October 2015

Every so often, we get a revealing glimpse into just how important money is in our political system, and in Congress in particular. And on Oct 8, we got a particularly amusing one, when the New York Times had to run a correction because it vastly understated how much time the speaker of the House has to spend fundraising: "An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to how frequently the House speaker typically travels to raise money. It is three weekends a month, not three weekends a year."

It's amusing to think about a world where the speaker of the House would only have to spend three weekends a year fundraising. The reality, of course, is far different. Hauling in money from wealthy donors is a key part of the job description and a constant, unceasing pressure. For instance, in the first half of this year alone, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) raised a staggering $28 million for Republicans in his chamber.

During the week of Sept 28, the latest chapter of the saga that is Auction 97 unfolded in all its messy, unpredicted and unpredictable glory -- Dish and its affiliate Designated Entities (DEs) surrendered over $3 billion of AWS-3 licenses back to the Federal Communications Commission. That same week, we saw a company worth over $27 billion, that has been rumored for months to be raising capital for an aggressive acquisition strategy, apparently could not manage to scrape together either sufficient capital or a proper letter of credit to pay its Auction 97 debt (color me skeptical). Dish instead defaulted on billions of dollars of licenses that it had aggressively -- some would say relentlessly -- bid on to buy.

The FCC accepted the default consistent with its rules, imposed the mandated 15 percent penalty and re-auction deficiency measures and declared that, because the post-default debt was timely satisfied and there had been no bad faith conduct, Dish and its entities would not officially fall under the FCC’s former defaulter rules and were fully qualified to participate in future auctions – including (drum roll) the re-auction of the surrendered licenses. If there is one thing we’ve learned the hard way it’s that no matter how much you prepare, every auction contains an element of surprise. The entire Auction 97 book makes us wary of the surprises that await us in Auction 1000. Dish has taken all earnest auction participants to school on how to exploit every rule and every loophole to game an auction. We can only hope that Auction 1000 doesn’t become a master class in the same.

According to research by the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, “digital amnesia” is gradually blotting out our brains. The report surveyed 6,000 adults in six Western European countries, as well as 1,000 people in the United States, about things such as the phone numbers they memorize and what they do when they need to remember a fact. Among Americans, half said they would try to look up an answer online before trying to remember it, and 29 percent said they would probably forget it again right after. Europeans weren’t quite so bad, but pretty similar: 36 percent said they Google first and think later; 24 percent admitted they would forget the Googled thing as soon as they closed their browser.

This brings us back to the specter of “digital amnesia”: the idea that our computers somehow hurt our memory. But when you remember that we’ve always stored memories in outside people and things, and that we don’t have the capacity to remember everything, the phenomenon looks less like amnesia and more like prudent outsourcing. That was, in fact, the conclusion of three psychologists who studied the “Google effect” in 2011: Although their results were widely interpreted as evidence that Google makes us forget, the researchers themselves were far more optimistic. “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools,” they wrote, “growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.”