My buddy Bruce Buschel lived through an outage, thank you Verizon, and tells about it.
So funny, you might wish he’d been out longer.
Monthly Archives: November 2014
SEC Rule 4 Disclosures, As Entertainment
Matt Levine writes about money at Bloomberg View. He’s funny, sensible and worth reading even if you don’t care about SEC disclosures. What?
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-29/high-speed-traders-avoid-low-speed-website
The Oatmeal on Net Neutrality
The basic idea is that massive megaliths like Comcast and Time Warner and, wait, are they merging? And every other cable company that has a monopoly because of community franchising, have some community responsibility.
That responsibility is called Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality means different things to every communication company trying to stick citizens with higher bills for their cable and internet service.
To all of them it means lower revenue.
But to the people who pay absurd cable and internet bills each month, net neutrality means that no matter what any company offers over the internet pipes, the price is the same.
Competing services, like Red Box, Amazon and Netflix, might have different business strategies, might have different owners, but each should pay the same amount to transfer their data through the internet to your house.
That’s net neutrality.
The same should be true if you’re selling Marxism, Leninism or Maoism. The price is for bandwidth, not ideology.
Comcast and Time Warner and your cable company would like you to think that this is unfair. They’re wrong. They’ve tried to sell you on paying extra for faster pipes, and better video speeds. They may have made money doing this.
But the basic principle of the internet is equality, and that breaks down quickly when those who own the pipes are able to discriminate between different data streams passing through.
Which is why this cartoon from the Oatmeal resonates:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality
Suburban Safari: Bears
The question is whether this video from Rockaway, New Jersey, reminds you more of Barbet Schroeder’s film version of Charles Bukowski’s Barfly, starring Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke, or is a leading example of why people are leaving the suburbs and moving back to the cities. In a hurry. If they have a choice.
I’m leaning toward Barfly.
Extreme Biking Fun.
This seems so impossible it is magical.
LINK: Keith Gessen in Vanity Fair about Amazon
This is a fantastic history of the ebook publishing industry, and the dispute between the old school book publishers and Amazon about ebook pricing.
Except, it never says what spooks the old line publishers (and Andrew Wylie) explicitly.
But it alludes.
Here’s the deal: Print books make more money for publishers than ebooks. And if the price of ebooks falls too much, print books won’t be competitively priced and won’t sell.
For the time being, a print window might work (the same way Taylor Swift created a CD window last week by pulling her music off Spotify), but it doesn’t seem likely to work forever.
At the same time, traditional publishers are fighting to retain the large margin they get from print books. It’s hard to say they shouldn’t try while they can, but they won’t be able to do that or long.
LINK: It’s Election Day and Someone is Writing About Nate Silver!
We all love predictions, and Nate Silver has proven himself adept at making them, so it’s understandable attention turns his way on Election Day.
What is also clear is that we have a hard time understanding the nature of a prediction, which is why Silver not only says what he thinks is going to happen but also offers the odds that he’ll be wrong. To determine these odds Silver turns to Bayes’ Theorum and the more modern Bayesians, who have developed a way to measure uncertainty in a prediction based on the work of the English statistician and minister, Thomas Bayes (pictured).
This truth in packaging is what makes even Silver’s miscalls informational.
The mathematician Jordan Ellenburg takes a look at how many of Silver’s predictions will be wrong today in Slate, if Silver’s self-claimed odds of being wrong are correct. It won’t spoil the fun of reading the piece for me to tell you that Silver should be wrong about 2.5 senate races.