(I swear, I try to post daily, I really do)

As one of the proprietors of a leading internet niche site, as you expect I get a lot of emailed criticism. Much of it is of the form:

You guys are [some horrible thing]. I’m so tired of you [wishing the team would fail/acting as cheerleaders for the team].

To which I always want to reply “Could I introduce you to all the people who email us taking the other side? Because if you all could just come to a consensus about what we could do better, I’d be happy to move in that direction.”

I read it all looking for reasonable opinions, but to the point of this — I got an email recently that went so far beyond the pale of normal criticism or even angry, these-would-be-fighting-words-if-I-ever-met-you ranting. It was frightening to even think that a baseball site could get someone that pissed off. So before I replied, I ran the person’s name through Google, and pretty quickly found that this person, in addition to hating us, held some shocking, paranoid racial/ethnic/religious views.

For a moment, I was relieved to know that it wasn’t only us, and that for whatever reason, we were the hate magnet of the hour, nothing more. And almost immediately, washing over that was the knowledge that somewhere out there was a person who was at some level legitimately unhinged, and even if that meant this was nothing personal after all, the existence of someone out there was just as regrettable as the horrible possibility that our posts had opened a deep well of rage in someone.

It was a strange feeling.

This is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Many companies have long under-funded their pension benefits through a bunch of different ways, the most common of which is to project far too optimisitic returns on the pension’s investments. For instance, the stock market’s historical return has been 7%. Many plans assume they’ll get a return of 10% or more every year forever in order to pay their obligations. This, of course, fails, and then (shockingly) the fund’s can’t pay people.

And that’s just one thing that’s gone wrong.

The argument against was that in tightening requirements, it would discourage companies from having the plans, or encourage them to default now. This seems strange to me: it’s like arguing that stopping the fraudulent sale of unicorns would prevent people from buying unicorns. If the pension plan can’t pay because it’s not funded, it’s not any less solvent now.

This doesn’t prevent financial hijinks, of course, but it’s certainly a good step towards it. Clap clap clap.

Not that anyone I know gets any kind of pension benefits these days. We’re all on 401(k) plans now.

Now let’s say you’re a music company president (or heck, a movie studio head). How do you cope with file sharing?

You control it yourself. Leak rips of releases early, but make them bad rips. Put some pops in there, make the bitrate low, maybe only include the left-side channel… whatever you want to do.

This does a couple things:
– You prevent high-quality ripping. Those rips will spread all over the place, and because no one can get the actual CD to make a better set of MP3s from, they’ll have to use and spread bad ones or go without. This makes it much more difficult later for good rips to get to people.
– You sell more music through legitimate channels.

That second one seems counter-intuitive at first. But if someone’s already out there listening to pirated music, they’re going to be:
– cheapies who aren’t going to buy music, since there are many subscription services and alternatives like iTunes
– normal people who might buy a CD, but like to sample new music for more than the 30s iTunes has, and don’t want to subscribe to a service
– audiophile collectors

Cheapies might be satisfied with the crappy rips you’re polluting with. They weren’t going to buy anyway, though, so you can at least be satisfied that their ears are slowly rotting away from listening to 96kbs rips.

Normal people would get enough to make a purchasing decision, but the low quality is likely to drive them to make a buy/delete decision. No one’s going to listen to a track over and over if it’s got one of those weird “blip” moments at :34 and 1:55 that interrupts the chorus.

Audiophile collectors will be driven nuts and forced to either buy and rip themselves or form some tightly-knit circle of quality MP3 traders. And that might be bad but it also isolates them from the mainstream, and actually helps you pollute networks with low-quality rips in the future.

Control of both the legitimate and illegitimate distrubition channels is a powerful strategy.

Say you run a pharmaceutical company. You have a highly lucrative business manufacturing drugs that treat erectile dysfunction. However, at the edges of your business are a couple of problems:
– gray marketeers buy drugs bound for export and re-sell them in the states through shady means
– black marketeers sell counterfeit drugs

What do you do? Law enforcement’s going to prove ineffective in the long run, and stamping out one results in another one popping up. Plus, the gray marketeers are harming your reputation because someone in Estonia can’t get the real thing because it’s been rerouted.

You enter the black market: control the high and the low. You don’t even have to do it directly: given a distributor of sufficently poor morals, you can supply them with a ton of drugs at a really low cost and watch them flood the black market. Because your drug only costs $.01/pill, you’ll still make a huge profit undercutting what they would pay to pick off those Estonia-bound drugs, and the gray marketeers are screwed.

And voila, your problems are solved (and you’ve created a whole set of problems for other people). Your involvement in easily-deniable cut-out companies now makes you a ton of money, protects the legitimate supply of the drug, and profits go way, way up.

Houghton Mifflin seems really happy with the first draft, but it looks like Spring 07 now: they want time to get full galleys out to everyone and their family so they can get quotes, and it’s not a particularly timely book, so I guess that’s cool.

So good news: it’s looking good, everyone’s happy
Bad news: another year? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn.

The supposedly third-most-important member of Al-Qaida may have been killed by a missle in Pakistan.

This makes, by my count, five #3s killed or captured. So… say that they all really were the #3 man, and also that Al-Qaida’s a pretty strictly vertical organization. Since 2001:
1-2: no problems
3-7: killed or captured

If you were in Al-Qaida and the #8 man back then, at this point you need to either quit or kill the #2 guy, because the US is coming for you. No kidding. This country is serious about pursuing anyone in Al-Qaida who isn’t one of the two guys right at the top.

One of a continuing series.

When I built my new PC, I set it up with RAID-1 because, being a writer and all, I’m amazingly paranoid about my data but don’t want to run full backups every night.

I had to go through this long and annoying process to set it up which involved me having to buy and install a floppy drive (which I suspect is the only time I’ll ever use it), but it worked fine and I was happy.

Until one day, Windows gave me this weird message on startup (“Installing new hardware… found Seagate… found Seagate…”) and then both drives started showing up. For a week I didn’t notice that somehow, the array had been split and one of the drives wasn’t working until today. I went to fix it, which was long and annoying, and when I got it up and going, it rebuilt itself off the older drive, so I lost a week of data (fortunately, I didn’t do anything really interesting this week).

I don’t mind tinkering with boxes. I’ve done it most of my life. It’s tedious and annoying, but I understand that when you want to do cool, non-standard stuff, you end up getting into loading drivers and reading manuals. I’m okay with that.

But once working, can’t it stay working for a week? Is that really too high a standard before everything — without explanation or any kind of chance to troubleshoot — blows up on me?

Argh.

Watch ads enough, and you’ll start to note that much of the time, the ad is an attempt at an almost Rovian sales philosophy: selling the weakest part of your product as a strength (SUVs with huge gas tanks saying “get 300 miles on a single tank!”).

But Xbox 360 marketing’s taken this up hilariously:

Limit 1 per customer. Due to high demand, orders placed after October 26th may not ship until March 2006.
If you’re a serious gamer looking for the ultimate console, the search ends here. Fully loaded, the Xbox 360 Ultimate Bundle

It’s $699.92.

The search doesn’t end “there” so much as this is the waiting room for the actual place where the search ends. If you’re looking for a “the ultimate console” you haven’t just found one: you’ve found the queue. Now just wait a long, long time.

It’s crazy. You could sell anything out of stock this way. “Are you tired of pedaling around on a bike that weighs over 10 pounds? Well, for only $5,000,000 you can buy a bike made of pure Unobtainium, a substance we haven’t even invented yet, but which we’re sure will offer amazing handling and performance sometime after 2050.”

“Hungry? Get on the waitlist for Snickers.”

One of the interesting things about having a blog with a relatively high Google ranking is that other pages will do things like link to you in an attempt to make themselves look relevant. So, for instance:

scotts faves alicublog busy busy busy talk left si vague nihilism alterdestiny
south knox bubba orcinus altercation the gadflyer uss mariner iraqd martini
republic war and piece american street madkane dogblog lance mannion camos axis.

Hee hee hee. A lot of “lawyer” sites lately, too, which is strange. Discount cruises.

It’s interesting that search engines, in attempting to make the web navigable, have created an entire new category of noise, and the battle has changed from being trying to make information usable to trying to pick information from the chaff.

A Flying Tigers flight jacket.

I believe the patch on the back says “This foreign person has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect, and provide him medical care.”