New Blog Feed!
Posted 19 Oct 11
Some of you will have noticed that I’m no longer posting here. My commentary has moved over to the Mike Cooper webpage. If you’d like to continue receiving posts & updates — and I hope you do! — please follow one of these links:
The Mike Cooper subscription page, or
a direct link to the RSS feed.
Thanks!
This post indexed as: Uncategorized
Go-Cart 1.0
Posted 10 May 11
Last weekend we built our first go-cart.
(click photo for detail)
My main disappointment is the wheels, which were scavenged from an old stroller and aren’t really sturdy enough. The driver’s main complaint is the lack of a jet engine, which he seems to think should be standard on a vehicle like this.
We can upgrade the wheels, especially if someone throws away a jogging stroller in the neighborhood. The jet engine is going to take more work.
This post indexed as: Personal, Technology
NOW I’ll Get Some Work Done
Posted 03 May 11
The sixth coat of varnish has finally dried, and the new bench is finished.
First project: the children want to build go-carts. (The old-fashioned, gravity-powered kind — no gasoline motors!) Hopefully some neighbors will throw away another old stroller, or wagon, or something, so we can scavenge the wheels.
This post indexed as: Personal, Technology
The E-Book Wringer: Ads and Theft
Posted 22 Mar 11
Gee, when momentum shifts, it moves fast. A year ago e-pub was still marginal; now it’s stomping through the industry like Godzilla. E-book sales overtake mass-market and hardcover; Barry Eisler disdains $500K to self-publish his next books electronically. (Half a million. That’s fifteen times the median US income — for two books.)
But, with new frontiers come new challenges. And not just the pricing, even though one-fifth of all Kindle books are now priced under a dollar. No, the technology itself introduces new problems to worry about.
First, advertising. No surprise, I suppose, since every last dollar of innovation on the internet appears devoted to deeply intrusive methods of “personalized marketing.” E-books are greenfield territory, just begging for interstitials, promoted copy, and value-add links. The possibilities are vast. Straight banners, perhaps between chapters, with color and animation to liven up that drab black-on-white text. Context-sensitive sidebar ads (ALL-NEW BABY NAME GUIDE! next to “Call me Ishmael”; ROCKBOTTOM AIRFARE SPECIALS! next to “A screaming comes across the sky”). Subtle hypertext links to words within the text: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” could take you to a discount lightbulb seller. And so forth. Given what pass for standard business practices on the internet, I’m astonished we haven’t seen it already, but as the WSJ describes, marketers are desperately eager to start.
Lucky or attentive authors will have made sure a clause in their contract at least requires pre-approval for this sort of thing. Still, over time, I expect to see more and more of it anyway.
Second, swapping. Not piracy — which surprises me a little, since I long thought that a fundamental inability to enforce DRM (see: music “business”) would doom e-books to theft and exploitation. Sure, plenty of illegal sharing takes place, through freeloader websites, torrents, and even that relic of the ancient past, usenet. But the numbers aren’t that large, not relative to overall e-book distribution.
Swapping is different. Although practice and regulation are evolving, most e-book systems have some sort of sharing mechanism, so you can read a book on a different device, or let your husband have a look. Cheapskates have jumped all over this loophole, leading to the rise of sites like eBook Fling, where a 1:1 distribution mechanism enables people to trade e-books freely. Legal? Probably. Ethical? Come on, it’s basically stealing. And for something that might cost a dollar! Authors have always tolerated used-book sales, even though they make nothing on secondary-market commerce, because an increasingly tattered book won’t actually change hands that often. But digital copies remain pristine forever, and are forever one click away. Swap sites, which operate beyond the reach of DCMA takedown writs, are going to be a permanent irritation.
That said, I’m still optimistic. After all, these are rather small and pesky annoyances to deal with, and people will figure out how to overcome them. It merely makes the transition more interesting.
The real question is, what challenges and opportunities has everyone not thought of yet?
This post indexed as: Technology, Writing
Shipping Looks for Shark to Jump
Posted 14 Mar 11
Warren Buffet is making billions on his acquisition of the railroad BNSF. Carlyle Group, the private-equity colossus, apparently wants to do the same in ocean shipping. They’ve announced a $5 billion joint venture to buy and sell seagoing freighters.
Hmmm.
The partners in the venture are shipping veterans, with long experience in Asia, and the focus of the deal is, naturally, China. One analyst suggests two aspects to the business plan. First, the Chinese government has increased financing — loans — to domestic companies so they can buy their own ships, and Carlyle wants a piece of that action. Second, the economic collapse over the last two years has decimated European shippers (who overbought in the good times, then crash-and-burned when shipping volumes plummeted), and it looks like an arbitrage opportunity: buy ships cheap from desperate Greeks, sell them dear to eager Chinese.
Certainly shipbuilding is picking up. Maersk recently announced a $2bn deal with Daewoo for the ten largest container ships ever built. Even breakbulk shipping — cargoes like grain or scrap metal, which go into open holds not containers — seems to have turned a corner. The Baltic Dry Index is up nearly 50 percent from a recent trough (though it’s still far below lofty pre-crash heights).
On the other hand, shipping is a notoriously volatile business, mostly privately-held, caught in an apparently inescapable cycle: as economies grow, shipping volumes increase, leading to higher rates and increasing competition, leading to big orders for new ships — which all seem to be delivered just as the economies slow down, and the glut of capacity causes rates to crash, and everyone goes bankrupt. Then they start over. It’s worse than semiconductor manufacturing.
So is Carlyle buying in at just the right moment? Possibly. Or will they end up holding a fleet of unwanted, unsellable, capital-draining hulks? After all, nothing’s stopping those Chinese exporters from going to Rotterdam and buying ships themselves. They have the money; they can hire the talent. It’s not clear to me what Carlyle’s value-add is.
It will be interesting to watch this one play out.
This post indexed as: Finance
The Couch Potato Index: What’s Reading WORTH?
Posted 10 Mar 11
Lots of talk about the 99-cent e-book, lately. I could make a couple of really obvious points: first, it’s the very, very rare author who earns $500K at this price; most, especially those without first-mover advantage, will get (literally) pennies. Second, to me the question is not, should a novel cost the same as a song? — it’s, should a novel cost the same as a Three Musketeers bar?
But that’s a pointless argument. Let’s look at real data! What are comparable leisure activities actually worth to people? How much will they pay, in other words, for the e-book’s competitors?
Here’s the chart (click on it to get a larger version). A full explanation of the data is at the end of this post.
In fact, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Television, despite (or perhaps because of) how much time we spend watching, is valued most cheaply. Video games, befitting their status as the most immersive multi-media experience, are at the top. Books are in the middle.
Obviously, I’ve tried to select activities that are similar in how they’re pursued: usually sitting, in a comfortable chair, most often by oneself. Yes, yes, people can talk to each other while the tube is on; gaming is often multi-player; and texting is two-way communication. These are ROUGH comparisons 
Is a well-written novel, in whatever format, worth the same as an hour of texting? On a normalized basis, the one-buck e-book costs a typical reader $0.20/hour — far and away cheaper than anything on this chart. (And of course, the candy bar really costs something like $50/hour — not that you could actually eat one continuously for that length of time.)
I don’t know the answers, but this seems like an interesting way to look at the question.
Methodological note:
The average American watches 151 hours of TV per month; the avg monthly cable TV bill is now $133.43. A teenager sends (and, presumably, reads) an avg 3,3339 texts/month, at a typical cost of $30. The average mass-market novel cost $8.30; trade paper, $15.64; with an average length of 90,000 words and a typical American’s reading speed of 300 wpm. A print newspaper sells for a buck and people spend 25 minutes reading it. The average movie is 113.3 minutes long, with a theater ticket price of $7.50 (in 2009; with all the 3D films, it’s probably gone up since then). A first-release, AAA video game costs $50, and takes an average 9 hours to play. The chart is generated from simple arithmetic on these figures.
This post indexed as: Reading, Technology
Kroll
Posted 27 Feb 11
So Kroll, the famous corporate espionage — sorry, corporate intelligence — company, plans to start selling credit ratings. Does that make sense?
Certainly the big three ratings agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, S&P) have disgraced themselves over the years. Most obviously in the recent financial apocalypse, they blithely handed out stellar AAA ratings to mortgage bonds that later, and deservedly, became known as toxic waste — thereby helping inflate both the bubble and the subsequent crash.
The basic problem is that the agencies are paid by bond issuers, not buyers. This is so fundamental and unresolvable a conflict, you might be amazed people still give them any respect whatsoever. After all, would you buy a house at a price based on what the seller tells you it’s worth?
Kroll does not intend to break this model. It merely hopes that its reputation for ferreting out deeper secrets will convince bond buyers its ratings are superior.
Kroll itself is no stranger to controversy, mostly involving gray-zone activities on behalf of clients. If anything, a demonstrated willingness to press ethical boundaries in pursuit of a client’s aims should make one more wary, not less, of Kroll’s ratings. Again, Kroll’s clients are the sellers, not the buyers.
There’s a serious problem with the overall incentive structure, when it’s just not worth it for anyone to pay for truly objective analysis of securities before they’re sold.
This post indexed as: Finance, Intelligence
US Military Prepares An Army of Trolls
Posted 27 Feb 11
And not the dwarfish, bridge-dwelling kind. Raw Story reports that the Air Force is spending millions of dollars on “manipulation of social network media,” including the creation of “fake, digital people.”
Sort of like a botnet, with innumerable bots masquerading as actual persons — ready to leap into discussions, pushing net opinion one way or another.
Astroturf meme generation.
An interesting twist is that Ntrepid, the private company contracted for part of this project, has as its CTO the founder of Anonymizer – an early, pre-TOR service making it possible to surf the web without being tracked. I used Anonymizer myself, for a few months, before switching to TOR. But there’s a big difference between privacy protection and active propagandizing on behalf of a high bidder.
Sure, maybe these virtual battalions are only to be deployed against our enemies; although, as recent events have demonstrated, the good guys are usually the ones using FB and Twitter, not the ones trying to shut down or manipulate them.
Furthermore, the military has proven willing to target psy-ops against US Senators. Another example: a few years ago, political appointees in the Pentagon ran a program to
bypass the mainstream press by working directly with a carefully culled list of military analysts, bloggers, and others who [could] be counted on to parrot the Bush Administration’s line on national security issues.
Maybe they’re still at it, maybe not. And after all, the Pentagon is only doing what it’s supposed to: defeat the enemy, by any allowable means.
The problem hinges on those two words. Who’s the “enemy”? And what’s “allowable”?
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
SF Still Lives (Not That The Reviewers Seem to Know It)
Posted 26 Feb 11
Why can’t the MSM review science fiction properly — or even at all?
I had high hopes for the New York Times’ new “Science Fiction Chronicle,” which debuted last September. Jeff Vandermeer got off to a great start. But since then … nothing. Not a single column.
Then there’s the Wall Street Journal, whose new Review section also has an occasional column titled, in a stroke of originality, “Science Fiction Chronicle.” Today’s, written by Tom Shippey, reviews two books: a Poul Anderson anthology and IMAGINING MARS: A LITERARY HISTORY.
Anderson was writing before I was born, and he died ten years ago. IMAGINING MARS is criticism, but the most recent story it discusses — in the afterword, by the way — is from 2002 (Ian McDonald’s “The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars”).
Shippey’s other recent columns reviewed Robert E. Howard (CONAN, etc; Howard died 74 years ago) and Orson Scott Card, an SF grandmaster whose most famous book, ENDER’S GAME, was published in 1985.
I understand that SF, like romance, is just not going to get much attention from the heights. But why, when they do toss down an assignment, are the works reviewed so old?
Look at the current NYTBR: every book came out this year. (Bruce Chatwin’s letters were of course written years ago, but this is the first time they’ve been published.)
Does Michiko Kakutani have to reach back to, say, Jay McInerney, when she’s flipping through review copies?
Look, I read a lot of sci-fi in the 1970′s, when I was a high-schooler. (That’s what we called it, back then…) So, apparently, did reviewers like Tom Shippey. But there’s so much great stuff being written today! Why constantly rake over the Golden Age?
If we’re only going to get thirty column inches a year, at least devote them to writers who are still alive.
This post indexed as: Reading, Writing
Why Ray Davis Is In Stir
Posted 23 Feb 11
The best summary yet, from Jeff Stein:
“This is what comes of taking guys who are basically commandos and letting them play at being spooks. They think in the wrong way. They do not understand that spies are not supposed to fire their weapons, and, if they do, they are supposed to float away, not hang around to talk to the authorities.”
Absolutely.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military