Slipr

Two weeks ago the Times Magazine did a profile of current fed chairman Bernanke, which said that he believes that the primary way to control the economy is through sound monetary policy.

But I couldn’t help but think, well… what about war? What about dwindling resources?

Speaking of dwindling resources, here’s the reason we’re about to enter a nasty bout of stagflation — that’s recession plus inflation, the worst kind of economic nastiness an economy can experience:

And why’s food so expensive? Well, there’s the biofuels issue — there’s now a competition on between our cars and our stomachs, and both are after the same feedstock.

Another reason is that it’s possible we’re approaching what might be described as “peak food.” That is, globally, we are beginning to bump up against the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity. Really, for real this time.

Here’s how the Christian Science Monitor characterizes it:

Fuse on the ‘population bomb’ has been relit

Prospects for stabilizing the world’s soaring population have taken a blow. This development, if not reversed, will have huge economic, environmental, and political impacts on most people alive today.

Two years ago, the United Nations projected that the number of people on this planet would reach 8.9 billion by 2050. In March, the UN Population Division revised that projection to 9.2 billion.

Here’s a prediction: the long expansion of the human population since the last ice age will come to an end this century — checked, most likely as a result of disease and resource scarcity. After all, that’s how all other animal populations are checked — why should we be any different?

The thing about a webpage is, it’s up or its down. It’s there or it’s not. You either have a computer with an adequate web browser and internet connection or you don’t.

But papers? They show up missing and incomplete. They don’t show up at all.

For example: I recently attempted to subscribe to the Sunday Times. Who doesn’t like the Times Magazine, right?

Only one problem: the Gray Lady proved physically incapable of actually delivering a paper.

Two months ago we subscribed. For the first three weeks nothing came at all. I called. Nothing. I called again. Suddenly a paper arrived — but it was incomplete. No Times Magazine - just the parts of the paper a regular subscriber would get on Sunday after getting the rest of the paper Saturday. Twice in a row this happens.

Finally I gave up. The customer support reps were very nice. $9 a month for the next 6 months, they said!

But really, I could use the walk to the corner bodega. And even if I’m paying twice as much for the paper, well, at least it’s intact.

So much for ink on dead trees delivered by greenhouse gas-spewing trucks. And good riddance.

Only science would prompt anyone to write a headline this worthy of being chopped up and screen-printed onto a t-shirt fit for your favorite absurdist.

Gas Fingers in Glass Beads Confirm Fluid-Theory Prediction

Loneliness Breeds Belief in Supernatural

People who feel lonely are more likely to believe in the supernatural, whether that is God, angels or miracles, a new study finds.

continued…

1. Ad buyers are stupid and lazy.

This isn’t my opinion — I’m quoting an ad sales guy who used to also (quite inappropriately, and sometimes to hilarious effect) run the web division of a certain media startup I used to work for (that had no clue about the wall that’s supposed to be put up between editorial and ad sales).

Maybe I’m being a little harsh — ad buyers are human, and while the landscape of ads they can buy has changed, embracing that change would require superhuman amounts of effort.

To wit: If you were an ad buyer for Acme, a medium-size company, and they gave you a million bucks to spend would you:

a. Diligently research the dozens or hundreds of tiny websites you’d have to buy ads on in order to best target your audience while getting impressions at fire sale prices

or

b. Throw the whole lump at a television ad network and call it a day so you can go home to your family in Westchester.

OK, so it’s an exaggeration, but the point is: until ad networks become more powerful and, frankly, monopolistic, the only people who are going to get high CPM’s on the web (that’s dollars-per-thousand-ad-impressions) are the biggest sites, like Yahoo, that can absorb huge ad budgets.

In other words, the bottleneck is the folks buying the ads — they’re stuck in the 20th century. (Except for the ones using Google Adwords, but those kind of ads aren’t going to command enough money to keep a business afloat unless it has ridiculously low overhead, like Plenty of Fish.)

One possible solution, as I just noted, would be for someone to do a better job of consolidating ads into potentially huge pools of buyable impressions.

Why do you think the Glam ad network is such a runaway success?

2. The ability to perfectly measure your traffic is a curse.

Think of how traditional newspapers sell advertising — they tell advertisers how many subscribers they have. But how many of their subscribers didn’t even read the paper that day? Or never saw the specific ad that was paid for? I’m sure if there were a print-world equivalent of Google Analytics, that had the same level of fidelity, advertisers wouldn’t stand for their low ad impression rates and print advertising rates would fall off a cliff — frankly, the whole thing is built on an illusion. But that’s the sort of thing you can get away with when you’re an institution with 100’s of years of history, I guess.

Thanks to Scott Karp over at my new obsession, Publishing 2.0, for getting this whole brainstorm started: Why Online Advertising Economics Are So Messed Up | Publishing 2.0

It’s not like XKCD didn’t say it first and say it better, but it really is true — the commenters on YouTube are quite possibly the stupidest people on earth.

In 2006, while covering it for Scientific American, I shot five videos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, and now once a week the comment robot at YouTube helpfully notifies me that some mouth-breather has spilled his or her genius insight below castoff clips I’d just as soon forget.

For example:

The original caption on one of the videos…

More ridiculousness from the Consumer Electronics Show - these woofers, embedded in the back of a truck, spin… for no apparent reason.

…and a typical comment…

well achmed they spin because its jsut plain fucking cool how many people do you kno that have like 12 subs in their trunk that spin O.o

In magazines it’s called copyediting. In software it’s called QA. It’s been a staple of assembly lines since they were invented.

Now it turns out your body does it too.

Quality Control Mechanism Tags Defective Sperm Cells Inside the Body

Read the rest of this entry »

I embark on the new project Thursday at Paragraph, a writing space in lower Manhattan.

They had a long waiting list for folks seeking full-time access (24/7) but there’s no wait at all for part-timers like me (nights and weekends). I guess this means New York is full of artistes, but committed dilettanttes are in short supply.

Now to become the 9,436,324th New Yorker ever to attempt writing a novel…

Good headline writing, especially for the web, is something I find myself teaching (and learning) again and again.

Mostly the recipe is be explicit, assume the headline is the only part of the article anyone will ever read, and sensationalism, in the right doses, never hurt.

e.g.

Syphilis for Christmas?

Manufacturers are hoping their range of cuddly toy versions of microbes including gonorrhea and syphilis will be a hit for Christmas.