Hugo Short Story Recommendation: The Slow Winter by James Mickens

Yes, I’m recommending a technical paper written by a Microsoft researcher for a Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

Wait.

Come back.

There is a narrative in there….about the 2nd person narrator, son John, and the generational differences in chip design between the two of them.

As a child in 1977, John had met Gordon Moore; Gordon had pulled a quarter from behind John’s ear and then proclaimed that he would pull twice as many quarters from John’s ear every 18 months. Moore, of course, was an incorrigible liar and tormentor of youths, and he never pulled another quarter from John’s ear again, having immediately fled the scene while yelling that Hong Kong will always be a British territory, and nobody will ever pay $8 for a Mocha Frappuccino, and a variety of other things that seemed like universal laws to people at the time, but were actually just arbitrary nouns and adjectives that Moore had scrawled on a napkin earlier that morning.

John learned about the rumored Intel Septium chip, a chip whose prototype had been turned on exactly once, and which had leaked so much voltage that it had transformed into a young Linda Blair and demanded an exorcism before it embarked on a series of poor career moves that culminated in an inevitable spokesperson role for PETA.

He would then throw a coffee cup at the speaker and say that adding new hardware features would require each processor to be connected to a dedicated coal plant in West Virginia. John’s coworkers eventually understood his wisdom, and their need to wear coffee-resistant indoor ponchos lessened with time.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Why Television Pricing Is Broken

There’s a fascinating article on Medium about why Cable TV bills are escalating out of bounds. I’d noticed this a couple of years ago when I looked, horrified, at our cable bill and we cut the wire. In 2011, we replaced cable TV with a dual antenna set that ran $400 and has served us well for the staggering amortized cost of $15 a month (and falling).

When the region changed managers, I got a call from Comcast asking why we wouldn’t come back.

It wasn’t the service issues, though those sure didn’t help. It was the realization that most of the money I was paying was going to things I had not only no interest in, but I felt were things I wouldn’t choose to spend my money on. Worse, what I’d rather spend my money on was getting almost no funding at all.

So, I said, “Until you have the Fuck Sports Channels and Fox News Plan, we’re done.” And I meant it. I’d far rather fund a real educational channel. Another Farsi channel. Something else.

Inevitably, non-sports fans will realize that they are getting totally ripped off. My favorite explanation came from a post by sports blogger Patrick Hruby: “ESPN’s business model is getting 60 percent of the country that doesn’t watch ESPN to pay 60 bucks a year to pay for ESPN.”

I don’t really want to go on a tear about funding for sports, how athletes are given passes in ways they shouldn’t be (especially true when sexual assault is part of the problem), nor about how Title IX and sports isn’t really anything liked I’d hoped it would be. It’s not that I dislike sports. I do make a point of going to sporting events. I just have little use for sports television apart from the Olympics. (And if you do, that’s fine.)

The problem, as is outlined in the Medium article, is packaging.

I can’t help but feel that we’re caught up in a variant of Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, where everyone is in competing marketing alliances and the cable companies need to suck up to all of them — to our detriment.

Here’s the bigger tragedy, in my opinion. Used to be that the networks were the studios that made the shows. An ABC show was actually made by ABC. This is no longer true. You’ve no doubt noticed the production company credits (e.g., Bad Robot) after the show if you sit through the credits.

Let’s say you’re a rebel like me and you cancel cable. And AMC has a show you really like — Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead.

Let’s say you can watch it on Hulu. Does that count toward the show’s viewership? Yes, because it has ads. Remember, the network is fundamentally all about selling ads.

Let’s say you buy it on iTunes. Surely that’s good, right? No. Because that money goes to the production company, not the network, it counts as zero viewers when considering a show for renewal. So, even though the production company gets a bigger slice of the pie and you are directly supporting what you love, it doesn’t count when the network decides to renew the show. (I suppose it’s possible that such sales affect the price to the network if the revenue’s significant enough.)

Same with buying DVDs — money goes to the production company, not the network.

Thus, not only is the pricing model broken, there’s incentives for it to stay broken, and it’s not likely to get fixed any time soon.

Until the bundled pricing model breaks (which is starting to happen), our hopes lie in iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, et al.

Graphic is from this article about highest paid public employee in every state.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Counting Countries, Another Look

Geography freak (and someone who loves edge cases as much as I do) CGP Grey tackles the issue.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.