Jacob Christensen

Sure, if you watch a movie by yourself, you may end up paying a bit more than if you go to the cinema. On the other hand, you save some twenty minutes of your life every time you put a DVD in the player – and you can easily avoid the annoying endless copyright messages and (these days also trailers) on DVDs by putting in the disc some ten minutes in advance while watching the TV.

But basically, there is a problem with the entertainment industry. It not only wants our money, it also wants to survey and control our lives completely.

Following Søren Pind, the Liberal Party’s failed candidate for mayor of Copenhagen and now foreign policy spokesman and all-round noisemaker, can often be quite entertaining. But let me answer Pind’s latest question – “When did we ever vote on EC competences in immigration policy?” – and provocation – “Let’s just ignore the European Court of Justice!”.

Well, first of all I’ve taught European politics for a number of years and my first and most important piece of information when it comes to the ECJ is:

If there is any room for interpretation, the ECJ will decide in support for further integration under EC regulations.

So the lawyers in the Justice and Immigration Ministries really ought to have known about this, or else legal education in Denmark is a few decades behind the developments.

And the answer to Pind’s question wil be: October 1972.

Turning political questions into legal decisions may not always be a good idea, but the competences of the ECJ and the general line of its decisions are not exactly a secret. Courts are not pro-active so it takes a complaint before issues such as these hit the fan public agenda. And we will no doubt be seeing the government put quite a lot of effort into trying to salvage the Danish regulations during August and September.

This one is complicated, so let me just note that July – which is otherwise the Sommerloch in Danish politics – could turn out to be the beginning of something interesting.

The shortest possible way of describing the issue is that the European Court of Justice (and basically, that means EC legislation – not anything to do with the JHA opt-out) appears to have blown a Titanic-sized hole in the immigration policy led by the government since 2001.

As it is, the story so far raises a number of questions which still have to be answered:

• Was it due to incompetence, administrative or political orders that the Danish Immigration Service Agency provided applicants for family reunions with false information?
• When did ministers (first Rikke Hvilshøj and now Birthe Rønn Hornbech) learn that there was a problem with EC regulations?
• When did the prime minister know and how did he react?

For what it is worth, the political commentator Ralf Pittelkow in a column on Jyllands-Postens homepage basically echoes the Danish People’s Party’s rejection of the ECJ’s role in European integration – and as we all know, Pittelkow is Mr. Karen Jespersen and like her, he has made the transition from radical socialist over social democracy to neo-nationalism. So it looks like the Liberals are positioning themselves in the anti-EC-legislation corner.

The only parties who greet the developments are the Social Liberals and the Socialists while the Social Democrats are more or less stuck in the middle: They are still trying to rebuild their credibility as an anti-immigration party.

Theoretically, the government could try a grand (issue) coalition with the Social Democrats but that would leave a wide open space for the Danish People’s Party to attack both Liberals and Social Democrats. On the other hand, the Social Democrats cannot win electorally by allying themselves with the Socialists and the Social Liberals against the government, while the government would be asking for trouble with other European governments if it tried to formally restrict the role of the ECJ. That would in all likelihood take another round of treaty negotiations.

Give the Immigration minister the chop? A nice short-term soloution, but the problem here is that Anders Fogh Rasmussen has invested too much prestige in her. Still: This is politics and you could sacrifice a minor player in the interests of the larger game.

Oh, well. Danish politics as we knew and loved it up until 2001: Complicated and unpredictable.

One thing which has often made me wonder silently is the fact that the Swedes on the one hand is one of the world’s most rational and organised people – spontaneity is not exactly a Swedish virtue. One the other hand, Swedes are obsessed with lotteries of all sorts.

Personally, my perspective on all kinds of lotteries and betting is that even before the game begins in earnest, I will have lost half of my money – and then comes the slim chance of winning anything. The poker craze of later years has left me completely cold (yes, I know that there are people who make a living on playing poker, but do they actually produce anything?¹ )

This piece in EurekAlert suggests that poverty plays a role, and while I can see relative poverty in a society being relevant in Sweden, it is an affluent country in absolute terms, so I’m still confused about this.

Or maybe the explanation is that the Swedes just need an irrational element in their rational lives?

1. Okay, okay: If they can get an audience to pay for sitting and looking at other people playing cards, but still… [↩]

I like the idea that 1) Matti Vanhanen counts as a celebrity and 2) I apparently have a distant likeness with him:

HT: Peter Santesson-Wilson

With this beauty from DR Online:

Oh, and “yt” is so out. It was mildly popular in the early 1980s.

I have to admit that I haven’t followed the US debate about health insurance too closely, but I found James Wimberley’s discussion about the Obama health plan interesting:

[Obama] didn’t mention that his universal health insurance plan is basically a clone (via Edwards and Clinton) of the cunning old warhorse’s revolutionary 1884 law. This also left an existing patchwork of enterprise-based plans in place, adding a default public one. So I’ll call Obama’s scheme by its Bismarckian name: a Krankenkasse.

Just some notes about the Scandinavian systems (which are not completely identical):

• One thing they have in common is that they are basically tax-financed, although there are some complications with regard to sickness benefits.
• In Sweden, sickness benefits are administered by a state agency; in Denmark, by local councils (but under national guidelines)
• In Denmark and Sweden, there is no national health care in the strict meaning¹ – regional councils are in responsible for running primary and secondary health care. Norway is different these days and there are definitively tendencies towards centralisation of the provision of health care.
• The rule of thumb in Denmark and Sweden seems to be that a health care authority should cover 1-2 million people.
• In principle, these systems will work with private providers of health care. GPs and many specialists are private entrepreneurs in Denmark. Equally, there are a number of private clinics.
• Private insurance has played a minimal role in Denmark and Sweden, but is becoming more popular in Denmark. The question is if work-based private schemes will supplement or crowd-out public health care in the medium to long term.

1. You are of cause entitled to emergency care everywhere and there is some choice between different providers, and the systems are of cause regulated by national legislation. [↩]

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Joc Nocera has a phone call:

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

HT: Daring Fireball.

And whaddayouknow: MobileMe has a blog:

Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we’re going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.

One issue we encountered was a mail outage affecting 1% of our members. Last Friday [18 July] a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail. The team has already begun rolling out restoration of full access for all the accounts and expect to finish by the end of next week. We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

Again at HT to Daring Fireball.

I’ve noted it before but Apple’s communication strategies are truly … erm … fascinating. One point about MobileMe is that it is a paid service which means that losing customers’ mails for a week is not exactly a selling argument.

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