Much time has been spent debating the merits of Ron Paul’s desire to eliminate the Federal Reserve and return the United States to the gold standard from an economic perspective. What people don’t seem to get is that Paul’s argument isn’t based on economics, but rather on his desire to take power away from the federal government. He doesn’t trust the federal government to manage the money supply (or do anything else, really), and so he opposes the Federal Reserve. There’s not really any more to it than that.

David Simon is making the rounds, responding to commentary on The Wire. First, he stopped in at Matthew Yglesias’ blog to respond to the assertion that the show is overly pessimistic. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:

Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn’t admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.

Then he submitted an email to Slate’s ongoing dialog about the last season. His email to David Plotz was a bit testy:

That said, if you’ve ever taken an Introduction to Logic course, you know that Argumentum Ad Hominem, while a stock maneuver in most half-assed journalism and commentary, is the weakest sort of intellectual crutch. If you are serious in addressing something, then ideas matter, not the man. The Wire’s depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it. I’ve got a secret for you cats: Ed Burns has some pretty fierce feelings about the people he worked for and with in the Baltimore Police Department and the Baltimore Public School System. Do you really believe that insiders in the B.P.D. and school system can’t recognize certain specific references to reality in the previous 50 hours of television? Writers of fiction cannibalize their most meaningful experiences and then regurgitate them and hope for the best. There is nothing at all new to this.

The only difference between your discussion of seasons one through four and the current one seems to be that you did not encounter Ed Burns at a party. Next time we meet, remind me to talk about the Orioles parsimony when it comes to pitching or my complete collection of Professor Longhair albums in order that you might be able to address yourselves to the work itself, for better or for worse.

Ouch.

Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke offers the following suggestion to her readers today:

There is so much traffic on my site right now that I’m having trouble getting the system to update my stories. But keep refreshing for the latest.

I’m not quite sure she understands how this whole Web hosting thing works.

Scott Rosenberg’s writing a book on the history of blogging. I have all the confidence in the world that it will be great when it’s finished and already can’t wait to read it.

I think I anticipated last night’s premiere of season 5 of The Wire more than any show I’ve ever watched. For years I listened to people tell me how great The Wire is, but I never bothered to watch it myself until this summer, when I started getting the DVDs from Netflix. Since I watched the first episode, I’ve been completely obsessed with the show. I read everything I can about it online, I listen to all of the commentaries on the DVDs, and at parties and social events I’m always on the lookout for other fans of the show so that we can wander off and discuss the details of the plot and compare our favorite scenes, characters, and seasons.

Unfortunately, after last night’s episode, I fear that my obsession has diminished my enjoyment of the show, for reasons that I’ll explain.

In past seasons, the show has taken on drug dealing, policing, urban government, and public education. This season, the show adds the press to the mix. Probably half of the episode was set in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun.

Show creator David Simon has a big, big problem with the Baltimore Sun, his former employer. He’s got strong opinions on everything, including how a city paper should go about its business, and he has a number of grudges against the big corporation that bought out the paper when he worked there. You can read the history in Mark Bowden’s article about David Simon from The Atlantic. Simon’s issues with the Sun have been documented in plenty of other places as well.

The problem with the premiere is that in the newsroom scenes, it was completely obvious which characters embody the vices and virtues of newspaper reporting as Simon sees them. One of the many delights of The Wire is the nuanced way in which characters are portrayed. There are things to like about corrupt politicians, assassins for drug gangs, and abusive bosses, and there are things to hate about even the most sympathetic characters. The newsroom characters don’t shape up that way so far. I’m hoping that there’s more to these characters than the first episode implies, but I can’t help but wonder whether Simon’s emotions on the subject are suppressing his talent as a writer.

Of course, as the plot unfolds I could be proven wrong, but I’m a bit reticent about that stuff at this point. On the other hand, I’m completely captivated by the rest of the plot. The city is broke, Marlo Stanfield wants to take over the entire world of drug dealing, Bubbles is trying to stay clean, and our beloved Major Crimes unit has once again been mothballed. So far, so good. Hopefully the press plot will live up to the rest of the show.

This morning I was thinking about all of the objects in my life that beep at me, and all of the different beeps that they emit. My iPhone rings when someone calls, rings differently when I get a text message, and beeps when it finishes downloading email or I plug it in to sync. My Tivo beeps and blorps constantly. Adium beeps, although a bit less after I told it to stop beeping whenever any of my contacts signed on. My car stereo beeps when I turn off the car in order to remind me to remove its face plate and take it with me. The car beeps if you turn it off with the headlights on. The dishwasher beeps when it’s done, as do the clothes washer and dryer. The refrigerator beeps if you leave the door open too long. The timer on the stove beeps when time runs out and the oven beeps when it’s finished preheating. The microwave beeps. The rice cooker plays a little song when it’s done cooking some rice. Any number of objects beep when their batteries get low although oddly enough, my iPhone does not.

It’s practically a language unto itself. I’m conditioned to know exactly what each of the beeps mean and what device they come from, even when they’re quite similar. Maybe one day identifying objects by their beep will be a discipline akin to identifying birds by their call. I can imagine the bragging now — “I just caught my first Nokia N70 receiving a text message in the wild, they’re not even offered by US carriers!”

The New York Times ran my favorite article so far from this election season on January 2. In it, economist David Leonhardt took a stab at describing the economic philosophies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton based on the policy proposals they’ve made on the campaign trail. This is the sort of reporting I’d like to see a lot more of. The article had all of the attributes of the best political reporting we could hope for. The information is new, it’s useful to voters trying to decide among the candidates, and it’s the sort of analysis that requires both knowledge of economics and research to evaluate the candidates’ positions and see where they shake out philosophically, and it leaves you wanting to learn even more. In a campaign season distinguished mainly by coverage of the horse race, real analysis deserves to be recognized.

Here’s how Leonhardt summarizes the two philosophies:

The easiest way to describe Senator Clinton’s philosophy is to say that she believes in the promise of narrowly tailored government policies, like focused tax cuts. She has more faith that government can do what it sets out to do, which is a traditionally liberal view. Yet she also subscribes to the conservative idea that people respond rationally to financial incentives.

Senator Obama’s ideas, on the other hand, draw heavily on behavioral economics, a left-leaning academic movement that has challenged traditional neoclassical economics over the last few decades. Behavioral economists consider an abiding faith in rationality to be wishful thinking. To Mr. Obama, a simpler program — one less likely to confuse people — is often a smarter program.

It’s easy to find out how the candidates have responded to real issues that they’ve faced in the past, what I’m interested in is learning how they’re likely to respond to new problems that we can’t predict. This is the sort of analysis that can help.

Where’s the article contrasting the philosophies of the various candidates on foreign policy?

Tim Bray predicts continued explosive growth for Ruby on Rails, and Joe Gregorio counters by saying that growth in Ruby on Rails has already plateaued (as he predicted), and has some graphs to back it up.

It’s inevitable that Ruby on Rails growth will plateau, Tim gets at perhaps the biggest reason why in his post predicting continued growth. He notes that developers on other platforms are paying attention to Ruby on Rails and figuring out how to apply some of the Rails goodness to their own frameworks. As people find Rails-esque features available in platforms they’re already familiar with, they’ll be less likely to learn Ruby and migrate to Rails.

Another factor that will limit the growth of Rails is that it really is best for new projects. Every time I think about rewriting an existing application in Rails or using Rails with a database that was not designed with Rails in mind, I blanch a little bit. It’s certainly possible to do so, but in the process you give up some of the Rails features that offer the biggest productivity gains. Even in the periods of the most fervent enthusiasm for Ruby on Rails, I didn’t see a big push to rewrite things in Rails.

The third factor that will limit the growth of Rails is that it’s difficult to get multiple Rails applications to play well together, or to get Rails to play well where multiple applications live on the same host. Many Web sites are an amalgamation of applications, perhaps running on different platforms. You may have some static content, a calendar application written in PHP, a blog powered by Movable Type or WordPress, and a PHP contact form. It’s easy to add another PHP application to the mix in its own directory, or even add a Java WAR file to the mix. Unfortunately, Rails really wants to control the virtual host it’s running on. Taking an existing Web site and putting a Rails app in /blog isn’t the easiest thing to do. It’s really a shame, because Ruby on Rails is the perfect framework for whipping up a job board, or a schedule of upcoming training events, or a customer support knowledge base.

If someone came to me today and said they’re trying to pick the technology platform for a new Web startup, I’d tell them to choose a modern framework built on a dynamic language. Django and Rails fit the bill, among others. But those types of projects are a small slice of the Web development work that’s being done these days. And it’s going to be tough for Rails to continue making inroads into the larger ecosystem, for reasons both technical and practical. The next big boost in Ruby on Rails growth will come when point #3 above is addressed and Rails deployment moves to the next level of simplicity.

Now that it’s 2008, let’s see how I did in my predictions for 2007:

Web applications will continue to become more like desktop applications. This turned out to be trivially true. JavaScript libraries continued to improve, and people added more and more desktop-like features to their Web apps, but I don’t think this was a particularly interesting year for innovation in Web interfaces. Comet looks intriguing, but this was more a year in which the industry consolidated its gains rather than really pushing the ball forward. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Google Gears and its equivalents in 2008.

Spam fighters will gain ground against spammers. The overall volume of spam continues to go up. (Weblog comment spam as well.) Gmail’s spam filters are continuing to perform well, but the Bayesian filter my wife uses seems to be losing ground. I’d love to get some outside input on how I did with this prediction.

People will continue to increase their reliance on Google, but more of them will come to resent that reliance as well. This turned out to be a good prediction, I think. People are more scared of Google than they ever were, and Google keeps announcing new products that make competitors of other sites on the Web. Here’s what Tim O’Reilly said about Google last week:

Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft’s Office monopoly, seeing it simply as “turnabout’s fair play,” (and a distant underdog to boot), but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google’s growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.

Web advertising will become even more obnoxious. I think it’s about as obnoxious as it ever was, but that it has not grown significantly more obnoxious.

I’d hope to see more progress in decentralized communication among weblogs, and less progress toward people moving into centralized weblog services. No progress on this front that I perceived.

I’d also like to see more progress on the copyright and DRM front. The DRM companies are still fighting tooth and nail, but with the Warner Music announcement that they’ll be selling music through the Amazon.com MP3 store, three of four major record labels are now selling music online without DRM. That’s progress.

Ultimately, it feels like most of the interesting things that happened in 2007 were completely outside the scope of my predictions.

Soon, my predictions for 2008.

Ars Technica reviews the responses of Presidential candidates to a question from Common Sense Media on violent video games. All of the Democrats responded, and only Mitt Romney responded from among the Republican candidates. Bottom line is that all of the candidates appear willing to sign legislation regulating video games, although some are more enthusiastic about it than others.