Rocket Bomber

[blockquote]
“Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

“It’s true that larger time zones would seem to cheat many people out of daylight by removing them further from their true solar time. But the demands of global commerce already do that. Many people work in companies with remote offices or have clients in different parts of the country. It’s become routine to arrange schedules to coordinate people in multiple domestic time zones. Traders in California start their day at 5am to participate in New York markets. True, not all Californians work on East Coast time, but research by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Catlin Meyers, and Mark Peacock showed communities are more productive when there’s more time coordination.”[/blockquote]

The US needs to retire daylight savings and just have two time zones—one hour apart : http://qz.com/142199/the-us-needs-to-retire-daylight-savings-and-just-have-two-time-zones-one-hour-apart/
via The Verge

##

Daylight Savings is a nuisance for most, and I for one would not miss it. Can we get Congress on this, or are they too busy doing nothing this year?

I do use the occasion of Daylight Savings clock changes as a reminder to back up my computer data twice a year.

Filed under novel notes, to be used at some point.

[blockquote]
“Yesterday morning the phone stopped a bullet that would otherwise have hit him in the chest.

“It’s a scene right out of an old Western flick, except that the pocket-sized Bible has been replaced by a 4.3-inch Android smartphone. A look at the back of the Evo reveals that its most volatile components (the battery) played an important role in stopping the slug.

…

“This isn’t the first time an HTC phone has stopped a bullet, either. You may recall an eerily similar incident that occurred back in 2011, where an Atlanta nightclub valet’s life was saved by an Evo 4G.”[/blockquote]

photos at link:

HTC phones officially the best at stopping bullets : http://www.geek.com/mobile/htc-phones-officially-the-best-at-stopping-bullets-1575442/

Embedding disabled by request

Click the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwLt-VXHxD0

“Third, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare retail to other kinds of architecture. Most of the cold, lifeless architecture I see is corporate or institutional. Retail establishments such as Starbucks are in the business of attracting customers and, if they have adequate resources and the location is right for business, I’d say they succeed at that more often than not. It may not be Great Architecture, but it works for people. Consider the amazing success of the enclosed suburban regional shopping mall, for example. The exterior architecture is generally hideous, as are the parking lots; but, on the inside, designers figured out exactly what people wanted. We now know that the results haven’t been so good for America, in my opinion, and the mall as an architectural form is now in significant decline. But it had quite a run over four decades or so.”

Has Architecture Lost Touch With the People? : http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2013/10/has-architecture-lost-touch-people/7388/

[blockquote]
Chiliheads are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.) Chili growing is to gardening as grilling is to cooking, allowing men to enter, and dominate, a domestic sphere without sacrificing their bluster. “I can’t remember eating anything spicy before the parrot came along,” Fowler, a big man with a brushy mustache, told me, in July. The chili world is full of garrulous, confiding, erratic narrators who say things like “before the parrot came along.”
[/blockquote]

Fire-Eaters : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/04/131104fa_fact_collins : via The Feature

“We don’t talk much about ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in public anymore, but the distinction between one place and another is implicitly understood and often explicitly specified. That location matters greatly for housing values, for example, is taken for granted. Less appreciated is the persistence of neighborhood inequality and its extensive reach into multiple aspects of everyday life. An increasing separation at the top has intensified the effect of spatial divisions on everyone else.”

Division Street, U.S.A. : http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/division-street-u-s-a/?ref=todayspaper&_r=0 : via Final Boss Form

[blockquote]
“Such is the case with the media’s renewed obsession with reports that the Japanese have given up on sex. This canard emerges every couple of years, but it’s snowballing anew thanks to an Oct. 19 Guardian headline screaming: ‘Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?’ The references to dominatrixes-turned-sex counselors, men who get excited by robots, virtual-reality girlfriends and the demise of the Japanese people proved too much for Internet jockeys to resist.

“Editors, too. The Guardian’s piece was followed by the Huffington Post quoting a documentary filmmaker who asserted, dubiously, that ‘it’s a strange thing that can only happen in Japan.’ The Japanese are really, really weird, you know, and this celibacy bubble that imperils the future must reflect their peculiar culture. Follow-ups are rolling in from the Washington Post, Slate, Time and all over the Twittersphere.

“Let me offer my own two yen. The root of Japan’s supposed sex drought isn’t culture, but economics.” [/blockquote]

The Lust Beneath Japan’s Sex Drought : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-25/the-lust-beneath-japan-s-sex-drought-.html

There was a time when movie studios were charging $99 to sell a VHS tape:

“There would typically be a two- to three-month delay between the time a movie was available for rental, and when the movie could be purchased by the consumer. In reality, the video was available, but priced for rental shops and film enthusiasts who wanted to own a copy of the film at the earliest opportunity. The pricing was between $70 and $130” [wikipedia]

The era under discussion would be 1985-1995 – after rental became big business, but prior to the introduction of DVD in 1996. So that “$70” in 1995 would be equal to $105 in 2012; “$70” in 1985 is closer to $145. “$130” for the rental-only version would be $200 or more in today’s dollars.
[inflation calculator at westegg.com]

How dare the movie studios charge a rental place $100 or $200 for a movie that has already had a theatrical release when we all know the video tape only costs $1.80 to manufacture! The gall!

##

Of course the consumer didn’t see that price: the investment was borne by the rental place. They did calculations that over the lifetime of the tape, they would be able to rent it out 100 times or more before the tape died; and obviously not every tape was purchased at a premium. And Eventually: the number of customers grew, the market matured, consumers became more informed and more discerning, and actual demand for titles began to set the price.

…Which is why DVD sets for Game of Thrones cost [approximately] two arms, a leg, and the still warm corpse of a Stark. DVDs changed the game anyway: By 1996, Blockbuster was in a position to dictate terms to the studios, rather than the other way around. Additionally, by the late 1990s the movie and TV studios had already figured out that the home market was in many ways more valuable than the first-run showings, and release delays and exclusivity windows shrank alongside the prices. And that was fine, too, for a while [I look back on it as a golden age of sorts for DVD] until online streaming and blu-ray further clouded the picture and led to the current situation (i.e. “a mess”).

There are series that are only streaming digitally where I’d actually prefer to have a DVD set. There are a couple (anime licensed expired) where there used to be a DVD but it’s no longer being manufactured and isn’t online anywhere* and so good luck with ebay, mate.

For those who aren’t anime fans, and who have no sympathy — indeed, no context — I have two words for you: Disney Vault.

##

Pricing nonsense is not new, and if folks didn’t raise a royal fit in 1988 over $100 VHS tapes I don’t see why a library (that is to say: rental-only) copy of an ebook at $89 is a deal breaker. Additionally, if a publisher wants to charge $24.99 for an ebook — as many note, all but free to manufacture, just like those $1.80 cassettes and 17¢ plastic discs with a bit of foil in ‘em — if that particular ebook is brand new and hasn’t earned back it’s advance, editorial overhead, marketing budget, with a pinch of profit besides than there should be no more complaint than the $11.50 we have to pay for a one-time showing of a movie that is eventually going to be in the $4.99 bin.

It’s all business. Movies have costs past the $2,000 or so it takes to make a print and ship it to your local cineplex. We all know this, and happily pay the $11.50 plus $6 for a popcorn to see a ‘first run’ movie in theaters.

Books have costs, too. Sure, a book doesn’t have a $200 million production budget, but a book is much more likely to just sell 5000 copies – not 11 million tickets. And just like movie studios have hits and flops, publishers have bestsellers and… everything else. Just because the scale is smaller doesn’t make the business easier, or even substantially different.

And just like the home video rental business has changed—radically—over the past 25 years, the ebook business will eventually become relatively sane (more or less) given time as well.

This post is technically a link, that (under the old program) I would have tweeted without commentary:

“For years we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) makes sense, despite the lack of printing, packaging, shipping and inventory costs. And, of course, we won’t even get into the question of the price fixing debacle”

The Good And Bad In Chaotic eBook Pricing : http://www.epublishabook.com/2013/10/25/chaotic-ebook-pricing/ – via the ebookPorn tumblr.

##

* footnote: yes, I know "unavailable anywhere" is a relative term, given the options available to those both morally flexible and technically savvy, and let's leave it at that.