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There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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O'Reilly really wanted to get his hands on Tillman. Media Matters found the clip:

Just a figure of speech? Yeah. Wink, wink.

How Canadian can you get?

The Finance Minister understates the deficit by $16 billion. Do we get mad?

Nah. The guy's doing his best. Let's give him another chance.

Canadian Press:

OTTAWA - Canadians appear to be willing to cut Finance Minister Jim Flaherty a little slack over his deficit shocker.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll shows few Canadians think the
finance minister should resign just because he made a $16-billion
mistake on his deficit projection.

The survey of 1,000 people finds only 28 per cent who want Flaherty to
step down, while 59 per cent think he should stay on the job.

Even among Liberal supporters, 54 per cent don't think he should lose
his position because the budget deficit has ballooned to more than $50
billion - not the $34 billion predicted in the budget four months ago.

How hosed is California based on state-sector pension obligations alone? Alert reader Robert Kelley sends along this gruesome little database of the 5,115 people currently drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the Golden State. (If you want to go down a fascinating rabbit hole of Internet searching, I highly recommend looking up the half-mil-pension-receiving Bruce Malkenhorst.) Kelley comments:

I used to work at a library and for a city government in the Bay Area.  I took a look at some people who I knew worked there and retired recently.  One librarian had retired with a $110k a year pension.  A former police chief who retired recently (in his early 50s) from my tiny city now has a pension of $185k a year.  These government workers are retiring with full health care benefits for them and their families at no additional cost, and they can retire at age 50 or 55 depending on where they work.

It's an amazing gravy train.  Given that a person at age 55 can reasonably expect to live 30 years now, that means the effective yearly salary paid to those people during their working years is about double what is stated.

The next time you hear about a schmuck Coastal Commission Analyst only making $80k a year, think about that.  The real cost is more like $160k a year.  Beats working.

While public employees continue enjoying gold-plated retirements, the ongoing media scare campaign over Gov. Schwarzenegger's "annihilating" cuts continues apace. The latest, care of also-alert reader Ray Eckhart, comes from the New York Times, under the headline "Deep Cuts Threaten to Reshape California." The word "pension" was not harmed in the production of this article.

The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed [...] would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.

Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.

My take on big-California-government apologists who don't ever come out and say big California government is kewl, here.