Original Cin

Jevons Paradox, anyone?

A simple example: cost and speed pressure means that when you get your car serviced, it’s unlikely you’ll be greeted by the mechanic himself, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, telling you exactly what he did to your car. Instead, you’ll get a difficult to decipher printout.

Why not use the technology to give more?

The mechanic can have a simple digital voice recorder. As he works, he can describe each thing he’s testing and what he finds. You can then email the digital file to Iowa, India or Israel, have it typed up and beautifully formatted and waiting for the customer when he returns. How can that not be worth the $1.50 it would cost?

- Seth Godin, “Old marketing with new tools“

FanCruft, my anime website, has just gotten a much-needed facelift. Here are before and after pictures:

When I first made Fancruft, I wanted to make it look good even in Internet Explorer 5 running on a fairly low-resolution screen (640×480). Many “Web 2.0″ concepts were new; RFC4627 was published just earlier that year. People were still advocating Smarty for PHP templating. I had been a Wikipedia administrator for maybe around a year and a half, and had not yet read The Wisdom of Crowds.

A lot of works still needs to go into FanCruft, but it now has a fairly modern face. IE 5 is no longer a concern, and the site now renders much more consistently across IE 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari. IE 6 doesn’t seem to understand fixed positioning and misinterprets it as absolute positioning, but this is still acceptable. The site is now designed for a screen of 800×600, but linearizes fairly well and should still be acceptable on smaller screens.

The independent “scattered” buttons have been replaced by a bar with a uniform height and no margin. Min-width is now supported well enough that I don’t mind just setting it and forgetting it, instead of using the IE5/6 hacks of yesteryear. Also, the buttons now glow gold on hover; yay!

The fine print at the bottom of the page has been cut down to a minimum, and the RSS icon now hovers on screen, just in case it isn’t noticed in the browser’s address bar. Overall, FanCruft is sleek and good looking.

My roommate and I were talking about this topic - The Motley Fool on “What’s Wrong With Mutual Funds?“:

Here’s our oft-repeated fact that you should get through your head: The average actively managed stock mutual fund returns approximately 2% less per year to its shareholders than the stock market returns in general. That means that before your dollar even gets to the fund manager to invest, his company has already taken two cents off the top.

I disagree with the Motley Fool on a fair number of things, but they’re spot-on here regarding the average fund.

One of the neat things about Google: They often work to subtly improve their service, and when they do, they often integrate the improvement so seamlessly into their existing site that you can easily miss it. This is a screenshot from the other day. I’ve entered the (domain) name of a website, and Google has automatically put a search box for that site under its listing in the results. I almost entered a second query in this box and clicked the button without even noticing that this was something I hadn’t seen before!

A search for "chipublib" on Google

Someone out there believes that gas prices are going to fall, or at least not rise very much in the future, and Chrysler seems to believe them. The company is currently offering to pay the difference between $2.99 and whatever the current cost of gasoline is, if you get one of their vehicles.

This is interesting, and there’s been a fair amount of discussion about it online. But I haven’t seen anyone point out that this means that Pricelock/Chrysler are basically shorting gasoline over the next three years. Pricelock’s website focuses mainly on the volatility of gas prices, but this really doesn’t make sense for a three year timeframe. Pricelock could change the guaranteed price every year, or every six months, and still provide a huge buffer against changing gas prices at far less obvious risk to themselves. So, what’s going on here, given that I’ve even heard some people swearing that $10/gal gas is right around the corner?

First of all, an overview of shorting. Let’s say that I’m really sure that Nintendo and Sony are going to drive the XBox line into the ground, mini Linux-run PCs like the Asus EEE are the wave of the future, and Google’s support of the ODF format and its Google Docs platform means that Office will optional software for businesses in the future. Basically, suppose I think Microsoft is doomed. I can short MSFT today at about $29.99 - basically making a promise to buy shares at some point in the future and getting the market price per share today. Let’s say I do this for 1000 shares. Disregarding brokerage fees, if the stock becomes completely worthless, I’ve just made $29,990. If the price falls to $10 (maybe only two of my three predications came true) then I’ve made $19,990 after I spend $10,000 to keep my promise to buy shares.

But, suppose instead that Linux is proven to cause cancer, Nintendo and Sony both bow out of the console market, and Google pulls the plug on Docs, and the price of MSFT increases dramatically, to $200 a share. When I make good on my promise to buy 1000 shares, I’ll be out an uncool $170,010! People often say that shorting has “unlimited risk.” This is not literally true (it’s just plain silly to think that the market capitalization of any stock could exceed the U.S. GDP, and lots of barriers will be encountered well before that point), but shorting anything is risky.

Now, look at the $2.99 “Let’s Refuel America” deal from Pricelock. It’s short-selling, but the target is gasoline instead of the common stock of a company. Even (especially) if you consider the profit from selling the car itself, it’s still shorting, just at a higher effective price than $2.99 per gallon.

Someone is making a huge gamble here. Pricelock, the company, could hardly be more opaque. Their website seems to have been run by a domain-squatter until late last year. Here’s my guess: this company was specifically created just to make this gamble. But regardless of who’s inside Pricelock, Chrysler would not play along if it thought that they weren’t able to make good on their promise. This means either insanely deep pockets to the extent that Chrysler is sure everything will turn out O.K. no matter how high gas prices get, or Chrysler has determined that gas prices are not really going to rise that much, that fast.

Who has the best information on the demand for gas in America for the next three years? Who has “inside information”? You can make good guesses based on trends and demographics and do fairly well, but only automakers can take this and also consider inside information on the availability of super-fuel efficient cars and cars that run on alternative fuels.

So, here’s Chrysler, signaling something about what it thinks fuel prices will be. I wouldn’t necessarily bet with them — the auto industry has made plenty of boneheaded decisions in its time. But, you’d be a fool to bet against them.

Serial entrepreneur Micheal Robertson takes the college board to task on the return to investment of college:

I am writing in regards to the “Education Pays” report that you co-authored for the College Board. I appreciate the College Board attempting to get information distributed about the financial value of a college education. I think this is necessary and valuable that young people and their parents have accurate and objective information so they can make informed choices about their future. Your report concludes that “[Higher education] yields a high rate of return for students from all racial/ethnic groups, for men and for women, and for those from all family backgrounds.” My belief after analyzing your report is that several critical errors were made in the data used to arrive at that conclusion. These errors and assumptions mean that the report does not represent the true financial picture for the average student.

….

According to your chart, the net difference in income after 40 years between a high school and college graduate is under $250,000. If one is to adjust the numbers using the changes listed above (-$421,441) then the financial benefit of a college education goes negative. Thus it would make more financial sense for the average young person to bypass college and simply graduate from high school and enter the workforce.

…it’s so important to observe how users actually behave versus the way they tell you they behave. People who do this professionally are called “economists” - Jeff Atwood, “Every User Lies“, Coding Horror

A long time ago, I saw an ad for a website on Fark. The site was in a blog format, well before Wordpress and Blogger were hits, and offered daily stock picks. I was intrigued, but skeptical (no, the site was not Fool.com, which has never advertised on Fark to the best of my knowledge). After a week or so, the previous entries were updated to show the change in price. The performance of the past picks seemed impressive, but I easily smelled a scam, so I kept on eye on the site.

Were the picks actually chosen after the fact? Nope, a few days of watching the site confirmed that picks were made in advance.

Was this a pump-and-dump? It seemed unlikely to me that a few hundred Fark readers had enough money to significantly change the prices of the stocks being highlighted, even if all of them had decided to bet their retirement funds on it — these stocks were cheap, but didn’t have market caps that were that small.

After about a week of watching and wondering just what was going on (and independently checking things on Yahoo and in a spreadsheet), I got my answer, as one or two entries that didn’t perform so well were silently dropped from the site. The picks were simply stocks that had a great deal of volatility in a generally bull market — and only the winners (or at least not-so-bad losers) were reported. I’m fairly sure the entire site was a poorly thought-out setup for a pump-and-dump to come, which probably failed miserably due to a poor choice of target (Fark readers? Come on…) The entire site went dead some time later.

Which brings me to the Motley Fool. My father loves the Motley Fool. I’m not so sure. It hasn’t really been that long since they were pushing their Foolish Four agenda. Basically, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the Fool is a more sophisticated scam, and if they’re basically a portfolio of portfolios for publication and sale. The losing portfolios and strategies are killed, much like the Foolish Four. There are currently 7 products, all with positive performance, listed on Fool.com, along with four others with no performance given. Call me suspicious, I know of at least one loser not listed. Who knows what else has been tried and never seen the light of day. With the massive number of recommendations made on the site, who knows what the real performance of the investment brains behind the Motley Fool really is?

Here’s one thing that’s certain: money that you spend on investment advice cannot actually be invested itself. Yes, for a large amount of money to invest, it’s a relatively minor cost. But is the benefit received really worth it? How can you tell?

Well, I did it. I went to the business center and had a look around 3:00 in the afternoon today. I was terrified that at any second, someone would recognize me. They had put in a new (but cheap block-letter) sign with the company’s name on the outside of the building near the office. I entered, turned the corner, and…

…the call center is gone. Vanished. There wasn’t a sound. I could see inside through the glass door and windows. There was a small paper on the floor that had presumably been stuck to the door earlier — I couldn’t read what it said. The chairs, plastic desks, and Durabrand phones had been removed — even the connections for the phones were completely gone. Nothing remains but a large, empty office, waiting to be rented out to someone new.

Earlier this year, I had a job interview at a calling center. The job was cold-calling, straight commission, for mortgages. They were even nice enough to let me to sit in for a day and see how I did. I noticed a variety of things while I was there:

• The people there were generally young. Most were recent graduates from high school. At least one was a drop-out. Everyone was talking about how they were making big money, but…
• The desks were plastic
• The phones were $10 Durabrand things from Wal-Mart, which is fine for home use, but really did stick out as inadequate in that environment.
• The best salesperson admitted to having “tons of debt” and worried aloud about his car payments.
• I was a bit uncomfortable around people who, quite frankly, were a touch sociopathic.

I had read a bit, just a bit about signaling on Overcoming Bias, and I realized that while you can’t depend on people pulling in six figures to advertise this fact to the world, the extremely wealthy don’t generally sit behind plastic desks punching numbers on generic home phones. Combined with the idea that a good work environment was something to shoot for, I politely said that I wasn’t interested any more, and walked away. At the time, I thought was giving up a smaller than promised but still real income to do the right thing and be able to live comfortably with myself. Now, looking at the way the housing market in the U.S. has changed, it’s obvious I didn’t give up so much at all. In retrospect, I suspect that the shoddy, unprofessional environment actually signaled something else — that the call center was temporary, not a permanent investment.

It’s not aways that I get a chance to go and see if I’m right about my intuition. On my next day off from my current job, I’m going to discreetly go to the business center that housed this mortgage company, and see if I notice anything.

I was going through my bookmarks, and found this via Collision Detection, an article which has had quite an impact on my thinking on some matters:

While yielding to temptation can certainly be harmful, this article argues that overcontrol and excessive farsightedness (hyperopia) can also have negative long-term consequences. In particular, we propose that, with the passage of time, choices of virtue over vice (e.g., work over pleasure) evoke increasing regret.

- “Repenting Hyperopia“, Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan

I probably would not have gone to ACEN 2007 if I hadn’t read this. On the other hand, there are some things in the past that I wish I had worked harder at, as well as past tasks that I wish I had just completely neglected (case in point: I spent a lot of time, money, and effort deciding which college to attend. My friend Scott picked UIC mostly on the basis of its location, and partly at random. I think he made a better choice by far; I also probably would have gotten more out of the experience if I had done less homework and gone to some parties from time to time).

I recently put $500.00 into Prosper. I can’t believe the rates that I’m getting — they’re quite spectacular compared to my money would be making in a savings account or even in stocks. Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch — we’ll see just how risky things are, but the average default rates do not look too terrible.

What really strikes me about Prosper is how it’s — I’ll admit it — fun. It’s neat to see the things that people need money for:

• House and rental property remodeling
• Recovering from identity theft
• Financing a documentary
• Throwing a wedding
• Opening a cat shelter

Fun. Here’s an affiliate link.

This is a really great idea, and it’s so simple that I have no idea why it isn’t more common:

This website’s sign-up process includes a bit of code to detect popular free webmail addresses and include a link for them. I don’t know if it just works for Yahoo, or if others like Microsoft (”Hotmail”) and Gmail work as well, but this is trivially easy to pull off on the technical side of things (a couple of if-then-else statements and regular expressions would do it), and probably results in a big boost in the number of accounts created.

It occurred to me today that there’s a unique opportunity, right now, for technologists to provide for a more robust environment for distributing content works, which embraces and extends the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, rather than attempting to get around them or fight them head-on. This opportunity involves setting up a licensing non-profit to act as a weak “gateway to publisher distributors.” Although careful implementation and attention to new legislation is required to insure that currently dominant content providers do not successfully sabotage this effort, nonetheless this plan would not require any legislative cooperation.

No amount of cajoling is likely to make the oligopoly of the music industry change their ways. Rather, the market must be fundamentally restructured. But given that current copyright law gives monopoly power over information for a very long time, how can this be done? I suspect that some clever contracts, marketing, and technology can combine to effectively force the information monopolists to submit to the public good.

To begin, we require a technological platform for delivering content. The platform must have strong incentives for consumers and content providers to use it. Content providers will use it iff it is popular with consumers, greatly simplifying the matter. The technological platform must use the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, which effectively means that content given to the consumers does have at least some minor restrictions (at a minimum, some weak encryption and a counter that keeps track of when copies are made).

Now, the fun part: the keys to the technological platform are owned by a not for profit organization, a “gatekeeper”, which has the explicit goal of making information as widely available as possible for as long as possible. The organization may maintain its own archive and library of materials, but does not presume that it has a good awareness of what consumers want to know, hear, experience, or see over the long run. Rather, it licenses access to its consumer platform and content that it itself has recently licensed to distributors and publishers on a non-exclusive basis. The effect, after some time, would be that our “gatekeeper” organization has monopsony powers to wield against content creators in negotiating licensing fees, while publishers and distributors would compete against each other on more or less equal footing. Distributors and publishers cannot legally access the technological platform without agreeing to the competitive “rules of the game” set down by the gatekeeper. This is the whipsaw alluded to in the title, in which the law that content distributors lobbied for is wielded against them.

But, what draws consumers to a platform? There are a lot of arguments, but the amount of content available on the platform is a good start. There is more free content available today than ever before, due to the Internet and the rise of copyleft philosophy. Software, art, and prose can all be thought of as being pre-licensed to our gatekeeper at a cost of nearly free. Thus, our content platform gets a running head start on any other in history.

I got this from a company I bought something from a month ago or so [my notes appear in brackets, like this]:

As one of our best customers [I've bought something from them once, maybe twice in the last two years], you’ve been selected to receive email updates [translation: "we've decided to send you spam"] on exciting ["cliche"] in-store and online promotions ["please buy something, I have a wife and five children!"]. You’ll also be among the first to know ["we'll tell everyone and their uncle's dog"] about new products ["repackaged junk we couldn't move as fast as we'd like"] and special services ["opportunities to give us more money"].

Plus, you’ll get: ["But wait, there's more!:"]

• Exclusive coupons and offers ["Coupons exclusive to human beings only!"]
• Advance notice about grand openings, and special events ["Irrelevant messages about things only we care about!"]

This message is wrong. All wrong. It’s not even close to right. It gets started on the wrong foot by presuming a relationship that doesn’t exist, then goes on to talk about what the merchant wants to do to me, rather than what the merchant can do for me.

I’m far from a marketing guru, but here’s something that would have gotten me to reconsider my opinion about this email: an honest, amazing deal, put first thing in this message. By “amazing,” I mean no less than a 40% discount on something that I could reasonably be expected to actually want. This company can’t reasonably know how obvious it is that I’m not “one of their best customers,” but they do know what I purchased recently: a new laptop computer. Why not offer me a cheap travel mouse? A cooling pad? A pen drive? No, they wouldn’t make money on a purchase like that, they’d probably lose a bit of money - but they might actually get that “one of our best customers” relationship that they seem to want.

The always witty, opinionated, and intelligent LummoxJR has announced that he will once again be critiquing ads and recognizing the worst of the worst. I have fond memories of the original Ad-Schlocks, and look forward to this.

I like Splenda in my tea, but I don’t like what the company behind Spenda seems to be up to lately. Not that it’s evil, just stupid. Found via the blog of Seth Godin is a story about Spenda’s marketing buying up negative domain names related to the sweetener.

Godin sarcastically asks “Is there enough money in the world to buy enough domain names to keep a determined person from saying something nasty about Splenda?” For those of you not familiar with how domains work, the answer is an obvious no - Bill Gates and Warren Buffet working together, liquidating all resources at their disposal, could not accomplish such a feat.

Actually, there are all sort of negative Splenda domains still available. Consider the following, taken from a registrar as of this writing:

badsplenda.com AVAILABLE
badsplenda.net AVAILABLE
badsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendablows.com AVAILABLE
splendablows.net AVAILABLE
splendablows.org AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.com AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.net AVAILABLE
splendaisevil.org AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.com AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.net AVAILABLE
saynotospenda.org AVAILABLE
deathbysplenda.com Make Offer
deathbysplenda.net AVAILABLE
deathbysplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendacancer.com AVAILABLE
splendacancer.net AVAILABLE
splendacancer.org AVAILABLE
splendasick.com AVAILABLE
splendasick.net AVAILABLE
splendasick.org AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.com AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.net AVAILABLE
waronsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendainformation.com AVAILABLE
splendainformation.net AVAILABLE
splendainformation.org AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.com AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.net AVAILABLE
splenda-addicts.org AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.com AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.net AVAILABLE
splendaboycott.org AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.com AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.net AVAILABLE
boycottsplenda.org AVAILABLE
splendacensors.com AVAILABLE
splendacensors.net AVAILABLE
splendacensors.org AVAILABLE
splendabastards.com AVAILABLE
splendabastards.net AVAILABLE
splendabastards.org AVAILABLE

All those domain names that I came up with off the top of my head, and only one of them is taken! Those Splenda people didn’t do a very thorough job at all. Tsk, tsk. You didn’t even think of blows as a synonym for sucks. I’m sure Urban Dictionary has some good ones too (Oh, splendawack.com is also available). The examples may be taken by someone shortly, but the search space for negative domain names for Splenda is so large that finding them all before someone else does is a futile task.

Disregarding all that about domain names, there’s another problem for people trying to squash negative speech about this product. Already, their actions have been interpreted as an implicit admission of guilt, as seen in the Sustainable is Good link. I’ll admit, first and foremost, that I don’t know how ideas die or how to kill them, except that it’s very, very tough. Shouting the opposite idea from the rooftops, however, rarely works. Implicit in each and every single domain registration no matter where it may be redirected to is the idea that sucralose is a dangerous product, and that there is a conspiracy to make Splenda look good.

I feel like I’ve been unwillingly tossed into one of those “Conversion analysis” things that appears on the Lunametrics blog from time to time, and I hate it.

First of all, I’m looking for a box. I have two of them already. They’re file-sized boxes about 8 to 10 inches deep with long, oval holes. I’ve found they’re great for mounting onto the wall with some 3M command hooks. I’m pretty sure that the brand on these boxes was Rubbermaid. I saw some similar items at the store made by Rubbermaid, but not the exact boxes I’m looking for. I’d like to buy some.

What would you do in this situation? There is, or at least was, such a brand as “Rubbermaid Office Solutions” but if it’s still being maintained, it’s not accounted for on the Rubbermaid site. There’s commericial solutions, laundry, kitchen, medical… but not what I’m actually looking for. Following the trail to Newell, they reveal, basically, that Rubbermaid-branded office products do exist, but fail to say anything more.

Trying a different tactic, I searched for Rubbermaid USB hubs, and found a company called Eldon. No problem there, except that they neither seems to sell USB hubs, nor file boxes. Clicking along the company’s downright bizarre description of their corporate structure (as a consumer, I really do not care one iota that Rubbermaid household products are manufactured by a sibling company to the people who make office doohickeys). Finally, I managed to get information on something that resembles what I’m looking for: Eldon sells things which are pretty similar as both “Rogers” and “Households” I suppose at this point I get to try putting part numbers in Amazon to see what pops out, since there’s no information at all on how to get any of these products anywhere in sight (they have a list of distributors and retailers off the home page of their site, but the first link I tried was broken).

This is entirely too complex for something that should just be a matter of walking to a local store and paying cash for a relatively small item.

I have a new cell phone. I’ve decided to name it Kusanagi, after the GITS character. Unlike my previous phone , it’s a clamshell, or flip-style phone. I had a telemarketer (someone doing a a so-called “Chicago Travel Survey”) forwarded to it, and I hung up after politely saying that I wasn’t taking any survey by snapping the phone shut. The person on the other end was, either by personality or managerial edict, not taking a hint, and saying “Sir, sir! Wait…” when I did so. I appreciate that surveys have to taken, but, well, no means no.

It was like slamming a door without the effort of actually moving a large, heavy object. That was fun.

Also, I figured out how to get it to play “Inner Universe” as the ring tone: “Calling… calling now… in the depths of longing…” This is so cool.