[O]nly the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.

GameStop, the video game retailer, has recently released their fiscal year 2010 report and business is a boomin’! The company announced a record sales year in the neighborhood of $9.47 billion.

There was a recent article by Sam Biddle called “Facebook is AOLifying the Internet – and That Sucks”. It’s a pretty accurate take on what Facebook has become over the last few years as it considers many of the new features that Facebook has both developed and ripped off. The article itself was probably a slight ripoff of one that John C. Dvorak had produced some months earlier, “Facebook is the New AOL,” that was essentially in the same vein.

ITIF is putting on a forum tomorrow on The Obama Administration’s Innovation Policy. The cast is, as Hollywood would say, star-studded,  with Austan Goolsbee (CEO Chair), Phil Weiser (NEC Senior Advisor), & Aneesh Chopra (US CTO), to list only Federal government people, plus reps of state governments and several high tech companies. The background document [...]

At Investor’s Business Daily, Robert Higgs takes a gloomy look at the current state of net investment in the U.S., and concludes: Unless private investment recovers more rapidly, the economy’s recovery is sure to remain slow, too slow to significantly lower unemployment. Firms are reluctant to undertake risky long-term investments because they continue to view [...]

It appears that average wireless service nationwide have reached new highs rising above 16% as politicians look for something to maintain state and local coffers in a down economy.  This is more than twice as high as the average rate of other consumption taxes and states like Nebraska, Washington, and New York top the list [...]

A hot topic in the smartphone field is mobile payments, especially Near Field Technology (NFC), as an alternative to debit cards. However, I don’t recall seeing, in any of the discussions of mobile payments, much about the possible impact of the Durbin Amendment, the provision added to Dodd-Frank that imposes fee caps and multi-network requirements [...]

On Thurs, Feb. 17, House Financial Services will have a hearing on“Understanding the Federal Reserve’s Proposed Rule on Interchange Fees: Implications and Consequences of the Durbin Amendment.” 10:00 a.m. in 2128 Rayburn HOB. From the perspective of DS, the relevance is twofold: (1) The connections between this regulation and regulations of other networks, such as [...]

Schulz comments on the implementation of Net Neutrality rules and the appointment of Tim Wu to the FTC as further evidence that Washington does not understand technology. He believes these two gentlemen see the “health and vigor” of the tech sector and destructive.

For over 20 years, I have observed with alarm the steady expansion of legal and regulatory quantity and complexity, combined with serious excesses in the use of criminal sanctions. I have so often voiced an anguished “this can’t go on” that I have become an object of mockery to my children, who have known no [...]