Category: Uncategorized

I didn’t go to Harvard. You know, I went to the school of hard knocks.

Scott Brown, describing his time in the urban hellscape that is the Medford campus of Tufts University. Later in life, he took on the mean streets of Boston College Law School. Chestnut Hill is about to get real.
Also worth noting that Harvard tuition is ~$39,849. Tufts: $42,962. Warren’s actual alma mater, University of Houston? That would set you back $9,211.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

Rick Perry’s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you’re attempting to get the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 — or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country’s state legislatures — and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign.

By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney?

Charles Pierce, getting it exactly right at his still newish blogging perch.

Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor [3]; and that apparently the Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances [4], and so on.

David Foster Wallace turns in the most complex single sentence that ever was or ever will be written about the film Terminator.
Source: tetw

King of Content

Predictably thoughtful take from John Gruber on the broader tablet strategy that Amazon is taking up in light of the new Kindle/Kindle Fire product line. You should read the whole thing, but a couple of points really stand out. First:

Apple’s primary business is selling devices for a healthy profit, and they back that up with a side business of selling digital content for those devices. Amazon’s primary business is as a retailer, including as a retailer of digital content. They back that up with a side business of low-cost digital devices that are optimized for on-the-fly purchasing of anything and everything Amazon sells.

This is exactly right. I’d extend the idea all the way out to its limit: Amazon should buy Qwikster from Netflix.
While this move would, to Netflix, be akin to selling Babe Ruth to your direct competitor for a few grand and a bag of balls, what other company out there understands shipping better than Amazon, has a built-in pipe for selling overstocked used discs of yesterday’s blockbuster movie, could seamlessly merge the “this isn’t available to stream, shall we ship it to you right now” experience, and, most importantly, has the leverage with the content owners to actually, you know, offer a lot of content from their streaming service? Clearly the answer ain’t Netflix. It’s Amazon, who can go to content-owners and say: “Do you really want Apple to dominate your pipeline to the consumer? We have the customers, data about those customers, and the access to them. Use us a leverage against Apple and we’ll give you a marginally richer cut in exchange.” Even in an era of increasing disintermediation, the Apple model shows quite strongly that if you pile up enough content that people want, it’s ultimately easier to sell from those fewer, larger silos. Nobody wants to search ten sites to figure out which has Transformers 18: This Time It’s Personal available to stream this week only to have said stream expire mid-movie because you had to pause it at an inopportune moment. In that model, T18:TTIP pirated torrents become king. And yet this is fairly precisely the situation we consumers and our content-overlords increasingly find ourselves in. The future is most definitely not 35 separate “Apps for that,” each of which has to be painstakingly consulted on movie night. There’s room for two, maybe three, giant content aggregators. As of today, I’d say one of them is pretty obviously Apple. The other sure seems likely to be Amazon; even more likely once they’ve sold a few million Kindle Fires. Hell, since Netflix likely won’t sell a direct competitor the keys to Quikster, Bezos should just buy both Quikster and Netflix, re-brand the sexily named “Amazon Instant Video” service Netflix and milk the Quikster “physical media” approach for as long as it makes sense to do so (as part of a broader package ultimately tied to Amazon Prime membership…which, of course, is mostly a deal-sweetening mechanism designed to drive unrelated sales for Amazon as a whole). As always: fewer choices for the consumer means more money for the provider; you draw them in with the enticing product or service, then completely empty their pockets on all the other stuff they hadn’t previously even thought of buying. It’s precisely Apple’s strategy, but attacked from the perspective of the content instead of the device.

Interesting point two:

Amazon is a data-driven company. I’ll bet the $40 premium [for a Kindle that never serves you “offers”] is based on how much money they expect to make from the ads they sell and products they promote via the special offers. Last year the special offer Kindle was only $25 less; the data must show that the special offers are worth more than $25 per Kindle to Amazon.

Taken together with the previous point, it’s clear that there’s potentially much, much more value in that premium. With Silk, Amazon will quickly have a huge dataset covering the browsing habits of their users. They already have a huge dataset on the buying habits of those users. In the user’s hand at the moment of the “offer” is a device purpose-built to grease the skids of said content purchase; just as easy to grease the skids for any kind of purchase once you know what the user wants or is looking for outside of the “content” world. And Amazon just so happens to sell that stuff, and will drop it on your doorstep quicker than seems possible with your annual Prime membership…which, oh yeah, you need because of all the content! Worth something to Amazon to be sure, but worth even more to the content owners and other potential advertisers who will presumably pay handsomely to get targeted sales…and Amazon will be able to show them exactly how well the campaign worked.
It’s simply not possible to do ad-word jiggery-pokery when an actual purchase (as opposed to a view) is the outcome metric. So I’d say it’s crystal clear that it’s in Amazon’s interest to gradually raise the heat on “offer-free” Kindles until, at some point Kindle purchases more closely resemble contract and contract-free purchases of mobile phones. That, I suppose, is when the ads start to intrude on the reading. But that’s a whole other post.

King of Content

It is as if the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was about to fall into the hands of Paul Wolfowitz. What happened?

Jonathan Chait contemplates the seemingly quite favorable strategic position Mitt Romney (suddenly?) finds himself in despite being an occasionally outspoken pro-choice Mormon tightly associated with Taxachusetts and “Romneycare” and yet working to curry favor from an increasingly lunatic “base” that seems quite willing to start Civil War II over any and all of those issues.

Most important MSM/Serious Person fact about Romney: he once strapped a dog, inside its carrier, to the top of the family truckster. So you know.

I know that admitting that Barack Obama is already the candidate of centrists’ dreams would be awkward, would make it hard to adopt the stance that both sides are equally at fault. But that is the truth.

Paul Krugman, commenting on the seemingly eternal font of “what we need is a mystical centrist third party to fix everything” pieces from the MSM.
What we have now is a right wing party, the GOP, and a center-right wing party, The Democrat. Obama ran as and is governing as a center-right technocrat… and still can’t get much done in the face of blanket GOP opposition.
Sadly, admitting to or even obliquely referencing this reality is an unforgivable heresy and likely as not to get you run out of Serious Person circles forever.
Source: The New York Times

Rick Perry: Constitutional Scholar

Q: The Constitution says that ‘the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.’ But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116 [of “Fed Up!”], you left ‘general welfare’ out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that ‘general welfare’ includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does ‘general welfare’ mean to you?

Rick Perry: I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term ‘general welfare’ in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

Q: So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by ‘general welfare’?

Rick Perry: I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

Q: But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

Rick Perry: [Silence.]

Q: OK. Moving on […]

You must R.E.M.ember this

MIKE: During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together. We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this–there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.

MICHAEL: A wise man once said–‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it. I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way. We have to thank all the people who helped us be R.E.M. for these 31 years; our deepest gratitude to those who allowed us to do this. It’s been amazing.

PETER: One of the things that was always so great about being in R.E.M. was the fact that the records and the songs we wrote meant as much to our fans as they did to us. It was, and still is, important to us to do right by you. Being a part of your lives has been an unbelievable gift. Thank you. Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis, and I walk away as great friends. I know I will be seeing them in the future, just as I know I will be seeing everyone who has followed us and supported us through the years. Even if it’s only in the vinyl aisle of your local record store, or standing at the back of the club: watching a group of 19 year olds trying to change the world.

…if you tax achievement, some of the achievers are going to pack it in. Again, let’s take me. My corporations employ scores of people. They depend on me to do what I do so they can make a nice salary. If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this. I like my job but there comes a point when taxation becomes oppressive.

Bill O’Reilly, considering his future employment options in some Obama-wrought hellscape. 50% top tax rate it is, then.
PS, Bill: Wikipedia has a fascinating entry on just how it is that marginal tax rates work. Surely a man with your tremendous job-creation skill-set (one that has led to the employment of four score and seven employees) can read and understand this. So you know: not actually half your income. Even if it happened. Which it won’t, since it’s a figure (like most you employ) that you pulled out of a falafel.
Source: mediamatters.org