Why on earth would Comcast buy Plaxo to (apparently) compete with YouTube & Flickr?
I think there will be obvious signs of the result of this combination by the end of this in terms of Comcast products. When we'll do that on specific platforms, we don't know yet. I think one of the biggest things to look forward to is not just things Plaxo has already built, but really bringing the social web to the notion of navigating, of making decisions about what you want to watch. ... Our plan is to really weave the social fabric into all those platforms so that when you go to your TV set or you go to Fancast.com, you're watching what your friends have recommended
Plaxo's big thing is managing & sharing address books, not streaming media, nor recording what media you're consuming. I can't picture having any desire to share that kind of info there, either.
At least as Plaxo is now, I just see it as a handy social / business networking contacts site, where if someone I have in Address Book on my Macbook updates their Plaxo information, my computers gets that change automatically. That's handy.
But I don't see much point in broadcasting that I'm recording "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" on the EyeTV each week, and I don't really care -- or, more importantly, want to know -- if people in my address book are going to be watching those shows, or, say, a football game, or "American Idol".
I don't get it. Perhaps I just lack imagination.
Maybe next Verizon will buy LinkedIn for their, uhh, media expertise. Yeah, that's the ticket.
A lot of the things I've written about on here are simply facets of big trends driving the world today. You could punt and say that the big trends are just "global warming", or "peak oil", or "peak food", or "the credit crunch", but even those seem like facets of the broader globalization trends going on. If it were just the USA putting out greenhouse gases, consuming oil & other resources, and driving the credit markets, then the problems we're having now might (maybe) still be happening, but less acute. But the big national economies are all interdependent now, and depend crucially of the rapid growth of big new economies like China, India, Brazil, and others.
On one level, the growth of these emerging nations is unquestionably a good thing. It raises the standard of living in the growing countries, provides cheap goods & services to the developed nations, and opens up new markets on both sides. But it raises problems as well: as the standard of living in the emerging countries comes up, so does their level of consumption, increasing the strain on global resources and amplifying trends like climate change and habitat destruction, raising questions about whether this is all sustainable into the future, or whether it brings back a Malthusian crisis.
Thomas Malthus realized in 1798 (!!!) that human populations rise geometrically ("fast"), while natural resources rise linearly ("slow"), and eventually we're likely to hit a point where there aren't enough resources to feed everyone any more. The only problem is, Malthus ended up being wrong: the population has ballooned massively since 1798, and so has the global standard of living by almost any measure. The reason is often believed to be the Industrial Revolution., which brought about a wave of prosperity & growth that swept the world and is still improving lives today. While the pressures Malthus raised over 200 years ago are still present, many feel we can continue to stay ahead of them, while others point out that Malthus was right for all of human history up to his own time, and for all we know we won't be able to escape the trap he identified forever.
Enter Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, who has coined the term "the rise of the rest" to describe where we stand now:
- Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, "The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest", by Fareed Zakaria"
- Newsweek, May 12 2008 issue, excerpt from Zakaria's "The Post-American World"
- NPR/PRI's Marketplace, May 12 2008 broadcast, interview with Zakaria, "Economic problem: 'The rise of the rest'"
- Bostonist blog, May 9 2008, article on a talk Zakaria gave about the book at Harvard
The main differences between what Zakaria is arguing and the themes I've been looking at include:
- Zakaria is the editor for Newsweek, and I'm just some guy, so people will actually listen to him.
- Zakaria has been watching these trends a lot longer, and thinking about them a lot more deeply, than I have, so people will actually pay attention to him.
- Zakaria seems to be a lot more optimistic about the long term outcomes than I currently feel, so maybe people will prefer his take on the situation to my bleaker one.
I'll finish with an excerpt from Zakaria's "Marketplace" piece:
Expensive oil is one facet of the signature trend of our age -- global growth. Last year 124 countries around the world grew at over 4 percent. This year, despite the American slowdown, growth in most of those countries remains robust. While we debate the current financial panic and impending recession, our future is not likely to be shaped by crisis and collapse. The real problems we will face will be the consequence of what I call the "rise of the rest" -- the rest of the world that is.
Look around, it's not just oil that is soaring. Almost every commodity is at a 200-year high. Wheat and rice prices have doubled and then kept on rising over the last two years. In some cases, demand is so high that we're actually running out of stuff. Helium, the gas used in balloons and MRI machines is in short supply globally. And it is the second-most abundant element in the universe.
The problems of growth are, of course, high quality problems. But on this scale they are problems we have never really experienced before. We know how to handle a recession. But how do we handle the rise of the rest? That will be the real challenge of the next decade, long after this recession has turned to recovery.
As Paul Mison notes, the gas price surge is finally driving Americans to use more public transit, but not exactly at a breathtaking rate:
But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.
Sure, usage is higher in Europe, but people always attribute that to higher population density. But does that explain it away?
[...]
Anyway, Canada has lots of open space, too — and it doesn’t even have $8 a gallon gas. Yet it still has usable public transit in a lot more cities than we do.
Fortunately, we'll have Chrysler pulling up the rear on this one:Canadian gasoline is somewhat more expensive than in the US — but not European-level expensive. Otherwise, Canada looks a lot like America, and Toronto almost speaks the same language, eh? Yet a high-quality transit system and different land-use planning make a big difference.
What’s more, as far as I can make out from the data, a lot more Canadians than Americans (as a percentage of the population) have switched to public transit over the past year; because the system is there, they have more flexibility.
All in all, this comparison is a reason not to believe apocalyptic warnings about the long-run effects of energy scarcity: there’s a lot of substitution possible. America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.
But even the Wall Street Journal doesn't think it's a good deal. They go on to say:As an alternative to the standard incentives, the company is offering $2.99 gasoline for the next three years to those buying selected new models. And you can get the cheap gas at almost any station, as it is subsidized through your credit card.
Well, actually I do think prices are going to rocket, but nevermind, they anticipate my objections:The bottom line? In most cases consumers are probably going to be better off taking the standard rebate than going for the subsidized gas. The savings on Let's Refuel America really only start to stack up if you think gasoline prices are going to rocket a lot higher in the years ahead.
Exactly. But, err....And if you think that's going to happen, what are you doing blowing, say, $29,000 on a brand new SUV that gets 15 miles to the gallon? You'd be better off scaling back to a secondhand Civic and ploughing your savings into a good energy fund.
...it's $3.69 at the cheap places down the street from my house, and pushing $3.85 elsewhere. I recently had what I expect to be my last sub-$50 full tank fillup, and can remember not so long ago when I could fill up my first car for under $10.The gas price would have to average more than $4.10 a gallon over the next three years before it made sense to take the subsidized gasoline.
I fully expect gas prices to hover in the low $4 range by fall, and only go up from there. Apparently, or so the article says, the gasoline futures market disagrees with me, but we'll see, won't we?
(On the flip side, when I first read about this program, I was worried that it was just going to stimulate consumption and exacerbate the problem, but apparently they cap how much fuel you can buy based on the projected mileage of the model you purchases, so that's less bad than I thought. Not great, but less bad.)
Next up, thoughts on Fareed Zakaia's the rise of the rest, but I'll save that for tomorrow, as it's now time to go play Boom Blox on the Wii. Yay escapism...
This post is very annoying to me. You must not know any poor people. We use our car for our work, buying and selling antiques, and gas is a HUGE expense for us. I agree that it has to go up so that alternatives are more viable, but the transition is extremely painful for us. We don’t visit friends, much less health clubs! Cable TV? Forget about it! Eating out? More like a big pot of soup that lasts 3 or 4 days. Where we live people drive 30 to 50 miles a day one way to work if they want to make more than 8 bucks an hour.
A break from all the apocalyptic gloom & doom I've been posting here -- some photos from our visit to the Franklin Park Zoo this weekend.
You may have heard that milk prices worldwide are rising at the fastest rates ever.
Unfortunately prices for milk will be higher for the foreseeable future.
We will continue to monitor the market and adjust milk prices to offer you the best value possible.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Declining egg production and an increased demand for dried egg whites used in manufacturing as product ingredients has resulted in a decreased supply of fresh eggs.
This decrease in supply has caused the cost of eggs to rise dramatically, which has resulted in increased egg prices.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
[...] He said he bought the business in February 2008, just in time to see the price of wheat, flour and Romano cheese “skyrocket.”
“Everything I need has gone up about 30 percent” in the last three months, he said. In addition, vendors have begun charging for the gas they used when delivering to him.
“We're trying to hang in,” he said. Masci said family members have helped by coming into work without taking a paycheck and he has added wraps, chickens and turkeys for the young professionals of the neighborhood.
He also said the economic downturn has made potential customers a little tighter with a dollar. “I get the sense that people are saving their money to pay for gas right now,” he said.
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she will remain in the presidential race "until there's a nominee."
This seems familiar:
[...] Because protectionism is an issue on which [economists] believe they have some special insight, they inflate its importance, and make free trade versus protectionism THE crucial issue in economic policy — which it isn’t. Trade barriers are a minor issue for the United States today; even small wrinkles in health care policy, like overpayment to Medicare Advantage plans, probably matter more to public welfare than all the trade restrictions now in place.
[...]
The gas tax holiday is in this category. Economists really do know something about tax incidence that the laity don’t. So when a presidential candidate says something that conflicts with economistic wisdom, it becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE EVER. Except, you know, it isn’t.
(NYTimes, Paul Krugman, "Gas tax hysterics", 2008/05/06 -- yes, I know, I need to broaden my source material away from just Krugman...)
This reminds me of how a lot of computer geeks approach issues like net neutrality, copyright & trademarks, patents, DRM, ooxml, etc.
It's not that geeks are wrong to have a libertarian stance on these things.
Its that these things simply aren't that important.
Who cares if Comcast wants to throttle BitTorrent users, or the RIAA is upset with people trading music files? Who cares if Disney gets to keep the trademark for Mickey Mouse into perpetuity? Hm? Why was it so terrible for Amazon to get defensive about one-click? Why is it so catastrophic for Apple to use a little DRM on iTunes purchases? So what if Microsoft wants to replace the Office formats, who really cares?
Are these really the things that keep people up at night? We should all be so lucky as to have such small problems as these.
Just because nerds have enough context to know that these things are "wrong" doesn't change the fact that they just aren't important.
Part of the point of the last few posts about deoxygenated sea waters, population collapse, oil price pressures & rising car usage, peak food, and the mortgage crisis & post-suburban America, is that they all seem to be examples of "stories broader than the news cycle".
With these stories, we're really seeing specific examples of larger, interlocking global trends, some driven by society, some driving society. The climate is evolving, with specific and often negative fallouts. The economy is evolving, and with it the fundamental ways we live & work. We're all being swept along with the tide here, but too often, the news picks up not on the rise & fall of the tide, but the ebb & flow of the waves on top of the tide.
The standard news media -- by which I mean pretty much everything from mainstream print, broadcast, & online media, as well as many blogs etc -- tends to be fixated on the "story of the moment". That's completely fine if you're keeping on top of things, and just want to get updated on what has happened since yesterday (or this morning, or in the last 10 minutes...). But it generally does a terrible job of stepping back and being reflective, looking at broader patterns and deeper trends.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some of the shows on NPR try to do this, at least some of the time, though they still too-often fall back into the short term type of coverage -- e,g, several minutes of "McCain & Clinton propose gas tax holiday, Obama refuses" this morning, and more this afternoon -- and not enough of the broader analysis: "here's the hoped-for outcome from such a holiday, here's some more likely outcomes, pros, & cons based on previous times such a holiday was offered, etc. I'm being slightly unfair, of course -- they did, after all, offer some of both the short-term & long-term reportage that I'm looking for, but I guess I just feel it didn't get to the heart of the matter as successfully as, say, Krugman did:
Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.
Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.
The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.
Clear, concise, contextualized. Maybe not the only side to the story, to be sure, but a good start.
But I digress.
In print, "The Economist" and "The Atlantic" do a better job at this kind of contextualizing, and I'm sure there are others that I'm less familiar with that do, too. I'm sure that there are web sites that do better here also -- Salon? Slate? -- but I'm not familiar with them. (And I can't stand the obtrusive ads on Salon, but nevermind that, as I can appreciate that they've got bills to pay and no print wing or parent company to prop up the web site...)
Maybe the lesson for me here is that I've been wrong for years now, and Google News, with its seductive "here's the current big stories, and some alternate takes on each one", is a terrible way to make sense of what's going on in the world. No one has time to read all those different versions of the same story, and even if you could, you'd still just be skimming across the surface of those broader trends I want to understand. I've never seen the appeal of getting all your news from one site, and while I feel a certain nostalgia for reading the daily newspaper from front to back, I've never for a second felt any desire to read the exact same content from the exact same paper on the web. If you're going to the web anyway, you might as well seek alternative points of view, right? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe "alternative" is just "more noise".
Hm.
Recent Comments
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Chris Devers said:
Interesting, that trick doesn't seem to work for my site, but if I skim over the source, the 'rel="me"' links... read more
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Paul Mison said:
Well, Plaxo do have a social graph widget, which does pretty well when thrown my vox page. Obviously that's not... read more
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DRB said:
An interesting account. I've always wondered who the helpful "geniuses" are. read more
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Hey Chris! I was sad to hear you left but I am glad things are going great with you and... read more
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