MattMaroon.com

So it’s official; Blu-ray has won the format war over HD DVD. No surprise.

About a year and a half ago, I gave a friend a stock tip, telling him to short Sony, then pick it up later. My logic was that the PS3 would be a flop, but even so, it would sell far more units than all HD DVD players combined, giving them the critical edge in the format war and earning Sony their first big win in media formats. They’ve had a long history of flops in that field (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, etc.) and were finally looking like they were going to win one. And having a winning media format used to be worth a fortune.

I figured the market would react first to the PS3 debacle, and then later their shares would jump when they took a clear lead with Blu-ray. My friend didn’t take my advice, and I had too much money tied up in other things to do so myself.

I turned out to be right about the first half. In fact, I was more correct than I thought. Not only did the PS3 suck far more than I expected (I never guessed that I’d see units on the shelf in Best Buy right after New Year’s) but Sony also got hammered by a massive laptop battery recall. The stock dropped about 25%.

But I think I got the second part wrong. They won the format war, but I’m pretty sure that the days of media formats are limited, and maybe over. Their stock price has gone up about 10% since credible rumors of Toshiba dropping the HD DVD format surfaced, which makes me think that a lot of people feel the same.

Now that I think about it, it seems Blu-ray won for a combination of two reasons. One was the PS3, and the other was consumer apathy. People really don’t care about a high def media format, so the one that made its way into only a tiny percentage of American homes beat the one that got into virtually zero. That’s not really a win for Sony, it’s a loss for media formats in general.

It makes sense when you think about it. More than half of American homes don’t even have a single HDTV yet, and that number isn’t skyrocketing. And most HDTVs in homes now don’t have the HDMI ports necessary for full-on 1080p viewing. Right now only home theater nuts will find Blu-ray to be significantly better than what they’re used to, while everyone will find it to be significantly more expensive.

And by the time that changes, in a few years, it’s questionable how much media people will buy. Video On Demand and iTunes style services are making inroads, and I have to think that will continue indefinitely. True, a high definition movie from iTunes isn’t as good as a Blu-ray film in full 1080p, but most people won’t care. An overly-compressed 720p movie will be good enough for 95% of the population.

People buy movies now because they want to watch them multiple times, on demand. I personally own one DVD, because there’s only one movie that I sometimes suddenly feel like re-watching without having to drive to Blockbuster or wait a few days to get from Netflix. The number of DVD sales (largely but not entirely driven by the rental industry) tells me that a lot of people own more than one, but how often do they watch each of those movies?

When you can rent one for $5 without leaving your living room, and a Blu-ray disc costs $25, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that it’s far less economical to buy than to rent. I can’t imagine very many people watch a movie more than five times in their life, except for maybe the few that are perennially replayed on TV (Shawshank Redemption, A Christmas Story, etc.).

The exception would seem to be children’s movies. Parents use them as digital pacifiers, and kids can watch the same movie every day for years. I don’t really understand why, but it’s most certainly true. Kids also don’t know or care about the difference between standard definition and 720p, because marketing departments haven’t figured out how to explain lines of resolution and frames per second to a four year old yet.

So I don’t really see any high definition format taking off the way DVDs did. I agree with Mark Cuban that last-mile bandwidth won’t be sufficient in the near future to replace the current television distribution system. People won’t be streaming football games in high def for decades. But Americans spend a lot less time watching movies than they do television, and given that you only need to give a high def iTunes rental 5 minutes to buffer before you can start watching, the end bandwidth is already there.

I can’t even guess what mass movie downloading would do to the internet’s overall structure, but I’m sure it will adapt. One way or another, total bandwidth will keep up, since it’s a service people are paying for. To put it in Ted Stevens speak, they’ll add more tubes to the series. The money will be there to do so.

So congratulations to Sony on a pyrrhic victory.

TechCrunch today touched on the real reason I’m personally endorsing Obama for president. It isn’t mainly his inspirational ability, though I think that’s an underrated quality in a leader, especially in tough times, which these certainly are. It’s his stance on technology issues, and specifically net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the most underrepresented issue right now, and certainly one of the most important. Sadly, I’m not sure any of the other candidates truly understand what it means. Even the Senators who are essentially in charge of regulating the Internet say things like:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

This is who is controlling the flow of information in our country. People who don’t even know the difference between an email and the Internet, let alone understand how either of them work, are in charge of the most important force in the history of humanity. That’s not only unacceptable, it’s incredibly dangerous.

The Internet is so massively integrated into our lives now that it’s hard for many of us to remember life before it, and most people first experienced it less than a decade ago. It’s influencing more and more of our everyday lives each year. It’s aiding in globalization, and might is beginning to chip away at oppressive regimes in countries like China. It’s probably the most significant invention since the printing press.

Because the Internet is, and for the foreseeable future will be, delivered by wires, telcos and cable operators have monopolies or duopolies in most of our country. Wireless that truly competes with today’s broadband won’t be here for a while. And in the mean time, allowing a couple corporations in each market to have that much control would be a disaster.

Government has long regulated natural monopolies, and the Internet certainly is one. Maybe in some deregulated future multiple ISPs will share the same cable and phone lines, as power companies often do, and the free market will ensure a neutral Internet, but we’re nowhere near that now, and it’s just too much to risk.

Net neutrality is one of the reasons I never could get behind Ron Paul. I’m pretty libertarian, but I still believe the government has to do some things, and regulating natural monopolies is one of them. And the Internet is so massively important to our economy and the future of our democracy that it needs all the protection it can get.

So I’ve been predicting for a few months that Barack Obama will be our next president. I became of that opinion after I saw him on Letterman last spring. The interview wasn’t anything substantive really, so my opinion wasn’t due to anything he said, and it still isn’t because what politicians say doesn’t really seem to have much effect on their success in elections. It’s more how they say it, and Obama does that better than anyone.

Since then I’ve talked to or read blogs written by people who’ve seen the man speak every so often, and they all refer to the experience the same way someone who saw Martin Luther King might. They’re practically hypnotized when they talk about it, even the ones who don’t agree with his stances. In fact, just the fact that they mention the experience of seeing him speak, rather than what it is he said, shows his aptitude.

And when you look back through modern history and start naming great leaders, pretty much the only common thread is their incredible communication skill. Especially since the advent of television almost all powerful men were great speakers. Guys like MLK, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Reagan. They all had that power to put words together in such a way that even if they really said nothing of substance, or maybe even said something you disagreed with, you found yourself cheering, not for what they stood for, but for them.

And that’s Obama. He can talk for an hour, say nothing, and people will nod their heads. That’s the most valuable skill in politics. And, without even knowing what he believed or having the slightest clue what he intended to do if elected, that was enough to convince me that he would be. Not that he should, but that he would.

I even tried to get some money on intrade to try to bet on him when his shares were trading below 20, but I couldn’t get any of my credit cards through, as is often the case on gambling sites. I was planning on betting a grand, which would have returned me about $4,000 in profit as of today. Damn I hate the UIGEA.

So the Iowa results were unsurprising to me, though at the same time, I didn’t really take them as confirmation of anything. Hell, Mike Huckabee won too, and I think he has zero chance, though that may just be wishful thinking on my part. If I thought that I lived in a country where he may one day be president I’d lie awake every night shaking in fear.

I’ve taken what I’ve seen from him since as more evidence though. His victory speech has had an incredible response on the net and in the mainstream media. The amount of links to it I’ve seen in blogs from various niches, even ones which rarely if ever wax political, has been amazing.

I’ve only recently come to an actual opinion on Obama’s stances myself, and for the most part I like the guy. I’ll talk more about individual issues later, but I think the only issue I strongly disagree with him on is government funded health care, but I guess I’m just too libertarian at heart to have faith in the government’s ability to succeed at such a large undertaking.

And what I like best about him is his technological bent. He’s pro science (especially stem cells), and, most importantly, fiercely in favor of net neutrality, which I think is one of the most important economic and civil issues our country has faced in a very long time. (I actually feel that nothing short of an Amendment will suffice there.)

After him I like Clinton (and I’m speaking in terms of chance of winning only, not personal opinion). Edwards is just too hypocritical. He’s ultra-wealthy, yet markets himself almost entirely to the poor. He’s too liberal for the general public and a terrible campaigner.

On the Republican side I like McCain. I think he’s working on a comeback. A year and a half ago I thought he had the presidency locked up, provided Gore didn’t run, but he spent a good twelve months or so shooting himself in the foot. His flip-flopping on torture and support of Bush on the Iraq war have taken a huge toll on his public image, and I think the damage has been too much for him to actually win the Presidency, but he might get to the finals.

Giuliani is going to have a tough time due to all of the skeletons in his closet, and McCain’s experience campaigning, but he’s still a pretty close second due to the nation’s perception of his strong leadership after 9/11.

I like Romney a bit on a personal level, as I trust anyone who made that much money himself to at least act rationally, but I think his being a Mormon makes him unelectable. That’s only one rung below Scientologist on the crazy ladder to most people. Your mythology has to be at least a millennia old before it is socially acceptable, so maybe in another 700 or so years one of his kind can win. Luckily for him the business world isn’t as prejudiced.

So that’s my rundown. It will be interesting to see what happens in New Hampshire and beyond.

 

 

 

Neat article in Newsweek about whether or not money buys happiness. While I don’t totally disagree with its conclusions, I also don’t totally agree with them, and I definitely don’t agree with their methodology.

They measured people’s happiness by asking them, on a scale of 1-10, how happy they are. That’s probably the worst method possible. People have no more ability to judge their own happiness than they do their own looks, or their ability to drive. Hell, if you want to do a fun experiment I invented long ago, go around and ask people to merely define happiness. Pretty much everyone starts stammering.

I definitely believe that money must have declining marginal utility. Having been through it, I can say that going from a negative income to a positive one is a pretty big jump, and getting to the point where money ceases to be a concern is a smaller but still noticeable increase as well. And I can only posit that both are far larger than the happiness gained by an increase from a few million in the bank to a few billion.

But I’d still wager that, by any objective measure, your average billionaire is a little happier than your average millionaire. If not, they would simply give away money until they were just a millionaire (who just gave a ridiculously large sum to the needy, which certainly has to make one feel better than a millionaire who didn’t) and you never see any of them do that.

The fact that guys like Bill Gates often give massive amounts to charity (him more than most of course) would seem to indicate that the indirect joy of making life better for others greatly outweighs the joy of having a few extra billion dollars. But the fact that none of them ever do so to the point of poverty, or even to the point of mere upper middle classness, would seem to indicate that there is some nontrivial amount of happiness in that extra money.

A much better methodology would be to find some objective measures of happiness and then compare. For instance, do a survey to see if rich people are less likely to take anti-depressants than the middle class. That particular one is probably bad measure, since they’re more able to afford that sort of thing, but there has to be some such quantifiable, objective metric or group of metrics that is much more accurate than asking people how happy they are.

A friend introduced me to YubNub today. At first I installed the plugin into Firefox and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Want to search Google Images for Britney Spears? Just type “gim britney spears”. Amazon for a screwdriver? “am screwdriver”. It is, as it says, a command line for the web.

But I quickly ran into a couple usability problems. For one, there’s no customizability. The command “a” takes me to answers.com. I never, ever want to go to that site. Who the hell does? It’s like Wikipedia for retards. I do, however, visit Amazon daily. According to compete.com Amazon has over 4 times the traffic of Answers. Shouldn’t “a” default there?

Second, anyone can create a command, presumably as long as the command’s key combo doesn’t exist. This is both good (in that pretty much any site you’d want to use is covered) and bad in that a lot of three letter words are taken. That’s a problem because the default command, if you don’t use one, is to Google for whatever you type into the box. That’s good because 95% of the time you use that box, it’s for Google.

But after installing YubNub weird things start happening. For instance type in “Rad Rails”. Turns out rad is the command for the weather channel. So you now have to type in “g rad rails” just to Google for it. In maybe twenty queries something like this happened to me three times, and since I hadn’t wanted to query anything but Google on any of them, and each time cost me a few clicks, it was a large amount of wasted effort.

The biggest problem though is that it’s useless. Most of the things you’d search for you can just find easily on Google anyway. For instance when my friend Russ was showing it to us, he wanted to demonstrate it by searching IMDB for Last Action Hero, which was just “i last action hero”. But if you just Google for Last Action Hero what’s number 1 on the list? The IMDB entry. I imagine that’s true for almost any movie you’d ever want to search for.

In fact, I find that to be the case with almost any search. If I want to find something on Wikipedia, it’s almost always the first entry on Google. So if, instead of YubNub, someone just made a plugin that made a hotkey for doing an I’m Feeling Lucky search in the box that’s already there, it would save tons of clicks relative to YubNub, and even a few to just the Google box that’s already there.

Can someone make that please?

Unscientific arguments in favor of MySpace:

1. I signed up for MySpace, searched for people from my high school, found at least 20 (out of a class of under 100). Same search on Facebook turned up 4. Every friend I’ve talked to has had similar experiences.
2. People always say stupid things like “most MySpace accounts are spam”. Here’s a picture of my inbox, which hasn’t been touched in a month:

   

   There’s definitely some spam there, in fact, that’s all there is since I don’t really use the site. You can see that every message (including one from 4 days ago) but the latest one (which came in a couple hours before I took the picture) comes from a profile that MySpace has since shut down. It seems virtually unlikely that, if MySpace is that good at shutting down spammers, any significant number of active accounts are spam.

3. The top 3 apps on Facebook are Top Friends, FunWall, and Super Wall, all of which merely replicate MySpace functionality. Top Friends has 2.8 million users.
4. Another complaint people have about comparing users is that tons of comedians, rock stars, actors, individual movies, businesses, TV shows, and other pop culture organizations have MySpace accounts and will be your friend. Lots of them use it as a blog and promote it at their shows, and many of them aren’t real people. You might argue this has no value, and that you don’t want to friend people you don’t know, and therefore they shouldn’t count. I totally agree about the first part, but millions of donkeys actually do want to be Dane Cook’s virtual buddy, or have Snakes on a Plane show up in their top friends list. They might not be actual people or friends, but they definitely count.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate MySpace and actually use Facebook. I like it much better for about 100 different reasons. But I’m in the minority and always will be. I’ve also never spent a cent on Facebook or clicked an ad, and can’t think of any reason why I’d be compelled to do either in the future. On that I’m in the vast majority and always will be.

It’s no Google.

The most interesting thing to me about the Michael Vick case is the widespread discourse on the topic of animal cruelty it has engendered, which is the first of its kind that I can remember. Sports publications and blogs have been buzzing about the story since its inception, but the conversation has hit a feverish pitch with the mainstream attention following his announcement that he’ll be pleading guilty on Monday.

It’s not uncommon to see statements like Daniel Negreanu‘s, wishing things upon Vick like “having these killer dogs that he was involved with breeding and fighting, rip his arms and legs to shreds. He deserves it. He seriously deserves to suffer.” Statements like that, which are pretty easy to find right now, make me realize how little thought most of us have put into animal cruelty.

When it comes to animal cruelty, everybody draws the line somewhere. It’s interesting to see where that line is. For instance, do you think Daniel, who goes on to say “One thing that’s rarely talked about, though, is speciesism. Humans can be really nasty. Just because we ‘can’ we often take advantage of, and abuse power in very inhumane ways.” would wish the same punishment on people who swatted a fly? Would he wish they be crushed by a falling building or the like?

If not (and most sane people who agree with him about Vick probably wouldn’t) why shouldn’t he? Flies are animals too. Why do dogs have more intrinsic value? Because they’re cuter? Is it ok to kill ugly animals? Or is it a size issue? Or maybe it’s about vertebrate. Either way, to value one species over another (in this case dogs over flies) is the very definition of speciesism, and we all do it.

I don’t know Daniel well, and hell, maybe he literally wouldn’t harm a flea. I’m just using him as an example since I happen to read his blog and his sentiments seem to match those of a lot of people these days. And, as always, I think it’s important to see things from every angle, which in this case means recognizing that almost everyone commits countless acts of animal cruelty.

Anyone who drives a car kills and/or maims dozens of animals throughout their lives. Over one million vertebrates are estimated to be killed each day by American motorists. That’s almost one and a half living, breathing animals that feel pain and emotions like fear or hunger (and maybe even love) just like we do, per driver per year.

So just by driving, you’re drawing a line somewhere. You’re saying that you’re willing to kill birds and squirrels just so you can get around. You might think it’s significantly less awful than what Michael Vick did, and I’d agree with you, but you should be cognizant of the fact that you are committing acts of animal cruelty for your own convenience.

By eating meat, or dairy, you’re also drawing a line. There’s a hell of a lot of cruelty in that process, and you’re contributing to it. Sadly the same is even true of vegetables, the harvesting of which with heavy machinery causes the accidental deaths of millions of wild animals. In fact a study has shown that a vegan diet actually kills more animals than certain types of carnivorous diets would. So if you’re buying your food, you’re committing animal cruelty.

By owning a pet you’re supporting an industry rife with cruelty. How many dogs are put down every year? How many fish are starved to death in pet stores? How many small reptiles or rodents die in transport? If you own a pet, you’re committing animal cruelty and drawing that line.

The fact is we all draw it somewhere. It’s a part of life and has been since the first human descended from the trees. It’s important to remember that when we talk about Michael Vick. It’s important to be cognizant of our own acts of animal cruelty, and to stop pretending that the fact that we are ignorant about how many squirrels we run over or how many chickens we ate had their beaks cut off and lived in a tiny box their entire life means we aren’t guilty of it too. Unless you’re a substance farmer living off the grid somewhere, you are.

Of course, I’m not trying to equate eating meat to torturing animals for amusement. They’re very different things. But they’re both animal cruelty. I would have thought a few months ago that electrocuting dogs was far beyond most of our lines, which seems to be drawn somewhere between convenience and sadism. But it turns out that a lot more people than we all might have guessed think differently. Making dogs (and I would assume some other animals as well) fight to the death is more popular in our country than those of us above the Mason-Dixon might have thought.

So if someone’s line is drawn in a different place than ours, and apparently a lot of them are, how much do we really have a right to be offended? What if they grew up somewhere where everyone’s line was pretty far from the one we’d like to believe Americans as a whole have chosen? Can we still be as mad as we would if they came from our community?

When it comes to drawing lines, most of us tend to do so in the same place our parents or our friends did, who in turn drew theirs the same way. There’s a pretty good chance Michael Vick went to his first dog fight with his father. There’s a pretty good chance that his friends and family saw nothing wrong with it, and saw torturing dogs in much the same light that you see running over a rabbit on your way to work. And there’s a pretty good chance that Vick came to see it the same way. Of course, that doesn’t make it right, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should simply allow it to continue, but it does mean that maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to throw stones.

I don’t know exactly what should come of this particular case, and I’m a dog lover and an animal nut in general, so I’m not in the best position to judge this particular case. Looking at it emotionally, I’d side with Negreanu. But I do know that when you’re cognizant of the fact that you too have a line, and you too commit acts of animal cruelty on a very frequent basis, it’s hard to be as judgmental as you might otherwise have been.

Today as a lark I visited a site I remembered from many years back, when I was trying to save the world from what I thought would be another disastrous 4 years of the Bush administration by telling all 18 people who read my blog to vote for someone else. The site, which is still without a doubt my favorite URL of all time, is johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com. Take a look at what’s there now.

Chris: What’s a library, dad?
Peter: Oh, it’s just a place where homeless people come to shave and go BM.
-Family Guy

Freakonomics asked the question yesterday “who could possibly hate libraries?” My question is “who could possibly not hate libraries?” There’s nothing likeable about them. They’re crowded. They’re full of smelly homeless people. They smell like a dead rabbit with a body odor problem. They’re basically a giant subway car that goes nowhere, but with books full of things you either don’t care about or could find on Yahoo.

It’s hard to find the things you want, in the rare instances that they even have them. There are public computers everywhere with random perverts looking at porn and touching themselves. And, worst of all, they’re full of used books, which are pretty much my least favorite thing on earth. They paper cut you every chance they get, and any of them over a year old have picked up that stale vomit smell that comes from thousands of random people putting their greasy, filthy hands (and god knows what other body parts) all over them. I can’t really think anything that makes me want a tetanus vaccination more than a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in any public library.

Amazon and Google are probably my two favorite websites, and the reason I love both of them is that they combine to ensure that I never, ever have to go to one of those god-forsaken hell holes again.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, perhaps America’s most notorious hatemonger, has passed away. Lest we be tempted to eulogize, as we so often are in times like these, I offer the following quote about 9/11:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America,” he said. “I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’ ”

This man did more to make America a worse place to live for a large portion of its population than perhaps any in recent history. And he made Tinky Winky cry. I’m pretty sure that if there is a God, right now Jerry’s finding out just how badly he misinterpreted His message.