Stephen has been arguing for some time that the trouble with iTunes is that allows only a 99-cents-a-pop ownership model of music rather than an all-you-can-eat rental model such as that provided by Napster.
Nevertheless, the all-you-can-eat subscription model should work, and it would certainly make sense for real music lovers—the more music you listen to, the cheaper the overall cost per song becomes. What’s more, subscription certainly works for Netflix, which continues to grow with streaming subscription on demand. So why do users still want to pay 99 cents per song and not, say, $15 for a month’s worth of infinite songs? Would the iTunes Store work just as well as a subscription service?
On the other hand, if Apple does stick with a purchase-only pricing policy, they may venture beyond the “everything costs $.99″ model:
Which brings us to another of the big ideas circulating around the music industry these days: popularity pricing. This model makes the cost of each song scalable depending on demand—a song by a niche indie band could cost 40 cents while a song by a big act such as U2 would sell for $1.50. Letting the market drive pricing could be a good idea or a horribly bad one. In the Internet realm, where a world of illegal, free material is only a few mouse clicks away, high-priced content can become an incentive for bad behavior.
It will be interesting to see where Apple goes with these various licensing options. I’d certainly like to see them adopt something a little more Netflix-like for video content. I love being able to load TV shows and movies down to my iPod, but this is where, to me, both the price and the notion of “ownership” seem excessive. And apparently they strike Apple as being excessive, too. I note that as I’ve been working my way through Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, iTunes removes each episode I’ve watched from my iPod. All the episodes are all still there in my iTunes on the computer, should I decide to load them back onto the iPod, but what are the chances I’m going to do that? Apple is tacitly admitting that this is content I would not necessarily want permanent, ongoing access to.
So why sell it to me, then? Why not just let me rent it? I think Stephen is on to something, here.
Any man who reads the newspapers will encounter the phrase “even women and children†a couple times a month, usually about being killed. The literal meaning of this phrase is that men’s lives have less value than other people’s lives. The idea is usually “It’s bad if people are killed, but it’s especially bad if women and children are killed.†And I think most men know that in an emergency, if there are women and children present, he will be expected to lay down his life without argument or complaint so that the others can survive. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs.
Read the whole thing…it’s a fascinating take on the differences between the sexes. Whether you buy into the arguments or not, it certainly does make you think.
Also, 2/3s of the ancestors of the current human population are women. I know.
Lately the Boulder Futurists have been debating the future of persuasion, with considerable emphasis on what topics the news media chooses to cover, how this relates to the interests of advertisers, etc. Here’s an interesting related piece, a Pew Research poll that shows how people’s interest in various new topics has changed over the years.
Apparently only half as many people are interested in science as 20 years ago. This is potentially alarming, to be sure, but what I find more interesting is that public interest has gone down in virtually all of these subject areas. Our interest in man-made disasters has dropped 20%; our interest in natural disasters has dropped 25%. Even our interest in terrorism has only nudged up a point. Meanwhile, politics and crime have made some significant gains. But the only area with a rise anything like as steep as some of the other drops is money. Our interest in financial news has increased substantially.
I also note that, for all the hand-wringing about celebrity gossip, our interest in that subject has actually gone down 5%.
Initially I thought that what might be going on with that one is a distinction between celebrity news and celebrity scandals, which Pew doesn’t make, but which the consumers of the deluge of celebrity information might. So people might truly be interested in a lot more celebrity fluff than they used to be, but balk at saying they have a strong interest in “scandals.” But no: after I double-checked< I realized that there is a separate category for "Personalities and Entertainment." That had a big jump between 87 and 99, but has remained flat since then.
Overall, I think the list of available categories that Pew uses might have a lot to do with people's seeming lack of interest. For example, a survey-taker might focus on the "Science" part of "Science and Technology," and not realize that their interest in the latest electronic gizmos fits into that category. It should really be two different categories. Likewise, there's been a huge increase in interest in and coverage of nutrition, fitness, and in medicine overall. This all has to fit uncomfortably into a category called "Health and Safety." I note that the environment isn't really covered by any of Pew's categories, either. I think there are probably a lot more highly specialized categories of information for people to be interested in than there were even a few years ago, so if people express a lack of interest in these more general categories, it doesn't tell us a heck of a lot about how informed they are overall.
Then there's the argument about whether what people truly are interested in is as serious and worthwhile as what they used to be / should be. There is a tendency to think that people used to be a lot more serious than they are today, and that people today are idiots. These are probably valuable memes, in that they encourage smartness and seriousness. These memes are helped along their way by a sense of urgency. I could have fallen in line with that, by making my headline : "America Doomed: Evolution-Denying, Britney-Spears-Adoring, NASCAR-Watching, American-Idol-Addicted Consumer Zombies are Dragging Us Into a New Dark Ages with their Lack of Interest in Science," but that sort of thing:
1. Isn’t really my style.
2. Is available abundantly elsewhere.
3. Doesn’t really reflect what I believe.
Contrary to these highly useful memes, I tend to think that people are getting both smarter and more capable, thanks in large part to technology. Unfortunately, there are now so many areas in which people can have knowledge, it’s only natural that apparent performance in traditional areas (like interest levels in standard topics in the Pew report) are going down. Meanwhile, it’s never been easier to “prove” beyond a shadow of a doubt that people, especially Americans, are complete idiots, in part because ignorance can be packaged and broadcast like never before:
Funny thing is, I immediately thought of “Uganda” and “Uruguay,” not the USA or the UK. Where does that put me on the ignorance scale?
No, I’m not going to argue that the individuals shown in that video are “smart in other areas” and so it’s okay that they seem to know nothing about some very basic subjects. Rather, I’m going to to suggest that ignorance is the natural state of humanity, and that most of the world has lived neck-deep in it for most of human history. And it isn’t just the US.
One bit of conventional wisdom has it that if you take a random letter written by a common soldier in the Civil War, you will find a better vocabulary and more sophisticated writing style than you are likely to get from a modern graduate student. Reading through a few such letters, it quickly becomes clear that writing skills varied a good deal among Civil War soldiers. It’s only natural that the most eloquent and poetic of them are, say, featured in Ken Burns’ documentaries. Still, there’s no question that the best of them were pretty damn good, and were able to achieve a sophisticated writing style with a lot less formal education than we get today. But in an era when illiteracy rates were 5-10 times higher than they are today, you better believe that you would find serving side-by-side with these excellent writers men so rough and unschooled that they would make the people in that video look like Frasier Crane by comparison.
It’s just that, 150 years ago, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to make a show out of ignorance. But now we do, because it’s “funny.” It’s especially funny for non-Americans, although Jay Leno’s Jaywalking feature indicates that this sort of thing is highly amusing to American audiences, too. I can’t figure out if that says something about what a good sense of humor Americans have, or whether it’s just the same “People are getting stupid” meme I mentioned above, this time being carried along by humor and shame rather than fear.
But whatever the motivation, I reiterate that this sort of thing is a net positive for us. It plays up the need for smartness by pointing out a lack of it. I don’t think people are less intelligent than they used to be; I think we’ve developed different skill and knowledge sets that aren’t necessarily valued as highly as the traditional ones. We are deluged with information, consuming more of the stuff in a year than our ancestors did in a lifetime. It’s no surprise that our mastery of certain things they had plenty of time to get good at would seem rather awkward and superficial in comparison.
Nor do I think people are fundamentally less serious than they used to be, although that argument might be harder to support. But it’s also the less important of the two. So we’re not as serious. Maybe they were too serious. Maybe our descendants will be more serious than we are. Does every trend have to portend the collapse of civilization? Plus, isn’t it possible that humor and irony are natural defenses to the above-mentioned information deluge?
I don’t have much patience for all the hand-wringing that goes on around how stupid and shallow people are or have become. But I remind myself that all that worrying is probably one of the drivers that keeps us moving forward. When people stop worrying about these things — that’s when it’s probably time to start worrying.
This promises to be a very exciting event– a unique opportunity to go in-depth on the most crucial questions about the future of our species. I plan to be there. Hope to see you there!
This promises to be a very exciting event– a unique opportunity to go in-depth on the most crucial questions about the future of our species. I plan to be there. Hope to see you there!
Recently I added running to my exercise menu. While in San Diego last week, I got up one morning and starting jogging along the pier and just kept hugging the water’s edge until I realized that I had run all the way from my hotel back to the airport — which trip had cost $11 plus tip by cab! Of course, the cab driver couldn’t take the same route I did, but still.
Running is a great choice while on the road — especially when you’re someplace like SD which provides such nice whether and beautiful scenery to run through. I mean, taking my bike with me isn’t really an option, and I get pretty tired of stationery bikes, treadmills, and elliptical trainers in hotel gyms. Being outdoors is more fun, even in a city. Or maybe especially in a city. In some of the places I’ve stayed over the years, running would probably feel more like a survival thing than strictly a matter of ensuring fitness.
But the other reason for adding running is that I’ve observed lots more fat people riding bikes than jogging. Of course, that could mean a lot of things — fat people start out riding bikes and then end up jogging, the fat joggers are all there but on a trail I don’t use, people jog because they’re thin and it doesn’t hurt them the way it would heavier folks (as opposed to concluding that they’re thin because they jog), etc. But I think it’s also reasonable to assume that running might represent a somewhat more vigorous workout, or that metabolically, it might just be more effective at burning fat.
So I was very pleased with myself when, yesterday, I ran one of my suburban mountain-biking courses. The distance is hard to estimate, but it was somewhere between 6 and 8 miles, with lots of grueling uphill stretches, several highly satisfying downhill stretches, and very little flat ground: pretty much the opposite of the terrain on the San Diego waterfront, seeing as I didn’t push on up the cliffs to La Jolla.
So let’s call it 7 miles. That means that I did better than 10K, not bad for a beginner. I mean, you can’t possibly run like that and keep much fat on your body, now can you?
Um, well, yes you can. Check out the September Scientific American if you get the chance. It’s all about nutrition, obesity, starvation, metabolism — all things food. One of the articles, Can Fat Be Fit? makes this observation:
Triathletes can now top 300 pounds, part of the fat-but-fit movement.
So people can be competitively engaged in an activity that has them swimming a mile, running 6 miles, and biking 25 miles and still look like this:
Not to say there’s anything wrong with the way this guy looks, I’m just surprised that a person could do that much cardio exercise and still be so big. I tend to expect a story more like this one — very similar to my own, with that starting weight of 297 pounds — where people lose a bunch of weight related to improving their athletic performance. Per the Sci-Am article, there are those who argue that people should be focused on fitness, not weight loss. Our triathlete shown above would be an example of somebody who is achieving remarkable things athletically, perhaps all the more remarkable when one considers his size.
All of which leads me pretty much back to the same conclusion as last time: this stuff is complicated.
Recently I added running to my exercise menu. While in San Diego last week, I got up one morning and starting jogging along the pier and just kept hugging the water’s edge until I realized that I had run all the way from my hotel back to the airport — which trip had cost $11 plus tip by cab! Of course, the cab driver couldn’t take the same route I did, but still.
Running is a great choice while on the road — especially when you’re someplace like SD which provides such nice whether and beautiful scenery to run through. I mean, taking my bike with me isn’t really an option, and I get pretty tired of stationery bikes, treadmills, and elliptical trainers in hotel gyms. Being outdoors is more fun, even in a city. Or maybe especially in a city. In some of the places I’ve stayed over the years, running would probably feel more like a survival thing than strictly a matter of ensuring fitness.
But the other reason for adding running is that I’ve observed lots more fat people riding bikes than jogging. Of course, that could mean a lot of things — fat people start out riding bikes and then end up jogging, the fat joggers are all there but on a trail I don’t use, people jog because they’re thin and it doesn’t hurt them the way it would heavier folks (as opposed to concluding that they’re thin because they jog), etc. But I think it’s also reasonable to assume that running might represent a somewhat more vigorous workout, or that metabolically, it might just be more effective at burning fat.
So I was very pleased with myself when, yesterday, I ran one of my suburban mountain-biking courses. The distance is hard to estimate, but it was somewhere between 6 and 8 miles, with lots of grueling uphill stretches, several highly satisfying downhill stretches, and very little flat ground: pretty much the opposite of the terrain on the San Diego waterfront, seeing as I didn’t push on up the cliffs to La Jolla.
So let’s call it 7 miles. That means that I did better than 10K, not bad for a beginner. I mean, you can’t possibly run like that and keep much fat on your body, now can you?
Um, well, yes you can. Check out the September Scientific American if you get the chance. It’s all about nutrition, obesity, starvation, metabolism — all things food. One of the articles, Can Fat Be Fit? makes this observation:
Triathletes can now top 300 pounds, part of the fat-but-fit movement.
So people can be competitively engaged in an activity that has them swimming a mile, running 6 miles, and biking 25 miles and still look like this:
Not to say there’s anything wrong with the way this guy looks, I’m just surprised that a person could do that much cardio exercise and still be so big. I tend to expect a story more like this one — very similar to my own, with that starting weight of 297 pounds — where people lose a bunch of weight related to improving their athletic performance. Per the Sci-Am article, there are those who argue that people should be focused on fitness, not weight loss. Our triathlete shown above would be an example of somebody who is achieving remarkable things athletically, perhaps all the more remarkable when one considers his size.
All of which leads me pretty much back to the same conclusion as last time: this stuff is complicated.
