antikoan

 |::| Monday, July 08, 2002

 |::| Poverty is Expensive (part 59)  5:09:25 PM 

From MeFi -- no additional comments, for now, save to second the opinion of one of the MeFi posters: It's a logical step on the way to fully digital cash...

posted by MattD » July 7 9:09 PM | 26 comments. Poverty is Expensive (part 59) The "i-Gen" prepaid MasterCard, available at a Rite-Aid near you, for those who don't have bank accounts (for debit cards) to say the least of credit ratings sufficient to get credit cards. Pay a $10.00 upfront fee, pay another $5 a month plus a "reload" fee of at least $5 every time your card runs down, all for the privilege of letting them hold on to your cash at no interest. [MetaFilter]

The lead is non-trivial, though. It is costly to be poor. Things do cost less when you cross a certain fiscal threshhold. Once you pass the point where you can afford to own a car, you get access to suburban retail outlets, which are cheaper on the average.

Some retailers -- such as the one concerned here, RiteAid -- specialize in urban environments. The locate their shops in urban areas, where they sell largely brand names priced higher than in suburban outlets. Once you are able to pull together a certain amount of cash at one go, and commit it, you can qualify to get an ATM card. That's on top, of course, of the deposit you've had to lay down and freeze for gas or electric hookup (and sometimes phone), rent deposit, which you often won't get back due to the other fiscal exigencies of being poor.

It's not a conspiracy, of course. It's merely market forces at work. The non-self-mobile, urban poor are a captive market; they don't have much latitude to take their cash elsewhere, and so, to a great extent, they can be charged whatever the market will bear...

 |::| Quote of the Moment  4:05:06 PM 

"Having a plan is nothing. Planning is everything."
-- General Dwight Eisenhower

 |::| Note to Jaimie Kellner at Turner Broadcasting: Don't like the odds? Don't gamble!  12:59:00 PM 

Privacy Digest [sorry, no permalink] posts a link to an article on the recent tendency of media functionaries to treat their users as criminals, at MIT's Technology Review.

I could not help but think about blipverts the other day when I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.

Kellner's intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may--and I stress, may--have been legitimately labeled piracy, but now all forms of consumerism are being criminalized with ever-decreasing degrees of credibility. Once going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack on a commercial break gets treated as a form of theft, the media conglomerates are going to be hard pressed to get consumer compliance with their expectations, making it impossible to draw legitimate lines about what is and is not appropriate use of media content.

Still missing, though, is a very, very important point: There was never any bargain to begin with.

What there was, was a bet. That's right: Turner Broadcasting, along with anyone who ever tried to sell anything by broadcast TV (and face it, that's what commercial TV is for) was making eactly the same bet that billboard or magazine or bus-placard or sandwich-board or blimp advertisers have always made: That people will actually be interested enough in the ad to actually watch it, and that they'll then be interested enough to go buy the product.

Any presumption of any obligation on the part of the viewer is a flat out lie, and deserves to be repeatedly and vehemently exposed as such.

 |::| Alertbox: Methods for Testing Satisfaction  12:01:47 PM 

I've gotten into a number of debates with design-oriented web geeks over the years. One of their fallback positions (since I'm very focused on usability) is to accuse me of being a knee-jerk disciple of Neilsen, or -- worse -- a dilletante. "Real design is more than just following rules," they sniff.

No shit, Sherlock.

Jakob Nielsen is a demon to these people, and one of the reasons is that he writes clearly and in a manner that real dilletantes (also known as "middle-managers") can easily understand. Worse yet, he has published a set of usability guidelines that are often followed slavishly by inferior designers or enforced slavishly by mind-numb middle managers. Since that ever occurs -- which is to say, since these designers are ever put in the position of having to do something in a way other than they'd prefer -- certain very prominent figures in the web design world have decreed that Nielsen is an evil influence.

Alright, I had to get that off my chest. Anyway, the point of that little rant was to introduce the most recent Alertbox column, "User Empowerment and the Fun Factor." Here's the properly Nielsonian summary:

Designs that engage and empower users increase their enjoyment and encourage them to explore websites in-depth. Once we achieve ease of use, we'll need additional usability methods to further strengthen joy of use.

... which attitude would come as no surprise to people who took the trouble to look past the showmanship to try and understand what Nielsen was trying to say. (Thus endeth the sermon...)

Near the end of this piece, Nielsen echoes Bronislaw Malinowski's admonition regarding participant observation:

As always, you cannot rely on simple, literal interpretations of users' statements. For example, in testing company websites, users almost always say that they don't want fun or entertaining content: Just give me the answers as straight and as fast as possible. And, in observing actual user behavior, we certainly do see negative reactions to frivolous content -- such as big photos of glamorous models or meaningless animations that bounce around the screen. But, at the same time, we also see users smile or exhibit other positive body language when they come across cleverly written content or moderately funny descriptions -- assuming they fall within the scope of users' expectations of professional writing in the website's genre. Thus, users seem to appreciate and enjoy a somewhat higher style to their content than they claim to prefer.

Or, as Malinowski put it (I paraphrase from memory), "Don't ask them what they think they do; watch what they really do."

 |::| That Good Old-Fashioned Free Market  10:18:41 AM 

If there's one thing that endlessly puzzles me (much as I think I understand it), it's the widely-accepted idea that there's a liberal bias to the media.

Of course there's not. The media are there to make money. There's no money to be made promoting political liberalism.

From MeFi:

posted by skallas » July 7 10:11 PM | 10 comments. How talk radio went right-wing.Or further proof that the airwaves are owned by corporations and not by the American people. Regardless, its an interesting look at how politics changed the radio landscape. [MetaFilter]

And as usual with a certain breed of conservative, it all boils down to free-market zealotry:

The position of the FCC dramatically changed when President Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as chairman in 1981.... As FCC chairman, Fowler made clear his opinion that "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants."

Here's another thing I don't understand. How is it that free markets are supposed to benefit normal citizens? Free market theory holds that people will simply withhold their capital from sellers they don't like. But what if a) the sellers are deceitful or act to mystify the nature of the market, b) the sellers have a monopoly control, or appear to from the buyers perspective, or c) a critical mass of capital (as money or the capacity to deploy it) is under the control of a small group of people or institutions with a unified set of interests?

Or, more to the point -- and reflecting the current state of affairs in America (or in any well-developed capitalist power), what if all three are true?

I've found that this question, in various formulations, is a really good way to destabilize and provoke free-market zealots. Anyone who happens to read this should feel free to steal it...

 |::| The reason the FBI won't tell the "truth"? They're Scared.  9:30:39 AM 

From MeFi:

posted by Postroad » July 7 3:19 PM | 9 comments [story apparently deleted on MeFi]. Hesham Mohamed Hadayat a jihad plant at L.A. airportTwo pieces by this intelligence site claims that the L.A. shooter had connections that make his shooting more than a "casual" random act. Of course, these two reports will by some be dismissed as coming from a site run by Israelis (though not govt connected), but this site has a fairly good track record thus far in what it claims. Worth considering till our own FBI gives us The Real Truth. [MetaFilter]

But what if the "real truth" is just that Hadayet was essentially just another school/workplace shooter? So far, he fits the profile to a T: He approached a workplace of an institutional oppressor (Israel / El Al), prepared to take as many lives as possible (multiple clips in convenient locations -- something, incidentally, he could learn from reading Frederick Forsyth novels), with little regard for his own life. All of this happened in a context of intense personal stressors (his marriage was shaky and his wife had gone home to Egypt, "his people" were being assailed all around him, and the place he'd come to make his fortune was now an enemy nation). So, like any of the several school/workplace shooters we get in this country every year, he picked a good, obvious target, and went in shooting.

Yes, there probably was a "connection" to terrorist groups, inasmuch as Hadayet wanted people to see him supporting them. Did he work with them? I seriously doubt it. Was he delusional about it? I have no idea, but I suspect not. The "delusions" of theses school and workplace shooters are most often a matter of simply dehumanizing their victims. They don't generally imagine grand conspiracies, though they often imagine a much different significance being attached to their actions by those who come after. ("I don't like Mondays," an early school shooter explained. She thought everyone would understand that she was actually making things better by spicing up the Monday. She was pretty amazingly wrong.) What chiefly distinguishes Hadayet is that he probably assessed his impact quite accurately: Everyone is going to see this as "islamic terrorism".

And that's the real reason the FBI hasn't come out with the "truth." They may be a slow, bureaucratic institution, but they do a few things really, really well. One is criminalistics/forensics. Another is profiling. So they already know pretty much why Hadayet did what he did, and they already pretty much know without having to look that he had no substantive connections to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

And -- most important of all -- they already know that the American media monster isn't going to accept that assessment, because it won't sell commercial time. With the shape the FBI is in right now, releasing a "workplace shooter" assessment would be like blood in the water, with the FBI as the bleeder.

 |::| Thoughts on ecumenicalism, institutions, micro-faiths, and quasi-catholic resonance,   9:11:51 AM 

One of the things about this that I find really interesting is that Reb Schulz is right: This is an insult to the God of the Missouri Synod. And it does dilute the force of belief. However, I believe ecumenicalism does serve an institutional end.

Paradoxically, as religions are rendered more vague and non-specific, they become easier to manipulate. After all, if you don't have specific rules, you can make up new interpretations and, in effect, new rules, all the time. That's why protestant pastors (who are free to make up their own interpretations of the Bible as the need demands) can get so wild and wooly: they don't have to adhere to a catholic interpretation of the scripture.

I believe this benefits institutions which would deploy religion (or at least, religious symbolism) in their service. Superficially, it would appear as though an institution would prefer a catholic interpretation: After all, that would put everybody on the same page, all the time. But if you remember that the institution doesn't really care about the religion per se, then you can see that it doesn't matter whether everyone's on the same page. In fact, the power of idiosyncratic interpretations is that they suit the circumstance so well. If you're a leader in a non-religious institution, and you want to manipulate your (real or metaphorical) troops using religious symbolism or ideas, then you first want a generalized interpretation. Second, you want to be able to have your lower-level functionaries (middle-management down to the line management / junior officers) be able to produce ad hoc interpretations to control the situation in the field.

Instead of tending to produce a single large, bland faith, what ecumenicalism seems to me to do is produce a culture medium that fosters the fertile growth of specialized, non-unified microfaiths. From a civic core (bureaucratic, institutional, what have you), some group could manipulate general symbols to produce resonances throughout the cultural petri dish. Evolutionary processes would tend to produce an ecosystem, and given the nature of humanity, would probably tend to create one or more dominant, quasi-"catholic" microfaiths.

I think this is pretty much what's been responsible for the rise of the "Religious Right" in America. Falwell, Robertson and their fellow-travellers have pooled the darkest, most fertile symbolism from their many microfaiths (most of them are members of Baptist sects, or are Assemblies of God -- the latter being essentially free to make up whatever they want whenever they need to, as long as they don't speak in toungues) to unite them into an institution which exists to manipulate the culture medium in order to produce the greatest feasible gain for their ideologies.

In this, they light torches to lead fellow-travellers as widely separated as Orrin Hatch (who, as a good Mormon, must regard speaking in tounges as an abomination) and John Ashcroft (who, as a devout Pentecostal, thinks speaking in tounges is just another Sunday at Church), and George W. Bush (who has a vague idea that there's a God and a Jesus and they both made him President) under a banner carried by men who regard all of them as salvationally challenged.