Author: Aaron Weber

Portfolio

My blogshares portfolio includes shares in RandomWalks, Not So Soft, and Follow Me Here.

You can’t buy shares in my blog because it is worthless. Until it gets worthful, it won’t be listed on the exchange. To gain worth it needs to get links from blogs listed on weblogs.com. As I mentioned earlier, inbound links determine worth, and worth determines the value of outbound links. The more popular you are, and especially the more the popular kids like you, the more you’re worth, just like in junior high. Remind me again why I care?

Room Temperature

One of the first things that Daria and I found that we had in common was that we both liked Nicholson Baker. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he’d gone to our college. I hadn’t read all of his stuff, and for some reason never got around to reading a favorite of hers, Room Temperature, until this week. It’s about a man giving his infant daughter a bottle and his thoughts of love and intimacy. There’s this whole part about how he was living in Boston and visiting her at school near Philadelphia, and it talks about the appreciation of style and color he learned from her and helping her decorate her apartment in Ardmore. He goes over all their pet names, their arguments, their desire to know what the other is thinking and understand the other, the paths of action and decision and chance that brought them together and kept them there.

Obviously, I’ve given up about twenty pages in.

Whirl Mart, Mall Wart

Last month, there was this really laudatory Fortune article about Wal*Mart, pointing out how it has lowered prices and brought competition to every area it could, shrinking the margins of every competitor and benefiting even the consumers who hate it.

Of course, when a band or fashion trend gets that kind of coverage from a major magazine, I assume it’s on the way out. I don’t know as much about business, though. News coverage for the company points to flailing competitors and an open field to become a trillion dollar firm. It can get larger and it probably will.

A lot of people say they dislike Wal*Mart because it’s a big-box, sprawl-based, homogenizing merchandiser. But I think it’s because it’s got what Fortune calls a “downhome twang.” I argue with people who dislike Starbucks — are you opposed to it because it’s bad, or because you prefer your version of cafe culture? Starbucks makes pretty good coffee, they offer organic and fair-trade coffee, and it’s a pretty good place to work. Now, Wal*Mart has fewer of those plusses, and it really is a bad place to work: low pay, no unions, no employee power, allegations of unpaid overtime. Still, it’s got one major advantage over any other store: it’s cheaper.

It’s the bottom line that matters most to the most people, and that vast majority is the Wal*Mart customer base. That’s what makes the company so big. Fortune points out a few tidbits of bigness: its annual loss through theft, incorporated as a business, would be a Fortune 1000 company. It is the largest employer in 21 states. It has more employees than the Army. It is the largest customer for a huge number of huge manufacturers: Tandy, Rubbermaid, P&G, Clorox, Revlon…

Wal*Mart has a wider appeal than most other stores, and its growth has been organic rather than through acquisition. They don’t waste money. They have a fantastic distribution system. Even their annual reports are printed on no-frills paper. They have an amazing reputation for cutting costs all along the supply chain. All of these things are good signs.

Still, I wonder about the example of McDonald’s: associated for so long with cheap food, McDonald’s is now regarded as the food of poor, stupid, fat people. Also, I’m concerned about overextension: they sell staples and groceries and media and electronics and gasoline, and are adding cars, computers, software… at some point they’re going to make a mistake and add something that their customers simply won’t associate with them. But for now, they look like one of the few stable retailers out there.

Obituary

The Weavers had a line about getting up in the morning and reading the obituary section in the newspaper: “and if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead, so I roll myself over and go back to bed.”

Fives, from Kung Fu Grippe has a rather different set of obituary requirements, like “there will be no use of the phrase ‘looking down on us.'” Of course, I think that Kitty Winn at Vomitola really would prefer to be described as “looking down on us” no matter what. I mean, if it’s accurate now, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be accurate after she dies.

A Excite Game

Two rather interesting web-based multiplayer games with a persistent universe:
Blogshares is a virtual stockmarket where you buy and sell shares of weblogs. Price is based both on the number of incoming links and also on the market supply/demand. Something like the Hollywood Stock Exchange and its affiliate at MuchMusic.

The Game Neverending is like an adventure game, but much, much sillier. Neat technology behind it, and a lot of thought in the economics, theology, philosophy, sociology. Basically, a playground with lots of puns and funny names for objects. Still in beta.

Finance and War

Dear Financial Advisor:
    You recently sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal which closed with the statement that “the meek may not inherit the earth, but at least they’ll get to retire”. With that in mind, I’d like to ask you about avoiding investment in Halliburton. I have read that they recieved a $1bn no-bid contract to put out oil fires in Iraq, and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll get more work rebuilding the country once we’ve levelled it.
    My concern is that destroying and rebuilding Iraq isn’t a viable long-term business plan. They do have a lot of coverage in the financial press, and it’s true that this is the second time they’ve rebuilt Iraqi oil fields, and possibly the third time they’ve built them, but I’m still unsure that they’ll be able to scale this sort of operation.
    I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

   Yours,
       Aaron Weber

Hilarity

Well, it’s Friday. People keep stealing the campaign signs from politician
Pat Stoner. He’s amused by it, but he says he was born a Stoner and will stay that way. The folks over at Bong State Park aren’t so sure about their name though. Elsewhere, police investigated a man advertising crack sales but it turned out he’d just run out of room trying to write cracklins, as in pork rinds.

Devout Fundamentalist Belief

People who believe sincerely in something can be blind to the facts. Sometimes, it’s funny, like the guy demanding a cervical exam because he’s convinced he’s actually a woman.

Sometimes it’s harmful, as in the case of Dick Cheney’s energy task-force which more or less created and exacerbated the California energy crisis.

Sometimes, it’s both laughable and fatal. Just look: Congress has voted us a day of prayer and fasting, while the radicals worry about the religious right and the religious right gears up for a mass conversion campaign. To try and deflect terrorism and criticism, US students abroad are pretending to be Canadian.

It all begins to make sense when you see headlines like this: Price of Darkness Quits Bush Team. Conflict of interest rules, apparently.