On looting

Is there something fundamentally wrong with the brains of those working in the national media? How else can you explain these very highly paid individuals discussing, often in the same sentence, that people in Haiti have been without food or water for days, and then expressing shock and horror that there is “looting” going on.

Listen very carefully. I’ll take it slowly so even a Grade-A fucktard (or idiot man-child) can follow along: when you take food and water from a collapsed store, food and water that you need to survive, it’s not looting. It’s survival.
By this the media model, everyone should just die quietly right next to palette after palette of water and potted meat product. After all, that stuff doesn’t belong to me. I’ll just sit here and quietly dehydrate, thanks.

Looting, in the traditional sense, applies to a riot or, perhaps, a war. Amidst mayhem, you spot a Best Buy and say “fuck it, at least I’m getting a TV out of this” and you break in there and take it. That’s looting. Strangely enough, that sort of thing doesn’t appear to be high on the list of things happening in Haiti. Where there’s no electricity.

Let’s review:

  1. 50" flat screen TVs: looting
  2. Food and/or water: not so much. That’s called survival.

Fucking imbeciles.

I don’t think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that’s what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds? Answer: yes.

David Cross
(via alex ryking)
Source: azspot

True Story

Pat Robertson, fucktard:

[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.

Did Lord Jesus pass on the direct quote, Pat? Or is this tale in your special Director’s Cut Bible?

Again, one would hope that sooner or later even most Christians will get tired of this shit. Same island, and all that.

Inverted Pyramid Power

Robert Niles provides an absolutely essential bit of reading for anyone in the content-delivery world. Also known as “traditional” media (Yes, you. You are all in denial.), re: their efforts to invent new revenue models for their 19th century, dead-tree product line [emphasis added]:

You’re wasting your time. Please, stop. There is no new revenue model for journalism.

Done and done. In tweet length, no less. But no! Niles goes on to break it right on down into simple concepts for even the dimmest of bulbs. We are, after all, trying to get through to the likes of Rupert Murdoch here.

There are three ways – and only three ways – that publishers can make money from their content:

1. Direct purchases, such as subscriptions, copy sales and tickets
2. Advertising
3. Donations, including direct contributions and grant funding

Niles breaks down the first and potentially most important point using the basic economics of products you might see today in a bookstore, with emphasis on the relative price-points (e.g. papers are by far the cheapest thing in there and still aren’t selling):

Without a home-delivered hard copy, the commodity information available in most newspaper has no financial worth to most readers.

[…]

Because of this, no one is going to be able to craft a paid content model that elicits significant payment from more than a handful of readers for commodity news. And, despite what “proud parents” in the newsroom might think about their work, almost everything produced by all U.S. newspapers and broadcast newsrooms falls into that category.

Exactly. Why pay for “commodity information” that you can get on many phones? Your pay-walls won’t do a thing to stop that, either. Well, not a thing unless you count directing people to other sources and, worst-case, coercing them into learning how to use Pipes as a “thing.”
I’d extend this overall concept of economic value even further and say: without a home-device delivered copy, tuned to individual specifications, most newspaper-derived information has no inherent financial worth (incidentally, this is also why demographics are slowly and inevitably killing the Tonight Show). News can and will be gotten from anywhere. Again, publishers, you are selling your editorial judgment, not the actual content. Yes, the content had better be good, but I want to know what is critical to know, and not just the various bits of arcana and other nonsense that have simply been automatically included in papers since the 1950s because “that’s the way we do things.” I want to be able to go deep, instantly, on a subject of interest to me while still reaping a quick-hitting, broad view of the state of affairs on my block, in my state, in my country, in my hemisphere, and in the world. You’re not going to be able to have your own employees covering all those things, but you damned well better know how to leverage all the various individual sources that do, compile them, maybe add some value or viewpoint, and then present the best of it to me. Every second of every day, whenever and wherever I want it, whether as bullet point, abstract, or 50,000 word exegesis.

All that said, the thing somebody out there in charge of a major paper has really got to realize is this:

it’s time to take a hard look at the other side of the ledger, and work to find a publishing and production model that allows a news publication to live within its current income means. That’s where the real change will happen in news publishing

Modern journalism in the form of newspapers is entirely an ad printing concern. Subscriptions just pay to bring the paper to the door, not to print that which is brought. Everything about the current model is designed to maximize the capability to create and print a big package of paper ads with some interstitial articles in there (yes, and a little sex, too). This needs to change. The first publisher with a national reach (in terms of name and reputation) to divest itself from the print albatross and concentrate fully (or very nearly so) on providing flexibly deep coverage in a RSS-style, fully user-customizable package will win. Big. People want excellent, well packaged information and are willing to pay for it (witness Cook’s Illustrated, the only successful thing going in the print world today and entirely predicated on a fee for service model). You, the broader news media, provide those people with mediocre information and, generally speaking, inconvenience because of your colossal tunnel vision relative to “how things have always been” and how you get back to that model as soon as possible and forever. I’ve got news for you: always is over.

Metastasis

Simple Finder. It’s been around in one form or another since OS 7 or 8. Here’s what it looks like nowadays:

Remind you of anything? Starting to get some ideas about how the product line could be integrated by the iTablet? How such a device could be made to have just enough Mac in it to be useful while Macs could be made to have just enough iTablet and iPhone in them to be instantly understandable to a hoard of potential new users? How those users would be trained from the get-go to buy apps and other content through Apple/iTunes? How the “what it does” question could be instantly forgotten with a single stroke?

It’s a computing product. It occupies the space between an iPhone and an iBook. And it makes everything else around it fall into place.

It’s what’s coming. It’s what it does.

People of Earth

After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

This paragraph, amongst several in the letter, prove that Conan’s the most qualified man for the job he’s now going to leave (assuming, that is, that NBC doesn’t back off. They won’t.). Sad.

(via ryking)

People of Earth

Command and (Voice) Control

mrgan wants some new iPhone Voice Commands:

  • “What time is it?”
  • “Rate song three stars.”
  • “What’s the weather?”
  • “Notifications!” (“You have one unread message and two unread emails.”)
  • “Redial.”
  • “New voice memo…”

For all its vaunted software design, the iPhone is the victim of a few punishingly odd absences; for the record, I agree with all of these, especially time and song rating.

In other departments, I’d like to see a FrontRow style functionality in the phone/touch. Right now if your phone/touch is docked (and connected to a tv or stereo), you are limited to starting, stopping, and tracking through your music with the remote. Why in the name of all that’s holy is there not a dedicated interface such that you can look at pictures, play a movie, browse your music, look at YouTube (and etc…), and fifty other obvious niceties such an app could provide, all right there on the teevee and from the comfort of your couch. Apple? Seeing as you are the only company that can cross these sandbox lines, why in the hell haven’t you done this yet?

Likewise: Keynote. Why does Apple’s own doodad focus on using the iPhone as a glorified remote? Where is a straightforward way of presenting my slides from the phone/touch? As it stands now, I can bodge it with a custom movie…so long as I don’t mind timed transitions. And, let me tell you: I mind them. There is no reason on this Earth that a laptop need be required to deliver a 50 slide stack at any moment to some unsuspecting audience somewhere. None! That’s the whole point of the device. Isn’t it? Well, that and dropped phone calls.