I.D. The Creep, Have No Friends! Ever!

http://www.idthecreep.com/ is the latest foray into popular, game-based messaging, this time by well-meaning individuals at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

I say "well-meaning" because there's a disconnect between the intended messaging and the actual messaging of the product.

The actual site is a set of flash-based puzzles set up to simulate e-mail, chat, and instant messaging that would be the usual fare of teen girls right around "exploitable" age, somewhere between 13 and 16.

Your challenge is to enter the world of a teenage girl, and sift through various e-mail, IM, and chat communications to identify "creeps"; people that would try to take advantage of you, apparently by "meeting u @ the food court". I don't know what that's sneaky stalker code for, but I'm sure it isn't kosher.

In this game, creeps use pretty standard lines, starting with "hey sexy" on chat, and rapidly dipping into the bucket of trenchcoat-flasher fare. Classic stalker zingers like "it's fun to keep secrets" and "i have dark hair" come up often, and are the red flags you're looking for, also, if you ever see "i live in california", that's a real good tip-off right there, ban that sonofabitch right away. Nobody wholeseome lives in CaliPornia.

These "creepy" messages are mixed in with benign messages, things like : "do u like ice cream and pizza lol!", or "it's such a rainy day omg" which are supposedly "safe" messages, but don't really say flattering things about where we're going as a society. Also, I hate rainy days, thanks a lot, girls.

You have a choice for each individual, to label them "bad", or "good". Get all the creeps labeled as "bad", and you win. Miss even one, and you lose.

I was getting frustrated losing, especially since e-mail subjects from supposed girlfriends saying "Can you pick me up after school?" were actually creeps (how am I supposed to know "Jenny" is a forty year-old divorced male stalker that still goes to junior high?), so I decided to do a little sex profiling.

So I just labeled all the guys as "bad", and all the girls as "good" on the next go-round.
You win!

Wow! Awesome! But wait a minute. Is it that simple? So I took one step further.
I labeled everybody as "bad".
You win!

Wow. That's an awesome message, guys and girls. Ban, block, kick, screen, delete, and ignore everyone you've ever met, and you're gonna be safe. In the game of life, kid, you're a winner.

Stacy: ice cream is the best! BLOCKED
Jenny: mom says I have 2 clean my room BLOCKED
Vanessa: did u catch american idol BLOCKED
Mom: clean your room honey BLOCKED
AOL Support Team: try adding friends to your list by BLOCKED
God: My child, I BLOCKED

Absolutely priceless lessons for life. Now we're all going to be safe forever.

Filed in: security anonymity teens children exploitation flash website

Guilty Pleasures and Pandora

So I take the advice of a few friends, Geli and Jeremy, and hit Pandora for a quick what-the-hell, can't-hurt five minute survey.

Pandora claims to be a web site that matches music to your tastes using data from the "music genome project".

I really only have one story to tell about this in the first thirty seconds.

It asked me to identify my favorite band. It's Steely Dan. After playing a little bit of "Deacon Blues" from Steely Dan, it then changes over to play the next song.

It's "No Way Out" by Starship. Seriously.

MINUTE OF STUNNED SILENCE
...followed by shame....

I didn't know that anyone knew I liked that song.

I've tried for years to hide my secret love for (some of) Starship's songs. How did a damned computer know, in less than thirty seconds?

Tags:

• mp3
• music
• genome
• ai
• computing
• web

Home and Abroad: Price Collusion in Japan Gives a Clue to Airlines

Been a while, sorry about that.

Let's start here.

Japan putting all its energy into saving fuel

From the article:

The government [of Japan] has set strict new energy-saving targets for 18 kinds of consumer and business electronics. Home and office air conditioners, for instance, must be redesigned to use 63 percent less power by 2008. The targets have sparked a gold rush among electronics makers, who are churning out record numbers of energy-saving -- but higher-priced -- consumer products.

Go take a look at Japanese consumer electronics imports (Page 15, self-sufficiency graphs) over the past few years. Yes, they're manufacturing more overseas, but they're still selling it from Tokyo, and they're not importing competitive products that will be able to loss-leader compete with overpriced, ecologically-sound consumer electronics. The majority of domestic shoppers will not have imported products in any reasonable amount to allow a substitution away from the trend toward more expensive consumer electronics in Japan.

This has the benefit of forcing the population to adopt the new technologies at the price set, eating the cost of development and fostering adoption of new, higher market cost even under protest. It's a closed-box system, leaving Japan out of sync with the rest of the electronics ecosystem.

This implicit, nationalistic price collusion is a tip, a crib sheet for another industry I've been watching: the United States airline industry. They could take a tip from Japan. If they want to save their failing industry, there's only one way to go: Raise ticket prices. All at once. Together.

BOOOOOO...

Okay, stop throwing shit at me, I know, price collusion is illegal. Getting together as supposed "competitors" in the same industry to fix prices is a violation of the Sherman Act, and has been since 1890. Largely ignored, it was bulked up later, and, just recently in '04 it was given a nosejob with the Criminal Antitrust Penalty Enhancement and Reform Act.

And, of course, we have American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall's infamous conversation with Braniff Air's (who?) CEO Howard Putnam in 1982:

Putman: Do you have a suggestion for me? Crandall: Yes. I have a suggestion for you. Raise your goddamn fares twenty percent. I'll raise mine the next morning .... We can both live here and there ain't no room for Delta. But there's, ah. no reason that I can see. all right, to put both companies out of business.

And that's got to put a little saltpeter in the coffee of anyone that's looking to try this kind of thing - Braniff was taping the conversation and turned the tape over to authorities. Crandall was censured for price collusion on that very conversation. Just a tip: never talk turkey with a bankrupt airline; they're not your friends, and 9 times out of 10, they're wearing a wire.

What I'm saying, though, is that for all the airlines talk about how the Internet has "ruined" their business, it's still the airlines that are setting airfares. And at this point, they're out of other options. They can't slash wages any lower. They can't cut any more pensions. They can't let their planes rot for lack of maintenance, enough of them crash as it is. And they can't lower the price of aviation fuel. They're hosed by rising costs, but they're all too afraid to pass the rising costs onto customers, under the guise of "competitive practices". The answer? Agree to raise costs all at once, save a sinking industry.

Oh no, travelers suffer. Well, it all hurts, but either travelers suffer or airline employees suffer in the case of this government restriction. And, in the ultimate case of government nannying, the almost inevitable rescue by "re-regulation", taxpayers will suffer, eating the cost that more frequent travelers should have rightfully eaten.

None of these scenarios are great, but he who uses, pays, and if it takes the government getting their noses out of this one and the airlines taking a tip from Japan to collude on prices, just this once, then that's what it'll take.

But it's not likely to happen, even implicitly. Bernanke, our new Fed Chair, already looks to be "hawkish" against inflation, teeing up the ball for rapid interest rate changes, and that, to me, suggests a more Keynesian attitude than his predecessor, Greenspan. Greenspan was the same kind of guy I am about price collusion: he didn't think it was bad all the time. See his paper Antitrust for more on this. Bernanke, on the other hand? I could see him spooking companies into playing straight on the surface.

My bet? Don't expect airlines to pull out of this dive for a while. They missed their chance to play around the government, and the pressure's on to find a better, "kinder" solution. But the way I see it, there isn't one. Someone's going to have to play dirty, but I wouldn't put my money on any one horse.

Some days, I kinda miss Bob Crandall.

Filed in: airlines economics japan oil bernanke microeconomics pricing antitrust

The Hard Choices: Jiffy Lube, Wi-Fi, and Microeconomics

Quick thoughts in the Jiffy Lube:

No WiFi access in the lobby? The most I get in the heart of Redmond is a crappy rabbit-ears setup that's nailed permanently to the bathroom stall of TV - the daily soaps. What am I supposed to do for 15 minutes?

But what profitability problem are Jiffy Lubes trying to solve? If it's competition with other quick auto service places like Quaker State, then WiFi makes sense. But given the explosion of "Dr. Lube" billboards on the road, I gather the real problem is that the profitability of the entire quick-service oil change industry has hit a plateau. So, supply meets demand. What to do?

In the case of Jiffy Lube, we've got a case of not optimization, but revolution, or at least an incremental version of the demand half of the market. Here's what I see in Jiffy Lube's case. They might think the following:

• The number of cars being sold versus number of cars being scrapped is going up incrementally, sort of keeping up weakly with inflation, but a great amount of it is outside the US. Therefore -
• The number of cars that hit their 3000-mile oil change lights per day is increasing only incrementally. And -
• There is no way to effectively raise price on services without the competition taking advantage to usurp market share. And -
• There are no major areas that are not serviced with Jiffy Lube stores or sufficient competition to warrant growth into new locales. Therefore -

The enemy isn't competition. It isn't that there is a bigger piece of the pie held by the other guy. It's that the pie is as big as it's going to get. There isn't any more pie to go around. Profit in the competitive system is, as the models always predict, dropping to zero.

So there's no use in WiFi to help differentiate Jiffy Lube. You don't get much from competitive practices if your competitors don't have much more than you do. Instead, here's "Dr. Lube", reminding people to come in for fuel flushes, wiper blades, engine whatzits and a million other things that are supposed to happen in between the standard 3000-mile marks that will get people coming in more often. They are trying to raise demand, to get the whole pie to grow, because the market has peaked.

But I won't get my WiFi.

Two other cases of "creating demand":

• There's a new drug - Requip, that's supposed to treat "Restless Leg Syndrome". RLS, they call it. "A medically-recognized condition", they say. I didn't even know it was a condition.
• A recent study shows that Vitamin D is more effectively received by the body through supplements than through sunlight exposure. Looks like we've got a brand-new market for Vitamin D supplements.

Tags:

• economics
• oil
• automobile
• pricing
• demand
• wifi