« The Great Moderation in the Confidence of Monetary Economists | Home | Credit Card Payments and Psychological "Anchoring" »
Once Again Duncan Black is Absolutely Right!
So says Eschaton: "Lucky that few understood the potential and didn't try to legislate or regulate it out of existence before it took off. Imagine telling senators in 1992 that soon every 13 year old would have a porn machine on his/her desk."
Well it was 1994 mostly, but we didn't mention the dark side to the senators and besides we were told by Andy Grove and Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen (who wore bib overalls and no shoes in the first meeting) that the upside case was worth the risk on the downside. So to summarize: yes. Saying yes to everything is a not bad first principle for conducting life as we know it, subject to having an exit strategy.
Advertisement
In 1989 I had a job in a university computing center - back in the days before the web where one could only read text messages. There were applications for converting image files into images and I was surprised to find out the amount of porn images that was flying around. Seems porn was the most readily image available in the early days of the internet. So someone did a really good job in keeping it a secret otherwise the internet as we know it would have been DOA.
January 9, 2009 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink