Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Sometimes, You Just Can't Help People I tried to post to this Radioland discussion on how I created my archive (and to get advice on how to refine it), but I can't find any way of actually posting to the discussion!  I signed up and am logged in, but there is no box or button for entering a reply. Update 9/13: I needed to what for an e-mail that click on a link in that e-mail to be able to post to the discussion group.  If you click on the above link, you can see now how I do my archives. 8:11:51 PM    comment []

What went right with the Internet UCB economist Brad DeLong has a post on his blog about "10 choices that were critical to the Net's success".  The list is on really techy stuff about the guts of the Internet.  I really don't know much about the Internet other than I was a fairly early user, but I think the list totally misses the seminal moment for the Internet - the release of Doom over the Internet.  My impression of the '93-'94 time frame of the internet, the key early adopters of the internet were PC game players.  We didn't care what TCP/IP was or what operating system ran the Internet.  We used our PC's to connect to the internet address the two biggest problems PC gamers faced - how to get patches for the buggy games we bought and how to get demos of the next big game.  The retail distribution system was much too slow for us, because we wanted the latest patch or demo NOW!!!  We wanted the latest drivers for our hardware NOW!!!  The idea of calling long distance to companies' bulletin boards just didn't appeal.  We gamers beat a steady path to the internet sites where the latest in games were stored. And then Id released Doom only over the Internet.  The whole dot-com bubble was foreshadowed in the Id's success. Contrary to the post's item #10, the government was a key player in the success of the Internet.  First of all, the key early sites were government or public university web sites.  Also, because the government was making serious stuff available on the Internet, it gave universities and businesses reasons to give Internet access to young men who could then waste huge amounts of bandwidth downloading PC games (and porn).  The government did the equivalent of building thousands of performance halls but instead of regulating the performances, the government regulated that all could attend for free. Yeah, the UNIX networking guys made the Internet technically feasible, but it was us PC gamers that created the demand that got the business world's attention. 6:34:58 PM    comment []

Softball questions to Cheney on "Meet the Press" I know I shouldn't be surprised on how few tough questions Cheney got on "Meet the Press", given how pro-Republican NBC and Russert are. Still, Cheney hid from the press for months and this was all that Russert could come up with? MR. RUSSERT: And we are back.        Mr. Vice President, corporate responsibility-when you ran as a CEO, boasting of your record at Halliburton-much has been written and said about it. Let me show you from the Associated Press on our screen, “Halliburton has been in the news often this year, mostly for the wrong reasons. It lost $476 million through June. It is under attack from disgruntled investors who’ve seen the value of Halliburton’s stock fall more than 70 percent since [Dick] Cheney left in August 2000. The stock price collapsed under the weight of falling energy prices, accusations of shady accounting and lawsuits over asbestos.” Should Halliburton have notified the SEC about their accounting changes? And two, should there have been more due diligence done when the Supreme Court, in ’97, six months before the merger, began to overturn and look into asbestos liability?        VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, that’s a lot for-how much time have you got, Tim? The accounting question is being handled in an inquiry between the SEC and Halliburton. I’m not a direct party to it, but obviously interested. I avoid commenting on it because I don’t want to be accused of trying to influence the SEC operation. But you can go to the Halliburton Web site, and you’ll find there, laid out, answers to all those questions that the current management had to answer with respect to the accounting questions. And I think all of that will be resolved shortly, as it should be.        Secondly, with respect to the asbestos matters: Asbestos is a problem out there that afflicts a great many companies, not just Halliburton. Halliburton had an involvement in asbestos long before I arrived at the company. When we acquired Dresser, they had vested themselves in another company that had been involved in the asbestos business. Since I left, there have been a couple of lawsuits and decisions handed down that have raised the possibility of additional liability. I think the company’s dealt with it reasonably well. They brought in a group of outside experts to estimate the actual liability. But I don’t know a lot of the details, since most of the difficulties arose since I left two years ago. So I’m reluctant to-we need more detail.        MR. RUSSERT: But should you have known?        VICE PRES. CHENEY: I think from the standpoint of the overall operation, I think our experience with asbestos at Halliburton was that we were insured, we were indemnified. We had a track record in terms of what settling asbestos claims cost. What’s different now is there have been some decisions handed down with respect to Halliburton since then that have raised this specter. But I have other views with respect to the asbestos claims. I think a lot of this is generated, frankly, by trial attorneys. But...        MR. RUSSERT: The stock went from 52 to 14.        VICE PRES. CHENEY: It did get hit hard, as did the stock of a great many other companies. They haven’t been alone this year. But it’s a great company. I was proud of my association with them. They’ve got some fantastic men and women who work for it. They do great things all over the world. And they deserve and I’m sure will perform much more effectively in the future, with respect to share price and... Did Russert ask about the energy task force still hiding its records?  How about the White House announcing that Cheney had free-lanced when he spoke at the VFW?  Isn't it important to know that Cheney isn't free-lancing again?  His one tough question covered too much ground and contained too little detail.  If you hadn't studied Cheney's history at Halliburton, you wouldn't have any idea from Russert's questions of what went wrong there.  Cheney got to pleasantly spin his non-answer on cooking the books, imply that he is not involved, and make Halliburton responsible for answering questions about what occurred while he was CEO.  If that was the extent of the tough questions, Cheney should have come out of hiding long ago. 7:06:40 AM    comment []

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