Closing more windows

Henry Rollins: Teeing Off: It’s a Gamble:

I don’t understand the compulsion to gamble, why anyone would take their hard-earned — or whatever way their money comes to them — and hand it over to a stranger.

There are literally millions of people in America who do not share my view and spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars gambling in casinos and online like never before. I remember when gambling was something only tough guys did in movies but now it seems that millions of Americans are willfully gambling away their earnings, thus insuring them a broke-ass future. Gambling has become a mainstream pastime. It went from the casinos to seemingly everywhere else and the demographic has widened and now there’s children with gambling debt.

What is the attraction of throwing your money away? Why are so many college students getting addicted to online gambling? Shouldn’t they be studying? Whose money are they gambling with? What amazes me is that people can’t wait to divest themselves of their earnings. Casinos don’t even have to try, people are willing to pay to lose their money! In Las Vegas, they can’t build hotels fast enough to stem the flow of incoming suckers. Why are people so eager to go into debt? I don’t get it. Perhaps I spent too many years working for minimum wage and being broke to throw it away in a few minutes. The final irony of America might be that the freedom that was so hard-won might be the very thing that is the country’s undoing, one hand at a time. Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya?!

Eric Hoffer – Wikiquote (I gotta read more of this guy’s stuff):

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

Metcalfe’s Law and Video – from Mark Cuban @ Blog Maverick:

1. The more people that see content when it is originally “broadcast”, regardless of the distribution medium, the more valuable the content.

This is the example of “appointment viewing” or “breaking news”. The more people who planned to watch, or did so as soon as they heard about it, the more valuable the content.

Call this the “heat check”.

10mm people watching a tv show at the same time creates more value for the content than 10mm people watching the same show on demand over the course of time.

2. The greater the number of people that watch content simultaneously, the greater the emotional attachment of the viewer.

The greater amount of confirmation that a viewer can get from other viewers that there were others, like them that made an appointment to see a video or immediately changed their plans to watch a video, the greater the “we ” effect and emotional attachment.

3. The longer the period required for content to saturate viewer demand, the cheaper the cost of delivery. Without the constraint of time, the originator to choose the least expensive method of delivery

4. The shorter the period required to saturate demand, the more expensive the cost. This is not intuitive. At first blush it may seem that broadcast technologies can reach an immense audience in realtime with a zero marginal cost of delivery to a new viewer.

However, there is a signicant cost to build a network that can saturate demand immediately. It usually takes constrained resources, whether it is spectrum for broadcast networks, the delivery infrastructure to reach an uncapped audience and the ability to deliver it without time constraints.

5. The greater the number of content alternatives at any given point in time, the more expensive it is for any given piece of content to acquire an incremental viewer. The cost may come in the form of investment into the production of the content, advertising, promotion or placement. It may come in the form of sweat equity from hustling to promote the content.

The Tawdry Rich – another book I have to read:

Richistan is the name author Robert Frank bequeaths on America’s booming microcosm of super-wealth, a demographic whose relative financial power and unique woes has created a kind of “country within a country,” increasingly isolated from the workday mainstream.

And while we’re talking about books– Book chief: Conservatives want slogans – Yahoo! News:

Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry’s trade group says she knows why %u2014 and there’s little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.
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“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,'” Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”