Thoughts In Grey

AT&T Wireless a lesson for tech mergers

This one came as a result of a conversation with an old friend on Facebook, in which he notes that he's had no AT&T Wireless service all day on Manhattan's Upper East Side. As he notes:

AT&T Cell Service non-functional between 12 and 8PM at my building today due to a tower that has been degraded since December 30th. 30% of the AT&T 3G towers on the UES are also degraded. The bad AT&T service in NYC has nothing to do with iPhones overloading the network---it has to do with horrific maintenance of their 3G network.

My own belief is that it goes far beyond horrific maintenance, to something that's been percolating for years, since Cingular (owned primarily by SBC) merged with AT&T Wireless as a part of the overall takeover of AT&T by SBC. Though the combined entity took the "AT&T" name, it was really a takeover of AT&T, which had become a horrific mess over the course of many years.

I've had a theory for some time, which says an awful lot about tech mergers and how difficult they are to manage even years after they are "complete."

The current AT&T Wireless pretty much came together from the forced union of the "old" AT&T Wireless (TDMA, non-GSM technology) and Cingular (TDMA, GSM-based technology). From the executive suite, this merger probably looked like it made a lot of sense because the companies tended to be strong in different areas.

But the problem of different technologies forced them to choose, and they chose the Cingular/GSM technology which was better and had a more robust upgrade path. Again, it made sense. "Old" AT&T customers were migrated to new phones on the Cingular/GSM side of the house and infrastructure was slowly repurposed from one to the other. The old phones and network hardware became obsolete.

What I've noticed though, is that years down the road places like NYC and SF where the "old AT&T" was strong are still having problems. Places like LA, where Cingular was a dominant carrierseem to be doing fine. While I have no detailed information to support this, it's as if the places with lots of "old AT&T" facilities are still struggling to catch up.

I suspect it's a lot more than just the technology. "Old AT&T" didn't have a reputation for a great workforce or corporate culture, which is part of the reason they were swallowed up. There are probably many more internal reasons.

But to me, the facts on the ground (or in the airwaves) suggest that years later we are still seeing the effects of a merger that turned out to be a lot more complex than the guys at the top would have had us believe. It's a cautionary tale for anybody who believes the pretty stories about how easy its going to be to merge two technology giants.

-mg

Brief Notes

It's been a rough few weeks, dominated by difficult "family" situation.

• Clio being diagnosed with cancer seems to have cost me about two weeks of my life. As is always the case with me, the tough part was the 5-6 days during which we didn't know what was going on. Now the challenge is to find the best course going forward, for however long that may be.
• But going to use this as an opportunity to get back online.
• Can't really say I care much about the GM IPO today, except to note that Barry again has it right. It's what we should have done to the banks.
• My brother's been having fun in Tokyo. Check out Jon's Tokyo Diary.
• My new Mac has been really showing its colors as I slowly scan and start processing some of my old negatives, to recreate the stuff I once was able to do only in the darkroom with noxious chemicals.
• But it really does suck that Nikon no longer supports their film scanners on current Macs. I understand that some companies cant be bothered to writer drivers for newer operating systems. With consumer products, more often than not it just isn't worth the trouble, but these are professional photo equipment, used by their "best customers," and they've terminated support on the platform used by most professionals? The same professionals who Nikon wants to retain as customers for high-end photo gear of all sorts? Dumb.
  The ill-will this obviously generates (just check out the various messageboards discussing the topic) would have been worth the cost of writing a stupid driver. The reason I've stuck with Nikon cameras for so long is that they DO still support my photo equipment roughly back to the beginning of time! If that's no longer the policy, maybe I don't need to be quite so loyal?
• Was really looking forward to finally skiing this weekend, but looks like I'll have to hold off for a bit due to the cat craziness around here. Snow base still not all that great anyway.
• Perseid meteor shower tonight! Hoping some of these clouds go away.

-mg

I just bought an iPod nano -- the old one

My reason is actually simple. While the new iPod nano looks really nice and the touch-screen capability certainly cool, it lacks something I often want: tactile feel.

This is something that Apple has ignored in their rush towards touch-screen everything. For example, those of us who type seriously -- even just for email -- want to be able to feel the keyboard without having to look at it. Yes, even on a tablet-type device.

Those of us who use iPods in our cars want to be able to do basic stuff without looking at a graphics-intensive screen and taking our eyes off the road. This is one of the reasons I'm still using my 2nd generation nano even while I also have much of the same music on my iPhone. True, I still need to look at the nano screen to do some things, but for basics like advancing to the next track, being able to touch the clickwheel without looking at it is a major advantage.

Apple would probably reply that the new Shuffle does that nicely, and that's partially true. But the Shuffle is a pretty limiting device. It has only 2GB of capacity and no facility for docking it to my stereo, or for that matter even hooking it up to my car stereo (which has a USB port), let alone a "line out" connection for my stereo at home, all of which are places where I may at times want to hook it up.

My old 8GB nano is getting a bit long in the tooth and battery life isn't what it once was. I decided it's time to get a 16GB nano (previous version) to keep me going for a few more years. Eventually maybe I'll learn to control my iPod through the steering wheel-based car stereo controls, which I know is an option, but for now I'll still have my trusty clickwheel to run things without taking my eyes off the road.

Confessions of a Mac neophyte (part 1)

I'm not sure why it's taken so long for me to make this move, but I finally got a Mac today.

I've been watching the Mac world from afar for many years, especially as I've struggled to move my photography hobby out of the dark(room) ages and into the digital curent and future. I've felt stuck deep in the world of Windows and PCs while my more artistically inclined friends happily dumped the Microsoft world for the one dominated by Apple, Adobe and the others that are at the forefront of anything graphics and design related.

But alas, as a project manager in corporate environments, I had to worry more about things like running Microsoft Project, and the Visual Studio development environment that most of my clients needed. I had to care about being able to share documents and spreadsheets with the people I worked with. I needed to be able to easily connect my computer to somebody else's virtual private network in the middle of the night in order to make things right when they went wrong. All of these forced me to remain in the Windows world for a lot longer than I might have.

Many things have changed recently to make those issues matter less.

For starters, I have been moving my photography out of the dark ages and have felt hampered by the restrictions of my Windows workstation and it's small 20" screen. At the very least, it seemed that a new high quality monitor was going to be necessary. At worst, I was going to finally have to upgrade the computer, the operating system and everything else.

But beyond that, many of the things I needed to do with my computer in the past have diminished in importance. I'm still managing projects, but spend much less time with my head-down in MS Project than I was doing for a long time. Lately I've been closer to the action, more "in the stuff" and less "in the paperwork." It's been a fun change and one that's led me to question the need for a powerful workstation at home running those business apps. For recent projects I've been experimenting with Workspace.com, a really neat online suite of applications available on a pay-as-you go basis. It doesn't have all the features of MS Project, but I never used most of them either! The emerging world of cloud-based apps is going to make our platform of choice much less important than it has been. For me it already has.

Why Apple (and Intel) Failed. Why they'll succeed anyway.

Watching the iPhone 4 antenna flaw unfolding for several weeks really took me back.  It was an illustration of how difficult it can be for any company to notice or adjust correctly when large-scale changes are effecting their customer base and with it the expectations of their products.

I was at Intel (NasdaqGS: INTC) back in 1995 when we went through the cathartic moment remembered today as the Pentium FDIV Bug. Calling it a "bug" would almost overstate what it was. A small imperfection in a lookup table meant that some division operations that required accuracy beyond six decimal points would provide flawed results. Realistically, this did not have an effect on the vast majority of Pentium-based personal computer users. Even a relatively sophisticated guy like me never needed that level of precision. The guy who found it was a mathematician, others who had problems might have included astrophysicists and guys working on quantum mechanics.

Intel's reaction to the discovery of the flaw was no different than it had always been. The nature of the problem was published in the processor's "errata" sheet -- an obscure document that only users with the most demanding needs were aware of or consulted. Major software companies and PC assemblers were notified so that they could compensate for the problem in software/firmware if they deemed necessary. It was thought to be a non-issue.

What Intel hadn't coped with internally was that things had changed. The Pentium was their first truly branded product, and its release coincided with Microsoft's Windows 95. Windows 95 was also the first truly branded computer operating system, complete with a Rolling Stones soundtrack to accompany the launch commercials. In 1995, the PC business was becoming branded and "comsumerized" even as the companies that were driving the change had few people in them with any sort of a consumer perspective. Apple is in much the same position today. They're no longer a supplier to geeks who idolize Steve Jobs. They've got to look at things from a different perspective, just as Intel did when their moment of truth came.

The Tyranny of Moore's Law

Yesterday during the Oil Industry hearings on Capitol Hill, I saw one congresswoman make a statement that hit a nerve for me. She held up two photos, one was of the oil containment booms used during the Santa Barbara oil spill of the 1960s. Another was of the booms being used today in the Gulf of Mexico. Where, she asked, was there any kind of technical advance in oil containment and why had nothing been done in 40 years to address the problem?

It's a good question, and one for which the answer is most certainly complex. It's quite clear that there are lots of technologies out there that most of the oil companies haven't even bothered to explore that they probably should have, and equally clear that lots of improvisation is going on along the coastline despite the oil business' reluctance to try any such thing themselves.

But it's also a naive question, one that I believe is rooted in what Red Herring once referred to as "the Tyranny of Moore's Law." It's naive because the presumption is that there's always some better technology waiting in the wings, always some new quantum leap yet to come that will solve all our current problems and make a greater future possible, and that something 40 years old in general design must -- almost by definition -- be obsolete.

Moore's Law is the name for the observation by Intel (NasdaqGS: INTC) co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that could be manufactured on a microchip in an economically viable manner would roughly double every 18 months. It has pretty much held true since the observation was first made in 1965 and was the driving force behind most of the technological advances of the past half century. Companies that bet "against" Moore's Law at virtually every point in the past 45 years have been proven wrong, often catastrophically. Even those that survived were often forced out of the electronics business.

But Moore's law has had a major negative effect. It's lulled us into the incorrect belief that everything can and should advance at that kind of exponential pace, that given enough R&D, every business should be able to achieve the same kinds of cost reductions and product improvements that Intel and others in the semiconductor field have managed. In fact, it should be quite clear that the semiconductor industry is the exception. It's the only business in which advancements follow such a clear trajectory or such an exponential one. Everywhere else, things proceed along much less predictable and certainly non-exponential paths of advancement. Yet over the past 45 years, the belief in there always being some disruptively better technical solution for every problem has become so ingrained that it's usually not critically questioned. When Red Herring wrote about the problem in 2003, they spoke of it as a key cause of the Dotcom boom and bust: millions of would-be entrepreneurs applying Moore's Law rates of growth to businesses for which no such expectation was reasonable. Today, we're applying those same kinds of expectations to everything, including such labor-intensive tasks as oil recovery, health care and screening of airline passengers. Usually when we try to apply the technical lessons of Moore's law to other fields, we fail, often catastrophically.

Yet we hear this ingrained expectation everywhere, including on Capitol Hill yesterday. The presumption is that a device invented 40 years ago should necessarily have been replaced with something significantly different and better. Something exponentially better. But the science and technology of separating crude oil from salt water does not follow the trajectory of Moore's Law. It could be argued that there's no real good technology to replace floating booms for the purpose for which they were intended. They need to float, they need to be flexible, they need to be lightweight enough that huge quantities can be easily transported quickly to anyplace they're needed. Are they perfect? Certainly not. Should they be supplemented with other types of technologies? Certainly. Could those new solutions benefit from new computer technology too? Probably. (In fact, one of the major improvements in boom usage has been the employment of satellite imagery and other computer-enabled technologies to determine where and how to best deploy them.) Has the oil industry failed to put sufficient efforts behind those other supplemental technologies? Quite likely.

But are we likely to find a "quantum leap" type technology to replace booms? Something as lightweight, flexible and easily deployable while being much, much more effective? Personally I doubt it. Again, oil recovery doesn't follow the trajectory of Moore's Law, it follows some very old, very well understood laws of physics. As Scotty often told Captain Kirk, we can't change those. At best, we can use the physics and chemistry in new devices, at worst, we can't do much else.

Most technologies don't follow Moore's Law. Cars are largely unchanged in the past 50 years or longer. Put my grandfather the bus driver (who passed in the 1930s) behind the wheel of a modern vehicle and most of it would seem pretty familiar to him, right down to maintenance items like changing the oil, filling it up with gas or putting air in the tires. There have been slow incremental improvements, but fewer than you might think: most of the big advances in vehicles are the result of better automation and electronics -- they too were driven by Moore's Law. Look around at virtually everything in our world and you'll see stuff that mostly hasn't changed much, or where the changes were driven by better electronics. Technologies that don't utilize electronics or aren't highly-dependent on computerization haven't changed a whole lot.

My bike is similar in operation to the one I had in grade school. Better materials technology, better design and better machining have made it lighter, stronger and given it a lot more gears. However, it seems that basic mechanics was pretty-well developed 35 years ago. Moore's Law-driven technologies have certainly contributed to the improvements (mostly through computer aided design and manufacturing), but there was no quantum leap. I could not ride cross country a whole lot more easily today than I could when I did my first long tour at age 16. The most efficient cooling device in my home -- a modern ceiling fan -- would be easily recognizable by my grandmother: put her 1940s model side-by-side with my 2010 model and you'd need an engineer to point out the ways in which the current one is better.

This is part of the driving force behind the current economic malaise around the world. The problems of the past 30 years and were mostly solved with computerization and application of better electronics, which have also driven new growth in new industries. The exponential improvements in computer technology has resulted in second and third order improvements in everything else. As available computing power has continued to grow beyond most people's ability to use it, we are running headlong into problems that are not so easily solved. More advanced electronics can make gasoline-based cars more efficient, more luxurious, even more fun, but they won't help us replace the internal combustion engine with something independent of fossil fuels, at best they'll be a second-order enabler of whatever new drive technology we need to invent. Likewise, we're not going to solve our healthcare cost crisis by hoping that advanced technology will result in a Moore's Law style exponential decline in costs. There is no evidence to suggest that such a thing is possible, let alone likely, yet I still hear those who suggest that high costs for care can be cured by just unleashing Silicon Valley technologies.

It's time for us to look beyond Moore's Law and the kind of exponential growth it has driven in a limited number of industries. Moore's Law is not the norm, it's the exception. 40 years ago flexible booms were designed within a set of limitations that drove the best design possible. Other than some materials technology improvements, they mostly look the same today and they're likely to look much the same in another 40 years because the design limitation are unlikely to change much. 40 years ago healthcare was people-intensive and thus unlikely to benefit much from economies of scale in the way electronics do, and the same is likely to be true 40 years from now. Properly screening airline passengers is always going to be people-intensive, as it is in Tel-Aviv, regardless of how many "revolutionary" technologies GE (NYSE: GE) and Rapiscan (NasdaqGM: OSIS) convince us to spend money on. In fact, most things in 40 years are not likely to look all that different. It's time we stopped pretending computer technology solves all problems, or that everything can be improved at Moore's Law's exponential rate.

-mg

Less "connections." Better understanding.

Last week, when Whitney Tilson sent a link to this article in the New York Times around I was both interested and somewhat horrified. As I read through it, I kept thinking "sounds a lot like me." Or at least it sounds like where I was a couple of months ago.

As readers of this blog have probably noticed, and my friends in the real world certainly have, I decided about a month ago to start backing off some of the online "sharing" I've allowed to take over increasingly large chunks of my time. I decided to read more. worry less about being "linked" to others, especially in cases where that "linkage" seemed to generate no real benefit to myself, just a lot of distraction.

What's interesting is that I did all these things before reading that set of articles or doing the tests associated with them. Something in my brain was telling at me -- arguably had been screaming at me -- that my life had gone in a bad direction. Reading those articles has redoubled my concern with what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. I'm now avoiding email, Facebook and all the rest on weekends. I suspect my waistline will benefit. I'm again reading more and even watching a few more Netflix movies rather than hopping around between three screens on my desktop. (I've actually got one of them more or less turned off permanently.) My twitter feed has been whittled down to those tags and authors whose information is not merely amusing, but which has actually proven to be regularly useful.

It's a bit hard to tell, but so far the experiment in disconnection is paying off. In fact, the real impact is that I'm connected more in ways that matter and less so in the ways that don't. Not having my phone with me at all times means I'm actually having useful conversations that get into complex issues. Not wasting my time constantly checking Twitter, Facebook and email feeds means I get to focus in on complex problems and solve them. My trading -- however limited -- is better than it was a couple of months ago. Not surprising since I'm not finding myself in constant "data paralysis" that makes sane decision making and risk management impossible.

Taking this step has also changed my view about what I'm looking for in work, and in life in general. For months I've been feeling like all I want to do is escape. Getting away from people (and the electronic tether) has been my primary source of joy. I've sought out those ski days on the back side of Snowbird and up at Alta, because those are the places where cellphone coverage sucks and digital data services are all but nonexistent. As I've limited my use, I've found myself less concerned with getting away. I get away by focusing on stuff that's right here. No need to find a mountaintop somewhere where nobody can find me.

I know for certain (as if there were ever much doubt) that I need work that allows focus, not to mention some time for myself to deal with problems without lots of interruption, but as I've been limiting meaningless interruption and "connection" I've paradoxically felt less and less like I need to be fully isolated. I just need to be able to isolate myself and to force myself to avoid unnecessary and productivity-reducing disruption.

Few people are good multitaskers and while we all want to claim to be in that special 3% of "supertaskers" most of us are most certainly not. In fact, if the tests accompanying those New York Times articles are at all accurate, it would seem that I'm great at focus, great at getting things right (in the "switching" test at right, I got every single one right), but not so great at quickly switching my focus and not surprisingly I tend to get frustrated when forced to do so frequently.

Looking at this also served to explain why I find myself less and less interested in what technology is about anymore. When I got into technology, I understood that there was a combination of stress and accomplishment that went along with it. But in recent years the focus has changed to the aspects of tech that are stressors to me: newer and better ways to interrupt my concentration and focus, more shiny things to dazzle me with and take me away from the things that are important. Less really interesting and complex problems to solve.

Interesting to note that Tilson, through whom I originally heard of this article and these tests, scored similarly. Perhaps because value investors like himself tend to need to focus in on analysis and detailed understanding of the companies they invest in, and thus the very nature of his field tends to attract individuals like him and myself who have precisely that skill set and temperament.

I don't think there's anything that should be surprising in all this, and I don't think the technologies will or should go away. As noted, I started realizing something was wrong long before I saw these articles. Clearly though, all of us need to be careful about how we use these technologies and how much we organize our lives around them. As with most tools, misuse tends to result in problems and we should avoid that, regardless of what the various individuals with vested interests continue to tell us. Sometimes, "connection" matters a lot less than real understanding and engagement.

mg

Brief Notes

Slow going here:

• I like this image, courtesy of my friend Hazel-Grace. Wondering what I should change, and whether it's one thing or a whole bunch of them?
    
• Was awakened from rather poor sleep at about 2am by an earthquake. Another hit just a couple of hours ago. Apparently quite a few have been taking place on the same fault just offshore.
   
• Being woken up at 2am didn't help my attitude throughout the day.
   
• This report about the impact of technology on our brains is pretty interesting, I'll have more about it later.
   
• Got another voter registration card today and dropped the Democratic Party registration. As noted before, I don't recall ever registering with that party (or any other) to begin with and suspect the reason lies with incompetence or possibly maliciousness at the county clerk's offices. I just really don't want more junk mail or annoying phone calls from washed-up celebrities.
    
• Clio is not liking the new low-carb food quite as much as the old and is eating less. This is probably a good thing.
   
• I'm beginning to wonder if we're ever going to see the sun again on this side of town.

mg

Weekend notes

• The report on The Age of Denial in New Scientist is fascinating. Thanks to Barry for passing it along.
   
• One of the most common misconceptions echoed in some of the comments is that if something is false, it will be dis-proven and by extension, everything that can't be dis-proven is fact. This is the veneer that many deniers of various sorts cling to. In fact many, probably most, statements can't be proven true or false. Say I told you there is intelligent life on Venus. Prove me right OR wrong. You can't. What if I made the same statement about the U.S. Congress? You'd still be hard pressed either way.
   
• Yesterday I commented about junk mail. Today the junk phone has started in earnest, with a robocall from mostly-forgotten bloated actor and activist Ed Asner. I wonder who is really that desperate? (I didn't stay on the line long enough to find out.) Ed Asner? He's supposed to be the voice that will influence somebody in 2010?
   
• I realize that due to a quirk in law, my participation in the "no call" list run by the FTC doesn't restrict political parties, campaigns and some other "special" groups. But it doesn't prohibit them from honoring it if they choose to and it would probably behoove them to choose to. Calling people who have clearly expressed an interest in not being called is only going to piss us off. There is no more certain way of ensuring that I won't support you than hitting me with a "junk call."
  
  As Coach Wooden once said: "Consider the rights of others before your own feelings and the feelings of others before your own rights." These robocallers may have the right, but would do well to consider my feelings on the matter first.
  
  
• My brother's garbage disposal jammed on broken glass and could not be revived. We replaced it with a simple drain that also opened up lots of extra storage space under the sink. What's so difficult about just tossing stuff in the trash can anyway?
   
• My experiment with Foursquare is over. I have been still playing around a bit since my last comment on the matter and it was interesting to try, but until I see some utility to it -- either because my friends are on there or they build in new capabilities that provide capabilities that are interesting -- I'd rather spend my time and bandwidth on other things. For now I've killed the app on my iPhone and moved on.
   
• My brother's going to both Europe and Asia this summer. From a currency perspective, it's the best time in years. But somehow I'm not particularly drawn to either. Too many trails I haven't ridden and rivers I haven't run, and they're all just a few hours from home.
   
• Lazy Sunday. Cleaning up a bit.

mg

Bandwidth use pricing? It's high time.

So today AT&T (NYSE: T) has finally told us what was probably inevitable. The offering of unlimited bandwidth to everybody was not working out well and it's going to be phased out.

As an existing iPhone user, I was a bit put off. True, I'd be able to keep my unlimited bandwidth for $30 for as long as I own this phone, but I know that in time I'll want to replace it and then things will change. By the time that happens, Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL) may offer me an alternative network, hopefully Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless , but I'm not counting on it.

But I did a little checking. Looking at the meter on my phone, I note that I've done about 1.3GB of downloads in the life of the phone, and barely 300MB of uploads the phone was replaced about 9 months ago. Checking my bills online, I saw that there has not been a single month in which I exceeded 200MB of use. This means that I'd be able to continue using no more than I already am and cut my cost from the current $30 unlimited use to the new "basic" level at $15 for 200MB. If I prefer not to "cut it close" and maybe allow me to see some streaming video now and then, I could still drop to the 2GB plan at $25 per month. That would allow me to increase my use tenfold and still not get hit with additional fees.

Now at the end of the day, I'm sitting here thinking "Thank you AT&T, you're going to save me money."

I don't think this ends here though. AT&T has just put out a template for what pricing is likely to look like in the future for all bandwidth providers, whether wired or wireless. The basic plan will be very reasonably priced and most likely will suit the needs of 65% of the population, more or less one standard deviation off the mean. The "heavy user" plan will extend available bandwidth to cover the needs of all but the top 2-3% of the population, or more or less all but those who are two standard deviations above the mean. I expect that over time as bandwidth availability increases along with use, we will see the bandwidth providers move the caps upwards while keeping the general scheme in place.

The top 2-3% will lose their subsidy and will be forced to pay progressively more for the bandwidth they consume. The rest of us will be allowed to stop subsidizing them. Bad for those who can't survive without endless streaming video on their phones, good for the rest of us who have been providing the subsidy.

This is how it should be. As I've noted before, I hate having to subsidize others through my subscriptions. I don't like it when it's the cable company forcing me to pay big fees for packages including ESPN and local TV channels that I don't watch or want, and I don't like it when it's the wireless company making me pay $30 a month when I'm using only a fraction of the bandwidth of some others paying the same price.

And there may be the added benefit of forcing some of LA's worst drivers into finally getting off their Blackberries and iPhones and paying attention to the road.

mg

Brief Notes

A few new thoughts, a few follow-ups on things I've written about before.

• This article in the LA Times neatly sums up a lot of the reasons I think Foursquare has pretty limited appeal in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on when I wrote about it. Even if you could get all my friends and venues on the service, it would be of limited use given the local logistics. Of course, the effect is circular: nobody's on it because it's of limited use, which makes it even less appealling and therefore less useful.
   
• Is Facebook really going to adjust in a meaningful way? Actions will tell, as I don't at this point trust their words. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, combining granular controls with easy controls is not impossible, as others have done it. The most important thing I take from this is their concession that giving me an easy way to block all third-party sharing of data is a feature that is desired. After all, even my bank gives me this option (not as easy to exercise as it should be, but it's there as a matter of law), and so do the credit agencies for a nominal fee.
  
  In fact, I think this could be a source of income: want a completely free Facebook? Give up some degree of info to get it. Want complete privacy? Pay a fee for the service. This idea actually lets the market work things out, as it lets a customer know what Facebook thinks the ability to share your information is worth and you can make a fair economic judgement about how you choose to pay for the service: directly or indirectly. This isn't all that different from allowing paid subscribers to not be subject to popups and other annoyances.
   
• Strippers Declare Inflation Dead! Business headline writers need to have fun too.
   
• Though, on that note, an old neighbor who moonlights as a "gentlemen's entertainer" tells me that even in the usually impervious Westside L.A. market, demand for her "services" is extremely slow these days.
   
• Transparent ratings are the kind of thing my friend Dennis at Institutional Risk Analytics has been promoting for some time. I'm not sure if Bloomberg's move into this business is good for him, but it certainly is good for us. Removing the importance given to the incompetents at the big ratings agencies would be a plus for everybody except those who are in on the sleazy "AAA" rated deals.
   
• One of the more interesting things I've read recently is a piece by Charles Gave, forwarded by John Maudlin. I won't reproduce copyrighted stuff here, but the upshot of the commentary is that the European crisis is a good thing, as it'll end the severe mis-allocations of capital that went along with the notion of a "single Europe." As he notes, ending the mis-allocation of capital into places like Greece is no different from ending the severe mis-allocation of capital into Miami condos that we experienced. Eventually the crisis forces us to start doing the right thing. The downside from my perspective? There's a lot of pain to be felt before the positive benefits of capital reallocation are realized.
   
• Spring has sprung, though it apparently snowed in the mountains here last night as well as in my "home" mountains outside of Salt Lake. Sadly, I think I'm done with skiing for the year. Might change my mind if Memorial Day plans fall through though.
   
• My best advice for energy efficiency in warmer climates? A simple ceiling fan. I just replaced mine yesterday after more than five years of good service. The new one is super-efficient, quiet and drops the temperature in the place 5-10 degrees. Been putting my money where my mouth is: installed one in each room for my brother and having them put into mom's place in Manhattan during her renovation.
   
• I've been grilling lots of lean meats and veggies. Because I'm on a diet? Well, a bit. Mostly because now that the weather is nice, it's pleasant to grill and the grill is so much easier to clean than the kitchen.

Now, if only the wind would calm down a bit so I could get the kayak out for the first time this spring.

mg

Some more on Foursquare

[Note that a previous entry on this topic has been deleted, as some of my criticisms have been resolved and some others turn out to be inaccurate, though it took a lot of searching to find the resolutions.]

I've played with Foursquare a bit since my last comment, and have decided that for now I'm done with it. Will not be cancelling my account, but just don't see much utility in continuing to play at this point.

There are lots of reasons for this including the wrong venue locations, horrible customer service, inability to get locations corrected, etc. But the core reason is that none of my friends are on it, none of them are especially interested in it, and none of the places I regularly hang out care about it at all.

To some degree it's generational, but also location and outlook, I suspect. Nothing could have crystallized the problem for me more than the fact that I "won" the "Far Far Away" badge after checking in a few places this past weekend. Foursquare, of course, doesn't actually tell you what you have to do to win the various badges, but there are some online listings that private individuals have come up with. Most of them suggested that the badge is won for checking in outside city limits. That didn't work. What did? Three checkins above 59th St. in Manhattan. Yup, those of us who don't live downtown or in Brooklyn are "far, far, away" according to the people who run Foursquare. Thanks assholes. You've confirmed your status as a bunch of useless faux-hipsters who think you're too good for the rest of the world. Did one of you send this text message too?

My personal feelings about this aside, it's just tough for me to use this in a way that is useful and beneficial to me. I'm not getting any benefits from my regular venues because they seem to exist primarily at other types of venues: coffee houses and cheap restaurants or bars, especially the impersonal chains that don't get to know their customers and/or have rules against rewarding them appropriately except as part of an organized campaign vetted by lawyers and marketing types. The places I hang out at most aren't especially looking for lots of checkins, they'd be a lot happier with a smaller number of high-dollar checkins, but Foursquare doesn't measure that. I am getting lots of frustration from not being able to check in at the places that I go to often because of mapping problems. A few weeks ago, up at Snowbird, I didn't even try. Why bother when you know the locations are all off the map, aren't getting corrected even when you report them, and the checkins won't work? And of course, my friends aren't on it.

So for now, my account's still there and I'll be watching how they're doing because the whole notion of location-based apps interests me, but for now the utility is nonexistent. I suspect that the technology will either be bought or reproduced by somebody like Facebook or Twitter. It would make a lot more sense if it were fully integrated into just about any other social networking platform.

mg

[The Foursquare logo is property of Foursquare,
used under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.]

 

Thinking About FourSquare

On my friend Nigel's recommendation, I've been experimenting with Foursquare for a few days. He and some others think it's the "next big thing," Based on my initial impression, I have my doubts and a number of thoughts about how it can become better.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Foursquare is a social networking utility that allows you to check in at local establishments, post your location to your FaceBook and Twitter feeds. (Out of respect for all my friends whose feeds are already full of stuff they don't care about, I've declined to do this).

I first became aware of it due to the clutter it was creating in my Facebook feed, which led me to quickly block the application from posting anything there. Realistically, I don't much care about where a couple of friends of mine, most of whom are elsewhere in the world, have "checked in" in the past few minutes. In fact, I don't much care where most of the people in my immediate neighborhood are unless I'm trying to avoid them, but that's probably just me.

As you check in in different places you accumulate points and "badges" for various things. If you are the most frequent visitor to an establishment, you are declared the "mayor" and reputedly some places are giving the "mayor" special benefits.

A Taxing Change of Paradigm

Amazon and Colorado are in a bit of a tiff over sales taxes. Colorado wants Amazon to either collect sales taxes or report them for purchases by everybody in Colorado. They'd also like reporting about payments to amazon affiliates and everybody else who might earn a bit of money from Amazon.

This is likely to be coming soon to New York, California and many other states as well.

The problem is a simple one: While states have the right to assess sales taxes on anything delivered to a buyer in the state, they have no jurisdiction to demand that an out-of-state seller actually collect the tax on their behalf. And with the proliferation of small online sellers -- including many who sell through Amazon, Google, eBay and others -- it's tougher and tougher to police this. State officials believe they're losing a lot of sales tax income because while they're entitled to collect the tax, it's not practical to track bill each individual purchaser for each out-of-state purchase.

Amazon has responded to Colorado's new law by cutting off all Amazon affiliates in the state. As noted earlier in the Huffington Post, this is more likely a matter of bringing political pressure than anything else.

But whatever the political maneuvering, the dispute is just the tip of the iceberg, indicating a much, much greater problem lurking below and increasingly undermining our entire tax system.

Again, the Solution is Obvious

They're at it again.

Once again, they're trying to pretend that the battle between network affiliates, other local TV stations and the cable companies that deliver their content to most households has to do with anything more than strong-arming the American public into padding their profits and buying content we don't want.

As I've noted before, there's a really simple way to resolve these conflicts, whether they're between Fox and Time Warner, ABC and Cablevision, or anybody else.

Stop demanding that we buy "packages" of stations in a way that subsidizes content we don't want and elimiates any ability to really vote with our wallets about what content we do want and what we're willing to pay for it. Want to save me money Cablevision? (Or Time Warner?) Easy. Let me opt out of all the expensive stations that I never watch. That'll save approximately $4 a month (or so I'm told) on ESPN because I never watch sports. Probably a few bucks for the local independents and their incessant Seinfeld reruns. Probably would drop the network affiliates too, as network programming is completly worthless. In fact, I'd probably drop all the "Broadcast Basic" stations that I never watch and which represent much of the "baseline" product I am forced to buy before I buy anything else.

It'll save me money, it'll deliver the content I want and it will allow the marketplace to work, because nobody will need to debate, discuss or argue about what consumers are willing to pay for any network. We'll vote with our wallets and you'll know how much or how little we value your product.

Roll Over, Get Tough, or Sell Me What I Want?

Like many Time Warner Cable subscribers, I spent the weeks ahead of the New Year hearing that I had two choices in my cable rates. I could either back Time Warner in "getting tough" with the local Fox affiliates, or I could "roll over" and submit to the higher fees for programming that Fox was demanding.

This is another place where the truth is in the "grey area" between the two warring parties. The truth is that the real value for the Fox programming would become evident if I were actually allowed to vote on what programming I want to receive and pay for. I can state with 100% confidence that my expense for Fox local affiliates in that scenario would be absolutely zero, because I would not pay a penny for the schlock that is offered on most local broadcast TV, or most cable TV networks for that matter. [Nothing personal to my friends at Fox, except that this time they were the ones involved. I'm equally indifferent to the other three broadcast networks and their useless programming.]

The resolution, predictably, was a "fair" deal, the details of which they won't disclose, which will inevitably mean my rates go up. In the end, despite the hoopla, the only real issue on the table was which of these corporate behemoths gets which share. We won't get better programming, we won't get better service and we won't get the choice of telling them "take those awful networks and shove them."

But that's the one thing that both of these business organizations are unwilling to even consider, despite the fact that it's what most of the customers would like.