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I’ve enjoyed CNBC documentary reports like “The Age of Wal-Mart,” which explored not only the business of Wal-Mart but also its effect on small business, how it saves low-income families much-needed money, and both the positive and negative effects on our culture.
Compare this to “Marijuana Inc.” This new report fails to explore the impact of marijuana use on individuals, families or communities. It also ignores the crime created by prohibition of marijuana and fails to draw the obvious parallel to alcohol prohibition.
Instead, this piece reports banal factoids, like how even “normal people” in California are learning how to grow pot because it’s very profitable. I can’t help but think that this sort of verbiage is evidence of a anti-pot bias on the part of the producers that kept them from asking hard questions or exploring some of the complexities of this issue—the very stuff that would have made this report even somewhat compelling.
I would be willing to excuse a one-sided, non-comprehensive look at the marijuana industry if it illuminated any aspects of the industry or the policy debate that I was unfamiliar with, but “Marijuana Inc.” fails on that front as well. Somehow I had already heard that California has marijuana growers and dispensaries.
In conclusion, FAIL.
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According to the site Today’s Big Thing:
An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you’ve ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.
This is priceless.
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While I have my complaints about Google Webmaster Tools, I’m starting to the appreciate its beauty now that I’m face-to-face with its competitors.
I just got around to submitting the sitemap for my last project, the new Mercatus Center website, to Bing and Yahoo! Bing’s user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but thanks Yahoo!’s website ownership verification system, I have yet to even see what their UI even looks like. That’s right, after I downloaded their xml verification file, I was met with this:
If you have uploaded the verification file, please keep the file y_key_********.html on your site root http://mercatus.org and do not change the content (********).We will authenticate your site ownership by checking this file within 24 hours.
Because of this, the task of submitting my sitemap now takes two days instead of two minutes. I need to remember to visit this page again, then submit the sitemap, and then visit the page again later to see if Yahoo! has any problems with any of the site’s URLs. Why can’t Yahoo! just navigate to the address of the file, verify that it’s there, and then give me permission to submit a sitemap for the site?
I don’t claim to know much about the complexities of corporate management or what fostering a good “corporate culture” even means, but clearly Yahoo! has tremendous quality control issues. Its products aren’t even in the same league as its competitors because of the failure of engineers to simply do their jobs.
It’s a little thing, but it’s all the little things working right that’s made Google what it is today and those same things not working that’s made Yahoo! into the butt of jokes—and not just any jokes. They’re the butt of nerd jokes.
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I have been waiting for Microsoft to release updates to Windows Media Center that would integrate Netflix and Hulu so that I could set my living room PC to boot straight into Media Center and view all of the media I want from there. What a dream that would be for a nerd like me who loves TV and movies! It would be great to be able to watch anything from the comfort of my couch using only a remote control.
But, of course, this is asking too much.
Last month, Microsoft incorporated Netflix into Media Center, but fell woefully short on bringing any sort of TV-on-the-Internet to my TV. Instead, Microsoft rolled out their “Internet TV” offering, which at first appeared to be dozens and dozens of popular shows along with a smattering of classic CBS-owned properties. Upon further investigation, however, I found that all of the”Internet TV” offerings—with the classics being the only exception—were either promotional clips of those shows or interviews with the cast.
Grabbing whatever throw-away, nearly valueless properties that NBC and CBS had lying around isn’t the best way to roll out a new product feature, especially when Apple’s pay-per-download via iTunes and Hulu’s desktop client exist. Microsoft new feature is 90% junk.
Despite all this, I was mildly enthused that every episode of the original Star Trek series was included in the roll-out. This could have made up for my disappointment in the lack of Hulu support in Media Center if it weren’t for Microsoft’s method of delivering commercials. Microsoft only shows three ads during the 42 minutes of program time an average episode takes up, however, those ads are over twice the volume of the programming. So watching Kirk and Bones engage in gladiatorial combat is interrupted by booming ads for the Cadillac CTS, making the viewing experience incredibly annoying for me, and nearly totally intolerable for my poor girlfriend.
So, despite the fact that Windows runs on somewhere around 90% of U.S. computers and the XBOX 360—a potential media center— is attached to over 31 mllion televisions, Microsoft will almost certainly lose the battle for the living room. Hulu, Apple, or some other dark horse competitor will capture this market push the cable operators off their perches as near-monopoly providers of television programming. Why? Because even thought Microsoft has such a strong advantage, they are incapable of offering their customers a quality experience in all but a few product categories.
Instead of offering full-length episodes and funny clips of shows like Hulu, Microsoft offers mostly promotional materials that bury the good content. Instead of making commercial more tolerable by making them brief and infrequent, Microsoft has made them a booming distraction that makes their television offering close to unwatchable. How anyone at Microsoft could have approved this deeply flawed product is beyond me.
While companies like Apple are redefining what it means to offer a quality customer experience, Microsoft continues churn out unpolished mediocrity. I feel like a teacher who repeatedly gets essays from a student who simply refuses to read his own writing—typos and flagrant erros abound. All the market share in the world (which Microsoft nearly has) can’t make up for that.
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What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian
January 12, 2010
in Blog, Political Commentary
My friend Seth Goldin sent me a link to an essay by John Hasnas, an Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, entitled “What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian.” The essay sums up my present feeling perfectly.
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