Politicans Being Politicians

This piece by Daniel Politi in yesterday's Slate, recapping coverage of the political maneuverings around the stimulus bill, leaves me deeply chagrined. I'm reminded of why we hate politicians. Forget the partisanship, I'm just talking about what's being done to this stimulus bill by both parties. These guys couldn't rise to an occasion with saturn rockets strapped to their backs. And I'm not sure about the actual bill, itself, either.

In a way, it's refreshing to loathe politicians for simply being politicians. After years of loathing them for being partisan hacks, it's something of a relief to see them acting like the regular old incorrigible, short-sighted, greedy, self-serving dweebs they've always been under whatever more horrific garments they'd donned.

They're also reminding me why we, as a society, have grown more cautious about ambitiously solving problems via public money. It's like a sausage factory where tax dollars go in, but mostly putrid links emerge. The inefficiencies, the nonsense, the waste, the pork...tsk. Can anything positive be achieved by these guys above and beyond the cynicism and the greed, and the dark roiling clouds of unintended consequences? Just imagine the further degradations as the money actually goes out; the sleazy contractors, the rigged bids, the pay-offs. Ugh.

I suppose I sound like the Republicans, but they only pay lip service to their aversion of big government (all recent Republican administrations have massively increased government's size). One relevant quote from the article:

"Implementing some changes requested by Republicans has already pushed the total cost of the bill in the Senate to almost $900 billion. And that's bound only to increase."

Of course, the same fate befell the Bush stimulus package, which got all porked up. This is simply how the process works. But I'm left unsure that the pipe dream of governmental non-partisanship is what's most called for, after all...at least when it comes to spending public moneys. The problem isn't a paralyzed inability to act. The problem's how politicians behave when they do act! If only we weren't led by politicians! 

Alas, there may be scant alternative. Hoover-esque laissez faire didn't work very well in the last depression, or in Japan's "lost decade" (the aftermath of similarly burst bubbles). But as we go about this, our government doesn't look any more sane, enlightened or "modern" than governments throughout history. Maybe things aren't getting better after all

I'm no economist, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Republicans are right. Just hand the money to the people and to businesses in the form of massive tax relief, and let them spend the economy back into movement. Some wisely-applied direct Keynsian stimulus with public money would likely work better, but wisdom seems in very short supply.

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Part 5

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All installments in reverse chronological order

I met with the powerful corporate titan dude a couple more times, but he remained cagey, asking lots of questions but offering nary a clue as to what he was brewing up. Then one afternoon, a week or two after our first meeting, he called to invite me to come over his house that night. On a Sunday. At 10pm. And his voice on the phone was trembling.

I naturally imagined I'd be led into a basement room, hear a heavy door clang shut behind me, and find a dozen other young entrepreneurs adhered to the walls via staple gun. But, no, nothing that weird (well, actually it was totally weird, but wait for it). I met his lovely wife and beaming children and no masked, leather-clad dudes named Dolph. The family was very nice, though my synapses over-fired as I tried to grok what on earth I was doing in this near-stranger's pad late on a Sunday night, being very meaningfully introduced into this domestic tableau. Was he planning to adopt me?

Then, suddenly, wife and kids were gone, and I found myself sitting on an ottoman, facing mogul, who seemed uncharacteristically nervous. Cold sweat condensed in beads on his brow. He cleared his throat and, obviously terrified, he told me he'd decided to quit his job as a famous top executive for an all-powerful, titanic media corporation...so that he could come to work for Chowhound. For free. And would...would...that be ok with me?

I blinked, gulped, inhaled, stammered out something polite and mildly encouraging, and managed to extricate myself from his tasteful townhouse. The Chowhound saga had always been surreal, but I felt like I'd dropped down the final rabbit hole. Once I'd staggered out the door and into the street, gulping fresh oxygen, I dialed my business partner.

"Uh, Bob," I murmured into the phone, "it looks like we maybe ought to hold off on closing the site for a minute..."

Read the next installment (#6)

SIGA: Told You So!

If you'd bought $1000 worth of stock in SIGA Technologies on June 9, 2008, the date I first recommended it, your investment would be worth $1460 today, a 46% gain. By contrast, the S&P 500 has declined since then by 36%.

And the market has not even begun to value SIGA's potential. Its stock price will almost surely pass $10 within the next six to nine months, and that's solely on the power of its leading smallpox drug (contracts with US and EU are imminent), disregarding its mind-bending pipeline, which quietly includes medicines for drug-resistant strep, staph, and pneumonia. 

Explaining Blagojevich

The only thing creepier than Rod Blagojevich himself is the way TV hosts have been warmly welcoming him to their shows, as if he were a bona fide celeb. "Today, ladies and gentleman, we have Joseph Goebbels on the show! Herr Goebbels, what a pleasure to have you with us! So, how has the balmy Paraguayan climate been treating you?"

Scumdog Million-hairs (as The Daily Show calls him) received a warm welcome from Aaron Brown on CNN ("So, governor, welcome. It's good to have you here.") but the subsequent interview was interesting because, for the first time, someone tried to aggressively and relentlessly cut through the delusion and bluster. Not that it did any good, of course.

He's certainly not crazy. Understanding that impeachment and an end to his political career are foregone conclusions, Blagojevich is taking "any press is good press" to an extreme, sopping up coverage and generating buzz - any buzz! - for himself. He's only 53, and needs to stake out some sort of future for when he gets out of jail, so he's using the predicament to pump up his brand. If he could go on these shows and just say "Blah blah blah blah", he would. It's not about coherence or content, it's about raw national camera time. Hence the Kipling and the random blatherings about Gandhi and cowboys. He's simply marking time; filibustering, even. It's the single purest example of media whoring in the history of mass media.

When Obama's senate seat opened up, Blagojevich's famous quote (captured on FBI tape) was: "I’ve got a fucking gold mine here, and I’m not gonna let it go for fucking nothing!" The publicity value of his current notoriety constitutes yet another "fucking gold mine," and the ever-opportunistic governor is mining as aggressively as he can.

And it will work. He'll grab himself a talk radio show, a column, a career doing self-effacing cameos in satirical movies. Something. If you're iconically famous enough, there's always some way to be whored out. 

About Free Stuff

Four things:

1. I'm surprised how many people don't know about The Freecycle Network. It's sort of like craigslist for free stuff.

2. Here's a great David Foster Wallace anecdote, from his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men", about the irrational aggravation involved in trying to give things away for free (thanks, David Agraz).

3. As a follow-up to that anecdote, my dad ran an auto parts store, where he tried offering a deal where buying $20 worth of merchandise got you a free watch. Everyone ignored the offer. But then he tweaked it: if you bought $20 worth of merchandise, you could get a watch for only five dollars! All of a sudden, customers started loading up their carts and angling to get the $5 watch. A free watch is value-less.

4. Therapists have long pointed to this same quirk in human nature to justify their high charges. Patients won't take their treatment seriously, they claim, if they're not paying near the pain point. It's clearly self-serving, though there's some truth in it. On the other hand, it's also dangerously close to admitting that therapy success derives from placebo effect!

Here She Comes...

Being a reasonably sophisticated urban type, I know that beauty pagents are "bad". They're sexist, offensive throwbacks. We, as a society, have evolved past that sort of thing, and their continued existence is an embarrassment. As the LA Times wrote yesterday:

"Why does Miss America still exist? The Miss America contest is stupid and dated.... [it's] even sexist in a dated way."

Educated, sophisticated people know to grimace and drip icy irony when the subject of beauty contests comes up. It's an instinctual reaction, sort of like we'd have to minstrel shows or Charlie Chan movies.

But wait. Are we saying that judging people on their looks has become passé? That our culture has evolved to favor deeper attributes - ideas, generosity of spirit, etc.? That the sexes no longer objectify each other, and that women, specifically, have come to resist objectification?

Be serious! At this moment in our society, the highest compliment one can pay is to call someone "hot". Looks have never been more consequential to more people in more realms. And objectification isn't passé, it's institutionalized - entirely accepted and even embraced by both objectifier and, uh, objectivee. Object. Whatever.

The new wrinkle is that if the objectified party has chosen to be objectified, it's deemed ok, because that equalizes the power dynamic. Madonna used raw sexuality to get where she wanted - and her message was entirely about using one's raw sexuality to get where one wants. Madonna is a poor singer. She's neither talented nor interesting. She's simply an ambitious, outrageous stuff-strutter. She's the Material Girl, she's Blonde Ambition, and she's just fabulous, an iconic inspiration to women everywhere. You go, girl! And what profession evokes greater status and sophistication than modeling, the ultimate objectification? Even pornstar Jenna Jameson is deemed chic. Porn chic!

So let me see if I understand. When Miss Oklahoma ambles around in a one-piece swimsuit for a chance to get a scholarship to go to college, for godsakes, that's a sad, disgusting display?

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Part 4

First installment

All installments in reverse chronological order

In the previous installment, I'd learned some very interesting things from a powerful media executive, but had no idea why he'd asked to meet me in the first place.

Acquisition was clearly not on the table; Chowhound was no fit for the titanic conglomerate he helped run. So something else was going on. But one thing was for sure, this wasn't just another hand-job of the sort I described in installment #2, where VIPs pretend to want to help but mostly just want to eat with That Chowhound Guy. This latest mogul was talking more than he was eating. And he was actually offering helpful information. After eight years of buying dinner for zillionaires, this was a first.

But we finished our meal, shook hands, and went our separate ways without any explanation offered. It was a flyby. Whatever was up would be revealed at a later time, and there was no sense in my getting pushy.

There was much to digest for the time being. Over and over, I played the scenario in my mind. To keep Chowhound alive, we'd need to solicit a few hundred thousand dollars of investment money (which would entail ongoing communication and collaboration - not to say pressure and bullying - from the investors). We'd need to bring on many new moderators to handle a traffic surge. And we'd need to replace our software. Plus, of course, keep feeding the monster - the ghastly daily overhead which preserved Chowhound's value as a resource (readers unfamiliar with Chowhound's forum should understand that it serves less as a social network than a trove of aggregated data, so the quality and focus of that data is paramount).

We'd spent years trying to replace our ancient, over-burdened software. Its primitiveness had served the purpose of deflecting traffic until around 2003, but it was around then that we began to fear an absolute limit. That is, we could foresee the day when our tech would blow up, spraying chowy shrapnel all over cyberspace. So we got serious about replacing it, bringing on two consecutive teams of programmers to tweak two different off-the-shelf forum software packages to meet our specific needs. For example, we needed to carry forward all the administrative tools we'd created in our old set-up, lest we lose the upperhand with the psychos and vandals. Since those tools were all unique, much labor-intensive customization would be needed.

The first push involved a couple of volunteer programmers working nights and weekends. They lagged, and the endeavor came to a halt when we realized our traffic had already outpaced the capacity of the new software. Our second push, with a paid programmer, became mired in technicalities just prior to launch. Both were Bataan-death-marches-within-the-greater-Bataan-death-march, and it had become clear that all off-the-shelf forum software is absolute shit, cobbled together with spit and wires - useful for small and medium-sized sites but completely unpredictable at larger scale. And we were too busy an enterprise to risk unpredictability (our ancient software was inadequate, but we'd consistently managed more or less 0% system downtime). Simply working, even working poorly, was infinitely better than crisis.

Better software could be built from scratch, but online forums are complicated beasts. Myriad people use them myriad ways - some intentionally destructive - and the off-the-shelf programs have at least been patched and tweaked over time. Creating custom software would mean reinventing countless wheels, and would require eons to really hone. All options, in other words, were sloggy.

Well, no. There was one other option: a quick, shallow, cynical makeover. We could have swapped in slick-looking off-the-rack software in under a week - admin controls and user features be damned. We could have slapped corporate lipstick on the pig (e.g. by eliminating our "mission statement" front page - an opinionated rant which deliberately rebuffed trendies). Moderation could have been eased back, stimulating a short term traffic swell (flame wars pack in audiences, per the gag about the talk radio host who, desperate for calls, asks if anyone out there wants to voice an opinion about murdering nuns). And we could have suspended publication of ChowNews, the apotheosis of our whole operation. I'd devote myself to shmoozing business people, letting the site drift, entropy be damned. Hey, we had the brand. With so much sizzle, the steak hardly mattered!

It was amusing to type the previous paragraph, because, until this very moment, none of those actions had actually occurred to me. I gag at the spectral image of my alternative-reality self. But, it's true: a little pig lipstick would have gone a long way to making us investor/corporate friendly, and a short term boost in traffic would have brought in fast ad money. Dear lord, It's so blessedly easy to suck. Sucking is seductive; it entices like a Siren. The Sirens of Suck literally suck you in. That's why they call it "sucking"!

I can't resist digressing with a quick vignette from the surreal Chowhound saga: Just before all this, very late in the hopeless slog period, I'd received an email from none other than the Macarthur Foundation - the "genius grant" folks who toss $500,000, with no strings attached, at people doing clever and/or useful things. And they were writing to invite me to, uh, well.....to serve on the nominating committee! You know; to help them find deserving recipients out there! People who could stand to be rewarded with half a million bucks for their fine, outside-the-box work! Do I know anyone like that?

I dutifully sent in a few nominations, including one for the Arepa Lady . And I was happy to do so, though none of my suggestions won. But it felt like someone crawling, thirsty, through a desert being asked to point jolly folks passing in a late model SUV toward parched souls who might like some lemonade.

But getting back to the story...

I tried to think carefully about exactly what outcome I was hoping for. The only thing that seemed to make sense was out-and-out acquisition. Pass Chowhound to a company with the resources to keep it rolling (and low likelihood to ruin it), and let me get on with my life. Or else stick with the plan to shut it all down. In my position, painted into a corner after a brutal slog, nothing else seemed viable. Even acquisition would require a certain level of stamina and shmoozing, and I wasn't sure I still had it in me. But I waited to hear back from this latest titan of industry. Maybe he had some Hail Mary play up his sleeve.

In the next installment, we pick up the pace...and the mysterious mogul makes me an extremely shocking offer.

Read the next installment (#5)....

Great Post-Katrina Show

"The Old Man and the Storm", a FRONTLINE special about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of a fifth-generation New Orleanian, is well worth watching (excellent quality for online video, too).

Here's a suggestion for the Obama administration. How about using that stimulus money to finally fulfill the pledge of the previous administration:

"We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. This great city will rise again." - George Bush, Sep 15, 2005

Budapest Redux Redux

I'm perplexed by the reaction to my Budapest Redux entry. Everyone seems to have reached the conclusion that I hated the place. In fact, I described the people there in glowing terms, especially in contrast to Americans. And I noted that "the culture's rich as paprikash; deep, pervasive beauty is everywhere; and subtlety is keenly appreciated." Is that chopped liver? Yes, there's a dreariness, but that's surely a catalyst for the flowering of human spirit found in places like Budapest. A drearily beautiful place with soulful, subtle, spontaneous, non-superficial people is nothing to sneeze at. I'm trying to decide whether it was poor writing that caused the misimpression, or whether the very qualities I find lacking in American culture cause Americans to instinctively over-recoil at such a description.

I also forgot to mention that one shouldn't imagine going to Budapest and not staying in one of the lovely and lovingly maintained apartments rented by my friend (and Chowhound stalwart) John Farago. John also hosts an amazing series of fascinating and beautifully written web pages on many aspects of culture there. Also see his interesting tips and comments in this thread.

Popular Sufism

In the rather unlikely event that you have an interest in Sufism (or in the slightly more likely event you're curious about persecution of these poetic, tolerant Moslems by their fundamentalist co-religionists), this article, reprinted from the December 18 Economist, is quite interesting. It describes Sufism as it's actually practiced by a great many people in South Asia, which is in stark contrast to the classical, mystical Sufism Westerners hear about.

Actually, a better link for the article is here, on the Economist's own site, where you can also see the photos.

After reading the article, you may want to read the interesting comments (beneath the article) on that first site. There's also a lengthy comment posted by me, at the bottom.