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shutterstock via gizmag.com
In one of my several unpublished fiction manuscripts, I have a futuristic travel tube that whisks people between cities at almost the speed of sound.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk now says he’ll soon have a working schematic for such a device. He’s calling it the “Hyperloop.”
Until Musk releases any real specs, observers are speculating about how it would work and what its limitations might be.
Some believe it could only travel in straight lines, which means (1) serious tunnel and bridge costs, and (2) potential big bucks to property owners along the way.
If it really works (safely) and if it can really be built at a recoverable cost (remember, dot-com and housing-bubble speculators redefined the degree of speculativeness people will invest in), it would change intercity travel forever, in all the populated/affluent parts of the world.
And it would potentially devastate (or, in Internet-age newspeak, “disrupt”) the existing airline industry and its suppliers, including Boeing.
Boeing had been involved in experimental high-speed rail development programs in the past, and could theoretically bid to help design, build, and equip Hyperloop lines in this and other countries.
Of course, that might require leadership at Boeing that knew what it was doing, which the company seems to not have now.
via wikipedia
theatlantic.com
Derek Thompson at the Atlantic has assembled a U.S. map containing what he claims to be “the most famous brands born in each state.”
Only he doesn’t consistently play this game by his own rules.
Some of Thompson’s picks are obvious: Nike for Oregon, Coca-Cola for Georgia, Hasbro for Rhode Island, DuPont for Delaware, L.L. Bean for Maine, Budweiser for Missouri, Tabasco for Louisiana.
Other choices are debatable but defensible: Apple for California, Hawaiian Airlines for Hawaii, Starbucks for Washington state.
But in some cases, Thompson lists parent companies rather than “brands.” (GM is a bigger company, but Ford is a bigger product name.)
In others, he places brands where corporate takeovers have placed them, not where they began. (Does anyone really associate Saks department stores with Alabama?)
Here are my alternate choices:
And for good ol’ Wash. state, arguments can be made for Amazon, Microsoft, and even Sub Pop, or such moved-away corporate HQs as Boeing and UPS.
1950 front page via portland.daveknows.com
Imagine a Portlandia sketch about people desperately seeking newspapers.
For dog training and bird cage lining. For papier-maché school crafts projects. For kinetic art pieces and retro fashion ensembles. For Wm. Burroughs-style “cut up” wordplay. For packing objets d’art and eBay shipments.
But there aren’t any newspapers to be had.
Not in the vending boxes. Not in the stores. Not in the attics.
Not even in the landfills—they’ve been picked clean of ’em.
The citizens are outraged. They form support groups. They exchange tips on where the rare newsprint can still be had.
Of course, they do all of this online.
•
That’s the scenario I imagined when I heard of the Newhouse/Advance Media chain’s latest cost-cutting spree.
You remember how Advance’s newspapers in Ann Arbor MI, Birmingham AL, and (most famously) New Orleans cut back their print issues to two or three days a week.
The New Orleans operation backtracked. This week it launched a tabloid called T-P Street on the regular Times-Picayune‘s off days (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday). The Street papers will be sold in stores and vending boxes, but won’t be home-delivered.
That’s the tactic Advance is taking in Portland.
First, they registered a new corporate name, “Oregonian Media Group,” replacing “Oregonian Publishing Co.”
Then they immediately posted an announcement that claimed the new entity would “expand news and information products in Oregon and Southwest Washington.”
Of course, that “expansion” is really a contraction dressed up in corporate buzz-speak.
The print Oregonian is going newsstand-only three days a week this October, with home delivery offered four days a week. (Home-delivery subscribers will get full digital access to all editions.)
And at least 45 newsroom employees are losing their jobs. That’s about 22 percent of the paper’s current editorial workforce, which in turn is a little over half of its 1990s newsroom strength. Some 50 workers are being canned in other departments.
That reduction might not be the final total; at least a few new hires will replace high-senority people taking severance packages.
If you ask whether the Seattle Times could join the trend of papers only home-delivering part of the time, the answer is “maybe but it’s complicated.”
The Times took over the Everett Herald‘s home-delivery operation. If the now Sound Publishing-owned Herald wants to keep delivering every day, the Times is contractually obligated to do that delivering.
And if the Times has drivers and paperboys/girls in Snohomish and north King counties working every morning, it might as well have them in the rest of King County.
plastic corn usb memory stick, available from made-in-china.com
This is one of those times when I run afoul of certain acquaintances who extol everybody to “think for yourself.”
Because I don’t always “think for myself” the way these guys n’ gals want me to.
The topic in question: “genetically modified organism” (aka “GMO” or simply “GM”) food seeds.
I’m not completely against them.
This shouldn’t surprise longtime readers of this venture. I’ve never been an organic vegan purist. I don’t believe in the innate goodness of all things “alternative” or the innate badness of all things “mainstream.”
As “ObamaLover20122” writes at Daily Kos, modern varieties of staple foodstuffs can add nutrients, reduce the need for pesticides, and help alleviate hunger and malnutrition in wide swaths of the world. Anti-GMO campaigns, this blogger insists, are full of conspiracy theory-esque pseudo-science.
And, as Meagan Hatcher-Mays writes at Jezebel, plants and animals have been selectively bred by humans for just about ever. (Corn/maize was so thoroughly domesticated by the Western Hemisphere’s pre-Euro humans that it can’t even reproduce in the wild.)
It doesn’t help that the outfit most closely associated with GMOs is Monsanto, the “radical” left’s current #1 corporate bogeyman (replacing Wal-Mart, which replaced Nike).
Monsanto was originally a chemical company, involved in everything from plastics and synthetic carpet fibers to the infamous herbicide Agent Orange. In the 1980s it started to make commercial crop seeds that would be especially receptive to its pesticides. Today, agribusiness is its only business.
It’s pursued this business with a “biotech” business model, something known to anyone who’s followed the doing of local drug-development companies. This model is big on patents and other “intellectual property” as the big assets, the big prizes.
Many of the boardroom-based brutalities Monsanto’s been (often rightly) accused of stem from this obsession with Profit Through Patent (such as litigating against small farmers who didn’t even deliberately put Monsanto-owned genes into their crops).
Other Monsanto corporate sins (industrial-waste dumping, f’r instance) are the product of similar them-that’s-got-the-gold-makes-the-rules corporate groupthink.
In short, Monsanto makes it really easy to hate ’em.
And that’s just what folks are doing, across the to-the-left-of-Obama end of the political spectrum.
One part of that crusade has been the dissemination of boycott lists online.
This documents and “meme graphics” purport to list, without documentation, “Monsanto-owned” food products you shouldn’t buy. Various versions of the lists include dozens and dozens of famous supermarket-shelf names.
The only thing is, Monsanto owns NO consumer food-product brands.
None.
Nada.
They’re not in that end of the business.
Many big food processors have probably bought grains and other crops from big agribusiness farms that have bought Monsanto seeds and/or pesticides.
But there’s no real telling who, or for which products.
And even the “GMO labeling” bills now going through several state and national legislative bodies won’t make it certain, thanks to the same natural processes whereby the aforementioned small farmers ended up with GMO genes in their crops.
So go ahead and hate Monsanto for its documented bullying tactics.
But don’t blindly hate all GMO projects.
And don’t blindly hate the entire non-PCC food universe.
joshua trujillo, seattlepi.com
messynessychic.com
ap via nbc news
While I’ve been busy doing whatever (looking for a new home, etc.), I missed a few big birthdays here in online-land.
Tim Berners-Lee opened the first public World Wide Web site on 4/30/93 at the CERN particle-physics lab in Switzerland. For the occasion, that site has been put back up at its original URL.
Berners-Lee was, and still is, an idealist. In the original CERN site’s documents, he described the WWW as something that could open up information to the masses.
Instead of “walled garden” online networks such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and the original AOL, the Web would be open to all comers and contributors. Anybody could put anything on, or receive anything from, it.
This ultimate “disruptive technology,” creator of LOLcat memes and destroyer of newspapers, record labels, and middle-class livelihoods, got its start with the most noble of intentions.
(Just like many a mad-scientist-movie experiment.)
By pure coincidence, the first issue of Wired magazine was out that same month.
From the start, it was intended to be a lot more important than a mere buying guide to PC gear. It was to chronicle tech as the biggest economic, societal, and even ideological movement of our time.
It posited loudmouth, alpha-male San Franciscan Libertarians as the Voice of the Future. It sneered at governments, residents of “Tired” locales (France, Manhattan, Seattle), and people who dared to think about the well-being of others as backward-thinking parasites.
In the world according to the early Wired, CEOs were the new rock stars, even the new royalty. No social or environmental issue could be discussed in its pages, unless there was a potential solution that would also enrich (or at least never inconvenience) big business.
In the end, the bosses and bosses’ lackeys Wired worshipped got most of their way.
And as cyber-critic Jason Lanier notes, the 99 Percent are still trying to pick up the pieces.
That same week 10 years later, Apple launched the first version of the iTunes Store.
The iTunes application had been around since 2001, when Apple bought and revamped a third-party program called SoundJam MP.
Steve Jobs had identified music (and eventually general media) playback as a technology in which Apple had to lead, for the sake of the company’s survival. Otherwise, Windows-only applications and file formats (remember WinAmp?) would shut out Mac users, threatening Apple’s presence in home environments. By making iTunes, and making a Windows version of it, Jobs and co. stayed in the home-computer game.
Two years later, Windows Media-only file protection schemes were threatening to put a lock on “legal” (commercial) music downloads. Again, the Mac and its users would be shut out. Apple’s response not only had to be Windows-compatible, it had to dominate the market on both platforms.
The iTunes Store did that, and more.
Its stand-alone hardware adjuct, the iPod, quickly dominated the new market of portable digital music machines.
And along the way, iTunes allegedly “killed the old music industry.”
(Of course, many of us felt the old music industry had deserved to die, but that’s not the point here.)
But now, the notion of music downloads seems as archaic as the notion of buying music on little compact discs.
The big hype these days is for streaming music subscriptions, a field which Apple has yet to enter.
Yet through all these industry changes, one thing remains constant.
Most recording artists themselves still get the fiscal shaft.
wikipedia via king5.com
factmag.com
via criminalwisdom.com
Pay close attention to the above image.
It indirectly has to do with a topic that’s been going around here of late, including on this site.
The premise: Seattle has become the new nexus of the book industry.
Amazon now firmly pulls the strings of both print and e-book sales, at least in the realm of “trade books.”
Costco and Starbucks also hold huge influence over what the nation reads.
Nancy Pearl’s NPR book recommendations hold huge sway.
And we buy lots of books for local consumption, giving Seattle readers an outsized role in making bestsellers and cult classics.
See anything missing in the above?
How about actual “publishing” and “editing”?
Now to explain our little graphic.
Cincinnati companies once had an outsize influence in the TV production business.
Procter & Gamble owned six daytime soaps, which in turn owned weekday afternoons on the old “big three” networks.
Taft (later Great American) Broadcasting owned Hanna-Barbera, which in turn owned Saturday mornings on the networks.
But if you think of TV content actually shot in Cincinnati, you’ll probably remember only the credits to the L.A.-made WKRP In Cincinnati.
And maybe a similar title sequence on P&G’s N.Y.-made The Edge of Night.
We’re talking about one of America’s great “crossroads” places. A town literally on the border between the Rust Belt and the South, in a Presidential-election “swing state,” often overshadowed by cross-state rival Cleveland. A place with innumerable potential stories to tell.
But few of these potential stories have made either the small or big screens.
The last series set in Cincinnati was the short-lived Kathy Bates drama Harry’s Law.
The only TV fare made in Cincinnati has been a couple of obscure reality shows.
The lesson of the above: prominence in the business side of media content isn’t the same as prominence in the making of media content.
What of the latter, bookwise, is in Seattle?
Fantagraphics has tremendous market share and creative leadership in graphic novels and in comic-strip compilation volumes.
Amazon’s own nascent publishing ventures have, so far, aroused more media attention than sales.
Becker & Mayer packages and edits coffee-table tomes for other publishers, and now also provides books and “other paper-based entertainment… direct to retailers.”
The relative upstart Jaded Ibis Productions combines literature, art, and music in multimedia products for the digital era.
We’ve also got our share of university presses, “regional” presses, and mom-n’-pop presses.
Still, the UW’s English Department site admits that…
Seattle is not exactly a publishing hub… so job openings are very limited and most local presses are small and specialized.… In any location, those seeking jobs in editing and publishing far exceed the number of jobs available; competition is very vigorous.
And these are the sorts of jobs people relocate to get, or even to try to get.
Of course, Seattle also has many writers and cartoonists of greater and lesser renown. But that’s a topic for another day.
tom banse via kplu
networkawesome.com
upwardspiral.blogs.com
No.
And from the looks of it, it’s one big no for next season and the indefinite future.
Yep, NBA commissioner David Stern played all of us for fools.
Again.
We had been what Los Angeles has been to the NFL brass, nothing but a bargaining ploy.
Drat.
And double drat.
seattle dept. of transportation
…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.
via jerry beck at indiewire.com
