Turtles all the way down

Got my letter today.

Yup, I’m a patent agent. Officially. Finally.

I’ve learned in law school that there is no Constitutional right to privacy. Fifty plus years ago, at least some Supreme Courts opined of a right to privacy, but since the 1970’s or so, the courts seem to hold that US citizens only have an expectation of privacy.

Privacy is a big issue on the net. Nobody wants their credit card numbers, bank accounts, or social security data stolen. And yet, this data is transmitted through various networks on a regular basis and stored on hard drives that are periodically lost.

On the other hand, in the age of social networking, many folks, myself included, are willing to publish some forms of personal info on their blogs and status updates. Between Twitter and Facebook, you can find applications that read GPS coordinates from your cell and post your current location along with your status. Thus, your chosen circle of friends, and perhaps others will be able to know when you’re hanging at home, attending a concert or sipping a latte at a Starbucks in Beijing.

There are two forms of private information. The first kind is that which a reasonable person would want to protect, such as their financial data and other information which could be used for identity theft and similar activities. Given the social cost of not properly protecting this kind of information, perhaps a right to privacy applies here.

The second kind is information that some people want to protect, but others want to share. But maybe they want to share it with a select audience, not the whole world. This type of information ideally requires the sharer to opt-in to sharing and not vice versa. The sharer might have a reasonable expectation that the social media service is going to only publish and share what he or she indicates is allowable. However, once this information is shared, even with a small circle of contacts, the sharer’s expectation of privacy is likely gone.

It is too hard to protect information that is released onto the net. Once it is out, it is out.

Cutting between these two kinds of information is not easy, but perhaps it can be left up to the individual user. Give the user control over what information he wants to share and let him set his expectations of privacy based on his decisions to share or not to share.

An intriguing story that proves once again proves that you can make a very good movie with no “name” actors. Ultimately, the movie’s portrayal of atonement and attempts thereof fall a little flat, but the film remains a pleasant and worthwhile way to spend two hours in front of the TV. B+

I pay a fair share of my income in taxes and wouldn’t mind paying more if I thought it was going to a good cause.

I find myself somewhat disturbed by the anti-tax efforts locally, which seem to imply that schools get too much money and teachers are overpaid. The schools could use renovation and when my wife was a teacher, she was underpaid.

I’m lucky enough to live in a town with great services. It is safe, the schools are good, the garbage gets collected regularly, the park district has dozens of well-maintained parks and great classes at a reasonable price, and we have three well-stocked public libraries. And, our taxes are low, compared to surrounding towns.

But more importantly, an underused function of taxes is that they allows the government to incentivize globally-positive behavior in markets where people will otherwise make locally-optimal decisions. For example, energy-efficient hybrid cars are more expensive than cars with pure gasoline engines. Many folks, myself included, decided to buy a car with a traditional engine because it would take 4-6 years of driving, even at today’s high gas prices, to make a hybrid more cost efficient.

People tend to make locally-optimal decisions. They try to save money.

In comes the government. Instead of giving a smallish tax break for hybrid vehicles, Uncle Sam could give a large tax writeoff, perhaps to the tune of $5000 or more, to anyone who buys any type of car than has a fuel efficiency of over 40 MPG.

Thus, the government uses our taxes to fund a program that distributes wealth to those who behave in a globally-positive fashion. Put all of that nanny-state nonsense aside. This is similar to the government putting criminals in jail, just a more subtle approach to solving a non-criminal behavioral problem.

And eventually, when we’re all driving fuel efficient cars, the government should find something else to incentivize, such as windmill construction and operation, solar energy, etc.

This is the sort of thing that the government could be good at, and that our politicians should focus on.

While eMusic is still by far my favorite download site for MP3’s, it seems that they and other sites are missing an opportunity.

Most of my favorite styles of music are clustered around a couple of dozen independent labels. It would be nice for me, and potentially profitable for them, to allow me to subscribe via RSS to a feed of new releases from each of these labels. The feed can either be per label or can be aggregated from a set of labels I choose on their site. Ideally, it would also be available when I log on via their home page.

This way, when a new album from a favorite label is released and available for download, I am aware of it immediately, rather than some weeks or months later when I happen to stumble across it.

Freakonomics is one of my favorite blogs, but I have a nit to pick with their math on inequality between the rich and poor in the US:

Their argument could hardly be simpler. How rich you are depends on two things: how much money you have, and how much the stuff you want to buy costs. If your income doubles, but the prices of the things you consume also double, then you are no better off.

Not quite. If you take home $5000 a month and spend $4000, your net savings per month is $1000. If you take home $10000 a month and spend $8000, your net savings per month is $2000. Their math only works if the cost of everything doubles and your $2000 per month is effectively $1000 due to inflation.

With all the talk about unified data between the major social networking sites, I’m hoping it goes beyond just sharing friends lists across Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, etc. That would be a good start, but I am hoping this movement includes sharing entire profiles, including status updates.

Currently I just update my status on Facebook. Doing so on Linkedin seems redundant, and since Facebook has pretty good mobile access, I haven’t used twitter just yet. Having a centralized status updating service could even be independent of the social networking sites. A user would only have to update his or her status in one place and point the rest of the sites to that place. They would read and re-format an RSS feed of the user’s status.

As you might expect, here is my outline for contracts. Enjoy.

Today is my last day as a 1L, unless you count the summer session, which I’m not going to. In many ways, my experience of law school has turned out very differently than I had expected. Off the top of my head a few of these differences include:

• Law school was much harder than I expected. I thought it would be easy to cruise by with B’s. It isn’t.
• I thought I’d make it through on raw brain power and not have to work too hard. Instead, my raw brain power got me very little. What few successes I’ve had so far have been through hard work.
• My fellow students are very bright, hard working and dedicated. I expected this, but the extent of their brightness, work ethic and dedication is more than I thought it would have been.
• There is way too much emphasis on grades. I figured that in law school, like any other type of school I’ve been to, grades would be a just a rough proxy of intelligence, ability and hard work. This is true, but hiring firms seem to put so much emphasis on grades that the law school do so as well with ridiculously severe curves.
• Having said that, my fellow students are pretty non-competitive bunch, which is a welcome relief.
• In law school the professors don’t teach, they profess. The students teach themselves the material.
• By far the best and most useful classes are legal writing and research. Grades in these classes are what hiring firms should look at.
• The time commitment for a part-time law student is enormous. It is easily a 30-40 hours a week on average. (Says the guy who spent 90 hours on his appellate brief.)
• For the most part, the law is reasonable, rational and fair. Also quite intellectual. The stereotype of lawyers being fast-talking scam artists is so wrong. Thankfully, those types are few and far between.
• The classroom and the textbooks do not prepare you for exams. However the study guides, hornbooks and online materials do.

This one is too much fun. Happy Friday.