The other evening I decided to check if a certain ringtone was available for my model of cellular phone. I quickly discovered, to my disgust, that ringtone sites generally don’t let one browse the selection of available tunes without first registering as a customer.
To hell with that. It’s a somewhat obscure (in the USA at least) tune, and I’ll be damned if I agree to pay money to someone before I’m certain they have it available. It’s bad enough that I have to register for ten tunes (or a month or three of downloads) when I’m only interested in one. Now I’m expected to pay and possibly receive nothing desirable in return? Incredible.
What kind of sleazeball operations are these crooks running? I’ve never heard of a legitimate retail business operating like this. Every other one I’ve dealt with lets prospective customers preview the merchandise first before agreeing to pay for it. If a bricks-and-mortar store has an “Come in we’re… Open” sign in the window, it means precisely that; I’m welcome to come in without any promise on my part to buy something.
Restaurants will gladly let you look at the menu before sitting down. Mail-order companies will typically send their catalogs to anyone who asks.for them, sometimes charging a nominal fee that’s refundable if you order from them, All other Internet merchants I’ve looked at are more than happy to let you browse their merchandise, no obligations.
But not these clowns. I remember once my parents made the mistake of renting a motel room at an establishment that didn’t let them look at it first. Not surprisingly, it was dreadful, They never made that mistake again. And neither shall I.
Congratulations, idiots. You just drove a potential customer away.
Can anyone who knows anything about the evolution of capitalism and its effects on society honestly be surprised by this?
I’ve always smelled a rat whenever the techno-libertarians would talk about technological advancement and the Internet making both traditional media and the regulatory issues it begs obsolete. Soon, they would claim, we’ll be in a world where technology had simply made the old issues obsolete. There was no need to worry about any possible conflict between capitalism and free speech; such concerns are the worries of an obsolete past.
Hardly. As I’ve written before, the dominant ethic in capitalism is the acquisition of individual power. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen, but I’ve been reasonably sure for some years now that the current era of a mostly open Internet will eventually come to a close. The concept of privileged treatment is simply too useful for the power-seekers; eventually the marketplace will satisfy this demand of the powerful at the expense of the many.
It happened with the old broadcast media, after all, which began with the same sort of lofty hopes many now have for the Internet. In the ’teens and ’twenties, there was no dominant form of radio broadcasting in the USA. There were commercial stations, but there were also educational stations (run by a variety of institutions), municipal stations, stations run by fraternal organizations, stations run by organized labor, and so on. There were so many licensed small stations that there wasn’t room for many big, powerful commercial ones. The system had evolved into a state of affairs where massive corporate consolidation was extremely difficult.
The response of the would-be consolidators was to change the rules. They paid the government to pass a law requiring a “scientific” study that concluded that it would be “objectively” better if there were fewer and more powerful stations. Many small stations were forced to close outright, and others were saddled with such unfavorable power and antenna limitations that they were doomed to close. The result was the birth of the large broadcast networks, most of which are still with us today.
As such, I have no doubt that the proposed legislation (or something very similar to it) is going to pass. It would simply be too much of a direct repudiation of one of the system’s core values for it not to.
Joan Ryan had a somewhat strange column in the San Francisco Examiner today, attempting to make the threat of sudden death and destruction (via an earthquake, of course) into a good thing.
I never particularly thought of it that way when I lived in (or when I visit) California. I wonder if more than a few do. I always saw it as a problem with the place, but a problem in perspective: lots of places are vulnerable to natural disasters of one sort or another. Many of them (such as hurricane country) get disasters more frequently than earthquake country does. On the other hand, it’s an apples/oranges comparison because hurricanes can be forecast with more accuracy than earthquakes. So pick your poison: more frequent and more predictable, or less frequent but unpredictable.
I certainly see no reason to be perpetually nervous about it when I visit the Bay Area. If that were the case, I’d be pretty nervous right now, as most earthquake hazard maps place a good chunk of the Pacific Northwest only a slight notch below coastal California.
I’m now officially speechless at the evils of the Bush Regime. No speculation I can lob can match the sheer evil and viciousness of wanting to start a nuclear war against a country that’s never attacked the USA.
While they don’t (yet) back up Hersh’s claims of nuclear attack plans, the Washington Post has corroborated his general claims that attack plans are in the works. Myself, I have little doubt that Hersh is correct; he has a past record of being a source of the highest integrity and accuracy.
The rally against the demonizing of undocumented immigrants last Monday was one of the most impressive demonstrations I’ve been to in some time.
For one, the turnout was incredible. I arrived at the Federal Building and a huge crowd had taken over the block in front. I stayed around for 15 or 20 minutes, then headed off because I had some errands to attend to that evening. After several blocks, I looked up the street and noticed that there were still huge crowds feeding into the rally. Every other block I looked uphill and saw Second Avenue still crowded curb to curb. I was sure I’d be able to get past the end of it by Pike Street. Wrong. I had to wait about five minutes for the end to arrive.
It was especially moving to me because it involved witnessing a formerly silent group finding its voice and asserting power. Who knows where this will all end up. Six months ago this wasn’t even an issue on the radar screen; it’s almost always the case that turns in the political tide come unexpectedly and out of the darndest of places.
Short summary: entertaining movie, but hardly an exposition of coherent revolutionary theory. I’ve also heard that the graphic novel the movie is based on had an explicit anarchist message, which has been sanitized out of the movie.
The Chinese head of state is in town, and all the mainstream media outlets are reporting on how the “president” of that nation is visiting. Which, indeed, is his official title.
He’s never been freely elected to that office, so that also makes “dictator” an appropriate label for the man. Not surprisingly, I see nobody in the establishment media using it. Of course not. China is behaving pretty much as the capitalist elite want it to behave.
Their measure of a dictator has very little to do with a leader being accountable to the will of those whom he leads. It has very much to do with how accountable he is to the will of the ruling elite of the developed world.
Just compare the search results for the number of Fox News pages that contain the words “dictator,” “Hu,” and “Jintao” with the number that contain the words “dictator,” “Hugo,” and “Chavez.”
Q: How many confused allopaths does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three. One to prescribe antibiotics for the bulb, a specialist to prescribe stronger antibiotics when the first fails, and a second specialist to say there’s nothing more that can be done and you’ll have to live with Light-Bulb Darkness Syndrome.
Q: How many alternative medicine practitioners does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just one, but instead of changing it he attempts to relight it with a match because that’s what tradition says to do with a light that’s gone out.
The above attempt at levity is prompted by my not-at-all funny battle with rosacea and my quest to find a treatment for it that’s something better than an illogical joke. For which I’ve come to the conclusion that the person I’m going to have to rely on most of all is myself.
The savagery of the puppet regime in Iraq grabs most of the headlines these days, but there’s apparently no shortage of same in Afghanistan, as this account shows.
As I’ve said before it should not come as a big surprise when a people whose main experiences with Western culture are brutality, death, and destruction later decide to reject all aspects of it outright.
The relationship between Seattle and the Supersonics is not analogous to a bickersome couple. It is analogous to the battered wife that stays in a relationship in the hope that if she acts submissive enough she will stop getting beaten.
DTMFA, Seattle!
Thought I’d make a quick mention of this, since it seems to be entirely absent from the domestic media, which as usual pretends the world ends at the US borders. Another link.
Why? Because the political system doesn’t exist to address the problems inherent in the American way of life. It exists to preserve that way of life, regardless of inherent problems. It’s all one big debate on how best to continue being the pig of the world.
If that means telling lies about it being a sustainable way of life, that will be done. And it will be done on both sides of the so-called aisle.
Dan Savage really can’t be considered a serious political analyst, but what the hey, I’ll discuss his latest rant anyhow.
Buses certainly can be improved to the point where they provide near rail-like quality of service. The result is usually called “bus rapid transit” and it works very well in both Ottawa, ON and Curitiba, Brazil.
The rub is that there’s no standard for what constitutes “bus rapid transit,” and the fact that buses are involved creates a slippery slope where politicians can throw a new paint scheme and a few insignificant changes at an existing bus system and label it as if it were a significant improvement.
True bus rapid transit requires separate dedicated busways. An occasional bus lane or traffic signal priority doesn’t count. Bus rapid transit, like more traditional rail rapid transit, still involves significant right-of-way acquisition, construction, and maintenance costs. Yes, done properly, it can offer significant savings over rail. But it still ends up being significantly more costly than buses on city streets in mixed traffic. TANSTAAFL.
The catch mentioned above is compounded more by how legitimate BRT service typically leverages the unique advantage of buses — their ability to go anywhere on existing streets — by offering passengers one-seat rides on routes that start on streets then join the busway. Seattle has a short busway south of downtown. Is a bus that pokes along for forty minutes in mixed traffic then spends its final few minutes on the dinky busway “bus rapid transit?” In my book, no, but on a technicality, quite possibly yes.
The monorail right-of-way that’s in the process of being squandered would have made a dandy busway (which later on could have had light rail tracks plopped onto it). As I’ve said before, that (and not the death of the monorail itself) is the true crying shame of the death of the monorail.
Which is why I’m renting and have no plans to buy here. Seattle has made the choice to neglect infrastructure issues, and I’ve made a choice of my own in response.
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