or very-near-zero discount rate”. Similarly Bjorn Lomborg refers to the discount rate as “extremely low” and Arnold Kling complains says that it’s a below-market rate.

So what is the discount rate we are talking about? Stern doesn’t pick a fixed rate but rather picks parameters that determine the discount rate in a given projection. The relevant parameters are the pure rate of time preference (delta) which Stern sets equal to 0.1 and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (eta) which Stern sets equal to 1. The important parameter is eta, which reflects the fact that since people in the future will mostly be richer than us, additional consumption in the future is worth less than additional consumption now.

Given eta = 1, the discount rate is equal to the rate of growth of consumption per person, plus delta which is 0.1. A reasonable estimate for the growth rate is 2 per cent, so Stern would have a real discount rate of 2.1 per cent. Allowing for 2.5 per cent inflation that’s equal to a nominal rate of 4.6 per cent. The US 10-year bond rate, probably the most directly comparable market rate, is currently 4.44 per cent; a bit above its long-run average in real terms. So, Stern’s approach produces a discount rate a little above the real bond rate.

Arguments about discounting are unlikely to be settled any time soon. There’s a strong case for using bond rates as the basis for discounting the future. There are also strong arguments against, largely depending on how you adjust for risk. But to refer to the US bond rate as “near-zero” or “extremely low” seems implausible, and to say it’s below-market is a contradiction in terms. It seems as if these writers have confused the discount rate with the rate of pure time preferences.

Tom Bartlett at the _Chronicle_ sat down Michael Bérubé and David Horowitz for lunch a couple of weeks ago. The results are “here”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm. It’s interesting and enjoyable; Horowitz clearly doesn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with an interlocutor who doesn’t take him Very Seriously. All in all, Horowitz doesn’t seem particularly bright.

Josh Marshall links to a Michael Novak piece in the Standard – a piece that is surely the apotheosis of Green Lantern foreign policy (well, until next week); complete with vulnerability to the hideous yellow streak that is the MSM.

It begins … horribly:

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war.

Read those two sentence again.

Other bits (in which our author is pretending to speak in the voice of an Islamist terrorist/insurgent, but I think he’s just being bashful):

The weaker political will yielded to the stronger will …

Yet, as always, will followed storyline. First comes narrative, then the acts that give it flesh in history …

In such wars … whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins …

I really don’t know what to say. War is a continuation of punditry by other means? Have I got that right? It’s looking increasingly like sheer intellectual inconsistency on the part of the neocons and warbloggers that they have not marched on – and levitated by force of will – the New York Times building. What’s stopping them?

For background reading I suppose you could try Mailer’s Armies of the Night [amazon]. But, frankly, it isn’t silly enough. Looney Tunes Golden Collection (vols. 1-3) are 50% off. A very good deal. And you can get all of season 1 of Robot Chicken for an astonishing $8.99. I’ve never watched Robot Chicken. Is it funny?

Two interesting arguments about the press and the 1960’s backlash against civil rights.

First, David Greenberg in a book review in _The American Prospect._

If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism’s finest hours, it carried a cost. It’s a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don’t explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today’s right-wing bogeyman of “the liberal media” originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story. … Roberts and Klibanoff also detail more subtle ways in which hostility toward the national media was voiced. In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South. Ultimately, politicians — notably Alabama Governor George Wallace — capitalized on this resentment. Wallace cited journalists alongside pointy-headed intellectuals and the Supreme Court in his litany of elitist villains who were screwing the little guy. Richard Nixon, too, picked up the strategy, which he bequeathed to men like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

Second, “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061127&s=perlstein112906 (free reg required) in _TNR._

Since the late ’60s, however–not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame–a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees “were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten.” Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn’t imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite’s show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: “Many of them are hippies themselves. They’re part of this movement.” Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, “Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America.” That air of alienation–that helpless feeling that we have no idea what’s going on out there–has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what “the great mass of ordinary Americans” supposedly believes–much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically–became reified. Pundits like Kraft–a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway–learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them–say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics–they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

Now the historical origins of a set of institutions and practices don’t necessarily dictate their current content. Much of the discourse around social welfare in the 1930’s had an unpleasant racist edge. But there does seem to be some continuity between what Greenberg and Perlstein (both of whom are excellent historians who are intimately familiar with their source material) document, and the ways that journalists tiptoe around the political importance of racism in the South today. Comments?

I don’t know anything about the Dutch show “Kinderen voor Kinderen”, but it seems like it could be fairly mainstream and have a sizeable audience. I also don’t know what, if any, reactions this video received, but it’s a good example of how you can socialize kids to be inclusive and understanding of diverse family arrangements. It’s interesting (and sad) to ponder how differently people would react in various places.

Via Legal Theory Bookworm I see that Samuel Freeman’s book Justice and the Social Contract is now out (the opportunity for immodesty is irresistible — my own book, On Education is, incredibly, on the same list as Freeman’s). A collection of his papers including at least 2 that are previously unpublished, this might qualify for Chris’s list of important books in political philosophy. (My only doubt is that, as a collection of papers, it might not meet his criteria, but I have a strong suspicion that reading them straight through will be a different experience from reading them one at a time). Looking forward, soon, to Freeman’s next book, Rawls which everyone will have to read.

After several months and an embarrrassing number of comments sometimes from strangers about the absence of a faculty page for me, I’ve finally entered the 21st century with a webpage of my own. It’s here. It contains a lot of the normal information, a page with links to some papers on the web (all but one of them by me), and a page with links to various of my journalistic pieces as well as my favourite CT pieces (again of my own). Each page has a not-completely-out-of-date photo of me (that was my wife’s idea, she being responsible for most of the layout and design). I can’t imagine I’ll update it for a while, but if anyone has useful suggestions (which have to be implementable by a Luddite with limited command of Dreamweaver) go ahead…

Shopping with a 5-year old on one arm, 2-year old on the other, saw a sale VCD of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, snagged it (don’t ask with what appendage). When we got home I was surprised to discover it was a minimal 1992 production, with Walter Matthau narrating. Walter Matthau as Cindy Lou Who is a hoot. Animation-wise, it’s just barely. Mostly just shots of the original Seuss illustrations with eyes that roll and horns that toot and a cut-out grinch who creeps along to a snow-crunching sound. (But done tastefully and appreciatively, as cut-out grinches go.) It comes packaged with a similarly minimal “If I Ran The Zoo” narrated by some kid who does sound as though he gets Gerald McGrew’s motivation. I sort of like this style. Camera-crawls over a kid’s book, with good voice-over. There’s a lot to love in the plain old Seuss drawings. Of course, it’s a bit hard to keep Karloff out of the back of your head. But I think my scaredy 5-year old and 2-year old might not be quite ready for the classic 1966 version – superior though it unquestionably is. Walter Matthau completists can get this strange version from Amazon. (I mean if you are that sort of person, you’ve already watched A New Leaf to death and are ready to turn over a new leaf. If they’d gotten Elaine May to be Cindy, that would have been funny.)