jawfish

A Simple Proposal to Save the News: Subscribe the Screen
john posted in politics & culture, technologies on May 4th, 2009

Update: May 6, 2009
The new Kindle is out and its not much larger. The NYT article isays they are offering a version of what I proposed before:

“…Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would begin offering devices this summer at a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

Since the new Kindle is very expensive at $489 list, I doubt this meets the necessary price point, but I’ll be looking at the deal as a way to supplement the fast- evaporating LA Times.

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By now everybody knows about the rapid closing, or downsizing of American newspapers. My own LA Times subscription has roughly 50% fewer ads by weight, and a lot fewer pages of all kinds. Sam Zell bought the parent company Tribune Corp using way too much debt – have we heard this story before? – let many prime reporters go, cut whole sections, and it’s obvious ad sales are way down.

The discussion about what to do about the death of newspapers has been marked by futile hand wringing from obsolete newspaper people, and silly statements from the internet Pollyannas, with a few interesting experiments in hyper-local news coming online. But it comes down to the fact that reporters and editors need to be paid , and so news organizations need a revenue stream.

On the hardware side, newsprint will be replaced by something. Laptops, iPhones ( yes, really) , and desktops, are not comfortable for sitting around reading, especially for the over 40 set who actually read newspapers. The technical problem is the screen. Size, weight, resolution, power need, and color are all issues to be solved. In the small formats, like the Kindle and Sony eReader, the E Ink screen is said to be quite good, but lacks size, and color. Large format screens like your desktop suffer from weight, power, portability, and illumination issues. Laptops fall into the barely good enough for a work-around category. News reports have been saying that larger color versions of the E Ink screen will solve the hardware problem. And today stories appeared saying just such a screen is near delivery, and deals are being made with newspapers ( see references below).

Stretched Kindle Image by Gizmodo

Selling the new screen will not solve the news organizations’ revenue problem, even if they get some of the profit from screen sales, which is doubtful. Until and if ad revenue fills the gap, they need subscription sales to fund the business, and likely thereafter. The Wall St Journal and Bloomberg have had some success at selling content, but few if any other services have attracted subscribers. (and Bloomberg uses dedicated terminals)

Proposed: Subscribe the Screen

News organizations could rent you a reader, as cable companies do now with set-tops and DVRs. Twenty to forty dollars a month should be quite a nice sum over three years hardware lifetime say, and subscribers would be tied, but not locked-in, to the supplier, in the way they are tied to cable companies. Subscribers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck with an unusable reader, or repairs. Because they would have hardware and software control, news orgs could figure out the marketing balance of exclusive content ( perhaps lasting 24 hours) vs free internet. Obvious tie-ins would be available like click-through ads to generate more revenue. There are many angles to be worked out in this model, but the elegance of it is that it removes the two essential problems: the initial cost hurdle of the $300+ readers and reinstates control over content distribution ( like the Bloomberg terminal), yet leaves an open platform that can be upgraded. Additional services can be tested later in the market because the basic platform would be there, and generating income.

Less Appealing Alternatives:
Google and the other companies with major internet ad revenue could set aside some percentage of their take for a non-profit AP-like version of NPR and PBS, without government support, or corporate interference. Or we could have a BBC, funded by a tax on devices. Or we could have ad-funded internet sites and flabby TV news as we do now, with virtually no local coverage (hooray! say the local pols until they realize “no coverage” means invisibility) and reality-show news aimed at the ninth-grade set.

What Amazon May Be Planning:
The Kindle costs over $300 and requires a monthly subscription, and creates a locked-in market for Amazon e-book sales. If Amazon lowered the initial cost for the new large-format reader to compete with monthly newspaper subscription costs, they undoubtedly would get a huge customer response. But if this is Amazon’s model, it won’t feed the reporters who create the content. In effect it feeds the weakest link in the delivery system, the aggregator, where the actual value is created by the device maker and the content provider. It is being reported that News Corp, Hearst and Plastic Logic are also planning to market large-format readers soon, so we might see multiple strategies.

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References:
Wired- Will Anybody Buy The Large Format Kindle?
eWeek- Bigger Kindle May Debut
Ars technica – Amazon Ahead of Competitors
Wired – Comparison of readers

What’s AIG Cost so Far? An Entire Electric Transport Industry, That’s What.
john posted in politics & culture, rides, technologies on April 7th, 2009

It’s way too easy to pick on AIG, and the unfathomable amount of taxpayer dollars that have been flushed down it. The story is, of course, more complex, in that both Bush and Obama administrations have been afraid to push over the first domino in what they fear could be a total banking collapse by.sending AIG to the landfill.

So count this as gallows humor.

AIG has been given roughly $185 billion.

Zero electric motorcycles announced today that they are selling a street legal version of their electric dirt bike at about $10,000 less a ten percent federal tax credit.

Zero street legal lithium-powered supermotard

Tesla automobiles has already sold a few of their all-electric high-performance sports cars at about $100k.

Tesla electric roadster

If we had used the money from the AIG bailout to actually support American companies that make things, it could have funded:

9,250,000 Zero electric motorcycles or equivalent.

(Honda sold about 15 million units world-wide in 2008. All makers sold about 1 million motorcycles and scooters in the US in 2008.)

Plus,

925,000 Tesla cars.

(BMW sold about 1.4 million cars in 2008 world-wide.)

So with one bailout package we could have created an American motorcycle company selling electric bikes as the second-largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. And we could have jump-started an all-electric car manufacturer to nearly two thirds the size of BMW. Not to mention establishing a dominating presence in the clean transportation industry of tomorrow.

Somehow I’m not laughing all the way to the bank.

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references:
motorcycle sales
Zero
Tesla
AIG bailout

Corrosion, Infrastructure Entropy and NPV Accounting
john posted in politics & culture, technologies on March 24th, 2009

Another really good post at The Oil Drum ( TOD). This time on corrosion of oil and gas infrastructure. Sounds utterly boring, but in fact the discussion quickly spirals into:

Accounting methods which shortsightedly neglect maintenance across all types of private infrastructure, causing future breakdowns and vast repair costs.
The declining maintenance and investment curve of oil companies as they see increasing taxation, and reduced assets into the future.
A nasty interaction between fluctuating oil prices, supply, credit, and infrastructure maintenance.
Yet another example of simplistic free-market economics failing to handle long-term community issues.

Clump it altogether under Peak Oil, and the interrelationship of a pessimistic oil future ( POV: oil companies), unpredictable supply vs demand and hence price, plus a crashing world economy, the general failure of political institutions to plan for the future, and the complete failure of macro-economics to guide us though this change from an oil economy to some other energy source(s).

Unlike almost all other Web2.0 sites, the comments are a must-read. In an area ripe for conspiracy theorists, actual oil industry engineers weigh in. Just like grown-ups. Imagine!

by sicasu

My comments: Just yesterday articles ran on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill pointing out that Exxon still runs the same type of tanker today. If Exxon thinks that a fresh fleet of tankers won’t be have enough oil in future to carry to full amortization, then this makes a lot of financial sense for them, but not for us. In fairness to the oil companies, their supplies outside the developed world are more and more being controlled by governments, including China, their distribution and sales in the developed world are likely to be squeezed harder and harder by various carbon taxes and environmental rules, and the two great growth markets, China and India, are closed or government controlled. Yet they sell an absolutely essential product, one that will remain essential for decades. Perhaps just knowing it will all come to an end in their childrens’ lifetime is enough to deflate them a bit.

One point rarely covered in the economic press, but with almost daily comment on The Oil Drum, is the connection between the end of the petroleum economy (Peak Oil) and our current financial meltdown. Failure to plan our energy infrastructure worldwide is central to our current crisis. Later on we will be hit with the costs of global warming, and right now we have to spend immense sums to retool for more sustainable energy sources. The few billion allocated in Obama’s first budget is just a trickle of what’s to come.

If Reagan had not been elected to wipe out the nascent Carter-era sustainable energy subsidies, we in America might be 10 or 20 years ahead of our current situation. If Bush had not wasted eight years… but that’s all the past now.

Clever Google Images Trick
john posted in technologies on March 24th, 2009

If you search on some item with a color name, Google will return images with that color as a prominent part.

try
“motorcycle=red”
“chair=brown”

here’s more information from Google.
They say “(you can replace “red” with “blue”, “green”, “teal”, “purple”, “yellow”, “orange”, “pink”, “white”, “gray”, “black” and “brown”)”

Messing with the URL also works, and produces different results:

http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red

If I was the only person who didn’t know this, so be it.

The Case for the Four Day Work Weekcomment
admin posted in politics & culture, technologies on January 30th, 2009

- a sacrifice we can easily make.

Listening to NPR today ask a pundit about the proposed shut-down of Saturday mail service, I went through the usual 3 steps of techno-guy reaction.
First I sneered at snail mail. Second, I questioned the value of Saturday mail and mail delivery in general. Third I thought of one entity that would be hurt, the biggest single user of the US Mail, Netflix.

But then it hit me: ending Saturday mail delivery will save one sixth of the greenhouse gases and nasty pollution and fuel use and depreciation caused by that huge fleet of mail trucks. It might also have a tiny, but measurable effect on traffic, which would also save a little pollution and fuel. Plus all those workers won’t be commuting, and those long-haul trucks won’t be delivering to the distribution centers.

Then I thought: what if all non-retail non-essential business shut down on Saturday, wouldn’t that have the same positive result, only much larger?

Last I realized that the very best way to do this is just have a voluntary 4 day work week. Sure, some large segment of the economy can’t do this, but I bet the majority of firms could. We could run the stock exchanges 4 days, the government offices 4 days, office workers could go 4 days. It doesn’t need to be enacted into law, that’s too rigid and inefficient. But here’s a chance to ask for a nationwide sacrifice that might actually have personal benefits, like more time with children, more time to help others, more time to learn new skills. More time for relaxing would itself pay dividends. Employers would save money on energy, at least.

Victory gardens and war bonds may come later in this down cycle, but for now, I think a four-day work week would be a good idea.

here are three of thousands of sites that have also suggested it:
MotherJones on a 4 day school plan
Utah tries it
a blog discusses the ramifications