Laffer Sued Over Ponzi Scheme, Cheap Cottage-Industry Manufacturing: The Two Best News Items You’ll Hear Today

Two bits of news you won’t find at any “NewsRight” affiliate, but which may be the most important things you read today:

– You always knew supply-side economics was a con job. Now we see that its popularizer, Arthur Laffer, is being sued over an alleged Ponzi scheme (h/t The Exiled, which has it in its “What You Should Know” news sidebar today):

HOUSTON (CN) – Fifty-two investors claim fund managers associated with supply-side economist Arthur Laffer took $3.1 million to prop up a Ponzi scheme, then said nothing as their money was “wasted with no reasonable expectation of recovery.”
Lead plaintiffs Ronald and Lavonne Ellisor sued David Wallace, Costa Bajjali, and their entities Wallace Bajjali Development Partners LP, Wallace Bajjali Investment Fund II LP, the Laffer Frishberg Wallace Economic Opportunity Fund LP, and Arthur Laffer in Harris County Court.
Laffer is best known for the Laffer Curve, an economic theory that says reducing taxes will increase government revenue. He was a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board during the 1980s.

Ooops.

– This is a game-changer, folks:

I have been aware of 3D printing – the ability to create out of plastic what ever you can design on your computer – for a while. But except for those who have built their own, it has been put of reach to all but engineers in large corporation and research facilities.

That is until now. According to this report from the CES in Las Vegas, there are a few companies that are now going to offer or are already offering this technology to the average (more or less) consumer.

And as the diarist notes, the device costs less than $2,000.

For not much more than a couple of house payments, or what you’d plunk down for a top-of-the-line gaming desktop machine, you can run a machine shop out of your home.

Think about that for a moment.

AP’s Beacon Spun Off Into “NewsRight”, Reeks Of Hypocrisy And Disgraced “Righthaven”

I see from reading NiemanLab that even the Righthaven fiasco and the epic spanking they got on their own “beacon” fair-use-mocking scheme hasn’t stopped the AP and its friends from trying to convince other news orgs that copyright trolling is the road to profitability:

A little history: Remember THE BEACON? Back in 2009, the Associated Press took a somewhat more antagonistic approach to protecting its intellectual property on the web. We reported on the AP’s plans to build AP News Registry, “a way to identify, record and track every piece of content AP makes available to its members and other paying customers.” Part of that plan was the beacon, a little bit of JavaScript embedded into the AP’s syndicated news feeds, which helped expose people who, in the AP’s view, were scraping or, well, over-aggregating, its material. The AP took a lot of flak in the journalism universe.

That’s been spun off into NewsRight, and former ABC News head David Westin runs it. This is richly ironic. Here’s what a NiemanLab reader has to say about David Westin:

Don’t be fooled. This will be a smarter Righthaven and there will be lawsuits. Just stand by and watch. Westin is after all a litigator.

His former employer ABC News, and all of it’s hundreds of local TV stations across the country have been stealing from newspapers since they came into existence. Every TV newsroom in the country has a morning meeting where they open newspapers and start picking stories. TV assignment editors hand newspaper articles to TV reporters on their way out the door in every TV station in the country. Except now they just print it off the web. I’ve watched TV producers type stories up out a newspaper thousands of times. TV news, even the networks, have been stealing from newspaper reporters for decades. It’s not even questioned. Every newspaper and TV reporter knows this.

Funny how Westin didn’t end that kind of rights theft while at ABC.

In fact, newspapers did that to each other — and to all other news sources — long before the advent of TV. Rewriting stories from other sources, and removing all evidence that the stories came from those other sources, is as old as newspapers themselves. Meanwhile, most bloggers actually try to follow fair-use law and cite their sources.