Posnit Ubek

Thursday, July 30, 2009

They’re assholes but they’re not stupid

Every time I call someone who has a cell phone, and they don’t answer, I hear their message followed by a message from the phone company. This second message is along the lines of:

”[Phone number] is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press pound for more options.”

This message makes a lot of money for the cell provides. From David Pogue: “If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year.”

Do You Like Hummus?

“...if you find a white person who does not like hummus then they probably just haven’t tasted it or they are the wrong kind of white person .”

Raising Awareness Is Just So Important

“An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through ‘awareness.’ ... you get all the benefits of helping (self satisfaction, telling other people) but no need for difficult decisions or the ensuing criticism…”

This site was so funny—I just wasted an hour that I didn’t have.

Cats Don’t Apply

If you’re not busy, you should kill ten minutes reading about one of the most successful lawyers of all time, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes:

“If you can prove [that] the victim abused a dog or a horse, you can convince the jury that the guy deserved to be killed… for some reason, cats don’t apply.”

The entire article is both fascinating and hilarious.

Monday, July 27, 2009

iPod Classic Holds 120GB ($24K)

This has all been said before, I have the urge anyway (with the Hadopi Law looming large in the rearview mirror).

The biggest iPod music player, the “Classic” holds 120GB of files. A single song takes about 5MB, more if it’s of high quality and less if it’s of poor quality.

120GB is 120,000 megabytes. 120,000/5 = 24000 songs.

The official price for a song is one dollar. So, to legally fill a new iPod, it costs (would cost) approximately $24,000.

Where does Apple think that people get their music from? How many of their customers have spent $24K on iTunes? Might Apple subtly be encouraging filesharing via the P2P networks?

One could argue that they’re selling guns for which the ammunition is freely available online (that’s one point of view anyway).

Another thought: I’m a music lover. Before the internet, I probably spent about $50-100 every month on albums. That works out to about $1000 per year.

Basic economic theory says that productivity gains lead to windfall profits followed by low prices. Releasing music as MP3’s instead of physical CD’s is a massive productivity gain. Consequently, by artificially keeping prices high, the record companies are reaping windfall profits. Which will inevitably be followed by low prices. The battle against filesharing is really a struggle to prevent the market from becoming competitive.

Boy would I feel like a sucker if I gave my $1000 to a company making massive profits purely by artificially enforcing an anti-competitive market.

NSFW

If you’re bored. If you’re not easily offended (seriously). If you used to like Lolcats, FailBlog, and PictureIsUnrelated, but you’re over them.

You might like this.

If you don’t know what NSFW means, DO NOT click on the link.

Killer Putdown

You won’t be interested in this article, but I just about fell off my chair when I read:

“And to be clear, I mean ‘short bus special’, not ‘shiny unicorn special’.”

Living Abroad Increases Creativity

According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.”

Learn These Words, Make Money

I am so totally going to learn these words, just so that the next time I’m at a dinner party and some pretentious kid goes off I’ll be able to drown him in incomprehensible jargon. Or so that I can look smarter to my clients.

High Prices = Damage

I love this quote:

“You can also create artificial scarcity to keep prices high ... markets, like networks, interpret this kind of interference as damage, and usually find a route around it.”

Trying to curb sharing music that I love is creating artifical scarcity. I interpret that as damage and try to route around it.

AP Would Rather Fuss Than Do The Really Simple Thing That Would Totally Solve Its Problem

The AP has made a lot of noise recently about how “news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web (sic) sites without permission”. What any webmaster knows is that a simple robots.txt file in the root directory will eliminate all “article stealing” by search engines.

So, how does the AP handle this? Based on AP.org, all their stories seem to be hosted on “hosted.ap.org”.

Take a look at their robots.txt file.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Hairy Hotdogs

I got inspired by an article at English Russia, and here are the results:

I broke a bunch of spaghetti in three equal lengths. Yes, it does get cooked in the interior of the hotdog. Some of the spaghetti was initially not covered by the boiling water, but it was simple to flip them over. Overall, it was very easy to make and tasted great.

See the original article for some crazy serving suggestions (including eyes)!

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Why politicians don’t get obvious truths

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair