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Guess what BusinessWeek discovered about State-backed monopolies? They don’t spend much on innovation.

This is not a terribly new discovery. There is little incentive for a firm that legally owns the entire market on a service, so why waste the money on more efficient or effective technologies when you have a legally guaranteed revenue stream? What is the incentive for a monopolist to invest in developing new widgets?

TechDirt suggests that these rent-seeking firms aren’t technology companies at all, but rather wealth-extractors. And AgainstMonopoly notes that their monopolistic actions speak louder than their superficial overtures.

You see, apparently despite bringing in revenues of over $40 billion last year, AT&T spent a mere $130 million on R&D. This is in contrast to the less-regulated market of computer chips, in which Intel alone spent over $5 billion on R&D.

So one question can be, what is that G-spot firms should spend on innovating?

Paul Kedrosky shows that sometimes more investments means less return in the long-run — just because you spent money on creating a product does not mean it will turn into a commercial success.

And this is a point that ArsTechnica misses in their op-ed on the matter. Throwing money at “basic research” without a comprehensive business model behind it is not a practical way of staying profitable in industries that do not receive subsidies or legal monopolies.

In fact, the main reason AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox and IBM all had the money to do what they did is because of one thing alone: State intervention.

They received tax-funded subsidies in the form of large government contracts. Their industries were protected from outside competition through patents and geographical monopolies. And while it is impossible to predict what free-markets would have created, a strong case could be made that different, more efficient patterns of capital allocation would have been made if this intervention never occurred.

In short, these firms did not have to deal with free-enterprise and its creative destruction. And unfortunately the only winners in the continual cycle of telecommunication reregulation has been the State monopolies which have once again consolidated into their original form.

And rather than making another long-winded polemical against State intervention, perhaps one of the solutions to innovation at large firms is already being discussed: Crowdsourcing.

What do these two sanitizing techniques have in common? For starters, they have both been demonized by not-so-friendly folks and have thus left the drawing board as practical uses to preventing the spread of harmful pathogens.

The FDA uses a good analogy to explain why irradiating food is not a bad thing:

Irradiation does not make foods radioactive, just as an airport luggage scanner does not make luggage radioactive. Nor does it cause harmful chemical changes. The process may cause a small loss of nutrients but no more so than with other processing methods such as cooking, canning, or heat pasteurization. Federal rules require irradiated foods to be labeled as such to distinguish them from non-irradiated foods.

The EPA notes that through this relatively safe and inexpensive process, bacteria and other microbes are killed off — thus preventing illness and food spoilage.

An interesting tie-in comes with recent research that indicates that “[v]accines made with bacteria killed with gamma irradiation” may be more effective than traditional accepted methods which use heat and chemical inactivation.

More on irradiation of food: 1 2 3 4
More on DDT: 1 2 3

Which is nuttier, playing a tongue twister game and being racked for incorrect answers.

Or.

Not speaking Japanese at all, as Chris Farley discovered.

This is perhaps the best segment Colbert has produced yet.  Even better than his grilling of the press.

Via Stephen Kinsella.  See also the antics of Ali G.

If you’ve grown tired of trying to organize your bookmarks at each computer you use, perhaps you might be interested in two handy services.

One is Deli.cio.us which is now operated by Yahoo.  The way it works is fairly simple.  You create an account and install a little utility that integrates with your browser.  Whenever you come across a site you that you want to bookmark, you simply click the “tag this” button and it instantly becomes immortalized in your ever growing cornucopia of links.  You can also look at what other people are bookmarking and build RSS feeds off of specific tags (e.g. technology, golf, base jumping). See mine.

The other popular one is Notebook from Google.  It operates in a similar manner, yet it is not only more substantive, but also influences the underlying ranking system of each site that is “noted.”