2008 Economics & Political Vloggery If you care to comment, email me at bradley@wogsland.org with "Vloggery" in the Subject line. All links are good on the day of posting, but you know how some tend to die after a while.

I started of this morning twittering as I often do lately and came across an article on Larry Brilliant. A fellow with an interesting life is he even if he does seem to hold onto some 20th century hippie socialist ideals. Nevertheless, having led such a varied existence gives one hope that there is goodness in humanity. Humility is perhaps the hardest, as Socrates was wont to say, "I know enough to know that I know nothing." Google's ad partnership with Yahoo announced recently shows that they are willing to work with everyone. And that takes humility. With Yahoo struggling traditional economic thinking would seem to say that now is the time to crush Yahoo and remove a competitor. Instead they had made a competitor into an ally. Ahimsa paramo dharma. That's something of a personal motto, but I stole it from Gandhi. It's Gujarati for "nonviolence is the best way". If there's anything capitalism allows for, then it's the realization of that principle in human interaction. Governments will always require taxation (confiscation by violence) and force to compel citizens to follow its dictates. Trade, on the other hand, is nonviolent by definition. I give you something of mine you want and you give me something of yours I want. Competition has the potential to get nasty, but this usually means crossing out of nonviolent trade and into violent means be they criminal or litigious (using the government's violence against your competitor). And nonviolence usually makes economic sense, too. My wife is a Yahoo stalwart. She's had an email address with them for over a decade and doesn't plan to change that anytime soon. If Google had tried to run Yahoo out of business it would have alienated my wife and she would have headed over to Hotmail or something. Instead, Google is making money showing her adds on Yahoo. Yahoo also acted with informed humility in allowing Google to sell adds for them. Yahoo has decreasing market share and realizes that Google is better at targeting adds. Of course, with Microsoft attempting an increasingly hostile takeover of Yahoo it also makes sense for the company to ally itself with Microsoft's chosen nemesis. And while we're on the subject, there's a company that lacks humility. Microsoft seems trapped in the 20th century of computing where they design a product and then desend from the mountaintop to present it to all of us for sale. They cannot match the size of the development of open source software and so in an increasingly diverse computing world Vista was a giant mess of bugs. So they build a wall of patents around themselves and try to use the violence of government against their competitors. Of course, they were attacked first. After being bludgeoned by antitrust litigation for a decade it's hard not to see government as a powerful weapon to use against competitors. Getting back to Larry Brilliant, however, it seems he's been set up as the head of a new philanthropy division, Google.org, that is set to make giving away money profitable. Considering what Google's already done, I'm not sure that's impossible.