The National Security Agency said this week that it would violate our privacy to say how many Americans have been spied upon.

Warrant less wiretapping (FISA) just passed the House. President Obama’s kill list includes Americans and courageously, Rand Paul wants warrants before drones can take our photo.

If elected, will you vote to uphold our constitutional right to due process?

Candidate websites: Tammy Baldwin, Jeff Fitzgerald, Eric Hovde, Mark Neumann and Tommy Thompson

Jared Diamond:

The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. North of the fence lies the American city of Nogales, Arizona; south of it lies the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.

This example, which introduces Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, illustrates on a small scale the book’s subject.* Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world’s richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world’s poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That’s a central question of economics.

Microsoft and Apple are thinking different on mobile strategy.

For decades, Microsoft expended considerable treasure and time to insure that old software ran on the latest Windows release. This meant that Windows carried a substantial amount of baggage, symptoms of which include slow boot times and the need to periodically wipe a hard drive and re-install the operating system.

Apple, on the other hand, has a long, well earned reputation for killing off products, software and peripherals largely in an effort to use the latest and greatest technologies – and create superior software experiences. Apple historically minimized the amount of baggage in new software releases. Their current operating system (10.7) eliminated support for PowerPC (Apple’s former cpu architecture, pre-Intel) software and therefore hardware of a certain vintage.

Microsoft, in a splashy Los Angeles event, ditches their long time hardware partners such as Dell and HP for what appears to be a home-grown tablet computer. They call it “surface”. Horace Dediu takes a look at the economic and strategy implications, which are not insignificant, of this announcement.



The next day, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Windows 8 Phone software will not support current phones. More ships burning, including Nokia.



Just last week, Apple announced the 6th major release of their iPhone and iPad operating system, known as iOS 6. Interestingly, the 3 year old iPhone 3GS (photo above) continues to be mostly supported. Apple notes that “not all features are available on all devices”.

It appear that Apple is attempting to address different smartphone price points using the 3GS (2009), 4 (2010), 4s (2011) and the looming 5th generation phone (2012).

The image of Microsoft burning the ships, that is hardware partners along with recent and significantly hyped smartphones is quite a contrast to Apple. Apple’s strategy appears to be ecosystem über alles.

Apple’s ecosystem includes iCloud, Siri, iTunes and the App Store.

What might the strategy tax be for both players?

Links: 1. Strategy Tax and 2. Burning the Ships.

Cringely takes a look at Microsoft’s announcement, as well.

Tom Simonite:

Heading Facebook’s effort to figure out what can be learned from all our data is Cameron Marlow, a tall 35-year-old who until recently sat a few feet away from ­Zuckerberg. The group Marlow runs has escaped the public attention that dogs Facebook’s founders and the more headline-grabbing features of its business. Known internally as the Data Science Team, it is a kind of Bell Labs for the social-networking age. The group has 12 researchers—but is expected to double in size this year. They apply math, programming skills, and social science to mine our data for insights that they hope will advance Facebook’s business and social science at large. Whereas other analysts at the company focus on information related to specific online activities, Marlow’s team can swim in practically the entire ocean of personal data that Facebook maintains. Of all the people at Facebook, perhaps even including the company’s leaders, these researchers have the best chance of discovering what can really be learned when so much personal information is compiled in one place.

Facebook has all this information because it has found ingenious ways to collect data as people socialize. Users fill out profiles with their age, gender, and e-mail address; some people also give additional details, such as their relationship status and mobile-phone number. A redesign last fall introduced profile pages in the form of time lines that invite people to add historical information such as places they have lived and worked. Messages and photos shared on the site are often tagged with a precise location, and in the last two years Facebook has begun to track activity elsewhere on the Internet, using an addictive invention called the “Like” button. It appears on apps and websites outside Facebook and allows people to indicate with a click that they are interested in a brand, product, or piece of digital content. Since last fall, Facebook has also been able to collect data on users’ online lives beyond its borders automatically: in certain apps or websites, when users listen to a song or read a news article, the information is passed along to Facebook, even if no one clicks “Like.” Within the feature’s first five months, Facebook catalogued more than five billion instances of people listening to songs online. Combine that kind of information with a map of the social connections Facebook’s users make on the site, and you have an incredibly rich record of their lives and interactions.

Pew Trusts:

The Systemic Risk Council, a private sector, volunteer group led by former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair Sheila Bair, will convene this month to monitor and encourage regulatory reform of U.S. capital markets focused on systemic risk. The independent, non-partisan council was formed by CFA Institute, the global association of investment professionals that sets the standard for professional excellence and The Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent nonprofit organization that brings a rigorous, analytical approach to solving today’s most challenging problems. The Systemic Risk Council is comprised of a diverse group of experts in investments, capital markets and securities regulation, including senior advisor Paul Volcker, former Chair of the Federal Reserve.

Fascinating.

Marketplace:

Gregory Warner: It’s called the Relative Value Update Committee, but everyone knows it as the RUC. It’s a committee of the AMA. It meets every four months in a hotel conference room. And right here — this being a radio story — is where I’d play you the sound of one of those meetings. You might hear heated debates between some three dozen doctors over which procedures should be worth and which ones Medicare should pay higher prices for.

But I can’t play you that sound because RUC meetings are invitation only. Observers are sworn to secrecy. Even the names of the doctors on this private committee were — until recently — kept confidential. For those who have been before the RUC, it’s a powerful experience.

Jim VandeHei and Robin Bravender and David Catanese:

Vince Lombardi, the man who taught Cheeseheads to think with clarity about the severe consequences of victory and defeat, once offered this gem about life: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

Scott Walker last night showed Wisconsin and the country a bunch of pretty good losers in his recall election triumph. In the spirit of tell-it-like-it-is St. Vince, POLITICO offers up a guide to the top five: Democrats, President Barack Obama, public unions, conservative critics and money monks.

Here’s why:



“If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”

Well, politics is all about keeping score — and Democrats suffered a good old-fashioned beatdown. They invested seven months of effort, tens of millions of dollars, exhausted volunteers to collect nearly 1 million signatures. Then, they litigated an extremely divisive primary and spent millions more — all to get back to exactly where they were when they started: with Walker on top.

VandeHei is a UW-Oshkosh graduate.