This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web — Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation: It was the most controversial vote in W3C history. As weeks and then months stretched out without a decision, another W3C member, the Center for Democracy and Technology, proposed a very, very narrow version of the covenant, one that would only protect security researchers who revealed accidental or deliberate leaks of data marked as private and sensitive by EME. Netflix's representative dismissed the idea out of hand, and then the W3C's CEO effectively killed the proposal. Today, the W3C announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all, stating that W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee had concluded that the objections raised "had already been addressed" or that they were "overruled."
• The Troubling Appeal of Education at For-Profit Schools — Dana Goldstein reviews the brilliant Tressie McMillan Cottom's new book in the NY Times: In the revelatory “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy,” the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom introduces us to London, a 48-year-old widow and single mother of three children. London lives in rural North Carolina, and has watched as decent working-class jobs in the textile industry disappeared from her region. […] At various times she trained to be a child care provider, a medical biller, a computer technician and, most recently, a medical assistant. Cottom asked London what she would do if she could not find the middle-class health care administration job she desired — a type of position that often requires training in a medical specialty like cardiology. London’s program at a branch of for-profit Everest College does not provide such specialized training. She smiled and told Cottom, “Jesus is my backup plan.”
• Lower Ed: A Review — Matt Reed at Inside Higher Ed has a longer and better review of the same: In trying to answer the question of why so many students poured into for-profit colleges from about the mid-1990’s to 2010-ish, she argues for a different answer than the ones usually given. The usual answers are twofold. Either the for-profit colleges are simply slick thieves who preyed upon the unwitting, or the labor market suddenly required skills that nobody else could offer at scale. She suggests a third, which she calls credentialism. In her telling, students are not witless dupes, and technological change was not unique to the mid-90’s. Instead, for-profit colleges formed a sort of “negative social insurance” program by which students hoped to protect themselves against being left behind in a labor market that had outsourced training costs to workers themselves.
• The Good News is Obamacare is Probably OK. The Bad News… — Ted Rall:
• Pigouvian Taxes and Bounties — Timothy Taylor observes — to paraphrase a prominent public intellectual — who knew fiscal policy could be so complicated?: A related problem in thinking about Pigovian taxes arises when choosing the tax rate. For example, in the case of alcohol there is some evidence that moderate consumption may have health benefits, through a reduction in blood pressure. However, inappropriate and excessive consumption of alcohol can also lead to drunken driving, violence, fetal alcohol syndrome, and other consequences. Thus, it seems as if the appropriate Pigouvian tax on alcohol should be to subsidize the light social drinker, but to impose a high tax on drinkers who impose high social costs. When the effects of an action on third parties are heterogenous in this way. choosing an appropriate Pigouvian tax becomes tricky, and society may well feel a need for use of alternative or complementary policy tools.
• RBA all but calls the dumb bubble — David Llewellyn-Smith quotes the Age quoting RBA Assistant Governor Michele Bullock: “We don’t want households to find themselves in a situation where they have to emergency sell or whatever because they can’t afford it any more.” In the past year Sydney prices had climbed 18 per cent and Melbourne prices have risen 13 per cent.
• Careful Car Care Made Care Free - Tires and fluids! — Phil Are Go!: