Articles 2025
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Who needs it?
Forbes, August 09, 1998
REPRESENTATIVE Billy Tauzin (RLa.), the chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, recently proposed a bill to increase the annual funding for public television by 63%, to $475 million. A friend who has spent decades working in and around PBS sent me a stunned e-mail: "Just as PBS is becoming completely marginalized, a Republican committee chair proposes a major increase in their funding. Amazing."
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Post-Crisis Politics
Why investigative reporters and political activists seem so depressed.
Reason, August/September 1998
At a recent convention for investigative journalists, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found a lot of unhappy reporters. They're digging up tons of dirt--the Clinton scandals alone can fill several pages of every day's newspaper--but the public just won't get hysterical about it. "We live in this bland yuppified era when people just care about fresh-squeezed orange juice and watching the stock numbers in the paper," complained Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity
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Why E-mail is dangerous
Forbes, July 26, 1998
THANKS TO COP SHOWS from Dragnet to NYPD Blue, most Americans over the age of 10 know that "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." We think the warning applies only to criminal suspects.
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Lost Horizon
An alienated GOP hands the future to Al Gore.
Reason, July 1998
Republicans sound different when they talk to their big donors. The party they describe isn't a party you hear from much these days. They say nothing about "culture wars" and lots about freedom. They praise entrepreneurship and free enterprise. They hardly even utter the word conservative
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Carrying On About Carry-On Baggage
Intellectual Capital, June 18, 1998
It won't surprise any frequent flyer to learn that the Latin word for "baggage" is mpedimenta. Dragging your belongings with you on long journeys has been a hassle since Julius Caesar was crossing the Rubicon. -
Disney reinvents the future
Forbes, June 14, 1998
FOR THE THIRD TIME in its history, Disneyland has opened a revamped Tomorrowland. Gone are the impersonal chrome and steel of the old structures, along with the Mission to Mars ride, the PeopleMover and the Circle-Vision theater. In their place, Disney has built a kinder, gentler tomorrow with buildings decorated in lush jewel tones and gardens filled with fruit trees and edible plants. Tomorrowland still has spaceships aplenty, but it hasn't shut out things that grow.
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No Telling
The push for Internet privacy controls combines a bad theory with a dangerous agenda.
Reason, June 1998
Over the past week, I received about two dozen unsolicited mass e-mails, otherwise known as "spam." About half were devoted to sex, including six messages promoting a new Hustler Web site and one paradoxically promising a site "SO HOT WE CANT SHOW IT ON THE WEB." Most of the rest advertised the stuff of late-night TV commercials and dubious classified ads: "LUXURY CARS FOR UNDER $1000" from government auctions, family histories and coats of arms ("All Nationalities"), credit cards for people with lousy credit records, a psychic hotline. One offered to teach me how to become a spammer myself. The most reputable-seeming message promoted a site for golf-related classified ads
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The Politics of Privacy
Forbes ASAP, May 31, 1998
SUPPOSE I AM A FIFTH GRADER selling Girl Scout cookies. Commercially ambitious and a bit of a geek, I don't just peddle them to the neighbors. I set up a Web site and take orders by email. And who should order six boxes of Tagalongs but Billy Jones -- the cutest boy in the class! I shoot a message to my best friend, Susan, telling her about the order. "I think he likes me -- what do you think?" Susan forwards it to Rachel, who sends it to Casey, who tells Holly, who tells her brother Sam, who tells his friend Steve . . . and pretty soon everybody in the fifth grade knows all about Billy and me.
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Foreign policy in Silicon Valley
Forbes, May 31, 1998
INFLUENTIAL New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman visited Silicon Valley recently, and he didn't like what he found. Busy with their high- tech endeavors, the businesspeople he interviewed weren't interested in the things Friedman cares about. They didn't talk about Iraq or foreign wars. They were none too respectful toward the federal government.
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The Sierra Club's Immigration Problem
Environmentalists' retreat on anti-immigration stance is just a blip on their agenda.
Los Angeles Times, May 05, 1998
A cultural-political movement opposed to mobility and change will, over time, come to support restrictions on technology, trade, and, yes, immigration—regardless of what its leftist allies think.