American Madness

There won’t be any surprise parties, but there will be countless tributes, re-showings, probably some cake, a few costumes here and there and a number of people feeling really old today.

Yes, Star Wars hits the big 3-0 today. And everyone should be aware of this. If you didn’t know, mark you calendar for big future Star Wars birthdays and such (and when I say Star Wars, I mean the original, I don’t buy into this whole retitling BS… A New Hope my ass)

I have the feeling you can find this exact post on about 10 different blogs today, but I felt it was my duty to give some love to Star Wars and Lucas

So big news- Apparently Bloomberg just updated his website. This has folks speculating that he is planning a run for Governor or, get this- President.

Governor I can believe. President? Don’t believe the hype.

Check out Bloomberg’s redesigned website here

Then come back and tell us what you think? Governor? President? or just a new design?

One of my peeves with the Media (capital M!) is that even though the Internet allows instant disintermediation of information, the media clings more closely to the idea that it needs to tell you things that you could read and interpret for yourself.

Hence, you’ll see a bunch of articles coming out this week (and probably for a while) based on a recently issued U.S. Trust report on the behavior of high net worth individuals.

I thought, hell, I’ll just give you the report. Here it is: U.S. Trust survey of affluent Americans. Press release (with summary) after the break.

(more…)

I sympathize with Merrill Lynch. Like many Wall Street research providers, the firm’s stock reports have long been seen as a commodity. The firm has two choices: lower its own internal cost of creation, or try to reframe its reports as more exclusive, higher quality, etc. ML has taken the latter approach, today informing the media that it will begin restricting access to specific stock research. I fear they are swimming upstream.

The good stuff will leak out. Always does. The pablum simply won’t be publicized. I suppose ML can say its analysts’ research and ratings are somehow special as compared with the stuff put out by all the other Wall Street firms, but can they command a premium price when the other reports are out for free in the media?

April 23, 2007
Dear Journalist:

Candace Browning, the head of Global Securities Research & Economics, recently sent a letter to clients outlining a number of additional steps that Merrill Lynch is taking to further protect the value of the premium products and services that we provide for the exclusive use of our clients.

To address a growing concern regarding the misuse of our proprietary research products, we will be modifying our research media policy effective April 23, 2007.

For macro reports on topics such as Economics, Foreign Exchange and Investment Strategy that we intend to make publicly available, media access will not change significantly.

However, continued media access to reports that contain fundamental equity opinions or stock lists through our research subscribe system will be significantly restricted, beginning April 23. We will continue to consider your other requests, including for company or industry reports or equity analyst interviews on these topics, on a case-by-case basis.

We want to thank you in advance for your cooperation with these changes. The goal of our media relations team is to accommodate your requests whenever possible.

Sincerely,

Susan McCabe Walley
Head of Global Research Communications and Media Relations

You can’t make this up!

The NYTimes reports on the large peaceful uprising in Najaf.

The story includes this photo caption:

Col. Steven Boylan, an American military spokesman and aide to the commander of all American forces in Iraq, praised the peaceful nature of the demonstration, saying Iraqis “could not have done this four years ago,” the A.P. reported.

So…the peaceful nature of the protest is…wait for it!….wait for it!…evidence that our occupation has been fruitful! I love it!

I guess if the Iraqi rebellion were to build an atomic weapon and detonate it on a major U.S. city, the Bush administration would praise it as a sign of increasing Iraqi technological sophistication under our occupation! “It’s a clear sign that we’ve made inroads in improving the educational system,” says Col. Ima Flunky.

So, it was recently announced that everyone’s favorite rice icon, Uncle Ben, has a new title.

No longer is he just the face on the box, representing (according to Wikipedia) “… a domestic servant, in the Aunt Jemima tradition, or perhaps a Chicago maitre d’hotel, Frank Brown.” Uncle Ben is now the “Chairman” take a virtual tour of his new office at Uncle Ben’s website.

According to one of their Ad Execs, Howard Buford: “It’s potentially a very creative way to handle the baggage of old racial stereotypes as advertising icons,” but “it’s going to take a lot of work to get it right and make it ring true.”

Of course giving Uncle Ben a face lift and a new wardrobe might be a good place to start.

Uncle Ben’s Virtual Office is filled with both Rice and Uncle Ben propaganda interesting to check out if you’re into that sort of thing.

So, this is my first post here. I was originally going to write a rant about the state of U.S. Consumer Culture. Instead I am going to just post a link that I think speaks for itself:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/03/giant_laserfiri.html

The Government: Working for you (unless it’s not).

There is a database maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission that goes to sleep at night. If you visit this site after a certain hour the page reads: “Investment Adviser Public Disclosure is currently unavailable. Please revisit the site during operational hours.”

I’m glad that the database can get dinner, go home, kiss the kids, get some shut eye. This is every night, mind you.

The Securities and Exchange Commission maintains this publicly accessible web site to disseminate information about Registered Investment Advisors (basically firms that manage money and agree to SEC oversight of their businesses. More complete definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Investment_Advisor).

I can only think that they close the site to dissuade hackers. Perhaps the SEC staff can’t monitor this database at 3am. But neither can an investor in Asia (e.g., Japan: 13 hours ahead of EST) check up on money managers at this hour. Why not?

We’re in a global economy and a sleepy web site strikes me as very odd. Am I nuts or is this just bizarre?

Radio Shack sent emails to 400 workers notifying them that their jobs had been eliminated. “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress,” read an e-mail delivered Tuesday morning. “Unfortunately, your position is one that has been eliminated.”

Firing staff by email takes the image of the soulless corporation to a whole new level. I’ll never buy anything from Radio Shack again. The crappy electronics that they sell can be had just about anywhere these days. The sentiment seems to be universal. This is a total public relations mess created out of shear stupidity.

Derrick D’Souza, a management professor at the University of North Texas, told AP that he had never heard of such a large number of employees being informed of their termination electronically. He said employees could see it as dehumanizing. “If I put myself in their shoes, I’d say, ‘Didn’t they have a few minutes to tell me?’” D’Souza said.

Steven Muslin writes in CNET’s workplace blog, “Perhaps it’s just a normal progression of the medium: We search for jobs online, apply for them via e-mail, use company intranets to change our benefits packages, and even use the Internet to work from home. Is there really any reason to see your boss anymore? Certainly not to get fired. Not anymore. Not if you work for Radio Shack.”

I liked this quote from the Drudge reports comments, “These people are gutless. Being laid off or fired or whatever is not easy, and it shouldn’t be easy for the people doing it, they should have to face the people they are firing.” That pretty much sums it up.

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By Jason Ihle

A few weeks ago Warner Bros. became the first major film company to strike a deal to make its films available to purchase and download on the Internet. Movies would be available online when they are released on DVD. Their deal was with MovieLink. Just last Wednesday Disney announced it had struck a deal with CinemaNow to do the same thing. It was followed one day later by Warners’ announcement of another deal, also with CinemaNow. Clearly the major studios will follow suit in the coming weeks and months.

Of course this is a smart move and I hail it as a step in the right direction. The music industry acted far too late in their attempts to curb piracy. The movie industry took a long time to learn from their counterparts’ mistakes, but they’ve caught on at least. Or so it seems on the surface.

The downloaded movies can not be burned to DVD or uploaded to your iPod. This makes reasonable sense to me. Why would the studios give you a clear outlet to make multiple copies of the thing they don’t want you to copy? The colossal mistake both Disney and Warners have made is in what they will charge for these films. The prices for most films will fall in the $10 - $20 range. What? You serious, Clark? That’s what you can expect to pay for a new DVD that is devoid of special features. Essentially what you get with a downloaded film is a DVD without special features, but you can only watch it on your computer (or your television if your laptop has an S-Video output like mine does). But the majority of people would most likely be watching these films on their computers. Even if you do watch them on your television, the high quality sound mix that exists on DVD will be absent.

Who is going to pay premium prices for material that is quite obviously not premium, especially when you can buy the DVD for the same price (or a few dollars more plus cool features)? If the movie industry wants to try to curb illegal downloads by making their films available for online purchase then they need to price them accordingly. I would be more than willing, especially given my current living situation in Spain with no TV or DVD player, to pay for movies online. I would not pay more than $5, however. I think I’m a fairly average person and there must be many more people out there like me who also would not pay more than $5 for such a service. So the movie industry is putting itself back into the position of encouraging people to find alternative (and illegal) means to see the movies they want to see.

Overhead can not be an issue. The cost of putting a film online for downloading is so much cheaper than mass producing millions of copies of a DVD complete with packaging, photos, features, notes, etc. Okay, they have to pay for the server space and they have to pay some techies to keep the sites working and actually post the products, but this is close to no overhead as a company can get with a new product.

It amazes me that the studios can be so bull-headed in this arena. They have made a smart move by allowing an easy, legal alternative for downloading films, but have priced themselves right out of the market. I hope their plan backfires miserably. I hope nobody buys movies online and they continue to download illegally and make bootleg copies of DVDs.