Archive for the 'Craziness' category

Wasteful, Inefficient Government Ideas That Refuse To Die

Feb 08 2011 Published by under Craziness, Government, Travel, Waste

A new piece in Fast Company today highlights the Administration’s renewed push for high speed rail.

For those keeping score of wasteful, inefficient government ideas that refuse to die, back in April of 2009, Team Obama announced an $8 billion push for high speed rail.  I noted at the time the almost complete inability to go north by train.  I also noted the old adage that trains offer all the discomfort and cost of air travel, but in six times the time.

All of that still holds true.  The new plan still foresees a US population only concerned with lateral movement, and one that wants to pay top dollar for low value.

The one thing that changed is the price tag.  Now the government wants to spend $53 billion taxpayer dollars (a 6.5 fold increase in the cost) to subsidize a mode of travel that has never been profitable in the US.

That’s change we can believe in, and what counts as a commitment to responsible spending by the administration these days.

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Dumbest “Ditch Cable” Post Of All Time

Oct 17 2009 Published by under Craziness, Technology

Because of the day job, I am constantly reading blog posts and mainstream media articles focused on one thing – telling you how easy it is to ditch cable, and still get all the content you’re currently watching FOR FREE!

The answer is always incredibly simple. For instance, you can just get Netflix, and watch all those episodes of Entourage on DVD – six months or so after they air. You can go to Hulu and watch programs – except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of cable programs are either a) not on Hulu or b) on Hulu months after they air.

Now there is a point to be made here about why they call it pop “culture” and how there is a societal value to watching shows near the air date so you can engage in the social aspects of entertainment. But I’ll leave that point alone.

The really annoying part of these posts is the authors will invariably talk about the ease of getting cable content, then cite as their examples shows which are not cable programs.

The latest of these is TechCrunch. Now, I’m a geek, so I read TechCrunch a lot. Some of their content I’ll quibble with, but most of it is pretty good. This little item, though, is truly stupid.

John Biggs posits that he has come up with a great process for ditching cable:

I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks.

Sure, John, that’s super easy as long as you’re familiar with Usenet, binary newsreaders, and video transcoders. Super easy!

He goes on to explain that the content he’s pulling in is completely illegal:

It consists of two disparate parts. The first is a shady underground that can offer these shows, stripped of commercials, a few minutes after they’ve aired. How they do it is a topic for another story, but needless to say popular shows are available in less than ten minutes after they air on the Eastern Seaboard. It is a testament to the dedication of a few TV lovers that these shows are available, for free, as they happen.

It’s important to understand that unlike mp3s, television content is not easily ripped and not easily portable. Yes, the shady underground may currently be doing this, but the content owners are chasing it down.

But let’s assume all of this is easy, and the illegality won’t make you squirm, and let’s look at the shows John’s actually talking about here.

What I don’t see in that list is actual, cable content. There is a bunch of stuff from the UK, and a whole lot of broadcast content, but where is the cable content? If it’s that easy to ditch cable (and cable companies should be “skeered”) and given there are literally hundreds of cable channels, and only a few broadcast channels, why is a list of available illegal content skewed so heavily to broadcast.

So from the read of this, John Bigg’s has gone out of his way to come up with a way to steal broadcast content through an incredibly complex process that involves “a shady underground”.

So here’s my suggestion for John. If you want to watch TV as it airs (rather than “immediately after”) then go buy yourself an antenna. They’re lovely inventions that let you watch all the broadcast TV you want, and don’t involve scripting, HandBrake, or SABnzbd. If you want an option to timeshift that programming, invest in a Win-TV-HVR-950Q from Hauppage. It has a built in DVR, and picks up NTSC, ATSC, and clear QAM programming (broadcast, in other words). It’s plug and play, so again, no scripting.

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The RNC’s Health Care Bill of Rights?

Aug 24 2009 Published by under Craziness, Pandering, Politics, Republicans

WTF?

The RNC’s Health Care Bill of Rights for Seniors

Specifically distressing is the second point:

PROTECT MEDICARE AND NOT CUT IT IN THE NAME OF HEALTH CARE REFORM: President Obama and Congressional Democrats are promoting a government-run health care experiment that will cut over $500 billion from Medicare to be used to pay for their plan. Medicare should not be raided to pay for another entitlement.

Since when are we about “protecting” medicare? It’s a bloated program full of fraud and abuse. If we guarantee it won’t be “raided to pay for another entitlement”, we’re essentially demanding that government create two conflicting and somewhat duplicative health programs – both of which will likely be full of fraud and abuse.

To a cynic’s eye, this ‘proposal’ is the “let’s rile and confuse seniors so they’ll get even more flummoxed” plan. It’s disgusting to me that the party of small government is pushing a plan that would guarantee bureaucratic longevity simply to curry favor with seniors.

I’ve got a better idea for a plan. Why don’t we make the government fix Medicare and Medicaid – thus demonstrating they have a clue – before we let them create yet another program. If they can’t be fixed, then let’s figure out how to dismantle them.

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How Big Is Your… Detail?

Aug 07 2009 Published by under Congress, Craziness, Government

I commented earlier today on Twitter about this article. It seems the good folks in Congress have decided to vote themselves eight new planes – 4 Gulfstreams and 4 737s. This after bashing corporate CEOs for their “excesses” in traveling by private aircraft.

In response, I got the standard pushback that the costs for such things are reasonable because of the security details that travel with elected officials. I was specifically asked if CEOs travel with security.

I had similar discussions in the spring when the issue was $12 billion for new helicopters in the Marine One fleet. The President, to his credit, was at least smart enough to say, “I’ll make do with the old ones.” Congress has had no such thought. Instead, the Congressional plan to buy eight planes actually DOUBLES the costs and number of aircraft the Department of Defense had requested.

This strikes me as odd on three levels.

First, there is a size issue. The request included four 737s. These are not small planes. So we have to ask exactly how big these security details are. Do we really need planes that big to ferry them?

Second, I am guessing that many CEOs do travel with security, but I am guessing that most do not. As a stockholder, I’m of two minds on that. I would like to think that the CEO of a company I have invested in is protected from threats of kidnapping or assassination. I may count on that company to provide income in the form of dividends or retirement planning. It would be nice if that were safeguarded.

On the other hand, however, I appreciate that most CEOs understand that they are expendable. If something happened to them, there are a lot of people who could be brought in to fill that role.

This brings me to the last point. Most Members of Congress don’t share that understanding of their relative importance. And we as a people seem to condone their inflated sense of their place in the world. We make excuses for their excess because “they have to be protected”. Yet we must ask ourselves whether that’s really true.

Their jobs, by nature, are such that they can be replaced on a whim by us in regular intervals. A Representative, specifically, serves only two years at a time and can be fired by the public every 750 days. Yet they believe (and we allow them to believe) that they are critical to the function of our government. That they even have security details is absurd. You can argue that only certain Members in leadership have such protection, but their term of service is still at our pleasure. We, and the Constitution clearly feel we could do without them.

We coddle our elected officials. More specifically, we allow them to coddle themselves. Then we make excuses for their behavior because its easier than looking in the mirror and asking ourselves why we don’t throw them out when they get out of control.

We’re left with Congress deciding, contrary to the wishes of the Department of Defense, how many planes are appropriate and how much private access to aircraft they need.

Perhaps we need to rethink things and send a clear message by throwing out every Member who votes for these planes. They clearly believe they mean more to us than we think they do.

If we took away some of their perks, forced them to live like the common citizens they’re supposed to be, and specifically did away with security details designed to protect them from us, maybe they’d behave less like protected overlords and more like our representatives.

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Rob Pegoraro’s Right. He Doesn’t Get It.

Jun 25 2009 Published by under Cable, Craziness, Elections, Pop Culture, Programming, Television, The Internet

Since the day job launched a blog on telecom issues, I have confined my rants about such topics to that forum. This is a “gray area” kind of post. It’s not really policy related, but it touches on the Internet and video. I’m writing it here because it is not, in any way, the view of my employer.

At issue is a column by the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro about the recently announced TV Everywhere plan cable companies are pursuing. In his column Rob writes:

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you’d have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban’s defense of the idea. But I don’t get it. At all.

Well, my immediate thought is, “You’re right. You don’t get it.” But after that, words fail me.

First, Rob, this isn’t “a new batch of TV shows”. This is the content you’re already paying for, but you’re now allowed to view it online. In order to view Pay-TV online, you need to pay for Pay-TV. That’s sort of the whole point.

Pegoraro suggests that this is like requiring people to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post in order to take a college prep test course. Ummm… No. That’s not at all the same thing. TV everywhere is, however, the equivalent of saying, “If you want to eat your McDonald’s Happy Meal in the park, you still have to pay for the McDonald’s happy meal.”

Next, Pegoraro asserts that incredibly complicated things like “authentication” are way to difficult to comprehend or apply:

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person’s a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?)…

Ummm… How do you know if someone is a Gmail user or not? Well, Rob, they’re called “accounts”. When you subscribe, they create one. They come with something called an “account number” or a “user name” and a “password”. When you want to access your service online, you type (that big flat thing in front of your monitor is called a keyboard) those pieces of information into a form, click “submit” and voila! You are authenticated.

Pegoraro, again:

If somebody wants to watch video online, let ‘em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising–better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don’t force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

Sure, because the “ad-supported” model is working so well for broadcasters and newspapers. Even YouTube (ad supported video) is projected to lose between $175 million and $470 million this year. Even TV advertising is a failing venture because people are skipping the commercials. Hollywood has begun writing the commercials directly into the script to stave off that practice. NBC recently announced that Jay Leno’s show in the fall will be “DVR-proof” to force advertising on the public.

Do such actions seem like the tactics of a business model that works?

So let’s take a business model that works (a hybrid ad/subscriber model) and force it to pursue a failing business model because you want content for free – content that may cost millions per episode to produce.

As for the comment that you are forcing someone “to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service”, that’s still ridiculous no matter how many times you repeat it. This isn’t a non-Internet service. It’s the same service you already subscribe to, you just have more ways to consume it now. However, if you want to consume it, you have to subscribe.

Finally, Pegoraro suggests that media companies should simply give up and make all their media available for free:

Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill–with a broom.

Well, actually, Rob. Most cable content isn’t available online for free – even through bootleg. Some of the most popular shows on cable are HGTV’s design programs. I challenege you to go find a readily available bootleg source of them. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…

…

Back yet? What about ESPN sporting events? They’re all available for free elsewhere, right? No? What about NFL games? Surely the satellite guys give those away for free and you don’t need to subscribe to get the Sunday ticket, right? No? Hmmm… Well what about HBO’s programming. You can get Entourage episodes for free all over the net, right? Really? Only the old ones that have been released for sale well after the air date?

How can that be? How can people control such things? How can they possibly defeat the bootleg distribution of their work? Because they don’t make them available online for free? Perhaps.

The fact is, despite Rob’s characterization of Pay-TV as “easily-duplicated content”, it’s simply not true. Look at YouTube. The most popular video sharing site will disable the soundtrack to your video if the audio patterns in the file match copyrighted content. Sure. You could cruise BitTorrents looking for content. And many do. Those sites are constantly defending against their copyright violations and go out of business regardless of the legitimacy they claim (AllOfMP3.com, anyone?).

You can also find websites that show grainy, handicam captured versions of first-run films – often before they appear in theaters. But the quality sucks. Under Pegoraro’s theory, movie theaters should simply give up the fight and make all movies (regardless of the cost to produce and market them) open to the public at no cost on day one. Better yet, just close all the theaters and let people download the movies for free? Heck, the studio could easily make up those $30 million salaries and production budgets by displaying an ad for mortgage caluclators right along side the film, right?

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