Month: September 2009

Super Mario Brothers will be to the eighties what Second World War was to the forties, except good. Although it is only 1985, I can also safely say that this game will be more significant than any future wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined…. Mario is going to so popularize Japanese culture in the U.S. that The Vapors’ hit song “Turning Japanese” will cease to be about a sex act and will come to describe the literal surgical transformation of Americans into Japanese citizens.

The New Yorker on the, er, slightly overheated reception of The Beatles: Rock Band.

Femtocells

Glenn Fleishman reports for TidBITS on a new doodad from AT&T, the 3G Microcell, which offers to connect to your home network connection and then make a little bubble of 3G voice and data coverage right there to the house. You get better coverage (or, in some cases, you get coverage), and meanwhile:

Carriers love femtocells because they shift traffic (and the expense of moving calls and data) from their expensive-to-operate, capital-intensive cellular networks to cheap broadband – broadband that the customer has installed and paid for separately.

That’s all well and good, but why in the hell does it cost the consumer anything? Apparently the 3G MicroCell (this is what it looks like; it’s pretty clearly the nefarious output of the Drax Enterprise Corporation) will cost $150, but that “AT&T will provide a $100 rebate for customers who sign up for a calling plan,” and but users on calling plans will get unlimited calls (placed through it) for the low-low price of $10 a month. Apparently the other carriers have like devices and offer broadly similar plans. The question: Why? Putative MicroCell users can get unlimited calls through their requisite pre-existing home network (without any femtocell attached) for the low-low price of $0 (though, admittedly, not in glorious 3G MODE!). And remember, these folks are (likely) already paying AT&T to insufficiently cover their home…this is most likely why they might be interested in the MicroCell in the first place! So: pay me not to cover your home, pay me some more so that you can personally provide said coverage for your home, then pay me a bit more per month to use said coverage that you are providing to your own home. Furthermore, said paying users are providing a carrier with extra connectivity. If lots of people on their (presumably troublesome) block did so, you can imagine said carrier’s service in said troublesome area improving for everyone. And it costs them nothing. Probably less than nothing as, just like the article notes, you’re shifting traffic onto people’s own networks and off the carrier’s; plus they’re winning hearts and minds through the magic of improved service, and getting paid by the participating subset of end-users to do so. You’d think they would be giving these doodads away just for coming by the store. But, once again, we have run into a plain example of America’s mobile industry mission statement:

Never miss a chance to screw your customer.

If we can get these idiots to run our networks for us, charge them for the privilege, and (best of all) silently shift them onto the inevitable dumb pipes while we’re doing it, so much the better. Later, we’ll figure out a way to charge them for providing access to and across their own home network; but we’ll let them get good and used to the improved signal first…oh, and texting over a MicroCell will cost, uh, $30.

The idiocy of Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck wants to have a national day of prayer and fasting, and points to Thomas Jefferson as someone who was all for that sort of thing. Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson weighed in on just exactly this sort of issue:

First, on the issue of prescribing such observances:

I consider the government of the U S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the U.S. Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority.

That one actually seems crystal clear without recourse to old TJ, but, in this day and age, it pays to be thorough. But hows-about the more sly, more thoroughly “modern” version of said observances in which the President (or a similar authority) simply encourages folks to pray or fast or what-have-you:

But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting & prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the U.S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant too that this recommendation is to carry some authority, and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation the less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed? I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.

Exactly right. Why, it’s almost as if this country was founded by deists who were looking to completely separate the respective functions of church and state. Just don’t tell Glenn Beck; such facts get in the way of his preferred narratives.

So, which recent or current President would Jefferson judge as more dangerous to the Republic? And exactly which part of Glenn Beck’s daily spew would Jefferson recognize as even American, much less the work of a self-proclaimed “Constitutional Scholar”?

People [should] have called for the resignation of Tom Delay back in the day because a hammer can’t be the Majority Leader. After all, hammers are inanimate objects and it’s an affront to American values to have a lifeless tool at such a high office.

–Ezra Klein commenter etdean1

Obama interviewed by GOP Talking Points

Obama: George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase…. What if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…
Stephanopoulos: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”
Obama: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.
Stephanopoulos: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.
Obama: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.

So why have you (unless you’re a massive news junkie) never have heard of [any of this]? Because for all the right’s whining about the liberal media, the mainstream media aren’t ideologically committed to party warfare in remotely the way that the conservative media are.

–Michael Tomasky (in this generally excellent roundup of the ACORN dust-up).

finermac:

In Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6+), if you need to open a hidden file, all you need to do is type Cmd-Shift-. (that’s a period) in the standard Open File dialog. All hidden files will be displayed.

This is a toggle, so typing the shortcut a second time will hide the hidden files again.

Holy crap is that useful information.

The Flashpoint

“[Obama said] ‘everyone should get the same deal as members of Congress.’ But you take the text of these bills, and not only are you not getting the same deal as members of Congress, who get a dozen or more choices in the D.C. area, but people aren’t going to get any choice at all. It’ll be tethered to a policy that many people might think is pretty crummy. Some of those policies will be high-deductible, going up 10 or 12 percent a year. And people are going to think that’s pretty crummy.

[…]

As for the people who don’t have coverage and are making $65,000, those people look at Washington and see us saying you’ll have to pay 13 percent of your income, and then we’re going to clobber you with all these co-pays and deductibles, and some government official comes and says, ‘We’ll give you an exemption’? No middle-class people will be attending rallies holding signs saying “thank you for my exemption!”

— Ron Wyden, speaking the Truth from on high, via Ezra Klein

Miller Time

If you’re in New England, you’d be well advised to go ahead and say your goodbyes to Buzzards Bay:

WESTPORT – Buzzards Bay Brewing will discontinue production of its eponymous microbrews.

“We’ve had a good run ” owner Bill Russell said, “but we have decided to head in a different direction.”

The surprise announcement Wednesday was influenced by a number of factors, Russell said, primarily a drop in demand. Sales had declined from a high of 5,000 barrels of Buzzards Bay brews in 2002 to a projected sale of around 100 barrels in the next seven months, Russell said.

That’s a hell of a drop in production. Where did it all go? Apparently right into the gaping maw that has swallowed many otherwise successful (but ultimately very small and by definition fragile) regional breweries:

“Our best years were when we distributed it ourself,” he said. “It’s hard to compete with national brands, representing huge corporate interests, that muscle their way into the marketplace.”

The big distributors could give a shit about anything that’s not called Bud/MillerCoors. And, let’s face it, nowadays almost all distributors are “big” (for a good rundown of the near-monopolistic situation, read this). If your beer doesn’t sell itself in business-sustaining volumes (complete with customers screaming for it at every store and bar if and when that tap or rack space goes away because your distributor had some big-assed Bud installations to do that week), you’d better self distribute or you will go out of business. Full stop.

Low volume, regional breweries like this depend on fanatical attention to every detail all the way from the grain to the tap handle. And, to you small regional brewers out there: If you are not on tap with at least one beer at every bar worth entering that’s located within 20 miles of your home brewery, change distributors or self-distribute. You are going to go out of business otherwise. It may already be too late. Seriously. Don’t kid yourself that breweries with good beers won’t fail. They do all the time. Even once mighty Celis was laid low on the altar of “better” distribution, and they had absolutely rabid, Smokey and the Bandit level fans.

But what about this so-called “different direction”; isn’t that just a pleasant euphemism for “closing the brewery”? Turns out it’s not:

“We are now producing a new product line called Just Beer that we can distribute ourselves locally,” he said. The new brands include John Beere, Moby D. and CIA (which the company Web site describes as “mysteriously smooth.”)

Ummm, okay. That sounds like a real winner. Something to base your future on. Nothing more profitable out there than gimmick beers and/or beers that try to out-Bud Budweiser. Newsflash: you will not be succesfull at trying to convert Bud drinkers to your Bud-alike. You cannot compete on price, and there is no bandwidth there to compete on taste. You think your quality is going to be better than a brewery producing a substantially identical yet biologically-derived product to the tune of millions of barrels at twelve very different locations? Why does anyone go after the American Premium Lager space? Even in a brewpub setting it makes no sense at all (time consuming and therefore costly with extremely marginal chance for success in terms of winning a steady and, by definition, choosy customer-base for craft beer).

Fortunately, it turns out they also contract brew for Cisco and Pretty Things, two fine product lines (we’ll forget for the moment some rather, uh, troubling bottles of Cisco I’ve encountered on various occasions and bask in the glory that is Indie IPA). But then comes this:

New ventures are also waiting, he said, including a partnership with an Irish brewer called Strangford Lough to produce and distribute some of their labels in the United States, one of which will be called St. Patrick’s Best.

“It’s very exciting for me since it’s part of my heritage,” he said. “They will ship us the syrup in 300-gallon boxes. It comes in a bladder inside the box. We will reconstitute it and ferment it here. It’s produced in County Down with Irish grain and hops, so it will have that unique taste and we will distribute it here.”

Indeed, reconstituted syrup will have a “unique” taste. Unique to Malt Liquor, that is… But with a name like “St. Patrick’s Best” I guess one should expect to wake up in the gutter (empty 40 nearby, natch) with what seems to be a tomahawk lodged in the front of one’s skull. Part of the heritage.