Month: January 2009

Just in case there was any doubt

The media loves to portray Israel as carrying out the slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians. Nevermind the fact that Hamas has been launching rockets and mortars indiscrimenently into civilian centers while Israel targets only confirmed weapon or supply stores, they have to find some way to spin it so that Israel is the evil aggressor. That’s why you’ll never hear about this multimillion dollar expenditure (h/t: Power Line) if you get your news from CNN:

First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

This is a very non-trivial setup, and a very large expense of time and energy on the part of Israel.  In addition, by warning the people, you warn Hamas, which means they’re able to escape the bombing and live to try to kill you another day. But for Israel, it is worth the cost: they want the moral high ground, and they have it. The IDF may indeed be “the most moral army in the world.” It certainly shows the most restraint. Setting up such a system has only one purpose: to save Palestinian lives, even if it comes at the cost of making it harder for you to meet your objective or kill the enemy… even if those lives are the enemy. Unfortunately such a system only works properly if the “innocent civilians” don’t hate you and aren’t actively aiding Hamas (h/t The Jury).

In one recent incident, Israeli intelligence learned that a particular house was being used to manufacture and store rockets.  It was a clear military target since their rockets were being fired at Israeli civilians.  But the house was also being lived in by a family.  So the Israeli military phoned the house, informed the owner that it was a military target, and gave him thirty minutes to leave with his family.  The owner called Hamas, which immediately sent dozens of mothers carrying babies to stand on the roof of the house.  Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a house with civilians in it.  They also knew that if, by some fluke, the Israeli authorities did not learn that there were civilians in the house, and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead civilians to the media.  In this case, Israel did learn of the civilians and withheld its fire.  The rockets that were spared destruction by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

The vast majority of these “innocent civilians” want to see Israel annihilated too. Many of them do not wish it to the extent that Hamas, Fatah, and the rest do, but they are actively aiding them anyway. This makes what Israel is doing much more impressive, and much more difficult. So just in case there was any doubt as to whether or not Israel hed a moral high ground miles above Hamas’ – now you know.

Gaza Update

Those guys are GOOD.

Second night in Gaza Strip: After IDF forces managed to reach their target destinations inside Gaza, soldiers have started searching the area for weapon caches, terrorist infrastructure and terrorists.

The incursion into Gaza, which was launched Saturday evening, has already claimed the life of one soldier, Staff-Sergeant Dvir Emanuelof of the Golani brigade. Some 40 soldiers were wounded in clashes, and over 50 Palestinian gunmen were killed in the first day of the fighting, according to the Israeli army.

The Israel Air Force struck some 30 targets in the Gaza Strip on Sunday night, including a mosque, a suspected antiaircraft machine gun and several tunnels on the Philadelphi Route. The Navy attacked posts belonging to Hamas’ naval force and a bunker where Grad missiles were being stored.

50 plus terrorists dead against a single IDF soldier – not a bad ratio. The loss of a good guy is always tough, but that they only did lose one is an incredible statistic, especially given the close-quarters environment these guys are fighting in.

Israel says describes its short-term plan for Gaza as a “root canal” – digging around for any sort of Hamas infrastructure or supply points and taking them out. So far they have captured the locations of 220 of the 300 rocket attacks made during the last week, which has led to a big reduction in rocket attacks on Southern Israel in the last couple days.

So yeah, I’d say so far they’re doing pretty well. Here’s to hoping they clean it up and stay safe. How about sending them a pizza as a congratulations on a successful start?

The internet is killing music sales (by increasing them)

Music sales went up another 10.5% in 2008, largely due to over one billion (yeah, with a “B”) digital song sales. There were 428 million full album sales as well, but as the online market explodes (32% increase from last year) physical CD sales drop accordingly (down 14%). This is not surprising to anyone who can look at this rationally. If you have a potential market of 100 people and they can only buy in one format, then the people who will buy will all buy that format. So let’s say you sold 60 CD’s to those people. The next year you release a second album, and allow the new one to be purchased online as well. This time, 66 albums are sold, 40 hard copies and 26 digital.

Are sales down? No. You sold six more albums, and increased your sales over the last album’s by 10 percent. You should be happy about that, not complaining that you sold twenty less CD’s. In fact, if anything, you would be happier, because you have eliminated the cost of creating those CD’s from the process, which gives you a higher net profit from an album sale (and/or allows you to lower the price, thus potentially attracting more customers).

So when you hear the big labels, the RIAA, and the anti-digital music loons claiming that piracy and online music distribution in general is killing music sales and hurting artists, remember that this screwed-up logic is what they’re using. Also remember that countless artists have spoken out against the harmful (and ineffective) tactics used by the RIAA to “combat piracy,” culminating in the creation of a copyright czar cabinet post under the new Obama adminstration, some artists going to far as to drop their labels entirely and finding great success in doing so. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead both had incredible and well-documented success with their independent online album releases, and many other bands have dropped their larger labels to found independent labels for artists seeking to leave the stifling, anti-consumer attitude propagated by the RIAA.

In addition to the obvious benefits of online music sales over traditional music sales, what has traditionally been described as “piracy” by lawyers and the media is often one of the artist’s best tools to spread his music around and reach ears he would otherwise be unable to. The classic success story here is Jonathan Coulton, who came out of nowhere and distributed his music via his website (with the option to pay, but not forcing you to) and now makes more money off his music than he ever did as a software engineer. I’ll leave you with a 2001 statement from David Draiman, lead singer of Disturbed, that kind of sums up why even the typical examples of piracy given by the RIAA and its ilk are not quite what they seem:

[I’m] Very positive about the internet, Napster. I think it’s a tremendous tool for reaching many more people than we ever could without it. When you release music you want it to be heard by people. Artists really want to have their music heard. They want to have their creation heard by people. Nothing is going to do that better than Napster. I can’t tell you how many kids have come up to me and said, ‘I downloaded a couple of tunes off Napster and I went out and bought the album.’ Or they say, ‘I want to come see you play.’ I don’t really make money off of record sales anyway.

And again in 2003, on the series of lawsuits brought against file sharers:

This is not rocket science. Instead of spending all this money litigating against kids who are the people they’re trying to sell things to in the first place, they have to learn how to effectively use the Internet. For the artists, my ass… I didn’t ask them to protect me, and I don’t want their protection.

The internet as a method for music distribution is (still) exploding. It’s time to jump on the train, not hold on to the boarding station for dear life.