Win One, Lose Two

I'm pissed off. You know why? Jonestown.

Remember Jonestown, November 18th, 1978.

I'm listening to an audio recording of the final speech of Reverend Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple, advocating mass suicide of the members of Jonestown. 913 dead, including 276 children.

An audio recorder was under Jones' chair in the Jonestown compound, and the tape was running on that fateful day.

Listen to it Here.

"You'll regret this very day if you don't die. The best testimony I can make is to leave this goddamned world."

Jones slams a woman for expressing her feelings of independence. Jones utilizes the hatred and pride of the crowd. Jones calls attention to an invisible, ultimate enemy, "parachuting in" to massacre everyone. Jones utilizes folk Marxism, creating the duality of the oppressors and oppressed. He utilizes racism. He orders the killing of a congressman visiting there and pretends he saw the killing prophetically.

"Do you know who walked out of here today? Mostly white people."

He utilizes people's fear for their children.

"If we give them our children, our children will suffer forever."

It is successful.

"If you're telling us we need to give our lives now, we're ready."

913 dead. I hear, on the tape, the buckets of Flavor Aid clanging as they bring it out.

"Please get the medication, it's simple, there's no convulsions, the GDF is coming."

I want to say, "this can't be". I can hear the children in the background. Did people do this? Did they sit there listening to this madman? They did.

"Can we hasten it up with this medication? They're not crying out of pain, there's just a little bitter taste."

Just a little bitter taste. This is madness. How can we go on listening to madmen - how long do we fool ourselves into thinking that what we want to see appears in front of us?

There's coughing on the tape. Crying. Fifteen minutes of tape left. There's gospel music run at slow speed in the background. It sounds demonic.

"I'm sure they'll pay for it, they'll pay for it, they brought this upon us."

Sure they will. He told people everything they wanted to hear. And people bought it. And people buy it every day from every type of con artist imaginable.

The kids are dying from the cyanide poison on the tape. They're crying. Just a little bitter taste. Everyone's listening to the madman, telling them everything they want to hear, and now everyone's drinking cyanide and killing themselves.

This can't be, but it is. I hear a little more of what people are capable of.

"If you knew what was ahead of you, you would be glad to be stepping over tonight."

The fear of the future. The world is so much worse, they say. We'd rather kill ourselves than face it? Pardon my French, but fuck these people. Fuck these con artists that tell us what the easy answer is.

"Who has the vat, the vat with the green C. Bring it here so the adults can begin."

There's just music now, slowed down to valium-speed. Everyone's dead. Why can't we understand ourselves to know when we're being fed this garbage? Why are we so hopeless as to need it?

When are we going to accept reality for what it is and stop being upset and hurt by it so much that we decide to give in at the sugar-coated killing orders of a psychotic?

If I can ask for one thing, I ask for your skepticism. It has kept us all alive, and I hope that it ticks on in your mind, the unwavering timekeeper that asserts that you are your own individual, free to view the world as interactions based in a reality, sovereign, subservient to none, and owned by nobody.

BY NOBODY.
YOU'RE ALIVE. THAT'S ALL THERE IS.
STOP HOPING AND FIGHT, GODDAMNIT.

Learn more about Jonestown here.

Filed in: jonestown religion anarchy autonomy skepticism

The British Virgin Islands

I've got the whirlies - my body still thinks it's on a boat. If I take a shower, I want to fall over. If I try to brush my teeth, I lean back and forth in the mirror.

My body doesn't want to believe it's home. It doesn't want to be back on land. I don't blame it. It was the most unbelievable vacation I've ever had. The British Virgin Islands is still, for all our attempts to civilize, capitalize, and bastardize it, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

Weather was smashing, temperatures in the high 80s, mostly sunny, trade winds hollowing through the islands at a steady 15 knots from the east. It caught our sails every day without fail, and we made no less than 4 knots of headway on our South African-built Voyages 440, a catamaran with ample living space and sturdy construction.

I wouldn't call her a performer - she can sail, at best, 45 degrees off the wind, and could only give us 7 knots maximum speed. Her twin diesels, that provided crucial maneuvering in tight harbors, hardly made up for her sluggish turn radius and somewhat quirky steering.

But let's not talk technical details. Go get on these pictures and see the amazing sights we saw. See images from Anegada, Sandy Spit, The Baths at Virgin Gorda, and other beautiful destinations in the BVI. I'll be adding comments to each of the photos as the evening goes on, so keep checking back on this photo set!

See The BVI - Link to Flickr Gallery

Filed in: sailing vacation

Who's Gonna Drop the Boom on Things To Go

I'm burning the last 48 hours until I pick up my bags and red-eye to the Virgin Islands, making the tin can in the sky my bed for the night and all the next morning.

I love putting down air miles at night - I've heard plenty of my friends groan and shriek under the specter of "uncomfortable" air travel and that pinnacle of inconvenience, the red-eye flight.

I don't think I'll ever get over jets. Let's do a quick numbers check. The McDonnell-Douglas (Now Boeing) MD-80 has a cruising speed at 35,000 feet of 0.76 Mach. Roughly 3/4 the speed of sound at sea level. That's 504 mph.

Few times in your life will you ever go 504 miles an hour. Rarely will you get over 100 miles an hour. Unless you're traveling in jets. People can complain all they want, and sure, recycled air, those tiny toilets, and cabin-pressure flat soda sucks, but we, the lucky ones to be living in this time and this place, get to sit down, strap in, and slingshot from one end of this country to another in six hours on a screaming aluminum dart.

Go ahead, complain. Just try it. Tell me how horrible it is, how inconvenienced you are, how awful it is to fly. Watch me not care!

And once I'm gone, for ten days I'm not posting, I'm not responding, I'm not checking e-mail, and I'm not sure as hell not picking up the phone.

I'll just be sailing. Here.



Watch your margins, stay solvent, and have fun with the country while I'm gone.

And if anybody asks me a question about Windows XP while I'm down there, I swear to God, I'm going to punch them right off the boat.

Filed in: vacation sailing airplanes travel airlines

Give Them What They Want, Don't Tell Them

Was looking for this one for a while.

From here: Top 10 Tuesday: Wildest Statements Made by Industry Veterans

Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, "Customers do not want online games." The Big N has long made bold claims about the marketplace based solely about what is - or, as it happens, isn't - happening in Japan, but this one definitely earns Iwata a spot on our list. Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement.

Filed in: games marketing online nintendo

Jon Spouted a Lot of Bullshit

This is absolutely excellent.

Garfield Comics without Garfield's Thought Bubbles

It's the old comic strip you knew, but without Garfield's cutting internal commentary, Jon just turns out to be another whiny, insecure, blame-projecting loser.

My favorite is the black and white with simply "You're a selfish pig." And Garfield doesn't even care.

Absolute genius from the user that did this. And I don't even know who they are. Thanks, Metafilter.

Filed in: comedy cartoon garfield mash-up

Video Game Studio Waffles on Digital Distribution

Let's talk video games for a minute.

Interview with Giant Bite Studios

They're asking a new games developer startup (yes, again), this time Giant Bite, some of the usual questions they ask game startups.

All I want to call attention to is their answer to the question of digital distribution.

HC: Digital distribution is a great way of reducing the cost of getting content to the end user. But this is only a small part of the costs involved in developing, marketing, pushing and supporting a AAA game title. We are looking forward to working with a publisher to see how we can leverage online community and digital distribution to help better connect with our player community.

So we're all drinking the same kool-aid, digital distribution is piping a full-version game or other product over the Internet to a consumer without them having to walk into a store. They log in, buy it, there it is. It's been going on with video games since the Steam days, when Valve Software made the first hack at getting it going.

Valve took the loss-leader role, pouring what I'm guessing is millions of dollars into Steam as the precursor to the quick influx of publishers, developers and third parties that decided that hey, let's put stuff on the Internet. Look at xStream (who early last year got $3.5M in funding for digital distribution), EA Downloader, Akamai, and Direct2Drive (which supplied me with the SWAT4 expansion pack for same-as-retail price) for examples of who's who in digital distribution.

It's great. Why am I pissed? Because smart guys paved the way, took the bullets, the criticism (remember when we laughed at Steam?), got 5 million registered users, 8500 cyber cafes signed up, customers who were hooked in without needing a publisher-distributor-retailer chain.

They did all this work, made all this possible, just so these new guys, these Halo-Counterstrike-Half-Life genius guys who've at least got the balls to start a new development house get to go on and say the same old line: "we look forward to working with a publisher". You do? I never did. Seriously, guys, that's not the revolution we're looking for.

I am not happy with the arrangement that a development house still has to pander to the publisher market, picking for scraps, and having to be more or less indifferent to digital distribution because they don't know which way the publisher's dick is going to swing on it. Maybe today's publisher is really in bed with the retailers, so a development house that likes digital too much is screwed. Maybe I'm evil for thinking so, but damnit, I think a few things have really come together to make it possible to say "we don't even need a publisher". Don't forget, Valve fought VU on this one and won.

I get that a publisher needs to provide daily airdrops of cash, booze, and booth babes (whoops, not allowed anymore) to your average game development camp, but if you want to pull a Peter Jackson and sign up advertisers to defray cost of the game's production, you're already assured you'll get at least Subway to sign on. And, though the PR cost has been high for VU Games and Irrational for taking the first few hot ones on using Massive Ads in SWAT4, they seem to be moving the chains forward; online advertising in-game is, I think, a hot market waiting to explode, possibly willing to put money up front for development and supplant part of the publisher's fat stacks of cash.

Add to this simple advertising more interesting and flavorful things like marketing surveys via distributed games for hardware vendors and you'll see a whole host of people that'd be willing to frontload money to get this sort of thing off the ground.

Do I think it's big? Absolutely. Do I think it makes sense for a studio to give publishers the finger right about now? Yeah, the time is about right. Do I have the numbers to back it up? No, they're asking about $3700 for a report. Probably good bathroom reading.

Oh, and the Steam thing? Looks like it's working well for Strategy First.

Filed in: entertainment advertising steam valve distribution retail marketing

Federal Government Asks for Debt Limit Increase, Taps Pension Funds

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11699012/

Snow in his letter notified lawmakers that Treasury would begin tapping the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which Treasury officials said would provide a "few billion" dollars in extra borrowing ability.

Cool. Raiding pensions, again. Only this time it's the federal government raiding their own employees. So, we've got the lowest savings rate since the depression, massive consumer debt, and our own government so unable to manage it's own debt that it stuck its hand in the candy jar made for its employees.

Treasury has also been taking investments out of a $65.3 billion government pension fund known as the G-fund.

I don't think I ever asked government to be our teachers of decent behavior - I leave that to our own parents - so I'm not saying it sends us a bad message about investment. What I will say instead: when the government invests as badly as its citizens, when it has about as little self-restraint for debt as Kirstie Alley has for a plate of cocktail weiners, you know it's gotten so widespread that it's passè.

Wouldn't surprise me to see tomorrow on the cover of People: "Britney and Kevin - In Debt!" Uncontrollable, snowballing, self-destructive debt is now a part enough of American culture as to be considered an aspiration. I guess we need to find a new vice; debt is this generation's cocaine.

Filed in: economics debt treasury pension

Knowledge Economy: It Ain't a Widget, Don't Count It

Business Week caught my eye in the local Teryiaki shop while I was waiting for gyoza to steam up for a take-out. Unmasking The Economy, it says. Here, take a copy for yourself and read. They say it's not as bad as it looks.

Upshot is this. We're not investing in capital (factories, machinery), so the numbers don't show growth of our American industry. It looks stale, like our companies smoked mom's cigarettes as kids and stopped growing at four-foot-eight. But raw R&D and investment in foreign factories to produce American-consumed products are hiding the successes we're all profiting from right now, even while things look grim by the numbers.

Say Intel puts 3.8 million in new chip R&D. They pick MIT guys and India overseas grads and pull them into a lab to generate the newest chip. Is it capital? Are they investing? Maybe to the shareholders, sure, on a Micro level, investors get it. But on a Macro level, is it considered growth?

Not according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Macro-side, these are expenditures, not investments, because it's not capital to increase production. It doesn't crank widgets, it doesn't get counted.

So, the Fed's Bernanke is following on Greenspan's anguish at this problem - is it growth to get smart people together for R&D? With more production moving overseas, you've got to wonder, is it really about the number of widgets?

Even farther ahead, with individual fabrication technology, rapid prototyping, the fabrication of the widget will scarcely be the issue. Like they say in Hollywood, it's all about the story. It's the design of the thing. The IP. The knowledge worker.

Okay, fine. I'd swallow it whole except for this one hook - supply vs. demand. I'm saying that the Bureau of Economic Analysis has been busy considering the supply-side of production in their growth numbers, asking the right questions for the industrial age: can you supply the widgets? Let's talk tacos.

Scenario: I have a taco maker. My taco maker spits out 50 million tacos a year for the US Government to put in their taco GDP. If I invest in another taco maker, I can spit out 100 million tacos and double the supply into the market. To BEA, this is capital, and whether or not there's demand for the additional 50 million tacos is immaterial. It almost looks like supply bias leftover from the Great Depression and WWII.

Now: I spend money not on a taco maker, but an R&D process to make a thing called a burrito. Nobody's seen a burrito before, but we're betting they're gonna ditch tacos and eat these things up like the horsemen were coming. What are we doing? We're changing the supply - retooling - and hoping to open up a new channel of demand, tap an untapped market. We're thinking we could get 150 million burritos sold, way over the tacos we'd sell if we spent money on the extra taco maker.

So: We go for the burritos. Does BEA consider that growth? No. Macro-wise, we're not helping the economy.

But this is the rub. Considering the circumstances and risk behind R&D it might not be bad to do things this way. To BEA, a taco in the hand is better than three burritos in the bush (my apologies for this horrible euphemism but I'm not going to delete it, let it stand as a lesson to me), even to the tune of tuning out huge potential profits by adjusting to new demand channels. Especially with software, where R&D can, with the same machines, create just about any product, it may seem overly cautious to not consider R&D costs as some kind of growth.

But if tacos were a sure thing, getting 50 million extra supply was too. BEA assumes demand, if the capital grows it must grow due to legitimate demand since no company would build more taco-making capability than they thought people would consume. The difference is that knowledge growth, trying something new with R&D, is a gamble on demand that may not already be established. Is it reasonable to count all R&D expenditures as growth?

If so, they'll have to be risk-weighted somehow. You want a recent expensive failure, try Gizmondo. That didn't help the economy much if at all. If the knowledge doesn't make a widget, maybe it's not something we should be counting.

I dunno. Thoughts?

Filed in: economics, export, information, knowledgeworker, outsourcing, process, statistics