Technological Restrictions on E-Books and Culture Wars on Books in 2022

Despite the long title, this post will be fairly short. This blog used to publish a lot more often (I had a lot more free time in high school & college) and focus a lot more on issues related to free software, free culture, and things like that, yet even after looking through posts on this blog from its early years (which, aligning with the stereotype of an adult looking through essays written in high school, made me cringe at the quality of writing even if I agreed with some of the basic opinions), I actually couldn't find any posts specifically about the effects of so-called digital rights management (DRM) on E-books.

In any case, I was motivated to write this because I recently listened to an episode [LINK] of a podcast associated with The Daily Show in which the guests discussed recent instances of conservative politicians in the US preventing public schools & libraries from teaching or carrying books that offend those politicians' cultural sensibilities. I distinctly remember reading in high school & college about warnings of the consequences of putting DRM on E-books, including making it easier to ban such books. At that time, I and many others felt it would be ridiculous for politically motivated book bans to take effect in the US especially given respect for the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Leaving aside whether such book bans from public schools & libraries technically violate that amendment if such bans don't go beyond those domains, it is disheartening to see a direct example of censorship so closely connected to technological restrictions that are politically motivated (not due to fundamental technical limitations). It will be interesting to see whether authors of banned books encourage or tolerate people scanning & sharing unauthorized PDF files of the books for free; this wouldn't be unprecedented, given that the huge markup of textbooks in the US compared to other countries has led many textbook authors to encourage students to buy cheaper editions from other countries.

Cap and Trade and Soda

A few days ago, my family and I went on vacation. On the way back, my family and I were discussing various things including some matters of politics. One thing that came up was some of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent actions. I expressed the view that the ban on soft drinks larger than 16 ounces seemed rather heavy-handed. (After reading a little more about the exceptions for fruit drinks along with sales at grocery stores, I'm a little more happy to see that, but I still feel the ban was heavy-handed.) I then heard the argument that even if it is heavy-handed, it does help combat the obesity crisis by reducing access to drinking 16 ounces of soda at a time, because even if it is still technically possible for someone to fill up an 8-ounce cup twice, human psychology is such that said person would only fill up once, because for many people the convenience of filling up once trumps the desire to have as much as possible. I then wondered what other alternatives could be considered. The simplest alternative would seem to be a tax akin to taxes on cigarettes; if the large sodas are taxed heavily at such venues, people would naturally be discouraged from drinking as much. I have taken the class 14.03 — Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy, though, so I have seen that in many cases a Pigovian tax scheme like that may not achieve the most efficient outcome because it is difficult to adjust tax rates to control quantities precisely. Then I also remembered learning about cap and trade schemes to control quantities. Would that work? Let's take a look after the jump.

Ro-ger and San-ia, Sittin' In a Tree

Before I get into the real material of this post, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate 50 blog posts. How am I doing so far? Is there anything else you want me to talk about? What are your general comments? Make all suggestions as comments for this post.

A bunch of news agencies have reported that a national Swiss initiative to ban minarets has passed. (A minaret is a spire-like structure on a mosque.)
For those of you who don't remember from civics class, an initiative is a law written by citizens and put to a vote with a certain number of signatures (in Switzerland, 100000) collected. A referendum is a law created by the legislature and put to a popular vote.
This is truly sad.
I almost always support expressions of near-direct democracy like initiatives and referenda. They are good ways of keeping people involved with the laws that may soon affect their lives.
However, this is really sad. The large number of people who voted for the initiative couldn't give a single reason why they did; it wasn't because of aesthetics, air traffic issues, or other utilitarian problems.
It was just simple bigotry.
Oh, and the title? Note that Roger Federer is a Swiss tennis player, while Sania Mirza is a Muslim Indian tennis player. With their international fame, both would do well to raise awareness of and combat this situation.
[UPDATE: Wow, how could I have missed that one after going over it so thoroughly? This "initiative" (as I originally thought) is actually a referendum introduced by the legislature. Sorry about that!]