Today’s Links: September 7, 2012

OPINION

STEVEN GREENHUT: “Scandals Show California Is Broken, Not Broke”
“It started in May 2011 when Governor Jerry Brown announced that ‘turbulent times’ required the ‘unthinkable’ — the shuttering of 70 parks to deal with the state’s enduring fiscal problems. Brown’s critics sensed that he found the proposed cuts to be quite ‘thinkable’ — at least as a ploy to encourage Californians to loosen the grip on their wallets. […] Brown and his fellow Democrats didn’t count on two things. First, nonprofit groups and local governments came up with the money to keep most of the targeted parks up and running, thus illustrating the effectiveness of nongovernment or local solutions in the face of state-government failure.”

WILL OREMUS: “Don’t Blame the Copyright Bots, Says CEO of Copyright Bot Company”
“Vobile doesn’t shut down its clients’ video feeds. Doesn’t want to, and doesn’t have the power to even if it did. All it does is notify them when it finds a match for material that has been marked as copyrighted in its database. What to do when that happens, Wang told me, is entirely up to the client. In this case, that means Ustream.”

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: “Obama Gives Up on Demand”
“There’s a forward-looking economic vision here, but it’s entirely a vision of structural transformation. A better health care system. Better schools. More domestic energy production, both renewable and natural gas. Better schools. Immigration reform. That’s all good stuff, though I continue to find Obama’s obsession with manufacturing to be a bit daft. But it’s simply not responsive to the short-term jobs problem. If you’re an unemployed adult, then reforming high schools or creating quality early childhood education isn’t going to help you.”

NEWS

MARKETS – Apple Seeks to Create Pandora Rival
“Apple Inc. AAPL +0.58% is in talks to license music for a custom-radio service similar to the popular one operated by Pandora Media Inc., P -17.58% according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a bid by the hardware maker to expand its dominance in online music.”

INNOVATION – Scientists Discover Method to Control Cockroaches Remotely
“Researchers have been working on this for a very long time and now they have finally achieved it: scientists at North Carolina State University have successfully remotely controlled cockroaches. Watch the video. It’s both disgusting and impressive, but it could save your life one day.”

E-BOOK PRICING – E-Books Pricing Settlement Approved
“In a move that could reshape the publishing industry, a federal judge has approved a settlement with three of the nation’s largest book publishers over alleged collusion in the pricing of e-books.”