http://from50000feet.dolanmedia.com/

…and a new feed address for subscribers:

http://from50000feet.dolanmedia.com/feed/

I’ve also changed the layout to a wider format, which should make this blog a little easier to read.

Thanks for your visits, and I hope they continue at my new address.

-John

Shell Oil Company wants to extract oil from the Green River Formation, which contains one of the largest oil shale deposits in the world. According to the Colorado Springs Business Journal’s Amy Gillentine, the government’s permitting process runs on a different track than Shell’s research on how to squeeze the goo from the rocks.

Shell submitted the application a year ago, but withdrew it when the company realized that research was going to lead in another direction, said Tracy Boyd, spokesman for the Mahogany Project, the name for the oil shale research work being conducted on 17 acres in the Colorado back country near Rifle.

“But that doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped anything,” he said. “It’s a delay, but other things are going on at the site. We’ve finished building the freeze wall test and it’s 100 percent online now. They’re working on heating tests elsewhere on the site.”

The next step, which requires combining both the freezing and heating elements into one big test to see if Shell can really wring oil from the rocks, is causing the delay.

“It takes about a year to process the application, and things in this research are changing so fast that knowing exactly what you want to do in a year is difficult,” Boyd said. “We’re learning a lot more all the time. We’ll resubmit the application a year or so down the road when we have better information to know exactly what kind of integrated test we want to do.”

Shell, which has secured 200 patents for oil-shale extraction technology, is the only oil firm working this problem on such a massive scale. As one might expect, the whole shale-oil enterprise has its critics and skeptics.

“Despite a century of trying, and $10 billion in investment, oil shale currently provides an infinitesimal .0001 percent of world energy,” said Randy Udall, director of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency in Aspen. “The technology is incredible — incredible in an insane way, incredible in a fantastic way, maybe both.”

Other analysts say that the fiasco of the 1970s and 1980s — when oil companies abruptly pulled out of the Rifle region and oil shale exploration, leaving thousands of people unemployed — means that investors should be cautious when viewing shale as the solution to the country’s energy woes.

“That history raises a feasibility issue,” said Dan Hattrup, an instructor in economics and finance at Regis University who is researching alternative energies as his Ph.D. thesis. “Looking at the new technology, however, it seems to be cost-effective. I’ve seen some estimates that say it can be effective even if oil is at $30 a barrel.”

But Hattrup also says the environmental costs will be much higher, with potential risk to groundwater the biggest concern….

Doesn’t every new governor (or president for that matter) promise the bar associations he or she will fill judicial vacancies faster than the last governor? And doesn’t every governor disappoint? That’s what’s happening with Gov. Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, according to Mass Lawyers Weekly‘s Barbara Rabinovitz. The furor over a current judge’s release of a convicted killer who killed again will probably slow things down more, Rabinovitz explains….

More fallout from Oklahoma’s ice storm: Funeral homes having to improvise, survivors distraught. The story by the Journal Record’s Brian Bus is here….

Lawyers take everything so seriously, including shopping for Christmas toys. Wisconsin Law Journal blogger Bev Butula says parents’ first stop should be the Consumer Product Safety Commission. I wonder if they pipe in songs from “Ralph Nader: Home for the Holidays” while you’re on hold….

Who do you think gets the edge when Sean Hannity, Tim Russert and James Carville come to the Long Island Association’s annual meeting next February (as reported by LI Biz Blog)?

Well, Carville and Russert worked for Democrats, so they have the numerical advantage. But as anyone knows who’s heard Hannity’s braying voice, the Fox News and talk radio star is a Long Islander through and through. He was born in New York City, but went to Catholic prep school in Uniondale….

In this crowd, Louisianan Carville might need a translator…. And everyone knows Russert is a New Yorker…a Buffalo, New Yorker…. Buffalo is a lot closer to Cleveland than it is to Nassau County….

(photo by Kevin Delaney)

Take, for example, #6, the Violet Nabaztag:

Meet Nabaztag, perhaps the world’s first toy that purports to be a Wi-Fi-enabled rabbit that beeps, moves its ears, reads your e-mails, says snarky stuff and responds to voice commands. Of course, when we say “rabbit,” we mean a white plastic cone with plastic oblong ears that tend to fall off a lot. So if your idea of what a hare should look like comes from watching animals in the park, or even watching old Bugs Bunny cartoons, you will be sorely disappointed. Also, it often ignores your requests and kind of doesn’t work.

Nabaztag is essentially France’s answer to Japan’s alchemical ability to turn cute into cash. It costs $165, and getting it to actually read our e-mails was more harrowing than setting up a wireless network (our old Teddy Ruckspin could have done a better job). We’re honestly stumped why anybody would ever want a device like this to read their e-mail out loud. Most of our messages are along the lines of “Vi@Gra 4 Cheap!” and “Sounds good, see you at 7”—not exactly the kind of thing that needs to be spoken aloud by a frightening doll.

Or how ’bout Microsoft’s new version of the Zune music player, which comes in at #8:

Cut to this year. Apple has revamped their entire iPod line, shrinking their already-tiny Nanos and adding the iPhone’s multitouch interface to a non-phone media player. So how does Microsoft respond? By matching the size and feature set of the previous year’s iPods and not even attempting to compete on price (the updated Zunes cost pretty much exactly the same as the new iPods). It’s almost as if Microsoft didn’t anticipate Apple making a single update or change to their constantly evolving line of players.

Apple itself gets nailed for the Apple TV, coming in at #2. The worst product? Oddly, it’s something Popular Mechanics‘ editors liked, the Palm Foleo, an ultra-lightweight notebook PC. The problem?

(B)efore a single Foleo hit the shelves, Palm killed it, claiming that they needed more time to develop the Foleo 2. The bloggers won, Palm lost, and our review unit became a bizarre unreleased prequel to a product that might never exist. It wasn’t perfect, but the Foleo deserved better.

It occurs to me you might be interested in the Popular Mechanics editors ten most brilliant gadgets of 2007.  That’s here.

Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner’s permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use.

Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free. Copyfraud stifles valid forms of reproduction and undermines free speech.

This is from a paper by Assistant Professor Jason Mazzone of the Brooklyn Law School, which was linked by the popular site Boing Boing. The full paper can be downloaded from here.

In the paper, he cites a warning notice placed on an edition of the U.S. Constitution that many law students use: “No part of this may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means…without permission from the publisher.”  The Constitution!

Corporate websites include blanket copyright notices even when they feature the U.S. flag, list stock reports, contain a calendar or rely on other materials squarely in the public domain. Following several high-profile lawsuits, many universities now pay licensing fees for virtually everything they reproduce and distribute to their students, whether warranted by copyright law or not.

Copyright law suffers from a basic defect. The law’s strong protection for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain.

Also prone to fraudulently asserted copyrights, according to Prof. Mazzone:  Reproductions of works by artists like Monet or Van Gogh, sheet music for classical music, church songs and patriotic anthems, and government documents like the Warren Commission Report on JFK’s assassination and the 9/11 Commission Report.

Mazzone points out that the Patent act prohibits false patent claims marking a product. Merely making such a mark is viewed by the law as sufficient to prove intent to deceive the public.  Not so in copyright law.  Those who pay fees for fraudulently copyrighted material must sue to recoup their losses.   Thus, one option Mazzone considers is putting copyright law on the same footing as patents.

Because Congress has continually expanded the duration and power of copyrights, Mazzone argues, it has a responsibility to protect what remains in the public domain.

And, after the jump, check out a brief, eerie video from Tulsa: A strange light seems to flash from the earth, probably caused by a branch hitting a power line.

Things are looking up in frozen Oklahoma — if you’re in the tree removal and replacement business, according to Kirby Lee Davis in The Journal Record.

“If you’re in the tree removal business you’re going to have a bonanza,” added Gary Trennepohl, a professor of finance and the president of Oklahoma State University’s Tulsa campus. “In our campus I bet we’re going to lose 90 percent of our trees. To me that’s the most devastating financial impact.”

Those comments reflect the aesthetics of the storm, the most visible area of damage. And it points to a huge, often overlooked sector.

Trennepohl estimated just replacing the trees at the OSU-Tulsa campus will cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. Multiply that by the thousands of square miles seeing similar wreckage, from Yukon and Norman to Grove and Claremore, and economists might start shaking their heads at the enormity of the issue.

Those businesses, however, might be affected by a labor shortage brought about by the state and federal crackdown on illegal immigrant labor.

Lee interviews University of Oklahoma economist Robert Dauffenbach and OSU-Tulsa’s President Gary Trennepohl (also a professor of business) on the broader economic effects of the still-ongoing blackout affecting hundreds of thousands of the state’s homes and businesses.

“It’s going to be especially hard on the small businesses,” said Trennepohl. “If this goes on probably for more than a week or 10 days, it’s going to start pinching people. If it (electrical service) comes back up tomorrow, we’re not going to notice much. But if it goes to a week or 10 days, you’re going to get into payroll and cash flow problems on many levels. It’s just impossible to put a dollar figure on that.”

Falling during the key Christmas sales season escalates the risk for retailers (and sales tax-driven governments) that can count on these sales for 25 percent or more of their annual revenue. Dauffenbach said this could create pent-up demand consumers will fulfill once normalcy returns, but Trennepohl had his doubts.

“Typically in my experiences you don’t really make it up,” he said. “You don’t just shift all of those sales. It doesn’t work like that.”

Such concerns could be reflected in recovery efforts, said Dauffenbach.

“I don’t know that this is the right social way to approach things but they seem to be very much in a hurry to get retail establishments back up and happening,” he said.

There’s a lot more. Read the whole thing. Also, check out this story about the likely impact on utility bills.

Ice storms are Mother Nature’s femme fatales. Beautiful to look at, dangerous to know.

Although these base closures have been painful for the communities affected, it always stood to reason that consolidating military facilities would represent a win for taxpayers. In the long run it will, but as John Maynard Keynes said about the long run…

The Journal-Record’s Kirby Lee Davis today describes the scene in Tulsa.

(A) disquieting eeriness pervaded every shadow, which spread into an omnipresent foreboding as twilight drained to a cold, misty dark Stephen King would have loved.

That’s when a dense shroud of gloom crept into these hilly streets, mile after mile lit only by fog-dimmed headlights. Dusk transformed much of Tulsa into a bleak ghost town, one where the cold and hungry flocked like moths to most any flicker of electronic light – like the McDonald’s at 15th and Peoria, a beacon of civilization in the deserted blackness of a normally robust Cherry Street.

Amazingly, downtown Tulsa seemed graced with power – almost the exact opposite of two years ago, when a frozen water main flooded an underground Public Service Company of Oklahoma station and knocked out much of the high-rise district. But the prevailing void Monday night caught up with those who sought refuge at the Spaghetti Warehouse and other Brady District venues by 6:50 p.m., plunging them into darkness in the twinkling of an eye.

Ted Strueli blogs about the storm’s impact.

You know you’re in a bad spot when the TV crew is two doors from your house doing the live remote about how bad the storm is. KFOR‘s Scott Hines got stuck with the mobile newsroom report from my stomping grounds, Edgemere Park, which might better be called Edgemere Dark. One of the disadvantages of historic neighborhoods os that the power lines are all above ground, interlaced witht he limbs of trees planted when the houses were built. Folks in new neighborhoods get power back when OG+E makes a single repair; in old subdivisions like ours, every tree poses a threat to every line and crews have to go house-by-house to restore electricity. Part of the attraction to Edgemere Park is, logically enough, the park. Unfortunately, that park and the tree-lined streets around it look a little like something out of The Golden Compass, but without Nicole Kidman or Eva Green.

And, according to Brian Brus, hotels in the major population centers are all sold out as residents flee their dark, cold homes, searching for refuge for themselves — and their pets.

Mark Hanson at La Quinta Inn & Suites on Memorial Road said, “Reservations are obviously up, but it’s hit and miss. You never know when someone’s going to cancel. It’s about half and half.”

“The phone has just been ringing off the wall, all day,” Kraemer said. “And as soon as a traveler with a normal reservation calls to cancel because they’re not coming into town, we’ve got five other people eager to take that room.”

Kraemer said many of her guests were interested in the hotel’s policy of allowing pets. Pet owners who weren’t able to secure pet-friendly hotel rooms turned to groomers and veterinarians, many of whom had the same occupancy problems.

Manager Vickie Phillips at Dogs Beautiful in south Oklahoma City said she had to send her visitors home.

“Everybody’s been calling us like crazy, but I’ve had to contact our dog owners to come pick up their animals because we don’t have any electricity ourselves,” she said. “Our electricity went out about 5 a.m. this morning, so we got the animals all bundled up and started calling everybody.”

Brus also covers the impact of the storm on the state’s airports. Keep checking The Journal Record for updates.

(Photo by Rip Stell, The Journal Record)

To celebrate the new look, they’ve posted some good stuff lately. Like this post about a flamboyant Baltimore attorney who gets to play “essentially, himself” in the final season of HBO’s “The Wire.” And this one, about Baltimore being “the 46th safest drunken city” in a Men’s Health survey. There are a couple of excellent photos on this post about last week’s Pearl Harbor commemoration….

New Orleans City Business’ Ariella Cohen covers the Brad Pitt “Make It Right” plan to redevelop the Katrina’d Ninth Ward.

Rebuilding homes is Pitt’s top priority but replacing stores, banks and offices could be next, according to “Make it Right” Director Tom Darden.

“We went to members of the community and asked what they needed. They said, ‘We desperately need housing.’ But all of us here recognize the need for other development, too.”

Any commercial building would require funding and development partners, he said.

Homebuilding paves the way for retail development, experts often say.

“Retail follows rooftops,” said Rich Stone, vice president of the commercial real estate division of Latter & Blum Inc.

But in the low-income Lower Ninth Ward, even a relatively dense pre-storm population of 14,008 did not attract a full-service grocer. Instead, people relied on convenience stores, small, locally owned markets and gas stations. Shopping trips were done largely at Winn-Dixie or Wal-Mart in Chalmette.

(Photo by Frank Aymami, New Orleans City Business)

VLW, the blog of Virginia Lawyers’ Weekly, reports alumni are disappointed in the “hopeless” new College of William and Mary logo. Feathers were removed to terminate insensitive Native American associations, but the result is being compared to the logo for the trash conglomerate Waste Management…

In an economic development move reported by The Journal Record, Oklahoma State University and OK state government have teamed to form the Oklahoma Nanotechnology Education Initiative to ensure the state will have enough trained nanotechnology technicians — people who can work with items fabricated on a molecular scale.

“First, we have to develop awareness and excitement among middle school and high school students about the enormous career opportunities this field will offer,” said (OSU-Okmulgee President Bob) Klabenes. “Then, we have to have sophisticated teaching facilities and labs so that students can have hands-on learning experiences with extremely complex equipment.”

Nanotechnology laboratories and classrooms will be in a new building on the OSU-Okmulgee campus. The facility will include atomic force microscopes, including specialized software for analyzing nanomaterials data, a scanning tunneling microscope and a fiber-optic spectrophotometer system.

So if your kid comes home from school one day and announces, “When I grow up, I want to be a nanotechnology technician!” remember you read it here first….

The highlight of the AlwaysOn Venture Capital Summit was Guy Kawasaki’s panel, “Why Take Venture Capital At All.” It was hilarious from the get go as venture capitalists watched the young entrepreneurs on the panel inside the swanky Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay resort. Kawasaki rounded up four people who were at the right place with the right idea at the right time. By making money with virtually solo operations, they are the lucky ones who make it look so easy. So much so that they didn’t really need much funding at all. In other words, it’s the people everybody loves to hate because they make the rest of us look so bad and unlucky.

Kawasaki asked everyone at the outset how much traffic each of the young entreprenuers were getting. Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, said he has managed to get 52 million page views a month from four million unique visitors. I enjoy Fark myself. It’s basically news of the weird that makes you laugh. People submit ideas for funny stories to him and he and his crew put the best ones on the site. Curtis lives in Kentucky, drinks beer, and plays a lot of soccer so that he counteracts the effects of the beer.

He got the idea for Fark.com as a “complete accident” back in 1999. “I did it because I was annoying the people I was sending the stories to,” he said. Curtis said the site is just a single page that you click on to go to the stories. Once it gathered momentum, the bottom had fallen out of the dot-com market so Curtis didn’t raise any money.

“Still, it was basically my own personal web site,” he said. “It’s almost on auto pilot.”

They get about 2,000 stories a day and then sort through them. He notes that every single late-night talk show and comedy show uses stuff from Fark.com but they don’t credit it. He reads through them from 7 am until 5 pm, when his soccer game starts. He says he is usually so drunk at night that he signs off early, he said.

“I’m having trouble feeling sorry for you, hanging out in Kentucky,” Kawasaki said.

Curtis said that four friends help him do the sorting because they have the same kind of sense of humor that he has. Sometimes he disappears and no one notices. Acting the social critic, Kawasaki asked, “What does it mean that a lot of people get their news through Fark? It’s not exactly NPR.”

“It comes down to the way the younger generation reads the news,” he said. “Most males 18 to 35 get their TV news from the Daily Show. It’s a different filter.” He is worried that Fark has been around nine years and it will be “screwed” if the younger readers don’t adopt it. But he said the younger readers are still coming.

Also on the panel: Markus Frind, who runs a free online dating service that gets more page views than eHarmony; Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of an international social network site called Hi5; and Blake Commagere, who invented the online game Zombies and Vampires that has become a viral phenomenon on Facebook.

In five months, there have been 20 million users. But there are about five million unique visitors who are active and the monthly page views are just shy of 500 million.

“How much?” Kawasaki asked in disbelief. “Half a billion,” Commagere replied. That means that the players of the game are addicted and they’re generating hundreds of pages views each.

All Commagere was trying to do was annoy and amuse his friends. They were annoyed with him when they found out he disappeared for two weeks to create a dumb game. “It was created as a joke, just to make me laugh,” he said. “As it took off, I said oh god I have to get resources into this.”

Commagere said it’s a very simple game that is designed to spread from person to person. The reward system gets users addicted so they can get to the next level and see new pictures of zombies. He figured he shouldn’t even try to ask for venture capital because he would get laughed out of the room.

“People would probably be terrified if I told them about how off-the-cuff everything was,” he said.

The freeze would apply to adjustable-rate mortgages originated between Jan. 1, 2005, and July 31, 2007, which would reset between Jan. 1, 2008, and July 31, 2010. The program is designed to help those with two-year or three-year low teaser rates on their mortgages.

It would only affect borrowers living in their homes, not those who purchased housing for investment purposes. According to the source briefed on the plan, those who have a 3 percent equity stake or more in their property also would not be eligible for the freeze.

Under the reasoning of federal officials, those who currently have financial wherewithal to make their payments but would struggle to pay a higher reset rate could qualify for refinancing.

The Bush administration is expected to seek authority to enable state and local governments to use tax-exempt bonds to fund these refinancings, an idea floated by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in a speech on Monday.

So what did everybody think?

The National Association of Home Builders was pleased, but wants more help, such as “FHA reform legislation to allow the agency to insure more home loans and help subprime borrowers,” and more “regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and allow them to purchase mortgages in high-cost markets.”

The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) , an affordable-housing advocacy group, saw the Bush/Paulson plan as the Administration’s first step to “limit damage by big business” and set “a new standard for government intervention in the mortgage industry.” It’s not enough, however. From NACA’s press release:

The mortgage industry has pushed defective mortgage products that created this crisis. These mortgages were never about long-term homeownership, but about massive profits for the lenders, investment bankers, brokers and rating agencies. NACA has been in the forefront of combating the mortgage crisis and has provided the most significant solution with its agreement with Countrywide Financial that permanently reduces the interest rate for homeowners to what they can afford – often to five or six percent fixed.

The Bush administration’s rescue plan impacts a limited number of homeowners and even those within the criteria will only have a temporary reprieve. Freezing interest rates temporarily is analogous to having a defective automobile with no brakes, and rather than fix the brakes, you are allowed to park it while making the payments and then drive it down the hill full speed. The inevitable result will be a crash or in mortgage terms – foreclosure.

In his blog The Big Picture, market strategist Barry Ritholtz points to the scope of the problem — a projected 775,000 homes with $143 billion in subprime mortgage debt projected to go into foreclosure — and says of the Bush Administration:

Hence, the political and economic motivation for doing something — anything — rather than look like they are just sitting there.

Ritholtz’s opposition to the plan is over what it left out:

This plan does nothing to address the issues which led to the snafu in the first place:

• The FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), who took rates down to historic lows, and left them there for a year;

• Ratings agencies, (not unlike the equity scandal of the 1990s) were in cahoots with underwriters, to the detriment of investors;

• The Federal Reserve, in their capacity of over-seers of the Banking industry, failed to supervise the rampant issuance of irresponsible debt

Peter Cohan at Blogging Stocks sees only the direct beneficiaries of the Bush program as gaining anything. Their gains come at the expense of mortgage-backed securities owners, all the other mortgage holders who don’t qualify, as well as two intangibles:

• Free markets. W’s plan thumbs its nose at the notion of free markets. It allows the free markets to work for borrowers not covered by the plan, while replacing free markets with government intervention for those borrowers who happen to have lucked into being in the class of people the plan covers. And if the plan was intended to limit the number of foreclosures, it’s not clear that it will succeed at that. That’s because the people who have not been able to make their teaser payments are more likely to foreclose. While the ones being helped by the plan — those who are making their payments — would have been more likely to afford to pay the higher reset amount in their original mortgage contracts.
• George W. Bush’s legacy. Given the damage W’s plan is likely to cause for these “losers,” George W. Bush’s legacy is also likely to take a hit. Fortunately for him, in the absence of more details. it is difficult to know whether his plan will actually go into effect or if — like his SIV rescue plan — it will stall. One thing seems clear, whichever group is left out of the plan — and this appears to include MBS investors — will resist its implementation.

Economist Ryan Avent is starts off snarky, then makes a serious point. One good way to avoid default is to sell your house, and that’s getting harder:

As someone who bought a home in 2005 with a prime, fixed-rate mortgage, I’m kind of wishing I’d gone for the unconventional loan product and gotten myself a lot more house.

My general thought right now, however, is that we’d be much better off following Larry Summers’ advice and ensuring that there’s a ready supply of mortgage credit to qualifying borrowers. I suspect a big problem with the housing market currently is that people who’d like to and are able to buy are having difficulty getting a mortgage. Absence of liquidity in the housing markets is going to force prices down farther than they need to go, and it makes it difficult for struggling homeowners to get out of their mortgages by selling their properties.

A half-dozen economists are quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog, including Peter D. Schiff’s view that

Without question, the Bush administration’s mortgage rescue plan will exacerbate, not alleviate, the problems in the housing market. As the plan will sharply reduce the ability of new buyers to make purchases, it really amounts to a stay of execution and not a pardon.

BusinessWeek’s Peter Coy is also scathing, citing the unfairness to borrowers who paid a premium to avoid ARMs and now are seeing the teaser rates that didn’t draw them in extended.

A Resolution Trust Corp.-style bailout might have been a cleaner way of dealing with this mess. Makes me wonder whether in its zeal to come up with a solution that could be labeled 100% “private sector” for political consumption, the Bush Administration made some poor choices.

In another WSJ blog, Deal Journal, Dennis K. Berman has an even more ominous take, comparing the new Administration policies to the kind of policies that sank the Japanese economy in the 1990s:

For decades, Japan pursued a “convoy system” for its banking regulation, forcing some of its larger and healthier banks to absorb some of the bad loans of weaker brethren. The approach worked fine for a long time, until the convoy –overloaded with years of mispriced debts — ground Japan’s economy to a terrible halt…

(Paulson’s) mortgage approach is similar, as it plans to freeze the worst economic outcomes (potential foreclosures) so the system will have more time to come up with less bad outcomes (less-costly workouts).

The discussion continues. Please add your thoughts in the comments.

My expertise doesn’t stack up with that of the people I cite, but I’ll offer an opinion anyway.

I think we’re crossing into a new period of economic history. After more than 25 years of booming economic momentum, signs of age are beginning to show. Apparently, a lot of us have been living beyond our means, a fact that will come much clearer as more baby boomers face retirement with depleted savings accounts, bankrupt pension programs, and overstressed Social Security.

So far, it’s not clear whether the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and in Washington are up to the challenge. In 2007–perhaps a turning point–leadership seems to be lacking in basic insight into what’s going on. Too many people who shouldn’t be surprised are telling us they’re surprised. It can make a person uneasy.

Here are a few stories from Dolan Media I wanted to get out of bed for.

The state-run Healthcare Group Arizona was supposed to be a self-sufficient health insurance plan for small businesses. Instead, “it’s in financial meltdown,” according to a state rep quoted in Arizona Capitol Times.

And the Department of Insurance seems to agree with(Rep. Kirk) Adams’ assessment. Preliminary results from a report that will be finalized in February show Healthcare Group does not collect the data needed to predict health care trends and adjust its premiums accordingly, said Director Christina Urias.

If Healthcare Group was a private insurer, she told the panel Nov. 27, her department would have shut it down.

“In my view, this is a situation…very, very similar to an insolvent insurer operation because it’s relying on subsidies from the Legislature to keep itself going,” Urias said.

Even Kevin Nolan, deputy director of Healthcare Group, told the committee the program may be entering the beginning stages of what is known in the insurance world as a “death spiral,” in which recently increased premium costs drive healthy people from the system, leaving only those with serious illnesses.

Another state Rep. thinks the situation is salvageable — that restrictions on eligibility and on marketing the service could get the program “back on good footing.” The full story is available to subscribers….

If you’re on top of the global warming issue, you’ve doubtless heard the litany of environmentally-friendly sustainable sources of energy: Solar power, wind energy, geothermal…and now “wave parks.” The Daily Journal of Commerce in Portland surveys the seascape, and reports that Oregon’s bid to be the world’s leader in commercializing the technology faces a surge in competition from Nova Scotia, British Columbia and neighboring Washington state.

Oregon… is working to expand Oregon State University’s wave research to a national in-water wave energy research center where companies around the world can bring their technologies for testing. And the state already has two test devices in the water – Canada-based Finavera Renewables’ Aquabuoy and OSU’s wave energy buoy – with six more permit applications on file at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Finavera suffered a setback last month, however, when the Aquabuoy off the coast of Newport began leaking and sank to the ocean floor. And public perception of wave energy parks as threats to ocean life and fishers could set back the state, energy consultant Justin Klure said.

“Oregon needs to accelerate our efforts for community outreach and education,” Klure said, “so wave energy projects are seen as positive instead of a threat.”

Also on the water… If you’re in Baltimore today or tomorrow, you can catch a glimpse of a very cool-looking high-speed Navy ship, on display in the Inner Harbor as part of the Army-Navy game festivities.  Go to On the Record to see it….

Slow home sales in New Orleans have some owners resorting to auctions, writes Deon Roberts in New Orleans City Business. But it seems like the auctions are serving to illustrate that sellers and buyers remain far apart on what they think properties are worth.

(David) Gilmore, president of Sperry Van Ness/Gilmore Auction, said New Orleans-area home auctions are attracting fewer buyers than for commercial properties or lots. Also, many sellers have not been satisfied with residential auction bids, he said.

“There are still buyers in the market,” Gilmore said. “We had bidders at every one of our auctions for 12 different sales three weeks ago. But I’ll tell you, on the residential homes, there was a price differential between which the sellers were wiling to accept and the buyers are willing to give, and that tells you we have market issues.”

Of the 12 properties Gilmore’s firm featured three weeks ago, three homes did not sell because the sellers rejected the offers, he said. There was a 30 percent average difference in what the sellers wanted and the buyers offered.

What one word comes to mind when you think of New York? Did you say “politeness?”  Me too!  But apparently the Long Island Railroad has concerns about its passengers hogging seats with their bags and gabbing on the cell phone, so they’ve launched an anti-rudeness campaign, according to LI BizBlog….

Three thousand gallons of chicken fat from a Perdue poultry plant. An unlatched tanker. Twenty miles of Virginia highway. Yuk.  And a few auto accidents, according to the VLW Blog…. Talk about rude….

From CNET’s post about the conference:

For Bradford, who was interviewed on-stage at the conference by Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Delaney, we’re in a new era where Web users want data and information filtered for them.

“People want you to do it for them,” she said. “They’re lazy. It’s a society of convenience.”

Fortunately, she suggested, MSN is here to help.

And in doing so, Bradford seemed to suggest, MSN is helping to create a dynamic where the most important and relevant information is presented to users, rather than relying on the long-tail to satisfy large numbers of users who want less popular information.

And by presenting the most important information in a way that is accessible and relevant, MSN is hoping it can benefit by similarly attracting top advertisers.

“The growth is still there,” she said. “Advertisers want the head. Advertisers will still pay 10x for the head instead of the tail.”

And from internetnews.com:

Asked if portals were “dying a slow death,” Bradford said quite the opposite. “Everything is looking more like a portal these days if you look at Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. I think there’s a reverse portal phenomenon going on where you stuff the tail back in the head and make it mean something.”

In other words, while a lot of social networking sites carry more personalized, user-generated and long tail content (referring to the theory of niche sites creating their own markets), they’re all trying to organize content like a portal does.

“People want things filtered for them and put together in a way that’s meaningful to their life, whether that’s around friends or items you want to buy,” said Bradford. “We really think people want you to do it [organize content] for them.” Bradford further claimed that most consumers don’t want to set up home pages, such as iGoogle, myYahoo or even feeds on Facebook. “There’s a great unanswered consumer need there,” she said, to automate the process of giving users the content they’re looking for.

To which I observe: Boy, that Microsoft culture sticks to its people like lint! Bradford’s head shot makes her look young and perky, but she already talks like an old-timer.

People are lazy?

People want things filtered for them?

MSN knows what’s “meaningful to (my) life?”

Really?

Here’s my hypothesis on what Bradford might be picking up. When RSS syndication first appeared, some people immediately got it–and some didn’t. The ones who didn’t get it just walked away from it.

It’s not that syndication is so hard to use, but the myriad feed readers make people feel a lack of confidence. What if I choose the wrong one? I’ve set up feeds on probably five different readers and I could easily do this on 25 more. It wasn’t obvious which one met my needs the most. There was a lot of trial and error. I’m still not sure I am using the right one, or in the right way.

Further, the nomenclature is all off. “Syndication” is not descriptive of what RSS feeds do for you. When I try to explain it to my wife and son, I get tongue-tied. What RSS feeds allow you to do is to organize the vastness of the web by categories that are meaningful to you, to pull into these categories individual sites that serve your needs and wants, and then to be able to check on whether they’ve been updated, and with what, more efficiently.

If MSN thinks it can develop a better widget to help more people create better feeds, then that would be a contribution to the usability of the Web.

But that’s not what Bradford seems to be saying. She seems to think most readers want someone else to aggregate content for them — to make choices for them.

I have to assume the current look of the MSN home page represents what Bradford thinks is meaningful to me, you and everyone else. Take a look. Is she right?

Yes, if you’re interested in:

• 7 Tips for a Job Interview
• Coverage of the murder of the Washington Redskins’ player
• Buying Xbox 360 games or booking travel on Expedia. (Xbox is a Microsoft product, and Expedia was founded by Microsoft.)
• A story about a “raging” debate: Which is more “green,” fake or real Christmas trees?
• Assorted national news, sports and “money” headlines.
• Gossip about Britney, Christina, Avril, and Dancing With the Stars.

Apparently, what we all want is USA Today, except dumbed down.

Oh, and here’s what MSN tells us are the hottest “searches” right now:

Note also the great options they give you to customize the page to meet your needs. All six of them, including your horoscope.

Note also: MSN’s home page doesn’t resemble MySpace or Facebook in the slightest. The only way I know this page is mine is the weather box. In the social networking sites, it’s all about me, which is how the advertisers like it.

Building on platforms like Facebook with widgets that allow you to feed particular news and entertainment interests onto your world of me — that seems like the obvious direction where the Web is going. Oh, I could be wrong, but I know for sure we’re not going back to 1999.

In its press release, Verizon said the “new choice” would not be available until the end of 2008, and described the process between now and then:

In early 2008, the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network. Any device that meets the minimum technical standard will be activated on the network. Devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab which received an additional investment this year to gear up for the anticipated new demand. Any application the customer chooses will be allowed on these devices.

The news has got everyone thinking about two companies not mentioned in the press release, Apple and Google. Apple, because the iPhone is such a sexy product but its appeal is weighed down by the required two-year AT&T/Cingular contract that comes with it; and Google because of its recent announcement of plans to create an open platform for a Linux phone that can run Google applications.

The commentary on Verizon’s move comes in two flavors: Laudatory, and intrigued conjecture. If anyone really doesn’t like it, they’re keeping it to themselves. Here are lots of samples:

“We’re seeing a sea change here. If you go back a year ago, there was absolutely no sign anyone was interested in pushing opening wireless networks,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit telecommunications law firm. “This is like a Berlin Wall moment, where the pressure is too much for these guys.” (SF Chronicle)

Atlantic Monthly blogger Megan McArdle, a libertarian-leaning economist, agrees:

This makes total sense for Verizon, which has the best network; the pressure will force other competitors to follow suit, and on network strength, Verizon wins in most (not all) areas.

This is enormous news for the cell phone industry. I suspect we’ll ultimately see little to no bundling, other than some sort of very basic freebie phone, which is all to the good. Consumers complaining that they won’t get cheap phones aren’t thinking things through; the phone company wouldn’t give you the phone if they didn’t expect to get it out of your hide in phone fees.

I suspect that this will put enormous pressure on Apple’s sweetheart deal with Cingular, as customers begin thinking of a phone as something that doesn’t necessarily come attached to a two-year contract.

From the Washington Post, comments from regulatory bigfeet:

FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin and Rep. Edward J. Markey, chairman of the House subcommittee in charge of telecommunications issues, praised the announcement as a victory for consumers. But some consumer groups, including Public Knowledge and Media Access Project, say it may be too limited to bring real change. Through its testing process, Verizon will still ultimately decide which phones and applications can work on its network, they say, and customers could end up paying more to use outside products. “When more details are out, we’ll discover what all the ‘gotchas’ are,” said Amol Sarva, chief executive of Txtbl, a start-up that hopes to provide mobile e-mail service to cellphone users.

Reuters leads with a suggestion that Google pushed the right buttons to make Verizon act:

Verizon Wireless said on Tuesday it will open its network to any phone or software application by the end of 2008, becoming the first major U.S. mobile service to cave in to demands by Google Inc.

Google had pushed for U.S. wireless operators to open up access to their networks by successfully lobbying the U.S. government to make that a requirement for companies wanting to bid in an upcoming auction of wireless airwaves.

Techcrunch also sees Google as the new driver for mobile telecom, and throws another big name into the mix — Microsoft:

When Google was trying to gear up support for its open-source mobile operating system Android, Verizon was one of the companies Google was rumored to be talking with, but did not end up being part of the Open Handset Alliance (which included T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel). Verizon may still join the Open Handset Alliance in its own sweet time, but this move suggests that it would rather compete by trying to attract mobile developers to its own network. Verizon is not embracing an open-source approach (which is probably why Microsoft is all gung-ho about the announcement), but it will give mobile developers access to its vast network and 64 million subscribers. You didn’t think Verizon was just going to let Google waltz right in and take its customers for a spin, did you? But if Verizon doesn’t make it easy for developers and unaffiliated device manufacturers to get onto its network, it could end up tripping over its own feet.

Here’s what Microsoft had to say in its press release:

“Microsoft is very excited to see Verizon Wireless make such a bold move to satisfy the demands of wireless consumers. As people’s mobile needs become more sophisticated and varied, they will require smarter and more adaptable mobile devices. We are proud to support any open access that puts more power in people’s hands to connect them to the information they want when and where they want it.”

Wall Street Journal blogger Ben Worthen reflects on the early days of the web, and sees a parallel:

Traditionally, wireless carriers have exerted tight control over what devices and software people could use on their networks. This approach is known as a “walled garden,” because there’s a whole world of interesting but hard-to-control stuff out there that the company is protecting its customers from. AOL and others used the same approach in the early days of the Internet. Rather than having people go off and find news or chat rooms on the big bad scary Web, these companies came up with their own sanitized versions of these services.

It didn’t work: No single company could keep pace with all the innovation that was taking place on the entire Internet. Now, Verizon is admitting that the model won’t work for mobile devices, either.

Gigaom’s Om Malik consults his “inner cynic” and finds these caveats:

It doesn’t seem very open to me, because it’s all about devices based on CDMA technologies, which really props up Qualcomm’s CDMA monopoly. More devices put more dollars (and I mean serious dollars) into Qualcomm’s (QCOM) pocket. The rest of the world is going down the post-GSM path and opting for other open standards, so betting on a CDMA- and post-CDMA-based platform is fraught with risk.

How many platforms can developers really develop for? Come on, people! Announcing a platform is easy, getting real developers to come on board — not so much. Verizon is thinking in API terms!

Verizon can go back on its word, citing security concerns. And then you’re basically left there to whistle, “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay…”

Do we really believe that Verizon is going to be happy being Pipes-R-Us?

Well, nothing a big company in a highly regulated industry does can be taken on face value, right? By the way, Verizon’s stock was up yesterday, but only 23 cents.

So, for example:

Tony Anderson writes this about a state supreme court decision that would eliminate limits on how many times someone can take the Wisconsin Bar exam:

On Nov. 7, the state’s high court considered a petition from Arnold A. Moncada Jr., a Thomas Cooley Law School (Lansing, Mich.) graduate who has made five unsuccessful attempts to pass the Wisconsin bar exam. Audio of that public hearing for Petition 07-04 is available here. Moncada said that 31 states allow unlimited attempts to pass the exam. He also noted that some other professions within Wisconsin allow unlimited opportunities to pass their licensing examinations.

I understand wanting to level the playing field with Wisconsin law school graduates who receive diploma privilege. However, the solution is not to eliminate the safeguards we have in place to protect the public. Questions regarding the appropriateness of diploma privilege should be considered separately.

Note that Tony links you to both the petition and an audio recording of the hearing itself. Not too shabby.

Two other pieces cover matters that all lawyers, litigants and anyone else for that matter should find of great interest. Trial lawyer and jury consultant Anne Reed discusses recent research into the power of “gory materials” to influence juries:

Just over 100 subjects were assigned to read a summary of the murder trial. The facts were the same in each summary, but the researchers varied the amount of detail in the description of the victim’s wounds. In addition, some subjects got photographs of the victim’s wounds with their summaries, some got “neutral” pictures of the crime scene, and some got no pictures at all.

The photographs had a huge influence. Only 8.8% of the mock jurors who didn’t see pictures voted to convict the defendant, compared to 38.2% of those who saw neutral pictures and 41.2% of those who saw gory pictures. The level of verbal detail, on the other hand, seemed to have no effect. Why did the photographs make such a difference? Another finding suggests the answer: the jurors who saw gruesome pictures “reported higher levels of anger directed at the defendant” than the others.

Her post includes a link to an audio presentation of this study by its author, David Bright, an Australian graduate student in forensic psychology.

Meanwhile, Ray Dall’Osto, a criminal defense and constitutional law attorney analyzes the effect of British and Dutch government moves to shut down OiNK, a music downloading and peer-to-peer sharing service:

Wasn’t all this decided in the Napster case? Remember when Napster existed and how you could readily have a world of music brought into your home – you could download songs from Vivaldi, Johnny Cash, Crosby Stills, Nine Inch Nails and even the Bonzo Dog Band? How cool was that? In A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001), the Ninth Circuit ruled that Napster could be held liable for contributory infringement of record company copyrights and shut the free file-sharing service down. The court rejected arguments that peer-to-peer file-sharing was a fair use or allowable personal archiving, or that First Amendment rights to free speech and association protections were implicated.

This was the first major case to address the application of newer copyright laws to peer-to-peer file-sharing. And big business got what it paid for when the copyright laws were redrafted in the 1980s, with the substantial help of the recording and cable television industries to provide Draconian civil and criminal sanctions for personal use and file-sharers.

Our Wisconsin bloggers don’t shy away from the big issues. So — if you think you can take it — check out the Wisconsin Law Journal Blogs. And, while you’re at it, go over to my blogroll and check out the other excellent and proliferating Dolan blogs on business and law. Smart commentary, breaking news, curious episodes — we’ve got it all.