Just added some comments to Rik Panganiban’s post, “Uncivil Society“. Mine is modestly titled “Where’s the self-replicating productivity meme?”.
This is an open letter to Magic Hector of Colorado, and KaiTech of Missouri. I am writing to ask: exactly what is your business model?
I ask only because I note that you’re selling used copies of my book for one cent on Amazon.com.
This presents me with just a whole series of questions.
First, may I ask you just what your wholesale price was? Did you pay it with ha’pennies? Hungarian forints? Indonesian rupiahs? Saddam-era Iraqi dinar?
My theory is that you found my book in a rain-soaked ditch somewhere, or it was stolen off of a Reading Is Fundamental truck and made its way to you.
Second, I’m assuming that some portion of the purchase price must be paid to Amazon for brokering the transaction. How do you accomplish this? Speaking as an Internet consultant, do you realize how much money you can make by solving the problem of micropayments? You’ve blown right past this and gone straight into nanopayments.
Seriously, stop selling my book and call me. There are some crazy people out there that would pay whole dollars for this.
Third, I’m curious to know just how you arrived at that purchase price. Did you look over the contents and say, “Yeah, this is about worth an amount of money I wouldn’t bend over to pick up”? Did it collect dust on a shelf when you priced it at a nickel? Are you unable to count higher than one, and trying to avoid embarrassment?
I checked the weight of the book, and today’s spot markets for the price of recycled high-quality bulk white paper. You seem to believe that the addition of 70,649 carefully crafted, laboriously chosen words actually reduces the worth of the raw materials by 60%, even before considering the valuable binding glue and laminate.
Surely you live within walking distance of a landfill? Or a high-school Greenpeace volunteer with some spare change?
Finally, I just need to know, is this really the best way you have available to you to make money? The book is subtitled “Making Money While Keeping Your Freedom”, after all, so I feel qualified to comment on this. I’m considering the time it will take you to make that precious penny.
You had to list the book on Amazon. What exactly were you thinking at the moment you typed “$0.01” into the pricing web form? Were you drunk?
You must be working on huge volume, and you clearly can’t afford warehouses. So you have to retrieve the book from your shelving in the cave network of northern Pakistan, or some other very large godforsaken hole.
Then you have to package the book, slap on the stamps, print out the buyer’s address, and drop it in the mail. Not difficult, but time-consuming, especially since you’ve probably been on a very low-protein diet recently.
Maybe I’ll be that buyer. I don’t know anywhere else I can get a bubble-wrap envelope at that price.
For the sake of argument, let’s presume that your penny is pure, unadulterated profit. It’ll probably take you about 60-90 minutes of your time to make the sale. So we’re basically not measuring your value in dollars per hour, but in hours per dollar. More like workweeks per dollar. You could earn much more by learning Bengali and becoming a migrant Bangladeshi day laborer. Those guys average almost $35 a week.
On the bright side, if you do decide to stay in the US, and you’re single with no children, you can work for 829,425 hours this year and still qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. And I truly hope you’re single with no children, for many, many reasons.
I’d like to thank you for your efforts to move my work as quickly as possible. It clearly was not meant to stay in your hands, as it was written for people with a functional prefrontal cortex. In gratitude, I’ll leave you with some advice as an expert on entrepreneurship.
Get a job.
Best regards,
Jeff Porten
You might have noticed that I’ve added a little bit of commercialism to the site with the Google ads over in the left sidebar. Call it an experiment.
I’m considering it highly likely that they will end up being a complete waste of bandwidth, but time will tell. Long story short, sometime last year a search engine at Microsoft went utterly meshuganah and decided that it absolutely had to check my site ten times a second to see if I had made any changes. Result: Redmond ran up $300 on my Internet connection charges. I’m still waiting to find out where I should send my invoice.
Even aside from Microsoft making my life extra miserable, the site costs money and I’m not above a little crass commercialism to cover expenses. I have higher hopes pulling in some bucks from software publishing than from shilling for Google, but every little bit counts. If it doesn’t work out after a few months, you can safely expect me to pull that spot and replace it with something more useful.
If you’re still checking in and you’re a carbon-based life form, you truly must be one of my favorite people. When I said I’d be updating the site in March, I neglected to mention which March I had in mind. So thanks for your patience.
On the other hand, if this is your first time here, the site has always looked like this.
Of course, you’ve noticed the spiffy new color scheme, inspired in part by my alma mater. No, it has nothing to do with red, white and blue. American or French versions.
A few words on the new sections of the site:
I’m going to be running two blogs here. Portentia is my space for essays, long-form blathering, and anything in general that takes me more than five minutes to write. The Jeff Wing Conspiracy is the more standard blog linking to interesting tidbits I find on the web and elsewhere.
Over in Software, I’ll be publishing various utilities and knick-knacks that I’ve written to make my life easier. Publications is a log of when I manage to get myself published by actual editors, while Photos is a vanity spot (as opposed to the rest of the site, right?) for things I thought were worth capturing in pixels. I am not a photographer. You have been warned.
Finally, I’m resurrecting two old sections. Friends of Jeff is the obligatory list of links to the sites of friends and colleagues. And Where’s Jeff? will tell you (or warn you) when I might be in your neck of the woods.
So The Aviator didn’t pick up the major Oscars it was hoping for. Can’t say as I’m that surprised. I finally caught it at the Uptown Theatre on Saturday night, and the only thing about it that was jaw-dropping was when Cate Blanchett opened her mouth. I didn’t know you could win an Oscar for channeling the dead.
Like another Leo DiCaprio movie that comes to mind, this film was heralded as the Second Coming of (the Passion of the) Christ, and turned out to be, well, long. Yes, you get a sense of epic scope in the opening scenes — but the rest of it just sort of fizzles in terms of making Hughes out to be a masterful character. Leo, next time, check out an Orson Welles flick you might recall, or heck, just cuddle up with Jeff Bridges for a bit.
Reuters: Lighters banned on US flights as of 4/14. Because they’re very dangerous:
Yo, Dorgan. How about a no explosives policy, then?
From his “drama” essay. See also his example for Venn diagrams.
| I can’t tell whether this is brilliant political commentary on the loss of civil freedoms under the guise of patriotic fervor, or just some dork who has had a bit too much patriotic fervor. By way of krautboy, who nails some vicious one-liners against the other kids playing dressup. |  |
This hack got added to my Mac about 10 seconds after I read about it.
[albook:~/Documents] jeff% calc c in fathoms / fortnight
1.98287925 × 1014 fathoms / fortnight
I was just invited to a conference in Lusaka, Zambia. Barring hitting the PowerBall, I won’t be attending.
The cheapest flight on Orbitz is a BA connection through London for the bargain price of $1,925. The most expensive flight is United to Zurich; Swissair to Jo’burg; and South African Airways to Lusaka. In coach. For $8,262.
You’d think they’d at least have the decency to not call that “economy”.
This reminds me of a conference I attended in Italy in 1999. The ticket cost me what I can bill a client in an afternoon. For the African man who attended the same conference, the ticket cost more than he could make in three months; in real dollars, his travel was five times the cost of mine.
| Astonishing documentary evidence proves that Superman is really not a nice guy. |  |
Ya know, I’m not sure why I put up with it for so long, but after seeing an animated cockroach crawl across my screen and feeling my stomach churn, I finally DNS blocked web ads.
The process is simple, really:
I neither know nor care how this is done on a Windows box, but on Mac OS X you can find fairly useful instructions here. Note that if you have BBEdit and know your way around Unix line endings, you can skip all that stuff with the akamai script and dos2unix.
If you’re not reading The Daily Howler, give it a shot. Bob Somerby is the only guy I’ve seen who consistently nails the reasons why reading a newspaper is a gut churning experience these days. In the past week:
Monday: Slams Tim Russert and Joe Klein for softballing Republicans, hardballing Democrats, and generally getting the facts so mixed up that they can’t even phrase the questions correctly.
Tuesday: Questions why the Bush claim of Social Security bankruptcy isn’t being refuted as the calumny it is. (EJ Dionne sez, because mainstream media can’t print factual information without being called liberal, so they just print the Republican version.)
Wednesday: Quote of the day: Scribes like Russert flee lucidity as their ancestors might have fled Lucifer himself.
Thursday: The same nonpartisan budget analysis can be used to quote a $2T, $4T, or $15 trillion dollar costs for the Bush plan, depending on the chosen time scale. So why is the “liberal media” quoting the Bush-friendly smaller costs?
Friday: More on the Bush-friendly cost numbers, plus a much-deserved evisceration of a self-proclaimed and self-loathing liberal Post columnist.
Monday: More from the columnist, as he proceeds to mostly agree with Ann Coulter, only with more polite language. QotD goes, as it so often does, to Ann: “Conservatives believe in God. All of our beliefs proceed from that…. That is why we love the United States of America, a country—I mean, I would be a peasant selling moccasins on the street or being beaten when my shoes make noise if I had been born in another country. What protects me is the United States of America, based on the Christian premise that all men are created equal…. By contrast, liberals believe they are God.
Something I just submitted to Interesting People:
SMS spamming isn’t restricted to businesses. I signed up for the DC Alert system , which generally has been a reasonable announcement service telling me about street closings and snow emergencies. Of course, the real reason to sign up for such a service is to get information telling me whether to get the heck out of Dodge in the event of terrorist incidents hitting the proverbial fan.
So you can imagine my annoyance when this emergency system was used to send me a greeting from “my new ANC commissioner” in Dupont Circle. For those of you not from here, ANCs are the very loud and largely toothless neighborhood councils that were established to provide grassroots democratic feedback to the largely toothless City Council. I don’t live in Dupont Circle (nor am I particularly affected by the ANC dealings in my own neighborhood), so this is spam, pure and simple, which serves to degrade the overall trust in an emergency network.
One could generally argue with the value of this service since it’s been already proven that in the event of a real attack, the federal jurisdictions are perfectly happy to withhold information from the local government which controls the service. I’m already acclimated to getting a disturbing message, waiting a few hours, and then getting an all-clear. So call me paranoid, but I think the true value of the service will be when I receive the message initially telling me “all is well, remain calm”, which I’ll take to be the trigger to start making tracks.
Amazingly, on the day of 9/11, people left to their own devices remained calm. It’s when they begin collating and distrusting information flows that mob mentality seems to set in. Given what I hear on a daily basis from my astoundingly uninformed neighbors, I fully expect the next incident to be managed straight into a major crisis.
Scientists demonstrate that stock trading can be rather well described with a completely random, irrational model.
Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber really nails how I’ve been feeling for the last few months:
Too many mainstream conservatives have adopted accusations of treason into their regular toolbox, and I guess I’m sort of getting used to it. But it isn’t OK. Not to mince words, this is insanity. This is mistaking the left for the Red Skull.
[Senator Rick] Santorum is essentially a poor man’s version of Tom DeLay without the charm or brains. From the Bull Moose Blog.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has shed some light on EULAs, which among other things can impair your rights to free speech, take over your computer, bind you to contracts that haven’t been written yet, and charge your credit cards without your permission.
Via BoingBoing and the great State of Alaska, Spazzstick. I’m fairly sure I saw some Jolt Chapstick in Japan a few years ago, but then again, that version probably wasn’t made by trolls.
