Kent Newsome writes:

But until the music industry as we have known it dies and is reborn as a direct artist to consumer market, the Blip.fm’s of the world are like snowmen in the sun.

This reminded me of a thought that’s been swimming in my head the last few months. I know a lot of people that argue that music should be direct artist to consumer market. The record labels are just middle men that obstruct the divine connection between artist and consumer and charge a toll. The idealistic part of me desperately wants to agree. I spent two or three years listening primarily to local and regional artists in my hometown, riding the quest of a new movement, and then watching that movement crumble as the (Nashville, in this case) record labels bought off just enough of the talent to deflate everything without changing much of anything that the movement became a response to. Who needs those bastards, right?

While it may be ideal to cut out that middle man, the basic problem as I see it is that they do add value and that added value has to have a mechanism in any alternate formula. They don’t add as much value as they used to, but they’re not as obsolete as a lot of their critics would have them. It used to be that they were necessary in large part because they provided the capital to record and distribute records, but that’s not really the case anymore. Independent artists all across the country are producing their own records now. But they’re not getting the national play that they often should. Because of the greedy, obstructionist record labels blocking their way? Yeah, partly. But not entirely.

As records have become easier and cheaper to produce, it’s created a wealth of material that’s good for everybody. It’s particularly good for enthusiastic music fans like Kent and (in a former life) myself. But it creates a problem for a key contingent of the consumer market. Namely, those people that don’t want to have to seek out good music. Those that want music delivered directly to them. People that aren’t all that picky and like familiarity. These people don’t listen to popular music because they’ve been force-fed by the industry. They do so because it provides a sufficient diet for them with little or no effort. New song comes to the radio, thumbs up or thumbs down, wait for new song on the radio. The record labels and radio provide that pipeline in a way that it’s going to be pretty difficult for any independent, side-stepping direct market could.

The bottleneck is radio. For all of the complaints about how record labels lack originality, they’re not really the culprits. I used to think that they were, but then I signed on with Rhapsody and discovered that there are a lot of great musicians out there that have been signed*. Not just copycats of Top 40 sensations, either. But we very frequently don’t hear these songs on the radio. A lot of that has to do with the inherent conservatism of radio. They have much more limited airtime than record labels have money to sign acts.

But even there, radio is giving us what we want. Complaints about how they keep playing the same songs over and over again ignore that a whole lot of people (myself excluded) like that. They listen to the radio for a few hours a day and are often waiting to hear songs that they’re familiar with. So arguments that they would have more time to experiment for the advanced listener if they would stop playing the same songs over and over again ignore that casual listener.

So the radio stations have to prioritize. But they have no idea what to play. Maybe it would be better if DJs had more freedom to play what they like, but that’s frequently going to be at odds with what the casual listener wants to hear. The casual listener being supreme for radio because the advanced listener has so many other options that they have effectively removed themselves from the equation. They, like me, have Rhapsody or some service of the like. Or alternate music pipelines. So if radio stations have to prioritize, how do they do so? Well, if everyone is shouting at you “play this record” they will have to listen to those that shout the loudest. Record labels shout the loudest. More than that, though, they have some of the best (if overly cautious) filters available because they have a lot more at stake than an independent label. They have to be infuriatingly choosy and cautious about what they try to push. So they push the stuff most likely to succeed (leaving the rest of it to be found by people like me that sign up for some music service).

This mechanism is far from perfect. But it’s there. If a more democratic system is to develop, it’ll have to answer the pipeline question. Right now the indy labels and music critics are particularly ill-equiped to do it. The worlds have diverged and moved too far apart. You get influential and critically popular bands like Wilco that have been around forever and that every serious music fan is at least somewhat familiar with but whom most casual listeners likely could not identify. These are the people most anxious to take the role as filters but least equipped to do so. The record labels act as an intermediary between them and the general listening audience. Their thumbs up can carry weight with the labels enough to get signed, but they’re still a hard sell to the secondary filter of radio stations and their soft efforts to push it will likely reflect that.

Many years ago, before Rhapsody and iTunes and in the big, bad days of Napster, I was a subscriber with eMusic. eMusic was a deal that couldn’t be beat. For something like $10 a month, you could download all you wanted. And unlike Napster, it was completely legit. Most of my friends were complaining relentlessly about the RIAA and record labels at the time, so I pimped eMusic hard. And yet, for all of my attempts to sell it, people weren’t buying. Talk about how they “would” pay for music dissipated. Complaints would shift to the fact that they’d never heard of 95% of the artists being sold on eMusic. I told them that the beauty of eMusic was that you could download it first and decide for yourself if you liked it… but nothing. They didn’t want to do that. Too much work. For all of their complaints about the Big Music Machine, they were relying on it a lot more than they realized. Some tried to sidestep it by saying that they don’t listen to current music… as if old products put forth by the record labels were somehow less indicative of their usefulness than new.

So being unable to sell the notion of Find Your Own Music(!!) and to this day having difficulty selling Rhapsody to people, I am resigned to the likelihood that people really do want to be sold. Somebody has to do the selling. Somebody with money to market and to get the appropriate attention and all of that. Right now there’s nobody that can do that for the mass markets as well as the record labels. If an alternate model is going to rise, it will have to account for that somehow. They’re like a bad habit. They can’t just be broken. They have to be replaced.

Note: I am not writing this claiming to be an expert in the music industry. This is based mostly on my observations as a consumer. What are blogs for if not outsized commentary from people with the objectivity of relative ignorance? Seriously, though, people who know (or should know) a lot more than me seem to often get hung up on the simple detail that most consumers simply aren’t like them (or, for that matter, like me). I’m open to hearing a good rebuttal as to why record labels are not providing the above service, but most of what I hear when I’ve brought it up are that “People don’t find their own music because record labels strangle out everything else and they aren’t given the chance.” I just don’t think that’s true.

* – What’s available on Rhapsody now is a lot less indicative of major record labels’ offerings. It used to be that only signed musicians that didn’t own the rights to their work were available. Since then, a lot more smaller labels and even independent artists have jumped on that train.

A few months ago, I had never heard of Alberto Cutie. He is apparently a popular Spanish-speaking Catholic priest in Miami that was caught necking with a woman. Interestingly, he refused to become the Poster Boy for the celibacy requirement of Roman Catholic priests. Less surprisingly, he has since left the Roman Catholic Church to become an Episcopalian pastor. Despite his desire not to become a living, breathing reason to question the Catholic requirement, the departure of a popular priest who had the misfortune to fall in love becomes just that. Of course, those most likely to consider his relevance are those that already don’t agree with the celibacy requirement.

I am generally loathe to make declarations about what groups that I do not belong to ought to do. It becomes sort of like when Republicans used to give “advice” to the Democrats about how to reverse their fortunes. The same sort of advice (from the other direction) that Democrats are giving Republicans now. The problem with such advice is that it ranges from biased to disingenuous. People that lecture a group about what it should be with no real intention of joining said group simply don’t have the standing to have their advice received. Having no vested interest in the success of the group and therefore being immune to the negative repercussions of their advice (if followed), in addition to being biased and disingenuous the advice is simply bad. The churches that do everything the non-churchgoing, irreligious people say that churches should do to grow and stay relevant instead shrink and become less relevant. So I take the point of view that the discussion of matters such as priestly celibacy is the church’s to have.

All of that being said, what point is a blog if not for saying pointless things that you don’t have the standing to say? I’m partially kidding. Though my thoughts are unlikely to be received by anyone that matters, I think that it is interesting to investigate the effect that such requirements have on a pool of candidates.

It seems to me that these requirements would broadly produce candidates that fall into one of two categories: People willing to give themselves over completely to God despite the onerous requirements and people for whom the requirement is, for one reason or another, not much of a sacrifice. The first group are often precisely the people you want as priests. The second group includes others that you might want, too. People that are naturally asexual, homosexual disinclined to act on it, and widowers. The latter group also includes people that you really, really don’t want. I don’t think that there is much need to elaborate on that.

But as important as the quality of candidates is the quantity. The shortage of priests in the United States is well-known. I’ve read statistics suggesting 1 in 4 American parishes do not have priests, a statistic that seems awfully high but even if it is it is a problem that’s getting worse. But I’ve read that despite its dwindling membership that The Episcopal Church has a shortage of its own. And some are arguing that the problem is one of distribution rather than numbers:

In fact, says Fr. Paul Sullins, the level of lay involvement, combined with increased use of deacons and falling rates of church participation among the nation’s 66.4 million Catholics, makes the whole question of a priest shortage not a crisis, but a manageable problem.

“It’s not a national shortage,” said Sullins, a married former Episcopal priest and father of three who was ordained into the Catholic church in May 2002. Rather, “it’s a shortage in certain dioceses” resulting from a “poor distribution of priests.”

“If the priests were evenly distributed among the country there would be at least one … per parish. The number of parishioners has grown a lot in the past 40 years, but the number of parishes has not grown as much.”

So it’s possible that even with the requirement they can pick up the slack with deacons and better distributions. Or by consolidating parishes. Or a bunch of other ways. The celibacy requirement seems to have become part of the character of the church and I could definitely see how it would be unwise to uproot that out of short-term utilitarianism when there are always going to be ways to compensate for it.

Religious traditions are traditions and our perceptions of normalcy are often simply the product of the environment in which we were raised. The reason that I remain a member of my church (albeit a… relaxed one…) is because it is what is normal to me. If I go to a charismatic protestant service, the jumping up and down and clapping and all that comes across to me as a bit of a spectacle. I’ve always felt more at home in Catholic services due in large part to their similarities to Episcopalian. But what I see as the idiosyncrasies of the Catholic Church are… well… precisely involving the areas in which it differs from my own.

So with that in mind I can respect the differences between the Catholic and Episcopalian churches and the value they put on the differences. But I nonetheless do want to advocate one major point that, even if there weren’t a question of shortages or a sex abuse scandal or anything like that, makes me appreciate the protestant way of doing things. I like the fact that the pastors in my church are, to some extent, one of us. I think that it helps them relate to the lives of the parishioners that they have imperfect marriages and children just like we do (or will). While I can appreciate the appeal of priests that are above (or apart from) that sort of thing, I think that there is value in a priests ability to better relate to the people that he is preaching to. In the Mormon church (as well as many protestant denominations), they go a step further and don’t have professional clergy and instead have members of the congregation appointed to the position and so they not only have the wife and kids but also the job and mortgage (Episcopal pastors have their housing taken care of).

In that vein, I found the aforelinked Slate piece by Michael Sean Winters to be puzzling in one respect:

In fact, ending celibacy would bring on a different set of problems and issues. Priests earn very little money, making supporting a family, let alone sending a child to college, seem impossible. Would salaries go up, and are the people in the pews willing to pay for that? The first time a priest abandons his wife and children, people would be clamoring for the good old days when priests did not marry.

Keeping in mind that I go to the church of rich people, is this really an issue? Episcopal pastors support families including a wife who rarely ever works (my own church growing up had one pastor whose wife worked… it caused problems). Divorce rates amongst clergy are generally pretty low, particularly in conservative denominations where losing your family can mean losing your jobs. This isn’t exactly uncharted territory. But I guess it would be for Catholics, and that is not unimportant. Amongst the laypeople, Catholics are not much less likely to divorce than average. That could be said to say that they would get over the first priestly divorce… or to say (as Winters does) that celibacy is a way to shield their pastors from such common human failings.

Abel has an interesting post up about his return to XXL shirts. He used to wear them when he was a touch flabby, lost the weight and went down a size or two, but is now bulking up (in the good way) and finds himself back to square one (albeit with a better physique).

I’ve been having fitting problems, too, due to my weight. My jeans size hasn’t really budged all that much since my leg-size holds me back from getting smaller pants than my waist requires (one of the reasons that I wear belts, though even without this reason everybody should wear belts… ahem… moving on…). Some of my shirts are a bit large, but having large shirts isn’t a problem because I’m long-bodied (my legs are about the same length as Clancy’s). It’s still a bit of an inconvenience, which I’ll get to later.

But undershirts have posed a real problem. It used to be that I got Large even though they were too small. They girdled some of my more uncomfortable shape and they were tight enough that they didn’t conflict with the shirt I wore over it. I’d tuck it into my underpants to add constriction. For instance, If I was positioning my shirt, I could grab the shirt and straighten it out without having to worry that I was also grabbing the undershirt.

But as I’ve lost weight, the undershirts aren’t so small anymore. The girdling is thankfully less necessary, but I’ve gotten used to the undershirts as sweat-catchers. They also give me more versatility in that I can have my shirt tucked or untucked when wearing an undershirt because the undershirt would guard against the discomfort of the beltline (and, as we know, everyone should wear belts). But now since they no longer wrap around my body tightly, it’s more difficult for my fingers to grab the shirt without also grabbing the undershirt. Now it feels less like I’m wearing a second (cloth) skin and a shirt and more like I’m wearing two shirts. I thought about downgrading to medium-sized undershirts, but they’re not long enough. I’m a fairly tall guy with a long torso. So that’s proven to be an inconvenience.

I also find that the XXL shirts that I bought that used to be moderately too big (but which I nonetheless bought because of the aforementioned torso) now hang a little too large. Well, some of them do. The t-shirts, mostly. I remember back when I lost 70 pounds the last couple years of high school and I would wear shirts that were too large I felt cheated because the way that they hung on me made it look like I hadn’t lost all the weight that I had. I feel a little bit that way now, though my weight loss is half of what it was then. But I can’t for the life of me find the XL t-shirts that I packed away somewhere. I hope that they are found when we move next. If they got lost in the last move, I’ll have to go out and buy more. I’m one of the relatively few guys that enjoys buying clothes (and keep a wardrobe for four weeks stashed away).

The best part of the weight loss though is slacks. Most of the slacks I wear are Puritan (one of the Walmart brands). Several years ago they came out with these great pants that were super comfortable and good enough looking that they were a step up from casual-wear. They stopped fitting when I gained weight, I had difficulty finding slacks in my new size, and I was reluctant to pay any more than I had to because I always had the intention of losing the weight again. The good news was that they had a weird sort of elastic waist with pleats so it didn’t look awful when I wore them. I know that some (a lot) of people out there hate pleats with a passion and probably thought that it looked awful anyway. Even so, it was do-able. The thing that drove me absolutely nuts, though, was that the pulling-out of the pants meant that the white inside my pockets showed. The fashion sin of pleats didn’t bother me, but the noticeability of white pockets from particular angles was something that drove me nuts. They’re gone now and that is a beautiful thing. Particularly since Puritan doesn’t make the slacks like they used to. They don’t hide the white in the pockets nearly as much and so now they can be visible even when the pants aren’t too small. They also no longer release the gray-green color (my wife swears they’re gray, I think they’re green) that I love so much. So being able to fit back into those pants is a wonderful thing. Whenever I do go out and get new pants, it’ll probably have to be a different brand. I’m not looking forward to that day.

When I was living in Deseret, I kept getting mail from Neumont University, a DeVry sort of university specializing in computer science. I have no idea how they found me. Though I already have a college degree, I thought it was an interesting concept. The Los Angeles Times actually did a write-up on Neumont:

“I don’t think anybody has enough fun at Neumont — it’s a bunch of people addicted to sitting in their mom’s basement playing World of Warcraft and drinking Dr Peppers,” said Murray, who himself was drinking a can of Dr Pepper at 8 a.m. on a Friday.

He might have a point. Instead of Mardi Gras, students hold Nerdi Gras, a video game party featuring “nothing that would ever happen at Mardi Gras,” according to organizer Keith McIff. And though the student commons doesn’t have couches or fast food (or for that matter, any hot food at all), it does have a “Star Trek” pinball machine, a pingpong table and a flat-screen TV frequently hooked up to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Some of Neumont’s female students, who make up about 5% of the 266 enrolled this year, are on a mission to get their peers to tune in to the world around them. In October, one posted a message on Neumont’s Web forums protesting what she called “offensive odors.”

“The truth is there are people in this school who just don’t smell pleasant at all,” she wrote.

The post generated more than a dozen replies, with students suggesting the creation of a personal-hygiene company, a crackdown on halitosis, and a three-shower-a-day regimen.

“People (who probably just get busy and distracted by their passion for coding) need to remember to take care of themselves as well as they care for their machines,” Stacy Hughes, the school’s communications manager, wrote on the forum.

The university instituted a requirement that laptops be closed during class (there was apparently a problem with graduates typing away at their computers during meetings) and taking communications classes. Both moves met with resistance.

The students are, of course, paying (or borrowing) their way through and having things their way is one of the things that they undoubtedly believe that they are paying for. The problem is if they’re there for the furtherance of their careers, they’re going to need to learn how to integrate into normal society. Things like Nerdi Gras don’t really help much in that regard. Communications classes do.

In the comment section of Half Sigma (where, no great surprise, I found the article), Brandon Berg points out that few of the developers he knows are actually like the kids described in the article. This could be because the article is caricature or it could be because there are strong distinctions between people that go into computer science and people that make a career out of it. I think that there is something to be said for the latter. I have spent a lot of time around developers and I have spent a lot of time around people that had the skills and the brianpower to become a developer and yet weren’t. One of the primary differences between the two groups was people skills. Some will say that this only proves that society undervalues social skills and overvalues people skills. There is definitely some truth to this. However, it is also the case that developing is a collaborative exercise where you’re working with other developers and testers and managers and the ability to communicate effectively is rather important. I don’t just mean communicating their ideas, but also communicating non-offensively in other ways (including the olfactory senses). Coworkers and bosses have a right to give preference to people that they enjoy working with, follow social protocols, and so on.

I have myself thought in the past that if I ever had a software design company, I would focus on bringing in those that lack social skills in favor of technical skill and exploit their undervalue in the job market. Years later, as I have watched how workplaces actually function, I have my doubts that this is a good idea. These people not only have trouble integrating themselves into general society (which I could perhaps but not necessarily avoid with the right workplace), but they very frequently don’t get alone with one another. Their lack of social skills makes it much more difficult to smooth over these differences than it would be between two ill-matched but more socially conventional people.

Outside the world of nerds, one of the great values of college is the socialization that occurs there. This is arguably one of the many things that should be taught in high school but aren’t. But while socialization occurs in high school, it’s often the counterproductive sort that includes values that ill-serves one in later life. That’s somewhat the case in college, but less so. But this only occurs if people that are forced to go outside their comfort zones. My brother Mitch joined a fraternity in part because he didn’t want all of his friends to fall into the categories of engineers and people he knew in high school. The experience changed his life. He went in a nerd and came out an All-American guy who could make friends with everybody and could date quite beautiful women without being at an exceptional disadvantage. That wouldn’t have happened at Neumont. And while I did not have a similar transformation in college, I nonetheless came out of it (largely thanks to the Honors College) with a lot of valuable social lessons I would not have gotten at Neumont or at a community college. Looking back, I only wish that I had striven more.

So while the Neumont students might wish that they were more catered to because of the money they’re putting forward, I think that not getting what they want and being forced outside their comfort zone is one of the best gifts that a university can give its student population.

My main entertainment center is a computer attached to an old-school television set. I can view video files, DVDs, Hulu, and play music on it. I even have a nifty mouse-remote. The problem is that I don’t have a good audio player for it. For video I use Media Player Classic and it works like a charm. My default audio player has always been WinAmp. The problem with WinAmp is that the buttons on it are waaaaay too small for my TV set. Aiming it with the mouse-remote is difficult. Reading the text from the Now Playing bar is next to impossible. So I’m looking for an audio player that meets the following specifications:

1. Large buttons (or a skin that I can apply large buttons on) – Very important
2. Easily viewable playlist with a font-size I can change – Very important
3. A way that I can sorta-minimize or fold the application but still have access to the buttons but it doesn’t take up much screen space. – Moderately important
4. No visualizations. I don’t want to watch lines dance with my music As long as I can turn it off and have it not take up desktop real estate, that’s fine. Otherwise, it’ll take up space I’m going to need for super-size fonted playlists – Very important
5. Does not catalog and organize my music. My folders change too frequently and they almost always organize it incorrectly. – Very important if I can’t turn it off.
6. Fits within standard windows. I don’t like the tendency of some applications (including WinAmp and Windows Media Player) to try to make their design sleek at the expense of the standard bar and menus up top – Moderately important

Anyone have any ideas?

I have now joined Facebook and Twitter. I’ve been late to the party on a lot of the social networking sites like Facebook. I created a MySpace account maybe a year ago. I guess I have a LinkedIn account, though I never really use it. The tipping point on Facebook was that Clancy joined it and started talking about it. When my wife is talking computer stuff, it simply will not do for me to not know precisely what she’s talking about. So I took the plunge. I also created a Twitter account. I don’t think that I’m remotely concise enough for Twitter to work for me, but we’ll see. My motivation there was similar except that instead of it being about my wife it was about my brother Mitch. It’s not like I take a whole lot of pride in being “ahead of the curve”. In fact, compared to most of my friends I’m a relatively late adopter. But there comes a point I guess where I feel at least a little embarrassed to say “No, I haven’t tried that yet.”

-{Note: This post is based on the Kindles as I understand them. If you own a Kindle or have done research, please correct any misconceptions that I might have.}-

Kindles are one of those technologies that I’m keeping an eye on, though so far I am pretty far from sold. The biggest issue is that the costs of a Kindle ebook is not much cheaper than a regular book and more expensive than a used book. That, combined with the price of admission and one other thing, DRM, make it something I don’t want to own right now.

The DRM (Digital Rights Management) function is at present the biggest obstacle. Amazon has been accused of more-or-less bricking devices of people that have done it wrong. They turn off the ability to download stuff you’ve bought or to buy more stuff and your Kindle becomes near worthless. Some of the reasons that customers are alleging their devices were shut down were pretty weak such as “too many returned books”. I don’t know if that’s all that’s going on, but the mere fact that it could be is enough to scare me away. Simply put, I don’t want to buy a device that someone else can turn off. AT&T can shut down cell service on my smartphone, of course, but even then I would be left with a Pocket PC and I could unlock the phone and sign up with T-Mobile or some other SIM-card service. The Kindle is pretty closed hardware, it’s not really meant to be used without Amazon’s accompanying service, and there are no competitors that could activate it.

Amazon is, by its own rights, not selling books but selling a service. As such, they have the right to refuse service under various circumstances. That all sounds reasonable. Rhapsody, for instance, can stop its music service to my PC at any time and though I would lose my playlists and all that, but they would be in their rights to do so. So why shouldn’t Amazon be given the same rights? The main reason is that Rhapsody doesn’t charge anything analogous to the ownership rights to its music. If Rhapsody charged 50c or 75c per song, then I would have a strong claim of ownership over what I’ve purchased. But they charge a subscription fee and so they can more easily claim that they are offering a service. Amazon is not only charging per-book, but they’re charging prices that are not far off from what it would cost to own the book outright. In short, they’re offering purchase-prices for a rental agreement. Sure, the terms of the rental are pretty generous (you likely own it for as long as the service is available), but (provided reports are accurate) they’re retaining the right to deny you what you’ve paid for.

This all flies under the banner of their providing a service (and not a product) but also under DRM. Were it not for the latter, they would let you manage your own books that you could make as many backups as you needed and the Kindle would be sort of like the Pocket PC without the smartphone. You can’t necessarily use it for what you originally got it for, but you haven’t lost anything but future service. But Amazon feels, and rightly so, that if they gave the user too much ability to treat the books like files to be copied and backed up that blatant piracy would not be far behind. This would cost them their contracts with publishers. This was the same sort of idea behind early iTunes. They had to put these restrictions to get the content-providers to sign on and neither the service providers nor content providers trust users.

That’s all fair enough, if it weren’t for the fact that they’re demanding that we trust them. And I don’t. It’s no secret that in an ideal world for content-producers consumers would never own anything and would pay a small fee for every time that they listen to a song, watch a show, or read a book. It’s not even all that unreasonable to think that we should pay for a product in correspondence to how much we use it. But users don’t like that arrangement because we don’t want a meter running every time we listen to or watch something. There was a reason why the DVD succeeded where the (original) Divx failed. More than just not wanting to pay for a service, we don’t want to be dependent on anybody else to enjoy what we’ve purchased. We don’t want to have to rely that some server somewhere is going to be functioning properly, that our Internet connection won’t be down, and a whole bunch of other things. We want to put the disk in the player and watch or listen or whatever.

What DRM mostly comes down to is trust. Both sides of the transaction are understandably suspicious of one another. If the Kindle gave us books in the form of PDF files, they likely would be swapped around pretty freely. Of course, you can get PDF files of a whole lot of books illegally and free now, but right now there’s no really easy way to read them. Except the Kindle. So if they become too freewheeling with what the Kindle can read, they provide the seeds for people to bypass what they’re selling. But the more restrictions they place, the more we have to worry about whether or not we will have access to the material that we’ve bought. When it becomes easier to obtain and keep pirated material illegally than to do it legitimately, they’ve got a whole separate problem.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Both sides can give credible reasons not to trust the other. But we’re sort of on the cusp on this great technology that will save bookshelves and trees across the country and the world. I hope it gets worked out somehow. Possibly it will entail some sort of actual subscription service and service rather than product rates. My guess is that, as with music, the consumers will eventually get what they want. Maybe not from the Kindle, but eventually some sort of device will make books and the like really easy to read and open enough that people won’t feel beholden to the manufacturer and service provider. The question is, when that day comes, will the pirates be so experienced trying to provide what Amazon and others wouldn’t that the content providers won’t get their share? It’s quite possible. The music and film/TV industries’ (understandable) mistrust of its consumers and (ridiculous) foot-dragging made them late-comers to the in the inevitable.

The Big Money:

Has there ever been an industry so relentlessly at war with its customers as the credit card industry is now? Watching new credit card legislation sail through Congress this week is the industry’s reward for giving even its most responsible customers the overwhelming sense that they are getting ripped off. Indeed they are, and there is no more compelling, incontrovertible proof than the flimflammery of “over the limit” charges.

I can actually go one better on “over the limit” charges.

Several years ago, I had a case with my Credit Card Company wherein I missed a $13 payment and had interest charged not just on the missed payment, but the amount I owed after that payment that hadn’t even been put on a statement yet. Unfortunately for me, that was a $4,500 auto repair bill. My interest in the two weeks it took me to get said statement was actually more than the missed payment. I decided then that I was not going to take any chances with credit cards under the assumption that if they can find a way to screw you, they will.

Apparently, my level of paranoia was insufficient. A couple months back I had a credit card bill for $450. I misread what was owed and paid $250. My bad. I realized this mistake a week or so later and paid the additional $200. But the way that the payment on the website was set up, it was still saying that I owed $450 despite the previous payment (which had gone through). Not sure what was going on but not wanting to get screwed, I gave them another $450. Having paid $900 on a $450 statement should put me in the clear, right?

Wrong.

At some point after the billing period, I made a $500 purchase on that same credit card. I hadn’t been billed for it, though as I learned previously that didn’t matter. I get my credit card statement and see that I owe them $50 and am being charged interest on that debt. Despite the fact that I had paid $900 on a $450 statement over a week before it was due. How can this be?

The issue described it as follows: The first payment made on any statement is applied to that statement. Any further payments are applied to the principle and not to that statement. So once my original payment ($250) was made, as far as they were concerned the remainder of what I didn’t pay off ($200) was combined with what hadn’t been billed yet ($500) for a total principle that any future payments (in my case, $200 and $450) would be directed towards. So after my original payment, I owed $700 (though only $200 had been billed to me to date) and the entirety of that amount must be paid before the interest spigot is turned off. As such, $650 I paid was applied towards that amount. And the remaining $50 was counted towards the $200 that I did not pay off with my first payment and thus was considered delinquent and interest-worthy.

According to the customer service agent I talked to, most likely the problem was that the source of this was probably a computer system not set up for people to make multiple payments towards the same statement prior to the statement being due. Had I made the payment the day after it was due, it may have been applied to what I owed them. He actually wasn’t sure. In the future, he said, it would be best to pay the entire amount in one payment or save any subsequent payments until after the due date. Otherwise, if I realize that I have made a mistake, pay off everything I owe (billed or not) because all delinquency ceases when the amount owed equals 0. In truth, the interest I owed them was minimal and after walking me through this the CSA waived it regardless. I guess I can’t even complain about the fact that I spent half an hour on the phone because even after he offered to waive it I insisted that he explain it to me until I understood it.

Even so, avoiding interest payments should not require a half-hour consultation with a customer service agent who has to pepper his statements with “I think” and “I guess” and “I suspect”. Maybe crappy software is to blame, but as long as the crappy software makes it this difficult to avoid being delinquent I doubt it’s something that they’re inclined to fix on their own volition.

Last week I complained that I was not enjoying The Chamber. Well, I finished it. It’s not terrible, but definitely not worth two weeks of car time to get through. The main character is as dull as particle board, though some of the peripheral characters are interesting.

So Sunday I watched the movie starring Chris O’Donnell and Gene Hackman.

The movie made me realize that there were quite a few things about the book that I didn’t realize that I liked (or at least refrained from actively disliking). Every time I was confronted with hamfisted, high-horse sermonizing or adults engaging in toddler temper-tandrums unsuccessfully disguised as drama, I realized “Hey, that wasn’t in the book!”

John Tierney recently wrote a piece in the New York Times that asks an interesting question and then gives a poor answer to it:

Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks? {…}

Sometimes the message is as simple as “I’ve got resources to burn,” the classic conspicuous waste demonstrated by the energy expended to lift a peacock’s tail or the fuel guzzled by a Hummer. But brand-name products aren’t just about flaunting transient wealth. The audience for our signals — prospective mates, friends, rivals — care more about the permanent traits measured in tests of intelligence and personality, as Dr. Miller explains in his new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”

Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes the message is something else. Sometimes it’s not a message at all. Clearly, conspicuous consumption is something that does go on every day. And when people pay extra for goods for signaling, they should look into themselves and ask why it is that they are doing that and whether or not it is really worth the “resources.” Particularly if the cost is coming at the expense of economic security.

But I think that there is the tendency of a lot of people to assume that anything that they don’t personally see the value in as a conspicuous or positional purchase. It’s no surprise that I first ran across this article by way of Half Sigma, who spends significant amounts of time trying to differentiate between that which he personally values (and thus is a natural good) and that which he does not value (and thus is a social ill).

No doubt some people that buy “fair trade coffee” do so ass a signaling device. Indeed, the people most likely to point out that they buy said coffee are the people most likely to be signalling. However, a lot of people buy it because it’s something that they believe in or because it’s an easy way to feel better about themselves. It’s not all that different from “Buying American.” Both are purchases that do little on the individual level but that people that get involved in these buying strategies believe would make the world a better place if more people did the same.

I see a similar dynamic when it comes to houses. I’m told that people buy bigger houses to signal their wealth and that it’s a wasteful, positional buy. Sometimes maybe it is. But you know what? For a lot of people, having that extra space is handy. A room for each kid was actually one of the few things that my mother-in-law insisted on when they moved when Clancy was six or so. She and I are not big on conspicuous, signalling, or positional consumption (more on this in a minute), but having a bigger house is one thing that we are going to spend money on.

Of course, when we do so, no doubt people could point to it and say that it really was about positioning and signalling. They could argue that it is mostly about neighborhood (positioning), for instance. Except that where we live, we don’t expect there to be the urban/suburban divide that exists where were were raised or where we live now. But to be honest, if we did live in an urban area, neighborhood would be important. That being said, living in a nice neighborhood has value apart from how we are seen.

But ultimately there is no way that we could argue that signaling is not a factor even when it isn’t. Everything we buy can be psychoanalyzed as having been about that. When I was looking at cars recently, I was looking at cheap and small cars. Was this because I am thrifty and value good gas mileage? I would say so, but someone else could say that what I really want is simply to signal my “thriftiness” as a point of self-determined superiority. That I buy cheap clothes is conspicuous in its own way by being all authentic and crap and that has social currency all its own.

This is one of the problems I have with discussions about how “most” people spend money to impress people (when they can). It’s non-falsifiable. There is almost no purchase which won’t be considered by someone, somewhere to be a signalling mechanism. This is particularly true any time anybody chooses to spend more money than is absolutely essential.

I don’t own an iPhone, but I do own one of its less expensive competitors. Denigrating the iPhone as a wasteful purchase may make me feel better, but in the end if I had more money, less mistrust of Apple, and more exposure to the product when it came time to buy a product, it’s likely that I would own one. The “16-gigabytes” in the “16-gigabyte iPhone” mentioned in the article is not just some marketing gimmick akin to “52-speed CD-ROM” back in the day, it is something that has actual value that a lot of people may have or be able to find use for!

Of course, that is lost on someone whose main gripe with their current phone is the inability to make calls from the kitchen. And that’s fine. But that the kitchen caller does not see the need or use for a phone with a substantial OS or hard drive space does not mean that it was bought to impress them. And of course it won’t impress them. So then Miller and company get to turn it around on its head and say “A-ha! These purchases don’t work!”

I fall into this trap myself. I see a decked out car and say to myself “Oh, give me a break.” That’s because I don’t see the value in an expensive car. Not because the car has no value. Maybe there is absolutely no difference between the BMW and Subaru WRX. I suspect that there is, though. I also suspect that I would look at the differences and say “Wait, that’s not even remotely worth $25,000.” Which to me it isn’t. But my upgrade from a smartphone with QVGA graphics to one with VGA would be similarly lost on a lot of people.

But sure, sometimes (maybe usually) a BMW is a status buy. Even then, it’s far from clear that it’s inherently an unsuccessful one. I wouldn’t impress anyone if I went out and bought one, but I’m not the target audience. I don’t live in a place where such things matter. But there are certainly places where pulling up in my Ford Escort would raise some eyebrows and not in a good way.

But the bigger place of effectiveness is not in the raising of eyebrows, but rather in the realms of the unconscious. People will often say that they don’t care what kind of car a person drives, but they may be lying or they may not realize that they’re lying. It’s sort of like how when I was growing up it was a popular thing to say that we prefer girls without make-up. It was a way to establish ourselves as unsuperficial and so an easy social marker, but it was also something we thought was true. But we associated make-up with those girls that caked it on. What we didn’t realize were the fact that girls that actually knew how to apply it were grabbing our attention in ways and frequency that they might otherwise not. We will tell ourselves that we don’t care whether a person is wearing designer clothes or driving a super-file automobile, but what’s really going on is that we don’t notice the ways that we actually notice.

In any case, I’ve become increasingly suspicious about broad-stroke explanations for the behaviors of others where the moral of the story is that the world would be a better place if more people were like the person explaining how others are.

That’s absolutely not to say that the world wouldn’t totally be a better place if more people shared my priorities. It totally would.