Category: Things

Someone I know recently helped her friend move. The apartment was cluttered with back issues of Real Simple magazine.

My family is pretty secular, and nominally Jewish. I’m going home for Easter.

People are tittering about a dog accused of plastic surgery. NYT coverage notes that “Dog shows, not unlike Miss Universe contests or episodes of ‘Are You Hot?,’ are little more than genetic trade fairs.” Their point is that surgically altering an animal to disguise its genetic value is unethical, and that’s true. The article touches on the ethical issues brought up by ultra-typing and the risks of genetic defects. Is it ethical to manipulate the genes this way? And, are these ultra-typed animals healthy? What if you alter the genes directly rather than by breeding?

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?

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.

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.

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

I’m so immersed with the online world that when I saw an ad for a new Charlotte’s Web movie today, I wondered what a pig and a spider had to do with the Internet. So, pardon me while I rant about the fine distinctions between two things that nobody actually cares about anyway.

Well, I’m looking at cell phone upgrades. Mine is so old and ugly that it has induced people to point and laugh, so I figure it’s about time. And there’s all these new cool features, right? Like maybe this hot mobile web-browsing stuff I keep hearing about from places like Danger. And since I’ve got their DSL and long distance, I figure that Verizon Mobile Web would be a good place to start. After all, they give a discount for bundling sevices.

I got to the point of showing up ready to buy a phone when I found out that when they say “Mobile Web” they don’t actually mean that you can access the web from your mobile phone. Now, I don’t expect competing services like mMode or iMode to do this, but if it’s called “Mobile Web,” it sure sounds like a mobile web access service to me!

What do you get for your Mobile Web subscription? You get WAP. You get Hotmail and IM and a couple tidbits in their special walled garden of licensed content. WAP sucks. It has been a well-documented failure for years and you’re still promoting it like it’s the hot new thing?

For actual mobile web access — say, blogging from my phone — I’d need to buy a Pocket PC (up to $599 after rebate), and pay $60/month for the minimum plan, plus per kilobyte data charges if I go over the allowance. Per kilobyte.

You fucking assclowns! What fool branding agency came up with that? Whoever picked that name doesn’t know IP from taking a piss.

Are you scared? Are you suspicious? Are you freaking terrified? My friend Duncan has family in Hong Kong and is pretty upset. I don’t blame him.

Some people think we can blame fructose for many of our health woes, if not the mystery plague. Of course high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s the one evil food you can cut from your diet and change your life. Remember: moderation, complexity, shades of grey.

For example, when you bring out the word appeasement you’ve usually ended the useful conversation right there. But it does seem that if we’d dethroned Saddam back in ’91 we wouldn’t be in this mess now. Of course, there are a lot of things we could have done to prevent this. What-could-we-have-done is a fun game to play, but it’s useful only to the extent that it can show us what we ought to do now.

In a few years, we’ll begin to see the wisdom of the 1990s welfare reform plan, and whether we should have done something different. We’ve got some data now– but we aren’t sure if fewer people on welfare is really good, or if it means there are a lot of poor people who aren’t getting help.

You can also turn to literature for guidance. Mark Twain is being quoted a lot recently for his rant about war and God. It reminds me a little bit Psalm 137:8-9, which goes like this:

O daugher Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Two little handbooks: one about war crimes and and one to help you distinguish one Iraq Pundit from another. The difference between the two handbooks is, one describes dozens of hideous atrocities, and the other is about international law and violations of the Geneva convention.

(Oh, was that mean-spirited? You don’t know what mean-spirited is, so shut your noise-tube, taco human. You want to see mean-spirited? Look at yourself, fucko. You’re a miserable excuse for a sentient being, a waste of space, waste of resources, waste of time and effort and money and oxygen. Go ahead, let that voice in your head run on and on and on, some sort of parasitic spirit, harping endlessly on issues long since resolved, backbiting, second-guessing, revising, rewriting, rephrasing. You little pseudointellectual shitbrain. You’re nothing more than a bitter husk of a person, an emotional corpse animated by modern psychopharmacology and economics, staring out at the world and whining about it.)