March 2008
14 posts
Legal Futures
The Google/Stanford conference about the future of law that I’ve been helping plan for months is finally finally happening. I thought I should at least announce it on my blog, since I’d been to busy to tell anyone, and a friend called to say: “Is that the conference you’ve been planning? He told me it’s all sold out (I’m not handling the, um, details) so you...
shbrown: @pierre: Being Chris Anderson's kids... →
February 2008
11 posts
Oh Google. You’re so clever. You ‘ve democratized the greek choir. Every so often I’ll glance over to the AdWords beside my emails, and I’ll hear the haunting warnings of my downfall.
Some pretend conversations. To illustrate.
> We have to stop this conversation. Right now.
> > Why?
> > > Because, an ad for a life coach just appeared
>...
“[I]f you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, [sleep with] their...”
– Jesse Unruh, a former speaker of the California House, on lobbyists
The Problem With Politics: Not Enough Alcohol
Barbara Holland gives an account of the heavy drinking that went on in the evenings of the Constitutional Convention.
[A]djourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and...
shbrown: Someone should do a study to find out if... →
shbrown: Andrew said that Microsoft was like a... →
How to Deal with the Problem of Corporate...
I’ve been studying corporate law, and find that it’s a fascinating problem in democracy. Corporate law is a question of how to align incentives and produce ethical behavior in a snake-pit of greed. Thus, I find it to be both more advanced, and more applicable to problems of regulating public integrity than most of our other attempts.
Case in point. In recent years, people have...