Things That Just Piss Me Off

Recently the discussion on this blog has led to a look at how fear is used for gain or profit by companies and even governments. So I wanted to take a look at that.

1. Newspapers and Television News: The traditional news media seem to get a free ride from the general public when it comes to covering news and how they make money. I don’t think they deserve a better break, especially since major corporations have bought up so many newspapers in blocks.

News today is corporate. Corporations are only concerned about their bottom line. They ignore news that won’t increase their bottom line or further their own agendas. Look at Fox News for the agenda issue. Do you really think that these corporations that own nes stations would not hold back a news story that will adversely affect their bottom line or agenda?

Newspapers and television news shows DO profit from fear. The old saying, “If it bleeds, it leads”, applies here. They show whatever the most people will watch just as networks do when it comes to entertainment. News is no different. It has become entertainment and they make a good profit from that entertainment.

2. Alarm Companies and Security Firms: These companies routinely put out crime statistics and other information that sways people to believe their services are crucial to their safety. These companies are correct. They use real stories and statistics. But isn’t that using fear to promote their products and services?

3. Insurance Companies: There may not be a better example of how companies use fear to promote their services. You may see a cute lizard or a caveman on their commercials on tv, but do you remember the last conversation you had with an insurance salesman? He or she uses fear to get you to buy a larger policy than you probably need.

4. Hitler: No, not a company, but this lunatic was an expert at selling himself based on fear. He made the entire public believe that they were in danger from everyone, especially the jews. Their were people reporting their neighbors for suspicious activity. People were reported just for being jewish because Hitler made them fear the jews. Making people fear others sold them on following Hitler to protect them. The government was able to use wiretaps, bugging, torture, and start wars by selling fear to it’s own people.

5. George Bush: See #4 above. Replace Jews with Terrorists.

Comments on this topic are closed. Please refrain from commenting any further on this topic.

Simple miscommunication between me and the family is all that really happened here.

It’s resolved. Over. Done with. Move on. Let them get back to what they need to be concerned with. Their child and his recovery. Thats all that really matters at this point.

I think the family overreacted to the original blogpost and I overreacted in return. I hate to remove posts, but making an exception in this case.

Yet Cheney still runs around the country saying that Iraq IS related to 9-11. Do Bush and Cheney ever talk?

Dictatorship runs in the family.

This is the same George W. Bush that promised America that he would not rest until Osama Bin Laden was captured. Well I guess he decided to reast aftyer all.

When is this going to be resolved or has it been?

Yahoo Music gets it! They are on the side of consumers in the DRM issue rather than cowtowing to the music industry execs who think they can control file sharing!

Here is some of what Ian Rogers, who currently works at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music, had to say about it in a post addressed to the music industry.

Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers.

We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”

Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP.

It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly. Yahoo! is the world’s #1 Internet destination. Hundreds of millions of people visit Yahoo! each month. Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors.

Between 10 and 20 million people watch music videos on Yahoo! Music every month. Between 5 and 10 million people listen to radio on Yahoo! Music every month.

But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions (sorry, we don’t release subscriber numbers, but the aggregate number proves the point), even after years of marketing by all three companies.

When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video.

Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us.

Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.

So we have media consumption experiences with no context (desktop media players) and an incredible, endless, emergent contextual experience where media consumption is a pain in the ass, illegal, or non-existent (the Web).

FIX IT. Your fans are pouring their music-loving hearts into blogs, Wikipedia, etc and what tools have you given them to work with? Not much, unfortunately.

This is what I’m vowing to devote my energy, and Yahoo!’s energy to.

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested.

Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor.

I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.

In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.

I applaud Ian Rogers for his comments and hope that Yahoo! will stand behind him and stand up for users rather than bowing to the dictates of the music industry gestapo.

ESPN has got to be the worst choice for a network to show monday night football. The annmouncers talk about everything but the game they are announcing. We have to go through breaks where ESPN has to tell us all about what’s happening in baseball. It’s not monday night baseball. It’s monday night football, a real sport.

The number of commercials have dobled since ESPN got the contract or it sure seems like it. There are new penalties for receivers throwing the ball down after a catch because the NFL says it slows the game down. Yet, when a 30 second time out gets called, the network finds a way to run 4 60 second commercials during one 30 second time out. The NFL and ESPN have learned how to fold time and space I guess.

All I know is from picking dennis miller to be a monday night football announcer, to talking about baseball during the football game, talking about other things besides the game like 10 minutes talking about niagra falls while plays are happening and being ignored by the announcers, to the number of commercials, Monday night football has lost one viewer. Me.

I love football, but I’ll just have to do something else on monday nights until ESPN loses the contract and it’s worth watching again.

Even the post game show. Right after the game ESPN ran like a 30 minute interview with some yankee guy talking about losing and being eliminated before they would even talk about the football game that was just played. The yankees lost. A 30 minute interview with the losers?

You ESPN guys thought that was more interesting than a wrap up of the football game you just showed? Or did you think the football fans would sit through all the baseball stuff to get to the post game wrap up? Or did you rightfully think this was probably the only way anyone would sit through that interview with the loser?

I like tv as much as the next guy, but some things are just so ridiculous I can’t stand it. Here are some of them.

1. World Premiere! Ok, this is a movie that made millions of dollars at the post office and a million people saw it, then it was released on video where tons more people rented it and watched it, then HBO showed it 15 times per month for over a year. Then when one of the networks shows the movie, they call it a World Premiere.

2. CGI at the bottom of the screen. It’s not enough to use over half the time to show us commercials, we have to have little things popping up at the bottom of the screen during the show. Nothing like watching a really scary movie and really getting into it, just to see Dog The Bounty Hunter Popup at the bottom to make my movie-watching experience better. CGI is to tv what popups are to the internet.

3. Cable Commericials. I pay for cable, they show me commercials, and just when I think they are about to take me back to the show I was watching, they want to tell me how great cable tv is and why I should also use it for my phone service.

4. Speaking of commercials. I know this is an old complaint. But isn;t there any such thing as consumer protection or false advertising anymore? Where is Ralph Nader when we need him? A truck can stop a 30,000 pound aircraft on a runway? Give me a break. Companies used to have to answer for false advertising. The FTC used to actually do something when comapanies used false advertising. Now they just do as they please.

And the phartmaceutical companies are the worst. They advertise some drug with a woman running through a field all happy and try to make you want to have whatever problem she has so you can take the drug and be happy too! Then they give you the disclaimers at the end like, this may cause internal bleeding without prior warning, stomach lacerations, and kidney failure in rare instances. But they still tell you the drug is wonderful!

5. HBO. Do they really have to show the same movie over and over and over and over and over and over again? They give you one movie per week that you may not have seen if you live in a cave on a mountain in Thailand and charge you $10-$15 per month to do so.

Then I really love it when I am a subscriber and I have to sit through their commercials about HBO everytime they give nonsubscribers a free month to try and get them to sign up too. I already paid my money! Why do I have to listen to HBO try to sell people who are getting the service for free that I paid for?

6. Reality Shows. Can this get anymore ridiculous? The networks create them for two reasons. 1. It costs them less money than a show that requires writers and actors. 2. People will watch anything.

I just can’t wait for “Survivor; Outer Space Edition”.

Maybe we should hold elections for president with a reality show. All the candidates are followed around for months and filmed doing the various stupid stuff they do, especially what they do in airport bathrooms and alone with their aides and pages, then the tv audience can just call in their votes and be done with the whole chad-hanging process.

7. Fox News. I keep hearing the fox news anchors talking about how biased other reporters are. Give me a break. This fake news channel is a republican propaganda machine and they are so obvious about it that anyone who is honest about it can say they know it. Stop defending them as if they are something other than this, please.

I’m not a democrat or a republican. But fair and balanced? Not a chance. They claim they are fair and balanced because they have shows like hannity and coombs, a republican and a democrat. Yet they choose hannity who can talk louder, not actually more intelligently, but definitely louder, than anyone else on his show including coombs. They pick coombs to represent democrats and he couldn’t out-debate a third grader.

So the idea is to make it look like the republicans have a stronger argument by putting on a loudmouth republican who can out-talk the weaker personality who represents the democrats. half the time it looks like allen coombs is afraid that hannity is going to beat him up.

8. Baseball Interruptions. Look, I’m not a big fan of baseball. I played it all through little league and high school and love playing the game. I just can’t sit6 through games that end up 1-0 after three hours of play. I can’t watch golf or fishing for the same reason.

But the other day, I was halfway through a movie and the network breaks in to show me a baseball game instead of letting me finish the movie. What? This was a nonscheduled game that just happened suddenly like breaking news? They didn’t know what time the game would start before just now? They couldn’t have scheduled the movie to end before the game? No prior warning? Someone just called the station and said, “Hey! I just saw the Yankees and the Padres playing baseball! Get some cameras over there and cover the game, quick!”

Well, thats just the 8 things I could think of right now. You are welcome to add some more if you like.

You know it never ceases to amaze me how people in large companies, supposedly very intelligent people, can shoot themselves in the foot so often. Do the record labels think they are winning when they sue people for downloading music?

They are so concerned that someone might hear a song for free, they forget how much money they make from it. It has been proven that cd sales went up at the same time the downloads increased. Yet the record labels and the RIAA claim it is costing them sales. A fact they have never been able to prove.

Sampling the music leads to buying the cds in most cases. The real reason the music industry is scared of downloads is that music artists are no longer chained to the record companies.

The music artists no longer need the approval of record company execs. Through myspace, imdb, and other social networking sites like youtube, new artists can emerge and become popular without the assistance of the record industry.

I really love the fact that the record labels claim they are protecting the artists by bringing the lawsuits when it is the record companies that have raped and pillaged music artists for years. By holding out contracts over musicians hungry for any type of deal and making the record deals benefit the record companies more than the artists they have left many musicians broke and alone while the record companioes are still making money off the artists work.

Labels Win Suit Against Song Sharer
By JEFF LEEDS
Published: October 5, 2007

In a crucial legal victory for record labels and other copyright owners, a federal jury yesterday found a Minnesota woman liable for copyright infringement for sharing music online and imposed a penalty of $222,000 in damages.

A totally ridiculous verdict the judge should have not just put aside, but should have thrown away altogether. Simple legal question. Can the RIAA prove that this one woman cost them $222,000 worth of record sales?

The jury verdict, which called for $9,250 in damages for each of the 24 songs involved in the trial, came after brief deliberations.

Better than $9,000 per song? Wow, the record companies make more per song in court than they do in record stores. No wonder they are suing as many as 30,000 people.

“Every lawsuit,” the posting said, “makes the recording industry look more and more like King Canute, vainly trying to hold back the tide.”

The lead plaintiff was Capitol Records, a label owned by the EMI Group. The three other major record companies — the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group — also had songs involved in the suit against Ms. Thomas.

Personally, I will not buy any music from any of these labels in the future. It may not be much, but these lawsuits have definitely cost them one customer.

Next they will get bush to label people who do file sharing as terrorists.