I'm going to start sharing interesting tidbits from my morning readings, starting today.

Paul Phillips: "The basic laws of economics are simple, and it is madness that they are so completely ignored in public policy. But of course they're ignored by the government - why should they care? Who spends other people's money as carefully as they do their own? And given the choice between having the power to economically control people and not having it, why would any group choose not to have it?"

GigaOm:

Now, at today’s Defrag conference, semantic web startup AdaptiveBlue has announced ClosedPrivate, the latest strike in the worldwide social applet war. CEO and founder Alex Iskold apparently instigated the ClosedPrivate effort in a closed and private elevator meeting before continental breakfast on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency.

No one would admit to joining the ClosedPrivate alliance. "That’s private," I was told.

Tomorrow, we’re expecting AdaptiveBlue’s announcement of the BluePhone, a closed mobile platform with no vendors on board, no plans, and no software or hardware whatsoever.

I like it better than OpenSocial already. Check out their website for some closed and private blog posts.

Coding Horror: "Selling directly to the consumer via download means bypassing the entire brick and mortar sales chain. This should mean cheaper prices than retail, not the same prices-- and it should never result in higher prices. Paying a premium for the privilege of downloading software is complete ripoff, and it happens all the time." - I never understood this. I was trying to pick up Battlestar Galactica Season 3 DVD, and noticed it had been shipped out in the UK, but wouldn't be available here in the US until April 2008????? Amazon Unbox had it for ~$30, but I've had bad experience with Unbox in the past ... so :(

Freakonomics: "The same group at Alberta has just shown that their Polaris program is on the verge of taking down poker professionals. In the recent “Man vs. Machine” Poker Championship, Phil “The Unabomber” Laak and Ali Eslami barely beat Polaris two sessions to one (with one a virtual draw). After the tournament, Laak candidly acknowledged that “the bots are closing in." More reason to quit online poker :)

I can has cheezburger: "TACOCAT is a palindrome"

Reuters:

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, "is a fascist," Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. "Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Spain's current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

"Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, "Why don't you shut up?"

Gotta hand it to Chavez, he's good at making world news, and he's been pretty effective at getting things done in Venezuela (nationalizing natural resource industries, etc.), but sometime he just ends up with egg on his face.

Valleywag:

Microsoft wants to build its own Flickr. In a job posting, Microsoft said it's looking for a program product manager to build a "next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with Flickr, Smugmug and other photo Web solutions." We're all looking forward to the splashy launch of WindowsPhotoWebSolutionsLive.com.

Seriously though, sounds like it'd be fun.

Hot Online News. So Michael Bay takes a winning formula for the first Transformers and throws it out the window for the sequel? Huh?

TechCrunch : "Why Are Founders and Execs Leaving Second Tier Social Networks?" It's cause it's getting harder and harder to create social networks. The fixed cost of creating that initial network (along with the general fatigue of signing up for yet another new service) is harder to overcome by individual developers.

Via You've been haacked as seen on Twitter:

CodingHorror: Guitar Hero III for the PC/Mac has truly insane system requirements http://tinyurl.com/2c42fm and USB guitar = dongle :(

LazyCoder: @codinghorrorSo for only 1 billion times the computing power required to put a man on the moon, you too can fake guitar playing.

Related: last week's South Park about Guitar hero was hilarious. I miss VH1's "Behind the Music"...

Uncov:

Duncan Riley plugged this thing on TechCrunch, with the defense that "not everyone has the skills to do everything in a startup". News flash: not everyone should be doing a startup.

If you don't have a clue about the the engineering that goes into an internet company, then congratu-fucking-lations, you are Ron Gutman of Wellsphere. You know, the MBA type who is thinking "There's a lot of money in that there internet. How can I exploit other people to get it?"

By the way, check out my new favorite amusing anecdotes blog from a great writer. Especially interesting is her experience interviewing the YouTube boys.