In comments on the previous post, Disgrunted Manatee suggests:

As others have said, without a picture of the selection from previous ages, it is hard to digest this data. I still recall Blockbuster having an entire aisle to display 100 copies of each of the 3 most popular movies at the time, then 3 aisles holding a random smattering of other stuff. The selection was never all that grand. Anecdotally in my small experience, the selection now just with netflix is way better than in my childhood with blockbuster and two other brick and mortar video store memberships combined.

A few points in response:

1. Blockbusters were, for the most part, terrible video stores, focused as they – and Netflix, for that matter – were on feeding consumer demand for the newest hottest things, rather than being consumer-oriented pay libraries (which are generally profitable enterprises, if not as profitable as stoking consumer demand to hyperactive proportions).

2. Your typical Blockbuster – and I can speak to this as I had multiple siblings work there – worked on stocking principles that dictated that half of the store’s shelf space was devoted to new releases (with the newest and hottest releases taking more prominence, of course), and half to older stock. This contrasted with more traditional video stores, where (and I personally worked at several, so I can also speak to this) generally had a new release/long tail ratio of anywhere from 40-60 (your neighborhood mom and pop store) to 20/80 (the really good video stores that took movies seriously).

3. Compare to Netflix, where we actually have hard statistics to determine how much of their catalogue can be considered recent thanks to sites like New On Netflix. Thanks to that site, I can tell you that Netflix Canada has 5,190 titles right now, and of those 5,190 titles 3,007 are less than three years old. That’s 58 percent! And that’s before you remove TV programs from the equation, because TV series are considered (for search purposes) single titles with their year being the earliest season available on Netflix, so most TV series skew older rather than newer, which means that the percentage of movies on Netflix that could be considered reasonably recent is actually even higher than it looks at first glance.

4. Just as important, though, is the fact that although most video stores and Blockbusters would generally clear out their new releases stock as “previously viewed” sales to increase their revenue, they would keep one or two copies of each new release to be incorporated into their older stock, because although the long tail for rentals is a thing, for movies that are 5-10 years old you’re still in the medium of the long tail where there was an active audience of people who were only getting around to see any given movie which they had intended to see for a while (this happened regularly with prestige pictures/Oscar winners), and after the medium of the long tail passed there was still the long tail of revenue to be generated from movies which had already seen the vast majority of their lifetime rentals but which could earn additional revenue every so often simply by sitting there and being available.

5. The average Blockbuster had a movie library of approximately 7,000 titles at any given time (per Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell); independent video stores almost always exceeded this, with “good” video stores often exceeding 15,000 titles. Netflix – regardless of country – has at any point a library of in between 5-6,000 titles. That is usually about 20% TV shows (and many of the TV shows are marginal things); it usually also includes about 20% bottom-bin straight-to-DVD releases (and straight-to-video releases were certainly a part of any video store’s inventory, but the ratio was usually about 10% rather than 20%). There really isn’t any numerical question that Netflix’s service is inferior to practically all video stories in terms of variety of catalogue.

So, the basic response to Manatee’s comment is the least satisfying one to all concerned, which is “your memory isn’t really accurate.” Regular video stores were better for catalogue than Blockbuster was, and Blockbuster was better for catalogue than Netflix was.

This proposal for a guaranteed income is so stupid it gives me hives.

Not sure if it’s the neverending libertarian fantasy that a reputation economy is somehow workable when we know it isn’t, thanks to reams and reams of experience (the net result of a reputation economy is simply that it becomes dangerous to offer anything approaching the real value for any item or service outside of your trusted social networks so everybody loses out massively once they try any wider commerce) or if it’s the fact that this “workable solution” is, quite simply, a giant workfare scheme that actually has nothing to do with the idea of a proper guaranteed income program (hint: once the income isn’t guaranteed if you don’t work, it’s no longer guaranteed so maybe stop calling it that), or that it is painfully obvious that this system would be gamed to death by every corporation able to afford so much as one single lousy contract lawyer, or that it believes that the problem with joblessness is a lack of desire rather than a lack of jobs, or…

oh man, I can’t go on, there’s just so much that is wrong with this idea and I didn’t even get to its overall screw-the-lazy-poors tone yet.

Hey, let’s all play a game: come up with a strategy to abuse this system as much as humanly possible! Best one (as judged by me) will get a prize of some kind. And you know it will be a good prize because I’m willing to put my reputation on the line so clearly I am incentivised to make it, I dunno, Krugerrands or something.

Generally, when it comes to sports owners pleading poverty every time they have to renegotiate with players, I am completely unsympathetic. The “always side with labour over bosses” rule is never stronger than when one is talking about pro sports, because without the players there would literally be no product, and sports owners are some of the worst examples of management crying poverty that there ever have been – where their franchises have not become profitable and ridiculously appreciated in value over time (particularly in an era where they can very easily blackmail communities into handling much of their expenses), it is usually because of mismanagement on a scale that is truly ludicrous (cf. the Maloof brothers, owners of the Sacramento Kings, who have turned a traditionally profitable small-market team with a crazy-passionate fanbase and a city willing to help pay for an arena into a neverending disaster) and even then mismanagement is no guarantee that the franchise will not continue to be profitable anyway.

Ridiculous salaries? The teams are making the money, and the players are the reason the teams are making the money; really, the salaries are much more justifiable than the fact that the owners in most leagues usually end up taking about half of all the money the teams make on the basis that they own the team brands and pay the cheerleaders and such. LeBron James has the league maximum contract and, based on his personal fanbase, brand power, ability to help a team compete and everything else that comes with being the best basketball player in the world, he is widely regarded as being underpaid.1

But LeBron is underpaid not because he does not have a maximum contract, but because other players – like Rudy Gay or Joe Johnson, for example – have maximum contracts as well. If Rudy Gay is worth $14 million per year, then LeBron must comparatively be worth much more than that – or so the argument goes. Of course, you can as easily argue that Gay and Johnson2 are overpaid rather than LeBron being underpaid – but this only works if you accept that the salary cap determines actual maximum player value, rather than being, oh, a totally artificial construct that owners demanded long ago in order to maintain the illusion of parity between small market and large market teams and to give them bargaining power over players.

But why, then, are the likes of Gay and Johnson paid so much? The answer is a bit more than “because teams can.” Rather, it is because every free agent signing or contract extension that rewards a good-but-not-superstar-level player with a maximum contract – Gay, Johnson, A’Mare Stoudemire, Deron Williams, et cetera – is done because a team wants to win. NBA players – and pro athletes playing in team sports generally – chase two things: money and prestige. Money is self-explanatory. Prestige is playing in large markets, playing for an organization that wins titles regularly – your Celtics, your Yankees, your Man Uniteds – and winning titles. This means that franchises with a track record of success (and let’s be honest: these are usually, but not always, large-market franchises, because they have more money and because top players want to play in big cities where there are more fun things to do and you will be more famous) will always have more ability to sign good players than small-market teams that have no history of sustained competitive success.

Which means that small-market teams – or teams like the Toronto Raptors, who aren’t technically a small-market team, but who get treated like one because it’s Canada – feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have to overspend in order to get quality players to stay in their town. This is not exactly true, but it’s true enough in a league where two teams (Boston and the Lakers) have won about half of the championships. So GMs overspend on players to create the sense that they are where The Good Players Go To Play so they can sign some more players – who also end up being overpaid when GMs try this strategy. And sometimes this strategy works (the Miami Heat). And sometimes it does not (the Raptors).

And I have been trying to figure out how the league might stop doing this, but I am hamstrung in two respects. Firstly, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma – if one team says “WE will overpay the good players” and nobody else does, then they will get their pick of the best players and while they might not be the best team, they will be very good and competitive for a few years (which is the point because GMs don’t stick around a team forever anyway and they want their tenure to be successful) and if they’re very good and competitive for a few years then the odds that players will begin to view them as a good place to play will increase. (It happened to the Houston Rockets, and Houston the city is, well, kinda shitty.) And there’s not a good way to rule around prisoner’s dilemmas that I can think of.

And second, like I said – this problem exists because of an artificial construct on player salaries that the bosses use as rhetorical and real leverage whenever they like, so I am not particularly inclined to want to solve it in the first place.

1. Since a lot of nerds read this blog I am anticipating the usual bunch of “well I don’t even WATCH sports and I don’t GET sports” comments. Dear nerds: there is quite possibly nothing more fucking annoying than that in the entire world, except when you are misogynistic and/or homophobic. So don’t do it. Don’t do the other bad things either. [↩]
2. Yes, yes, get your snickering fit over with now. [↩]

Image blatantly looted from the always excellent flashboy

It’s been a while since I exercised my guest-blogger privileges here. I figured that since I was on the scene, I might write a bit about the shit that’s currently going down in my town– although my neighbourhood, Lambeth, is fairly quiet so far.

I am only an adopted Londoner, but I’ve inhaled enough urban grime to have acquired a certain patina of Londonness for my soul. One of the characteristics of the species is that we do not let shit faze us. In times of crisis, a Londoner feels an instantaneous connection to the survivors of the Blitz. Our shoulders square, our bosom swells, our accent becomes ten degrees more clipped, and suddenly you could use our upper lip as a backboard to practise your Wimbledon serve.

To be honest, the unflappability of the current generation probably has more to do with the plethora of attacks by various Irish maniacs during the Troubles, which carried on intermittently into the mid-’90s (long enough for even a late arrival like me to become blasé). Still, when the July 7th bombs went off in ’05, we went straight into Blitz mode. Out into the street we strolled with a generalised air of “Terror? No, sirs; it’s been tried before by bigger bastards than you.”

(We’re kind of like Captain America in that respect. Our comeback to everyone, up to and including Galactus, is “Oh yeah? Well, I fought Nazis. And won, so there. Nazis, dude.”)

But then there’s the other Britain. If we’re Five Go Mad In Dorset, we’re also Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. (First link rife with overstated tweeness; second link definitely NSFAnyone.)
continue reading "London’s burning"

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about how important it is to keep taxes low on the rich. Not, as we all might suspect, because all the Congressmen saying it have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred grand in “campaign contributions” from very rich people who generally don’t tend to part with money unless they think they’ll get something out of it; instead, it is because these people are the “job creators” who drive the economy and if they have to spend all their money in taxes then they won’t be able to spend any on creating jobs.

Now, one might…one just might…point out that we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich for the last decade and all we’ve gotten to show for it is a net loss of five million jobs and a small group of very rich people who have gotten much, much richer…but instead, I think we should take all these people at their word. I think that we should treat these people as the job creators they really are, just like the Republicans in Congress say. And to that end, I think we should do exactly what the Republicans insist is the best solution for the economy, the best solution for just about anything. Let’s let the free market handle it.

Specifically, I think we should tie the top income tax rate to the unemployment rate. Say, a baseline tax rate of twenty-five percent, with a baseline unemployment rate of five percent. Every percentage point below that, the top tax rate decreases by thirteen percent (down to a minimum of one percent, a purely token rate.) And of course, every percentage point the unemployment rate goes up above five, the top tax rate increases by thirteen percent (up to a maximum of ninety-nine percent; after all, nobody should be denied the right to make a living.)

Naturally, the specific numbers could be haggled a bit, the tax loopholes closed here and there to make sure that they’re not shirking their duties as job creators, the exact unemployment figures that we use to calculate this tax rate precisely detailed to avoid fraud. But in theory, this should be exactly what the nation’s captains of industry want. They have an incentive to put the nation’s unemployed back to work, we have a way to balance the budget in times of economic stress, and the Republicans get to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to free-market economics and their worship of America’s ultra-wealthy as the people who make America great.

I don’t know why, but something tells me they won’t go for it…

Ezra Klein argues that Professor X was wrong to dream of peace when the dream of “shared prosperity” would be stronger. I don’t entirely agree, because although prosperity doesn’t have to be zero-sum, the nature of mutant powers would place them frequently into competition with basic labour.

Ezra rightly identifies that a power set like Storm’s would provide a unique and indispensable service to businesses and governments, but that’s because Storm has a power that’s both fairly rare (weather control) and dramatically useful in a way that regular human business can’t easily duplicate. Most mutants, though, don’t have powers of that sort. How many mutants are just big strong dudes? Answer: lots of them. And in the real world, if you’re a big strong dude with no other skills (assuming these mutants wish to use their powers for profit), you’ll end up in manual labour of some sort, and then you will see resentment. How many normal-human construction jobs does a Colossus or a Strong Guy replace? For that matter, how can professional couriers be able to compete with mutants who can fly under their own power?

I strongly suspect that unions would, in these circumstances, put strict hiring quotas on mutants (and most likely gene-wide, because how can you prove that you aren’t strong or can’t fly?) and then we’re just back to square one – and that’s before you get to the psychics, who would inevitably be barred from any number of professions, and genome-based resentment on either side of the coin would almost certainly follow. And with that, the dream of shared prosperity becomes restricted to those outliers, the mutants who don’t potentially threaten human prosperity and who can provide useful services to humans. That’s not equality, and in the real-world scenario it’s why Magneto is right.

EDIT TO ADD: In comments Fistfulloffists says: “Even a society made up entirely of mutants would, realistically, suck.” Which isn’t entirely inaccurate, because all-mutant societies would almost certainly have some degree of labour immobility. Are you a big strong guy? Then society most likely demands – either explicitly or simply through cultural conditioning – that you go be a labourer. Energy blasts? Welcome to the energy sector. Indeed, there were more than a few hints in the comics that Genosha (pre-genocide) was somewhat like this. Which could arguably make mutant societies less able to progress – what happens when an Einstein or an Edison just happens to be a being of living steel and therefore most immediately and obviously useful at manual landscaping? As another example, Hank McCoy’s mutation isn’t that he’s a smart guy – it’s that he’s physically agile and powerful, and his brains are sort of a genetic non-mutation bonus. Hank is an example of what existing in a non-power-normative – e.g., human – society can do for a mutant.

Over at Balloon Juice, Mistermix has a complaint about somebody waxing poetic about the virtues of Groupon:

Groupon sells coupons, not invisible condoms or no-hangover martinis. I have no doubt that Groupon can be quite profitable, but coupons have been around for a hundred years. Groupon competitors will spring up, just as they have in the real world. Retailers are going to get skeptical about whether coupon shoppers are potential return buyers or actual skinflint cheapskates, just as they have in the real world.

That’s not really a fair comparison. Traditional coupons are valued and printed on the basis that a certain percentage of them (I remember reading a while back that it was less than one in four) will be used, but have to account for the possibility that they will all be used, which is why most of them offer a relatively low rate of savings (usually about 12-20% of retail cost, although occasionally you get lucky and get a coupon for 20-30%).

Groupon, however, values its discounts on the basis that everyone who buys into it will use it and pays in advance for the privilege; it’s not a coupon so much as it is a floating group purchase rate in which anybody can participate, and most sellers working through Groupon are lowering their profit rate but not eliminating it entirely on the basis that selling more stuff to more people for less profit individually means more profit overall, especially if even a small fraction of them become return customers.

Groupon is simply more efficient than coupons for all parties involved, which is why the speaker’s sentiment – while florid – is reasonably accurate.

The format war officially ended two years ago. Blu-Ray is the new standard of the land, every Wal-Mart and Best Buy has a dedicated Blu-Ray section, and prices are down to the point where the average person can afford them. So the question then becomes…do we actually need to care?

No, I’m serious. Set aside the automatic “but it’s an upgrade!” reaction that comes second nature to geeks. (I’m not saying I don’t have it too. I have a Blu-Ray player, and I don’t even have a hi-def TV to watch the discs on. Long story.) I’m asking whether we actually need a new format, now or ever. Sure, the picture quality is better. Put two TVs side by side, one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-Ray DVD, and people will be able to tell which one is which. But it’s not the same as the difference between VHS and DVD. It’s not between “okay” and “amazing”, it’s between “amazing” and “near-perfect”.

Do we need “near-perfect”, though? Already, some films are having problems being converted to Blu-Ray because the format is so perfect that you can see imperfections in the film used to shoot the original master edition. The differences are so small as to be almost subliminal. DVD is immersive enough; Blu-Ray improves, but can you put a dollar amount on the exact improvement…and more importantly, is that dollar amount equal to the difference in price between DVD and Blu-Ray?

Perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this than some fans, because I’m a Doctor Who fan. We get our series one story at a time, eight stories a year, and there are twenty-six years of stories to go through. It took them almost literally the entire life of the format to release all the existing episodes of the classic series on VHS, and by the time they put out the last one (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, if memory serves me right) they’d already started putting out the DVDs. Which means I’m very familiar…perhaps uncomfortably familiar…with buying the same thing twice.

As a result, I can’t help but think that Blu-Ray is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–a way to get you to buy the same thing three times. Let’s face it; at a certain point, even the best movie stops making money for the studio, because the market’s saturated. Everyone already has it. The only solution is to find a new way to repackage it, so you’ll buy it twice. And improvements in technology are a remarkably convenient way to do that. And, to get back to the question at the beginning, the question in the title…at what point does the improvement become incremental enough, insignificant enough, that it’s not worth buying into the new format? Is Blu-Ray that point?

Oh, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is one of those columns where I don’t actually have an answer. (Except for myself, of course. I have one Blu-Ray disc, and I got it as a gift. The player was on sale for cheap. I won’t buy any DVD over ten bucks anymore…after all, I’ve got plenty to watch, and the prices always come down eventually. For me, market saturation’s a big saver!)

I think the existence of Donald Sterling makes the case that the European football club system of league construction (the freewheeling, free-enterprising “to play in the top leagues you have to make an effort”) is superior on multiple points of argument to the American system of league construction (tightly controlled and defined membership).

Sterling’s profit model – which essentially consists of doing the bare minimum necessary to compete in the league – simply wouldn’t fly in European leagues because the Clippers, in a Euro-style system, would eventually sink to whatever second tier existed, at which point the Sterling model fails because the expense of running a team as large as the Clippers wouldn’t be satisfied by the revenues generated by a second-tier team. Admittedly, Sterling could then rejigger his system to do even less and allow the Clippers to do the bare minimum to compete at second-tier – but then they’d eventually slip to third-tier, and at that point your worth-hundreds-of-millions-team is not actually worth hundreds of millions any more, and you’ve run a profitable enterprise into the ground.

Discuss.

You know, the “hey, A Christmas Carol is total crap because Scrooge is actually the hero” argument is quite possibly the bottom of the barrel as far as libertarian thought goes: taking Dickens’ classic story about the essential emptiness of living only for profit and greed and completely missing the goddamned point isn’t something that should surprise me when it shows up on Mises.org (unofficial motto: “Sure, The State Paid For All the Stuff That Made This Website Possible, But That Doesn’t Mean We Wouldn’t Have Created A Massive International Information Network By Ourselves If We’d Been Given The Chance”) written by a bell curver, and yet it does.

Consider this part.

More notorious even than his miserly ways are Scrooge’s cynical words. “Are there no prisons,” he jibes when solicited for charity, “and the Union workhouses?”

Not necessarily. As Scrooge observes, he supports those institutions with his taxes. Already forced to help those who can’t or won’t help themselves, it is not unreasonable for him to balk at volunteering additional funds for their extra comfort.

What Levin does here is conveniently forget to include the response to Scrooge’s question:

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

What this serves as is an indictment of Levin’s entire philosophy. The role of social welfare is traditionally condemned in libertarian circles: better that social welfare be provided by private agencies, say they, as it is in the best interests of all concerned to prevent desperation and abject poverty as much as possible. Well, Scrooge is given a chance to contribute towards the social welfare and he says “go screw.” Apparently, in Scrooge’s eyes, the welfare policies enacted by Victorian-era England (which is, I dunno, a socialist utopian paradise all of a sudden) deny the need for private charity even when clearly insufficient, and give the lie to the theory of private social welfare systems so beloved by the right.

It goes downhill from there. Really. It’s kind of sad.

Once again, Sarah Palin writes a column saying that the secret to American energy independence is drilling for oil.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the fact that Palin claims energy issues as her particular sphere of expertise just amazes me, and similarly it amazes me that nobody important bothers to point out that, on her professed area of expertise, she is a goddamned idiot.

To be fair, for quite possibly the first time ever, Palin actually includes a few numbers in her screed: specifically, domestic American petroleum consumption. Unfortunately, this does not get her a cookie, because if you’re going to talk numbers about consumption and then say “well we gots to drill more of them wells you betcha,” you need to link it to that other number, which is production.

The United States has an estimated 21 billion barrels of remaining uncollected oil reserves.1 Were it all to become suddenly available tomorrow, the USA’s consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day wouldn’t allow it to last long. This is because a consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day is also a consumption rate of 7.1 billion barrels per year. So basically, the United States has nearly three years’ worth of oil reserves handy at its current consumption rate.

Of course, that figure isn’t really that meaningful either, because there is still no magic straw given to us by a friendly genie2 that gets all the oil out. Oil wells do not show up overnight. Even if the United States government expedited the leasing process, the oil companies still have to drill exploratory wells, develop a production plan from that exploration, and then install production wells. That’s a six-to-nine-year process to reach basic production.

And even when you reach basic production, you don’t reach peak production that quickly any more, because all the easily drilled oil deposits are now empty. Oil is sometimes in the ground in a big single pool; the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, for example, was mostly a big-ass single pool. But the big-pool deposits are mostly gone, so you can’t just stick a well into the ground and get all the oil from a single field. What’s left in the ground at this point is the harder-to-reach stuff: far-offshore fields (which take more than six to nine years to successfully explore and drill, one might add) and land-based fields which are kind of like Styrofoam except instead of air pockets there are oil pockets. These do not produce oil at “traditional” production rates. It will be in the neighborhood of fifteen years before anybody sees more than a relative dribble.

And finally, unless Sarah Palin plans to nationalize the oil industry like some sort of socialist or something, that oil is just going to go onto the free market anyway, where all the other countries in the world – like, say, India and China – will compete for its purchase. And frankly, at this point they can more easily afford it than the United States can.

So to sum up: Sarah Palin’s “drill” plan involves ignoring how much oil is actually in the ground, how quickly it can be drilled, how easily it can be accessed, and the basic reality of the global oil market. And this is where she thinks she is an expert.

Dear Rachel Maddow: please, just take all of this, put your Rachel Maddow style on it, and do a five-minute segment. You can’t tell me you don’t want to make fun of Sarah Palin again. You would be lying if you said that.

1. CIA World Factbook, following from World Oil and Oil and Gas Journal. British Petroleum’s most recent publicly available statistical analysis – in 2007 – puts it at 30 billion, but most consider that an outlier. [↩]
2. Genies hate the Middle East for bottling them, so clearly they would be on America’s side. Well, if they existed, anyway. [↩]

SUV sales as share of total auto market are rising.

Because gas prices will never be high again!

So you’ve been worried about GM’s financial outlook, eh? That GM bailout got you down?

Well, how about GE?

It appears my investment strategy of “be broke-ass” is finally paying off for me!

HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, YOU PRUDENT INVESTMENT-HAVIN’ MOTHAFUCKAS? HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW?

EDIT: Just to clarify as some people have complained: the financial crisis isn’t hitting me or my family directly in terms of investment, but capital availability issues have the potential to royally fuck me and many, many people I know over but hard. Rest assured that this post contains exactly zero schadenfreude.

This post over at Ezra Klein’s, explaining some more reasons why letting GM go bankrupt is a bad idea.