Oil

This is not the first time that the world has "run out of oil." It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry. A similar fear of shortage after World War I was one of the main drivers for cobbling together the three easternmost provinces of the defunct Ottoman Turkish Empire to create Iraq. In more recent times, the "permanent oil shortage" of the 1970s gave way to the glut and price collapse of the 1980s.

We're not running out of oil. Not yet.

Thanks to EconLog for this.

Spirit of the Sea

See the Photos

South Puget Sound has a spiky little offshoot called Commencement Bay. It's the home of container ships and concrete wrecks. Piles of pieces of the old I-90 floating bridge are stacked up on barges as you pass the Tyee Marina near the southeast shore.

It was also the site of a monumental event.

You may not be aware, and then again, you may be; I'm learning how to sail. I can't say I have much official experience - maybe six or seven total hours, and that's not even as a skipper - we're talking crew, and by crew, I mean reluctant, fearful crew.

All that changed today. It gets really hard to get this emotion out in words, but let me try, and forgive the mess, okay?

Half a Skipper

It is not a cerebral thing to be on the water. You don't use that much of that part of your brain, the part that, at least for me, turns on when you have to solve a logic problem, or write something dry, or conduct an interview. You know - the part that's on so much it's burned into the back of my eyes, yeah, that one. I don't do much feeling.

But I feel the water. It doesn't let you off the dock without feeling it. You don't just stroll onto the waves and ask for a Jack and Coke. Everything's done with a reverence. I always thought it was a little stupid when I read about it, what with the Mizzenmasts and Jibs and Jibes and Sailing By The Lee, all that language and all of the ritual crap that went with it.

Pull that curtain down. That sail went up today - my hesitation and ridicule of the mysteries of the deep got kicked right out the window. I've been sailing with instructors before. But that wasn't the order of today. I was sailing with my mother, who's recently been made a certified skipper, and that's it. Nobody there to help, nobody there to ask. We're it.

Each of us agees to be half a skipper. We'll work it out. No central command authority. We're bucking tradition, but it's just us, we have to do what works.

A Forgiving God

Trial and error. Right out of the gate we've got problems. Sail won't go up. Winch won't work right. And deep down inside, I know it's all us. It's what we're doing that's wrong.

But I'm working toward something amazing. I'm on my hands and knees, untying knots, unjamming winches - I don't know what I'm doing. I know exactly what I'm doing. I've never known that before. I've never known something natural like this.

I'm doing it for her: not Mom, and not some far-off female ideal. But for her. The boat. She is real to me, in a way so much hasn't been before. I can't tell you - I have to show you one day, with all of the feelings that come with it. A sailboat is like a tremendous amplifier - it is a sensitive world-microphone, a radar with which you can intercept the signals of nature. The wind, the waves, God.

Hey, I told you to forgive the mess.

The Passion

I don't know any other way to describe the feeling that happens when the wind, invisible, suddenly becomes life, the fluid showing you what it wants, what it needs. To sail, you merely set up the boat in such a way as to receive the gift of the wind in the most beneficial manner.

You flow. You can't fight. You have to feel what the wind wants. And when you're trimming sails, manning the helm, you begin to pick it all up. You're a tuning fork, you vibrate with the right signal when you get it. The wind has a pull when it takes you right. When the sail unfolds after a tack, opening out in full blossom, blooming to take the breath of the water, I realize that's what I'm in it for.

What I Am

Time has yet to say if this is truly something I will continue.

I have a habit of growing tired and moving on. But something happened to me today. Something that came so naturally, so instinctively, that everything in me was at one-hundred-and-ten percent - I can't ignore this.

Guess I've been called by the water for a while. The time has come to call back.

This might be the fruitiest post ever. Screw it. I'm feeling like the luckiest guy in the world to have a feeling this deep. It's worth keeping.

Credit

"It's a tricky business, but creditors don't care, because they know you need credit. If you are a good, money-conscious consumer who pays for everything in cash, basically you are dead to them."

MSN Credit Article

The business of making powerful friends, namely, creditors, is an unavoidable part of modern living in this country. I've had friends and family tell me in hushed and not-so-hushed tones alike that credit cards are the devil incarnate, and yet, isn't it just the irony of the whole thing that to get what you want, you have to belly up and shake the devil's hand?

The days of cash may never be truly over. But there are groups out there that are trying to wean you off it, and fast. If the carrot method of persuading you to use credit cards rather than cash, namely miles, payment protections, and - yes - spending more money than you rightfully have wasn't enough, now there's the stick method: no credit cards, no credit. No credit, no house.

Get those credit cards cooking! Just keep your debt ratio around 30%, and no department store cards - apparently they'll give those to anyone.

Flickr Gallery

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/

I'll be posting more as they come.

Working Nights

The United States Congress has voted to extend Daylight Savings Time by a few more months, starting in 2007.

NPR Interview on the Topic

You know, let me say this. It's amazing, first of all, what this entails. Changing clocks, modifying calendars. Messing with time. It's incredible how integral this is, and the movements of the world mechanisms due to this change will be a sight to behold (well, I mean, you'll have to look for it a bit, but it'll be there).

But let me step out on a limb here and say that this had better be a temporary measure. I don't mean necessarily as in months or even a couple years. It might take generations or centuries, but I'm sincerely hoping that our global world will realize a very important fact and take note: when it's night somewhere, it's day somewhere else. That means the entire world doesn't stop at once.

Now I advocated against the temporary notion of DST, but I am only forecasting the reason why, and that reason is that in order to optimize rapidly-globalizing business, we need business running, producing, and trimming input and output twenty-four hours a day. If a Seattle company is going to keep up relationships with branch offices in India, for example, that's almost a diametrically-opposed time relationship: it's a 12.5-hour difference. If it's 10AM here, it's 10:30PM there.

As if we didn't have enough trouble just with the telephones over there, now someone's trying to sleep while you're juiced on morning coffee and trying to tell them about your plan to open up new branches under the Pacific Ocean. And the way that countries are dealing with it is pretending their day is going to last longer?

Yeah, yeah, I've heard all about it, fewer traffic accidents, more time to do sports after work - is this what they're really thinking about? This was a rider on an energy bill, folks. This is the one with $11.5 billion in tax breaks. They've got business on their minds.

But my question is more far reaching than this session of Congress. Will the market always bear these kind of - to put it bluntly - nationalistic tactics? Yeah, it's minor, sure. Except, it's not. We're changing when you get up. When you go to bed. When you get to work. We change when that is with regards to the whole rest of the world, and we're multiplying that by some number of months.

The real goal, I think, is still optimization. Global business has yet to fully contend with the problem of human sleep cycles. I do realize that yes, cargo moves 24 hours a day. Some factories are day/night operations. But the business of business, negotiations, analysis and recommendation; with a corporation being just a group of people acting ultimately as one, I can't see why the eyes of the corporation have to shut just because some humans do the same.

The market can't see it either, and won't accept it for long. My advice if you want to be highly paid for simple work: go learn a foreign language of a country that has building business relations with the U.S. and is at least 8 hours different in time zone (China, anybody? Hello?), and get to be a real night owl. I mean, not just party nights. I mean, everything night, eat your breakfast at 5PM, lunch at midnight, dinner at half-past 6 AM, and in bed by 10 in the morning.

The reason? International negotiations over videoconference. Face it, jet travel ain't getting cheaper. VOIP is. Next, video. Then, it's Konnichiwa! between U.S. and Japan corporate branches and someone's going to get the short end of the daylight stick. Smart companies will want crack-team negotatiors that have their wits about them at night just as the regular-unleaded folks do during the daytime so that their side doesn't lose psychological advantage, and that's going to cost money. Hey, their desperation, your loss. Just think about it: you could put Business Vampire on your card. Okay, that's not attractive to me, either, but nobody said the future was going to be pretty.

Point is, whoever's first on the 24-hour train wins. No points to the U.S. for stalling it off. Honestly, I don't think it matters how long governments want to stretch their daylight dollar, or how many times they want to adjust their clocks; that's petty last-two-percent optimization when there's still a whole globe out there waiting to make money in the dark. Sooner or later some enterprising group is going to realize the benefits of moonlight swing-shift business development the same as they've seen with overnight flights, trucking, factories, and then we won't have a choice - the market is going to require that the world carpe noctem with both hands.

Still, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the daylight while you can. Go on.

Just don't cry to me if your "nine-to-five" ends up starting when the sun goes down.

Discovery

If years of hearing about past and pending shuttle launches, a father with permanent airborne syndrome (air or space, the man has to be flying or thinking about flying), endless hours of playing Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space (remember, Tyler?) and a week at Huntsville's own Space Academy did one thing for me, it crystallized in my mind that solid rocket booster separation will always be the coolest part of our conquest of space. _[1]

SRB Separation Video (Real Player)

Walking on the moon? Too ethereal, I have nothing to compare it to. Floating weightless? Too textbook. But two blazing, twelve-story-tall, hundred-ton cylinders shedding off into the blue sky at Mach 3? Rewind it, let me see that again.

Two minutes after the shuttle pulls off the pad, and the two white SRBs have burned one-point-one million pounds of solid fuel for a total thrust of over five million three hundred thousand pounds, these still-burning rockets pop off the sides of the shuttle twenty-four miles up in the sky, traveling at over three thousand miles an hour. A set of tiny booster motors on the sides fire off to push the rockets out of the way of the shuttle. Empty, the dead SRBs weigh almost two hundred thousand pounds a piece. They curve off, sputtering and smoking, still flying up in the air for about seven more miles, and then pop parachutes to end up in the ocean. They are then picked up by ships and refurbished for another go-round.

Maybe it's the silly little kid in me, that one that likes fireworks and giggles at stuff that looks like genitalia, but it's when you combine the astronomical magnitude of size and power with what looks like the pyrotechnic equivalent of strapping bottle rockets to your G.I. Joes, I get the chills inside. It's amazing to watch something going so fast, and with so much raw material-moving energy, perform a dance that appears so fluid and relaxed, as if the whole scene were happening underwater.

NASA may have made it a science, but it still looks like art to me. With the same mystifying air voices have that speak of the occult, there's a part of me that marvels at the unending magic of the continuing workhorse of our explorations of the outside sphere of our own little corner of the universe. Aluminum and potassium, perchlorates and nitrates, casts and mixes, potions and elixirs, the shamans of the modern world contain within their clean-room Utah huts the ingredients to make the magic fire. In the same breath as the ancients would whisper witchcraft, I say with equal reverence: rocketry.

To the crew and support staff of today's shuttle mission, I wish you the best, you've got all the voodoo our medicine men can muster.

Good luck, Discovery!

1. I think it also convinced me that six-foot-three is a little too tall to be an astronaut, but we're talking about SRBs here, not my personal problems.

Bet They Can Dance, Too

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors in Boston joined regulators in trying to determine whether brokers at Wall Street investment banks had chartered a private jet to whisk a Fidelity trader off to Florida for his bachelor party.

Thomas Bruderman, the trader in question and son-in-law of former Tyco International Ltd. (TYC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Chief Executive Dennis Kozlowski, no longer works for Fidelity.

Several newspapers have reported the 2003 yacht party may have involved drugs and prostitutes. More recently, Danny Black, a dwarf hired as a waiter for the bash, described it as lavish.

Lavish, as in "containing midget waiters and prostitutes", I guess. And cocaine. Don't forget cocaine. Another great set of American businessmen.

An Oil Lesson From The Agent

WMA File, 1 MB

Revelations While Cleaning Part II

A story told in pictures.

Self Interview #2

.net: What does the future look like to a consumer?

.cox: Faster, brighter, louder. There's nothing new, but very little old. More of everything. More advertising. More labels. Corporate efforts to consolidate and merge will put us in hyper-franchise mode within 20 years; differentiation efforts will keep everything from looking exactly the same, but small businesses will probably not be the source of this differentiation.

.net: How do you justify this notion of consolidation?

.cox: Profit. Two scenarios are the perfectly competitive model, and the corporate oligarchy. Perfect competition; imagine all these little donut shops, three or four thousand of them, all selling donuts. The important part is that they are all in competition. The demand for donuts slices the whole thing into equal parts, nobody gets a lot, and this is the important part, changes are diluted. Nobody gets to explicity set price or restrict supply. It won't do anything. There's too much competition, too many alternatives. You are in reactive mode, if you're one donut shop there are 3,999 other shops that are setting their price lower or higher based almost solely on what they see everyone else doing. Anybody who takes their eyes off the road in that situation is dead in a second. Get four-thousand shops all doing that and the price edges closer to a zero-profit mark. No business wants that, but it's inevitable with that many competing firms.

.net: Oligarchy is different how?

.cox: Say instead of four thousand donut shop companies, we have four. Just four. There may be four thousand stores, but they're split evenly among four companies, a thousand a piece. Now we've got one company that sets prices centrally throughout a thousand stores. Raise it five cents all across the board at 9:00 AM sharp, assuming each donut shop sells two donuts a minute, you've just taken in an extra fifty grand by 5 o' clock.

.net: Won't the competition do the same?

.cox: Absolutely. But here's the difference. It wouldn't matter to any company what any one other company did in a perfectly competitive model, only the movement of the herd makes a difference. And once the herd moves, any deliberate competitive action is lost. There's no such thing as raising a price proactively with four thousand competitors. You couldn't even ask them to do it. In this example of oligarchy, there are only three others to watch. A company can take an action, see the results, and trim out more proactively. That kind of optimization leads to greater profits. There's also the greater possibility of price collusion; the four companies agree to collectively raise prices, say they all go up five cents. Everyone's better off. With larger profit surface area but smaller variability, these sorts of things get more predictable.

.net: Isn't price collusion illegal?

.cox: Sure. So's fraud. Expect to see more of both in the future. It's more profitable, that's all - enterprising people will continue to seek higher profit, and some people don't believe that the government should be regulating collusion activity. To me, it's just expressing autonomy versus mob rule. I won't go so far as to say these are enlightened beings, but centralizing corporate planning and decisions in this manner lends a new causality to what was previously thought of as just an exercise in reactivity.

.net: It almost sounds like the beginning of a new kind of autonomy. A new kind of being.

.cox: Seems that way.

.net: Well, what now?

.cox: Beg your pardon?

.net: How do we deal with this new corporate being?

.cox: I'm not really into policy.

The Economy of San Andreas, Part 2

Okay, first thing's first. Half of these figures are straight from my ass, and the other half are gleaned from market charts and annual reports, which are about as good as pulling them from my ass, so keep that in mind. For this, it's not worth it to be precise. So skip it if it makes your mathematical righteousness hurt.

Alright, let's have a little fun with numbers.

The Numbers

Time On Shelves: 0.8 yrs
Copies Sold So Far (sex included): 20 Million (12.3% of all 2004 game sales!)
Copies Left to Sell (sex removed): ~12 Million (xbox, pc, special editions)
=
Estimated total sex/non-sex ratio: 1.6 to 1 or 62.5-37.5 split

Analysis, Caveat

I would say that the numbers don't favor a huge price increase for resellers of the original sex version of GTA:SA. But, the numbers up there are for the total number of units on all consoles. Remember, SA didn't sim-ship. Xbox and PC versions just came out June 6th of this year. Some quick calcs here:

Xbox/PC Version
Estimated Xbox Copies to Sell: 16 Million Raw (80% of PS2)
X
Xbox Popularity Differential: 0.2262 (18.1 million vs 80 million)
= 3.61 Million copies
X
Time On Shelves: 0.1 yrs (0.125 of life of PS2 product)
= .361 Million copies

So, I estimate about 350,000 copies of the Xbox game are out there right now with the sex stuff in 'em.

Copies Left to Sell (sex removed): ~3.25 Million
Estimated total sex/non-sex ratio for Xbox: 0.11 to 1 or 10-90 split.

There's your opportunity. Xbox and PC folks - go get those incorrectly-rated copies while you still can!

PS2 Copies Sold So Far (sex included): 20 Million
PS2 Copies Left to Sell (sex removed): ~6 Million (~12m - 3m Xbox - 3m PC)
Estimated total sex/non-sex ratio for PS2: 3.3 to 1 or 76.9-33.1 split

With a ratio of 3.3 to 1, the PS2 people are kind of out of luck. I estimate that sex-included copies are the bulk of all PS2 sales, trailing sales won't be able to match the 20 million copies that are already out there. Owners might be able to sell their copies back used for the same price they bought them for. Since retailers won't be able to offer them at all, the market will move to match previous retail price minus usual discount over time. Expect these copies to go used for $35 versus non-sex copies for $30 over the next six months.

But, with an unbeatable 0.11 to 1 saturation for the Xbox and PC folks, the sky may well be the limit. Granted, gating factors are that there are numerous PS2 copies available, but few folks will buy a new system at this late in the game with PS3 and Xbox 360 on the horizon, so with few alternative choices, elasticity of demand is low, and that means the price can go up. How high? I don't really know. I'd guess anywhere from 15% to 30% above cost over time, but that's really from the hip.

Let's take a look at one more possible scenario. What if someone monopolized all the copies of the Xbox and PC versions still left, buying them all out...and then selling them back?

Estimated time to full recall: 2 months
Estimated retail back stock: ~10 per store.
Estimated retail stores: 10,000 (3500 Wal Marts, 1800 Game Stops, 1200 Target stores, ~3500 others)
Estimated total load: 100,000 units
Estimated price per unit: $50
Estimated total price: $5 million

Now. With 100,000 units, what if they could be sold back at:
Cost + 1% ($50.50): 5.05 million revenue - 5 million cost = $50,000 profit
Cost + 5% ($52.50): 5.25 million revenue - 5 million cost = $250,000 profit
Cost + 10% ($55.00): 5.50 million revenue - 5 million cost = $500,000 profit

Even if they could only squeeze out a 5% markup, a monopolist, if they moved right now, could make a quarter of a million dollars if they bought out every copy on store shelves.

What people won't do for pornography. I'm getting a soup can just talking about it.

The Economy of San Andreas

Following up on the "Coffeegate" scandal -

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8647176/

Looks like Rockstar finally broke down and just had to tell us what we knew all along:

Rockstar’s parent company, New York-based Take Two Interactive Software Inc., also admitted for the first time that the sex scenes had been built into the retail version of that game...

And, as I said before, keep your old San Andreas discs. While there are many of them out there, there'll be a higher demand for them on the re-sale market because of this fact:

Rockstar has agreed to exchange unsold inventory with new, "M" rated versions that "have the hidden content removed," the ESRB said.

Is it going to make anyone a millionaire? No, it won't. Can you profit off the backend from Rockstar's flub? Yes, a little bit. It's a bit like a class-action lawsuit where everyone who signs up ends up getting a check for seventy cents and a form letter.

Next post I'll have some numbers about this.

Redesigned Website

Whaddya know, she's brand new for the summer:

http://www.the-agent.net/

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, everything's under construction, it always is. I'm tinkering with all kinds of crap in CSS, none of it's rock-solid, I'm more of a "play with it and see what happens" kind of guy.

Though I do like what I'm seeing an awful lot this time around. The XML sections under construction might take a while, and I suppose they're more for my own screwing around than anything else, but hey, it's open to the public eye, I had might as well advertise it anyway.

Self-Interview #1

.net: Why economics?

.cox: Everyone says they want globalization. I believe economics is the way there. It is what brought us to the table globally to begin with, not goodwill and altruism.

.net: Is there a place for altruism in your worldview?

.cox: Humans are at their core cost-benefit machines. Everything we do is transactional. We have a biological precedent for helping one another; we do it because there's a reward somewhere. I don't know if there's any true charity to be had. It seems counterintuitive.

.net: Do you see economics as merely an equation to be solved?

.cox: Maybe. Or, maybe it's more like a game we can win at, or lose at. That doesn't mean it's easy; there are certainly many times we've had to pick the lesser of two losses, but ultimately there may be a way to ensure progress toward the goal.

.net: What is the goal?

.cox: That's not one I can answer for you.

SmartGroceries

After all of this to-do about working in the software industry, I finally decided to up and try my hand at a few concepts I've been needing more exposure to. Just the basics. XML, WinForms, a few other things. There was no cure but to crack open a beer, dig into the mixed nuts, and get coding. I'm very proud to have reached a point that I can call the first prototype functionally complete.

You're looking at the first prototype of a client application for a system I call "SmartGroceries". It's not a tremendously catchy name, but take a look. First off, we have a simple, but easy way to add, remove, and edit groceries in a virtual grocery list. Keep a list for all of your groceries! More support for things like "categories" of groceries could easily be added.

Why a virtual list? Because SmartGroceries uses a website to store an XML file that represents the list. Going to that website, you (or anyone) can see very easily what is on the list, and how much there is to get. The XML is transformed to a nice readable format by an automatic XSL file. If you're curious, the grocery list for our house is up on the web and you can go look at the file here: http://www.the-agent.net/groceries.xml.

But this is where it gets really cool. Did I forget to mention, along with WinForms and XML, that I decided to go ahead and try my hand at programming for a cell phone, too? Thanks to the amazing Smartphone platform that Microsoft has raised and bootstrapped with .NET, the same list stored in XML on the web can be pulled down by a Smartphone, right over the cellular network, and when you're at the store, you check off items right as you put them in your shopping cart! When you are done, you upload the new list with a press of a button and the virtual shopping list is updated, the items you bought are cleared, the items you haven't bought stay on the list.

Just today, I added the functionality to add and edit existing list items right on the phone, so in case you have a brainstorm or see a deal you want later, you can make it part of your new, updated list. View, check off, add and edit, all from your phone, no wires, no stylus, no keyboard, no pen or paper, all in XML, all on the web.

I think, when looking back at the total development effort, the amazing part was that the Smartphone portion was done first, and then, the client program. Total time to make the smartphone program - 10 hours. Total time to make the client program - one hour. One guy, one hour. That's how much code was similar between the client version and the Smartphone version.

Well, tomorrow it goes for a trial run. Tyler and I will be yanking off the crappy h4x0r joke items and putting up real groceries, and we'll see how she fares.

Defanging Cellphones

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8629562/

Above links to the most asinine interview I've read in a great long while. Howard Melamed, a director of a company that makes cellular repeaters, has a beef with cell phones.

Number one, apparently, they're too easy to open. Terrorists can open the back of cell phones and put stuff in them.

...we have to make them tamper proof so that you can't open them up with simply a screwdriver or just by removing the plastic.

Can't open them with a screwdriver? Jesus, Howard, what do you think the weenies at tech support open them up with? If you want to make them welded rivets, you can kiss your phone warranty programs goodbye - they'd have to set off little charges all around the back of the case just to get the damn thing open and nobody's going to purchase a "slightly demolished" phone, even on EBay, that looks like it took a bouncing betty while tromping through the bush. No resale, no warranty programs. Oh, and phones will cost another $25 to $30 a piece, easy.

Number two, according to Howard, the batteries in cell phones are explosive all by themselves. They're little terrorists-in-waiting that will just sense when the President's around and *BOOM*, martial law!

Now, I tell you there's other problems associated with the cell phone as well. Including the battery itself is unsafe. Lithium iron cobalt is a very unstable material and these batteries have been known to blow up without any terrorists doing it just naturally.

When have they been known to blow up? I know the shitty Korean ones overheat, and any battery will explode when you put it in a fire, Howard, but is this really a concern? I've read that Lithium-ion batteries are subject to thermal runaway, but it's scaled heavily by the size of the battery; you don't get some kind of nuclear blast out of a stick battery that's smaller than your credit card. The thing is, batteries are dangerous things, they have acids, nitrates, alkaline solutions, all this good shit that makes them hold a charge. No nannying us on batteries, Howard. Life's dangerous, live with it. If you want to power your phone by a hand crank, go ahead, but I already have a hands-free set and that makes me look stupid enough, I don't need your help. Oh, and by the way, that's another $25 per phone.

And third, apparently it's the alarm clock function in your phone that sets off bombs.

Well, there's two ways of setting off a bomb with a cell phone. One of them is the alarm function...we have to make sure there's no alarm clock function on these phones. If you ask me, I'd rather have no alarm clock function and be completely safe and sound then using my cell phone.

You ain't exactly safe and sound if there's two ways to set off a bomb with a phone and you only stopped one. Face it, Howard, if someone really wants to use one of these things as a bomb, they don't have to set the alarm. That's something they do in Steven Segal movies. And nobody's going without the alarm clock. Instead, they'll have to develop some kind of crappy alternative that you forced them into, and that's going to cost - guess what - $25 extra for each phone.

Now, there's more shit in there about turning off all cell phone service in tunnels and in government buildings and never, ever, ever having cell phones on planes, but let me cut to the chase.

First, stop playing to our fears like this, jackass. You're making the problem worse. Second, we're not going backward with cell phones. Ever. 300 million cell phones in the U.S. alone, dude. We're keeping 'em, and we want more, better, faster, cheaper. People want, and will get, their alarm clocks, their easy-open phones (because we can't live without interchangeable faceplates), and their cheap-to-make Lithium-ion batteries (1). They expect it. They won't settle for less. And even if they did, the short term losses that manufacturers and carriers would suffer has the potential to be so great as to scare the shareholders right off the dance floor, and you know how much these companies like to dance. Ain't happening.

In all, this guy comes off to me as some no-load third-party bit player looking to make a stink that'll get him a juicy government security contract - I mean hey, it worked for Accenture.

For him, though, this won't last. The more stink he makes, the more he's going to piss off the manufacturers of cell phones, cell phone carriers, city planners, airlines...the list goes on and on, and the last I heard, they were much, much bigger than any company that sells cellular repeater pads to stick on the inside of your office.

I'm surprised some Samsung ninja hasn't pushed this guy down a stairwell yet.

1. Admittedly, the switch to Lithium-phosphate will occur eventually, as it will reduce cost of goods as Lithium-ion batteries do require special electronic circuitry that could theoretically be rendered obsolete by Lithium-phosphate.

cdBBQ

Look, fellas. I'm not paying fifty bucks for a Bourgeois Tagg CD. It ain't happening.

Especially not for a CD-R you up-ripped from a worthless vinyl that's been sitting in some dude's closet since his last snort of coke twenty years ago.

But I've got to give you credit for your business model. Twenty bucks for noise reduction? Forty for "advanced" noise reduction?

Very smart.

Falling On Your Own Sword, By Rockstar Games

I don't know who it is that starts this kind of outrage. Someone puts a couple of computer-generated models with blocky features having blocky sex with blocky sounds into a video game and someone goes into a full flesh-and-blood shitfit about it like they saw their daughter in the back seat of the family Tercel with Bobby Brown.

I am, of course, talking about the "Hot Coffee" modification for GTA: San Andreas, made by Rockstar Games. Considering that at least two politicians, some anti-gaming asshole, and, quite likely, your grandma, have already taken this game up as the poster child that supports the theory that games lead inevitably to teenagers becoming sex-and-violence crazed hip-hop gunmen that don't go to church and only call their mom on Mother's Day, I suspect just about everyone's heard of this thing.

In short, "Hot Coffee" is a modification to GTA: San Andreas that lets you play a sex minigame. Use the left stick to keep a rhythm. Make sure the woman orgasms before you do. In short, the kind of education we could all use. But it's really freaking the older generation out, and so here we are, two steps from the titans of the gaming industry going to court with the politicians over this.

Is Rockstar Lying?

Are they? Not technically. Rockstar's denying that they were responsible for this "mod". That statement, of course, was carefully crafted and came almost a week after the initial allegations went live, a week in which Rockstar maintained monolith-like stoicism and silence (you know, minus that humming choral thing), and, considering that initial reports showed that only a user-created modification that changed the source code of the game could enable this "activity", all seemed well for Rockstar. Hackers did it, they said. We bought it.

Until now.

Confirmed: Sex minigame in PS2 San Andreas

Ouch. Looks like it doesn't take a hacker to find the game when it's already on the CD, guys! Maybe Rockstar's official statement is enough to keep them out of the hottest of the hot water, but the smoking gun has been found. A GameShark and a copy of GTA: San Andreas for the PS2, and you're good to go for some digital sex, from fellatio all the way to doggy-style (no anal, guys, sorry).

Now I could go on about how it's ridiculous to be shocked - shocked! - about this. We're ass-backwards about sex in this country anyway. It's okay to have a million AK-47s and decapitations, complete with rivers of red rain everywhere in a game, but get two characters anywhere near each other with a single moan or groan in the wrong spot and you're up against the wall with Hillary Clinton putting your teeth right through the back of your head with an old Mannlicher Carcano.

But what makes me more angry is that, being a guy with a little experience in the games business, and quite a bit of time in software in general, I know what this is going to mean to people that just want to code their games and have fun while doing it. It means less fun, folks. It means another two million dollars and eight more months spent per game on reviewing code for easter eggs, cheats, and never-ending vigilance against dirty sexual things in software, anywhere, ever. I don't even work in games anymore, but I'm sure that by year's end, some asshole in a suit is going to walk into my office, look over that screen, and the following conversation will ensue:

Suit: "That piece of code, right there. What is that?"
Me: "It opens a window."
Suit: "And it's called Open Window Sex? Salacious! Scandalous! Remove it now."
Me: "No, it's OpenWindowsEx, the Ex is for -"
Suit: "And what's THIS? A void with an asterisk?"
Me: "Yeah, it's a void pointer. VOID*"
Suit: "It's so dirty, it had to censor itself. What kind of slime are you? Get out of my company!"

I can hardly express to you my joy about not being in the games business, or at Rockstar, right now. As much as I'd like to see them taken down a peg, I know who's going to get shafted worse than anyone. Hard-working developers.

Just a quick note here - want to get rich quick? Go buy as many copies of GTA: San Andreas for the PS2 as you can. Once the recall happens, they'll be going for premium prices. You watch on Ebay.

"GTA 3 W/ SAIX MOD! FAQH CHIX, ORAL, NO RESERVE $1 CHECK OUT MY OTHER AUCTIONS D00D"

My Golden Circus Girls All Sailed Away

I'm shuffling data around, staving off what eventually has to happen over salsa-coated eggs and grape juice - opening the 2,000 words I wrote last night for the ritual of the next-morning checkup.

Like the morning after, looking over at that figure hogging the sheets and hoping she doesn't look too much like your sister, you'll do anything (hope, wish, pray, drink) to make sure it's not what you fear it is.

It's going to be crap.

I've had this thing over the past week or so; I've been stuck in re-evaluation mode, wondering if I've really had the right idea all along - I've had my mistakes, and the book about writing to the audience, and blah, blah, blah, but I can have whatever I want, I'm not running on my own energy.

I realized about five days ago that I've crashed hard on my own best intentions, and haven't just spit out the words that I really want to say. I've pre-sterilized them, made them clinical, predictable, there's no flow, it's all like romanticising a wooden leg. There's no blood, no nerves, the inherent beauty is gone from the structure. Plus - put all the nylons or garters on it you want, it's still wooden: you can always tell. Not only is it fake, but it's obvious.

So, last night, after going over some advice from a few friends, I repeated a familiar and common mantra a few times.

"Fuck it." And punched out 2,000 words.

And now I'm reading it over.

And it's good.

I have to remember to care less, and listen to myself more. What's good about my work is in here, not out there.

Phrozen Crew '97 Greetz!

Thanks to Dan for his advice on not caring about "voice". Thanks to Tyler for the always-appreciated "fuck 'em" advice. Thanks to Jessie for the understanding that sometimes it's healthy to take a look back before you work forward.

Yeah, I know, I didn't do much, but little victories add up. When I can break the blockade and see daylight, it's a victory. The support of the people close to me is what I need to keep going.

I know it ain't the Tour de France, but it matters to me.

"Behavioral Finance"

Sound Investment Advice

1. Never, never speculate. One big player says jump onboard now, this market is a "muscle car mired in the mud," soon to get "unstuck." Another urges investors to gamble: "For higher returns, you need to get into riskier investments." Yikes! Don't listen.
2. Your home is not a stock. You live in it. Today many mistakenly assume that rising equity means you don't have to save for retirement. Or that you can use a home-equity loan to buy consumables. Or worse yet, use that money to buy more property and play the real estate market. When that bubble bursts it will be too late to exit the loser's game.
3. Save lots more. America's savings rate has dropped from 10% two decades ago to zero today. We're consuming like crazy, importing and running huge trade deficits, while foreigners recycle our dollars into U.S. Treasurys, justifying our failure to be frugal. This game of musical chairs will soon end. And your failure to save will hurt you in retirement.
4. Brokers aren't your friends. There is an inherent conflict of interest between you and every broker in the world. They make their living on commissions, and that cost reduces your returns. They win and you lose.
5. Never trade commodities. Yes, you may want to add a small allocation of energy, metals or other commodity funds to your long-term portfolio. But short-term trading is a loser's game, and a fast one. Commodity traders tell me that amateurs invariably lose all their risk capital within 12 months to 18 months, then quit.
6. Avoid new and exciting deals. With all the turmoil and risks domestically and globally, chasing hot stocks and exotic opportunities is an instant replay of the irrational exuberance that got us all in trouble in the 1990s. "Stay the course!" says Bogle.
7. Bonds also ride up and down. Ellis reminds us that in the short-term bonds go up and down like stocks. However, you can increase your chances of winning the loser's game by using bonds to counterbalance stock cycles in structuring your overall portfolio.
8. Never invest for tax benefits. Every year my accountant reminds me of this rule. All decisions should first make sense as an investment. Tax benefits are secondary.
9. Write goals and stick to them. Create a well-diversified long-term asset-allocation strategy. A budget. A savings plan with regular money going into a retirement program. And start living below your means now, save more now, because later will be too late.
10. Never trust your emotions. The new science of behavioral finance makes it clear that investors are their own worst enemy. Too optimistic against impossible odds. Professional players own the game. They have more information, sooner than you do, more capital to play with and they spend all day playing while you work for a living. You're an amateur. Don't play by their rules. You can't win the loser's game because your emotions trigger too many mistakes.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome

A note from the editor: The author provides this article as a counterbalance to conservative overload he experienced at the wedding described previously. While beautiful and special, there was a distinct culture shock present - there wasn't even alcohol present - that requires rebalancing. The author kindly reminds you he is just a human being.

I've gotten myself into another retro-band frenzy, snagging everything I can from Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It was about halfway through Warriors Of The Wasteland that I decided to go and check up on a sneaking suspicion I had about these guys.

Now, I had my reasons to think they might have been led by an ostentatiously-gay frontman, but none of them were good reasons. They were things like "Oh, he sounds gay", or "They're not singing about 'baby, I love you, please come back', so there you go", and that's not going to convince any scientific committee.

But I do my checking up on the web, and there's the frontman, Holly Johnson, HIV-positive and out, just like one of my early favorites, Erasure's Andy Bell. Johnson's a strong gay community supporter, just like Bell.

I normally wouldn't care, but it keeps layering the icing on a cake I've had for a while - this isn't a good metaphor, but whatever - that I've just got the music-hots for the gay male artists.

Frankie, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Boy George, these guys have been responsible for a different look at life and love that has served to provide the counterpoint to the weight my family provided toward the unilaterally-conservative lifestyle they wanted their progeny to continue.

Stop The Presses

Before I freak my roommate out, let me qualify this real quick. It's music. I don't fuck music. I'm straight. Go back to sleep on the couch, dude.

But have you listened to some of this stuff? You know what it is? It's fearless.

There's a collective wisdom that comes out of some of this music that's contributed bucketloads - that's another bad metaphor - to my consciousness about the world around me. For instance, life's short. Or, love's unpredictable. Or, shit happens.

Did I get some of that from the "straight" artists I've listened to over the years? Of course I did. But it didn't sink in like when the Pet Shop Boys did Domino Dancing, or George Michael broke out in Praying for Time.

Maybe it's because these guys broke the mold in what might be the most uncomfortable way for many of us, and that gave them some special status in my mind, as if they got the special channel into my brain-radio. They haven't let me down. Nice to have you on board, Frankie.

You Put Ten Pounds of Turkey On There, Man

The Grilling Question

And the research goes on. Is grilling safe, isn't it safe, who's going to get colon polyps and die...let's face it - we're all screwed.

Choice quote, coming at ya.

Although it is a good idea to use an instant-read thermometer to be sure meat is thoroughly cooked, the further you cook meat past that point, the more HCAs will form. A higher consumption of well-done meat is linked with two to five times more colon cancer and two to three times more breast cancer. Risk of cancers of the stomach, pancreas and prostate may also increase.

Right on, folks - too rare and you're fucked, too well-done and you're really fucked. So much for those worry warts and that "I'll take mine sterilized" attitude. In this world of drive-thru cancer, it's starting to look like all roads lead to the proctologist.

We cooked a whole turkey on the grill today. Anyone got a problem with that? We'll go right now.

The Wedding Singer

Weddings can be tough on single young gentlemen.

I had my chance to experience the thrills and chills today for my friends Chris and Corrie. Seriously on the chills part; something about experiencing a wedding puts the wobble in the spine with the magic fingers, like I'd been struck a quick tap of something right in the back of my brain. It's got to say something about an experience that is evocative enough to get you right in the vertebrae.

From the flower petals on the ground, to that doe-eyes look that the bride and groom satellite-beam to each other during their dance, the whole thing is a celebration likely to make any guy without a special sweetie shed a few tears for the lucky sonofabitch and all of the special moments he'll have from this point forward.

And there are the couples there too, boyfriends and girlfriends looking on, taking notes, holding each other tight, wondering when it is they'll have the privilege to make their special day happen.

The world's changing, you know. I was confused for a second out there - someone must have popped smoke between my ears - when they talked about having the "single guys" up for the garter toss. Did they mean guys that hadn't gotten married? Did it count if you had a girlfriend? I mean, my own answer was easy - I was up there with all of 'em - but it was the principle of the thing.

It's a wedding, and in a wedding world, single still means "not married", no matter how close you are to your sweetheart. Even the taken fellas had to get up there to prepare for garter bombardment.

For the curious, it wasn't me, which is fine. Weddings look expensive, and frankly, I've got other shit to buy.

What's In A Name

First things first, folks; are you like me, do you have to stifle a giggle at the newspaper columns about the Ex-CEO from HealthSouth with the name of "Scrushy"? I must be a "name" guy - and for a guy that's got a phallic-tastic last name of his own, far be it from me to be picky. And maybe I'm putting too much in a name.

But I can't see a guy donning the monogrammed shirt and italian suit, going into work on top of a sky-piercing tower in his Berkshire Bell JetRanger, teleconferencing with regional, national, and international corporate clones in three-sixty satellite videophone, moving stocks with one finger, and all the while, the coffee-toting underlings with the bamboo necks are calling him Mister Scrushy. Come on. The way the name sounds, I imagine some two-foot tall blue accordion creature from The Lost Episodes of Sesame Street is pulling junk bonds out of his ass and doing donuts in a Maserati around the HealthSouth helipad.

I'll be honest with you - I'll take a CEO with an ominous name over a Frank Oz puppet name any day. Give me a sexual harasser, give me an overcompensated bloat-balloon, give me a government gut puncher, give me a tree-chopping, outsourcing, warmongering industrialist, you can give me all that and more, you just better make damn sure his name beats the pants off my man Harry C. Stonecipher.

That's right - the sexually inappropriate former Boeing CEO with the melting Franklin D. Roosevelt face wins the name contest without breaking a sweat. That's good, because I'm pretty sure if there was a sweat involved, his pacemaker'd be sending dead-guy signals to Boeing Medical and there'd be something of a panic and that face is coming right off and we just mopped in here.

I mean, folks, let's face it, the question is obvious. What is a Stonecipher? I see some ancient thing, about thirty tons, ring-shaped, with all that Mayan calendar shit on it, with some magical power to unlock the portal of time and unleash pretty much every demon of Hell right on up to and including Paris Hilton's true form and that's enough for me, it's all right there in his name. It commands my respect.

Go ahead, compare that with Scrushy. Go on and do it. Get those names in a knife fight and "The Accordion" is going to lose all four limbs, both eyes, and a previously-functioning colon in about ten seconds to Harry C. Stonecipher, the only man powerful enough to lock the secrets of the universe away for eternity, right there, in that red tie with the white diamond things on it.

Harry C. Stonecipher, you win the name game, man. I'm sure Boeing misses you. Well, all except that one chick you tried to give the glove-love to. That wasn't cool, Harry.

Cheswick and Old Mace

Just a few thoughts on the recent London bombings. I have to say first that this episode, like the Madrid bombings of not-so-late, doesn't sink too deep, not having experienced the vision or the reality of either country. Maybe I'm not as empathic as I'd like to think. Maybe I'm just a little less connected, emotion-wise.

And yet, something about this London bombing shocked me - and I have to be watching for the shock, it comes passing like a car on a dark night, two headlights and it's gone - but it doesn't bowl me over. This time I was ready to take a look into those lights and the first thought is

Jesus, that's London

And the second thought is

They don't do that there

I mean, that's the little place where you get two years for squirting a mugger with pepper spray, they're that pacifist. That's that place I saw in MI-5, that's that place with pubs and ales and chips and Wotney's Red Barrel and Holland and Holland and Savoy Row and they just got the Olympics Slot for 2012 and "We've won 'ave we?" and those emergency vehicles with checkerboard patterns come slicing through all of that like they're supposed to and suddenly I remember that someone just blew the top off a double decker bus and derailed a tube car several tube cars and killed two and wounded a hundred killed at least 37 and wounded over 700, just like that. Bang.

Spiegel Online has the text of Blair's response speech.

Not a bad speech, and I'm glad the G8 will continue. There's getting to be a lot of buzz around African poverty, from the Time article earlier this year about Jeffrey Sachs' vision of eliminating poverty, Live 8's recent showing (with Sir Bob Geldof the not-quite-dead), the ongoing efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and now the G8. Someone's getting the message, and I'm hoping that a workable solution will materialize from all of this ballyhoo and instead of fading away because some new cause celebre muscles it off the seat, actually moves forward into some kind of real policy.

But then someone goes and slices up the public transportation system on what looked like a nice Thursday morning. Thanks for the static, asshole.

Updates: Updated the numbers - figures were still coming in when I did my initial post. It's worse than I thought.

I'm Not Moblogging This

Scratch another trendy blog - agentcox.textamerica.com - from my roster. There were probably plenty of folks that didn't even realize I *had* a moblog, let alone visit it.

That's fine - I didn't visit it much either.

Honestly, it's due more to a technical problem than a lack of interest, but now that you mention it, considering that there was one picture maybe every two months, I wasn't exactly pleasing the crowd with my wild, wild life on film.

Sue me. Besides, if there's a really good photo I just have to share, Blogger's been making a lot of noise about how easy it is, and I'll just take them up on the offer.

So let me do some quick math here. I had - let's see - carbolysis, carbolysis.com, the-agent.net, the-agent on lj, artofthestate, razorone, textamerica...so seven blogs/webpages in all.

I'm down to one, maybe one and a half if you count that work-in-progress stuff some of you have seen around the new The-Agent.net (that I haven't made any progress with in a while, sue me twice). That's 85.7% reduced-fat blogging. Simple is good. More than good, it's great. More than great, it's absolutely necessary. See previous post "A Very Special Episode" about playing to the crowd, add me rolling my eyes, shooting my old blogs in the head and burying them in the desert, and you'll get the idea.

Fun while it lasted, though.

Trent Clayton

For those of you that know my main protagonist man, Mister Trent W. Clayton, from his early days, be prepared for a fun and exciting bit of news. This is huge to me, ironic and wonderful.

First, let me tell you where Trent Clayton came from. This is sort of a did-you-know thing. Let's go back more than half a decade. Did you know? Trent Clayton was the product of two first names: Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, and Dr. Clayton Forrester from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I decided on this name more than six years ago.

Now, flash forward to this year. Microeconomics class. We're talking about antitrust litigation, monopoly busting, the real good shit, the stuff our boy Trent Clayton would eat right up. I see something about Clayton-some-shit-or-the-other. That's nice, I think, I'll get back to that.

Now, advance the tape to today, thirty minutes ago. To here. The Clayton Act, and here, Henry D. Clayton:

The Clayton Act, 1914, passed by the U.S. Congress as an amendment to clarify and supplement the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. It was drafted by Henry De Lamar Clayton. The act prohibited exclusive sales contracts, local price cutting to freeze out competitors, rebates, interlocking directorates in corporations capitalized at $1 million or more in the same field of business, and intercorporate stock holdings.

Holy Zeus's balls, I think, the tsunami's going for the high score, here. This can't be possible. I didn't even know about the Clayton act six years ago. I didn't name Trent Clayton back in the nineties because of this, I didn't even know Clayton was going to be some kind of economic freedom fighter, but something steered me toward it, even if he was only just some words on a page and all of a sudden -

And I mean, all of a sudden -

He has a history. A heritage. Descended from the honorable Henry De Lamar Clayton of Alabama, servant of the fifty-fifth Congress of the United States of America, the defining force in drafting one of the most critical pieces of corporate governance legislation in United States history.

I have so many answers to my questions in this very moment, questions about Trent Clayton I've had since the very beginning. Where is Trent Clayton from? Alabama. Is he proud of his heritage? Absolutely.

I'm not transmitting this too well, I'm sure. I'm not getting across how amazing this coincidence is. I can't express to you how much the random looks almost like the supernatural. How chance looks so much like God when I get an opportunity like this.

Thank you, God, chance, providence, or probability, for giving me Trent Clayton and the Clayton family of Alabama, and letting me find the link myself, today, on a Friday of all days.

This book will be made. Everything is falling into place. I don't know why, I can't even prove it, but the feeling is so close, so red-hot and glowing with potential it's almost inhuman to think it isn't meant to be. Then again, it's irrational to go that route, and it doesn't have to be demoralizing. Even if there is no meaning, even if it is completely random, it's extremely good fortune for me, and I don't intend to squander it. Trent Clayton, from the honorable Claytons of Alabama, is coming to save the world. At least until the next book, then he's gotta do it all over again.