From the Hip

Madcon recently won the Norwegian “Spellemannsprisen“, a Norwegian musical award, for the best music video with their sond “Liar”. While the video is great, it turns out that Madcon has actually made two versions of it. The first, which won the Norwegian award, you can see here:

embedded by Embedded Video

The second version, you can see pictures of at The Suns home page. And the video itself may be viewed at the site of Norwegian TV2. It features, among others, the topless Playboy model Triana Iglesias.

During the recent annual champtionship of bodypainting in Kiev, Ukraine, some stunning, stylish, and beautiful designs were on display. Here are the two I liked the most:

The facts in this case are well known: States are allowed to collect sales tax from out-of-state companies who have established a “substantial nexus,” or physical presence, within the state. However, according to a 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in the case of Quill Corp v. North Dakota, mere advertising does not constitute a nexus. Still, cash-strapped California felt it needed to collect taxes from internet retailers. According to some sources, California hoped to collect more than 300 million in sales taxes from Amazon.com, Overstock.com and other out-of-state online retailers. So in order to collect tax from Amazon and other out-of-state internet retailers, California created a new law with a very elaborate and exceedingly unclear formulation of what constitutes a “nexus”.

California’s decision to adopt the law was cloaked in a lot of rhetoric; for instance that the state wanted to “level the playing field”, provide regulation that made things easier for small California based retailers, and the like. As we all know, all that is just smoke: The new California tax law cannot prevent internet, telephone and mail order companies from out-of-state and having no “nexus” from selling tax free in California. And the “nexus”-formulation invented by California is so wide that if it was to be upheld, no out-of-state business making money online would ever be able to purchase services from any California-based corporation – be that marketing, design, or production of parts. It really is a joke. It is all about state revenue, little about anything else.

Now, as we all know, Amazon has been faced with similar situations in several other states. Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and Rhode Island have all instituted similar laws. In all these cases, Amazon has immediately terminated associate relationships. We must assume the California lawmakers were well aware of this.

However, in the case of New York Amazon did not terminate the associate relationships. Rather it went to court to fight the new laws, calling them “unconstitutional” and “unproductive”. And, as a consequence, Amazon is actually collecting sales tax in New York. As it contests the new law, it places the collected taxes in an escrow account while it awaits the court ruling. We must assume California lawmakers were aware of this too.

My interpretation of the actions by the California legislature and Governor Jerry Brown is that they made a bad gamble. They assumed that as California is the biggest market in the US, and as Amazon had over 10,000 associates in California (some say 25,000, I don’t know what the real number is so I use a conservative estimate), some of them quite large, Amazon would not, when push came to shove, terminate the associate agreements. Rather I think they expected Amazon to do as it has done in New York: Go to court and start collecting taxes.

Today we all know that Amazon didn’t do this. Instead they immediately terminated all associate agreements. As per usual. And, by the way – even though Amazon gets nearly all the negative attention for this, other online retailers with affiliates in California did the same. As they should – this is about interstate commerce, and the ground rules must be federal and equal for all, not set by the state of California. In my opinion there are two reasons why this was a bad gamble by California:

First, Amazon doesn’t actually lose all that much by terminating associate agreements. I think California lawmakers overestimated the potential losses for Amazon. I think we can safely assume that the 90-10-rule applies to Amazon’s associates as it so often does: 10 percent of the associates make 90 percent of the money. And most of those big associates are corporations rather than individuals. I think it is a fairly safe bet that most of them will or already have moved their corporations or set up new corporate entities in other states, like Delaware or Wyoming or Oregon. A number of the smaller associates will do similar things. So Amazon will not lose 10,000 affiliates, and it will definitely not lose more than some very small percentage of the business stemming from their associates.

California, on the other hand, will lose a lot: It will lose pretty close to 100% of the income made by associates from Amazon and other online retailers. Only a small portion of that, of course, is tax income for the state. But most of the money was probably spent in the state, giving jobs and stimulating an economy much in need of stimuli. Now that income stream is gone and will probably never return. Nor will new internet based businesses that view associate or affiliate incomes as an important part of their revenue stream set up business in California in the future. Neither will online retailers invest or set up anything in California for a forseable future that can conceivably constitute a “nexus”. So there is much more at stake than sales tax here for California.

Second, I think Amazon reacted as it did in the case of New York in order to bring its case to the courts, not because New York is big or because they have a lot of associates there. And now that they have a case, there is no need for Amazon to bring a second case to court just because the “nexus” is formulated in a slightly different manner. In my opinion California lawmakers overlooked this fact, or perhaps thought that their new, innovative and expansive “nexus”-clause (which may well prove to be very costly for California) would make Amazon treat California as they do New York.

Well. They were wrong. Bad gamble. And most likely a very costly move for California. Also, very bad, in my humble opinion:

First, is this really the way government should operate in a democratic state? To try to push the law (laid down, in this case, in legal precedence) to its limits and beyond? Isn’t that how shady businesses operate? Shouldn’t a good government be concerned with jurisprudence, legal precedence and the like, and behave in a manner that fosters predictability and stimulates business?

Second, while the big Amazon affiliates will pick up their businesses and move, the real losers in all of this are the small affiliates and associates – people who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to building something that may not earn what to onlookers look like a lot of money, but still provides an income supplement that is important to them. They now have every reason to be upset with the state of California. Like chess pawns, they have been sacrificed in a tax game for no good reason at all. There is no mate in sight for California here, just a long uphill battle.

Swedish and Danish women are still fighting for equal rights. Scandinavian women have in many ways been in the forefront in women’s struggle for equality between the sexes. And much has been achieved. A number of studies indicate that wage discrimination has more or less disappeared in Scandinavia. And the women have won a number of other important victories as well.

Now a group of women are fighting for the right to bath and swim topless in public swimming facilities. The city of Sundsvall in Northern Sweden granted women this right after a bare-breasted protest a while ago. And now Copenhagen has permitted topless swimming as well.

Another victory for Scandinavian women.

Actually, for the men as well, I guess?

The Sun (UK) wrote about this today (03/29):

Campaign leader Astrid Vang, 20, who took her top off with others to protest at a leisure centre at Christmas, said: “We women would like to decide by ourselves when our breasts should be sexual and when not.”In swimming pools they should not and that is why the breasts should not be covered – We will bathe topless just like men.”

The Danish campaign was inspired by a Swedish group called Just Breasts, which was formed after two women were asked to cover up their breasts by a lifeguard at a public pool near Stockholm.

Swedish protesters carried out several full-frontal marches in their country but their tireless topless fight will not stop at swimming pools — the perky suffragettes want to show tops the red card at football matches next.

For a long time Google has been active in it’s own American brand of censorship – violence is fine, nudity is bad. Now the another of the American giant internet companies – Facebook – joins ranks with Google. According to Swedish newspaper Dagens nyheter, Facebook has removed images of paintings by the internationally renowned Swedish painter Anders Zorn (see image) from a Facebook site.

Zorn is famous for his paintings of female models, many of the with few or no clothes on. Even so – this is art, not pornography! There is a difference! And it is very sad that huge, influential American corporations can not see this difference. Are they trying to promote a neo-Victorian age on the Internet? Or to make Orwell’s 1984 a reality? What is going on? Are we all really ok with sensorship of art?

The organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest fair for the book and media industry, have conducted a survey of book industry professionals. They asked respondents to identify the challenges and threats facing the industry, as well as to predict emerging trends and areas of growth. A total of 1,324 industry professionals from 86 countries responded to the survey.

Challenges facing the industry

• Over half (53 per cent) identified digitisation as the biggest challenge facing the industry, reflecting one of the key themes of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
• Other challenges cited were increasing globalisation (24 per cent), user-generated content (22 per cent) and the ongoing battle over territorial rights (15 per cent).
• Concerns about digitisation were strongest in Anglophone countries, with 71 per cent of North Americans, 77 per cent of Australasians and 68 per cent of UK respondents marking this challenge as the most important.

The top four threats to the industry

Asked what is the biggest threat to the publishing industry today, respondents said:

1. competition from other media and sources of entertainment (50 per cent)
2. over-publishing (31 per cent)
3. the proliferation of piracy (23 per cent)
4. illiteracy levels in both western Europe and the developing world (17 per cent)

As unlikely as it would seem only 5 years ago, digitization is rapidly rising. Most likely new electronic book readers (e-book readers) will emerge that make it even easier to read books electronically. The change will take time, of course, but with continued high prices on books and a continuation of the practice of delaying publication of paperbacks to milk the market, it seems book publishers are undermining their own business.

I do not understand Microsoft. It’s a great corporation – it has supplied the world with lots of spectacular software. And it continues do to so. But still, there are things about how they operate that I don’t quite understand. Especially as far as Internet Explorer is concerned.

First they gave us generations of bad browsers that weren’t fully CSS compatible. And that includes all their browser up to and including IE8, which is the only major browser that doesn’t support CSS3. Which means you can’t see CSS-based animations, box shadows, text shadows and a lot of other things.

So, as a consequence they have steadily lost market shares in the browser market. They are down from around 90% to around 50%, and still declining. Their numbers are in free fall, as a matter of fact.

And web designers, including myself, have stopped using all those IE hacks that are necessary to make IE show things the way they should look. Which, of course, makes the problems worse for IE users and increase the number of “converts” to other browsers.

But here is what surprises me today: I thought I would have a look at IE 9, which is now out in beta and which is supposed to support CSS3. But guess what – you can’t use it if you run Windows XP. All the other browsers supporting CSS3 run on XP. But the new browser of the corporation that made Windows XP, do not support it it IE 9 Beta!

LOL! They probably want me to buy Windows 7, or something like that. And maybe I will, at some time in the future. But in the meantime I will continue to be annoyed. And, of course, continue to enjoy using Chrome and Firefox.

And continue to wonder about the ability of Microsoft to NOT understand its customers!

You really have to admire Times. Being stubborn is, after all, at least partly a virtue. And being willing to take a risk is also, up to a point, a virtue.

Times is insisting that you have to pay to read the paper online. They must have known they were taking a huge risk when they started the experiment. I mean, all those who have tried that so far, as we all know, have lost on it. They succeeded only in shredding most of their loyal readers. People are willing to pay for content online. But not for news. There’s too much available. But Times still think they should try it. That’s risk taking for you!

And they still persist. That’s enormously admirable! I check in every once in a while, as it was a newspaper I used to read before the experiment, but their experiments is still running. That’s being stubborn! Every day, every week, every month they are loosing readers. And they still march on.

Well. We see it all the time; newspapers and magazines that have to close shop. Most go under because they are unable to compete in the new, hard, environment with online news from everywhere. And some, as Times, as it were, commits suicide.

So there you go. Being stubborn is OK, up to a point. Being willing to take a risk is OK too, again up to a point. But the two in combination is bad. Seriously bad.

Unless, that is, you happen to be The Independent, Guardian or Daily Telegraph. Then it is excellent. The more customers Times decides to get rid of, the merrier.

Chocolade? Hot chocolade? Pretty chocolade!

I think I like chocolade. Like this, I definitely do. And I even think chocolade can be quite artsy! This is art? No? Yes!

The US economy is not longer the largest in the world. Numbers from 2009 IMF for 2009 shows that the European Union had a GDP of 16,447,259 mill. USD while the US had a GDP of 14,256,275. Figures from the CIA World Factbook shows the same, even though the figures are slightly different.

With respect to GDP per Capita, things are even worse for the US. According to IMF, Luxemburg is on top with USD 104,512 in GDP per capita, Norway on second with USD 79,085, while the US is on ninth with USD 46,381 for 2009. The CIA World Factbook has Lichtenstein on top, with the US on tenth place.

The US is declining on other key indicators as well, for instance with respect to broadband penetration. The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway are on top among the OECD countries, while the US is on fifth place. The US is not among the top 10 as far as mobile telephone penetration is concerned either.

The US economy has been severely weakened by the 2009 crisis, and as of now the unemployment is around 10% according to official statistics, but most likely around 17% all included. When the numbers for 2010 come in, it is therefore reasonable to assume that the position of the US will be even weaker on a number of dimensions.

Are we witnessing the end of American hegemony? And – will the EU step up and take over the role of the US globally when the US can no longer manage and afford to play this role?