Category: Technology

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Banks and Lawyers and Pimps and Pushers

I am the chairperson of a committee organizing a public, non-profit event in Montreal in May, 2000. People are registering for this event from all over the world. One of the problems we have encountered is how to transfer money from one country to another, swiftly, efficiently, and painlessly.

You would think that with the world gone hog-wild with the internet and digital wireless communications and fiber-optic cables and mergers and the new world economy, that this would be a simple thing to do. Franz, in Germany, wants to send me $75 Canadian to pay for his registration. He logs onto the internet, right, and transfers the money from his account to our Event account. Done, right? Simple. Easy.

Well, if you’re not already rolling on the floor laughing your head off, you’ve probably never tried to accomplish a simple transaction like that before.

Franz did indeed send us his $75 dollars. He got some kind of money order (it’s in German so I’m not sure what you call it) and sent it to me. I took it to my local Bank of Montreal. They accepted it and told me it would take three weeks to clear. They also warned me that there would be surcharges. Well, I knew the Canadian bank vampires would get their fangs into it right after the German bank vampires, and I knew it would be outrageous and excessive, but, hey, you can’t fight every battle, so I merely smiled and nodded and went on my way.

A few weeks later, I got a call from the bank. A nice woman named Cindy said, “You don’t want to cash this money order.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “Because it will cost you $15.” I said, “well, I know that’s pretty bad, and it’s a rip-off, but we really don’t have much choice. At least, we still get $60.00 out of the deal.” She said, “No– you won’t get any money out of the deal. It cost $90.00 in bank fees to process the check.”

!!

Now, if you’ve read through some of my earlier rants, you already know how I feel generally about the banks. But this is a new low. For Franz to get his $75 from Germany to Canada is going to cost $90.00. This is something he could also have done with an envelope and a $1 stamp, and some cash. At least then, I would only have been hit with the exchange rate.

Vampires. They’re all vampires out there. It’s getting depressing. VISA handles some of our registrations. They take a cut of 2 or 3%. The Bank of Montreal kindly provides us with a free “Community Account” but they still take their share of the exchanges from U.S. to Canadian dollars. The American banks and European banks each take their cut. Every time money moves in our economy, the vampires at the banks get their fangs out.

Why? The banks know that you can’t sit there and watch them and add up the total amount of time it takes for them to actually handle your check. But I do know that bank employees are not paid a lot of money (only the managers are, but they don’t handle checks) and that a trained employee doesn’t take more than a minute or so to stamp a check and put it into a pile to be sent on to the next clearing house. And with all this globalization going on, of course, we’re supposed to see all the advantages of increased efficiencies and productivity.

And, of course, we all know that the banks are making record profits these days.

Of course the “efficiency” stuff, the rationale for mergers and the new global economy, is pure nonsense. The increased efficiency is really only in the way they squeeze the customers for more and more money by applying vague and arbitrary surcharges to every conceivable transaction.

Efficiency? I’ve been to the bank three times to deposit checks. The first teller took about 45 minutes– I am not exaggerating– to process about 20 checks in U.S., Canadian, and European coinage. The second teller was indeed efficient: about five minutes to do the same amount of work. The third teller was in the middle: about 30 minutes. She was completely confused. She had to get help. She did not know how to deposit a check from Texas. Two of the three tellers had insufficient training.

Efficiency? I went at 2:00 in the afternoon and there were about ten people in line, and only one or two tellers working. It was slow and inefficient.

Efficiency? Remember when the banks promised that they wouldn’t start hitting us up for surcharges when they started driving us all out of the lobbies and into the vestibules to use the banking machines? Surprise, surprise– a few months ago, the Bank of Montreal sent me a notice that they were now going to charge me .50 for every transaction on the ATM. Everyone else on the face of the earth uses computers to increase productivity and efficiency. But the banks– it must be costing them a fortune to be so efficient– that’s why they keep hitting us up with service charges!

The banks have a cooperative monopoly in this country. No single bank has a monopoly, of course, but neither do they really compete with each other. All of them hit you with the same basic service charges and other aggravations.

The solution is simple: the government should now require every employer to give employees the option of receiving their pay in cash. This is not as silly as it sounds. Why don’t they offer to pay you in cash now? Because it would cost them more to do it. But it seems pretty likely to me that if you took all the service charges and bank fees paid by any group of 50 or more employees, you could easily do it more cheaply than the banks.

The banks have the most incredible office towers in every major city. I wish God would grind them all into the dust.

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Our Moral Decline

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. Or was it just that we were all complicit in urbanization? We all wanted our own homes with a back yard and a driveway. And we never blame ourselves for society’s ills, so we blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you can elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

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Having it Both Ways

The State of Virginia just passed legislation that tries to give some force to the so-called “shrink-wrap software agreement” you supposedly agree to every time you install a software package on your computer. The software industry is “ecstatic”. This is their “crown jewel” of legislative achievements. If you wonder what “soft” money in politics really means, this is it.

Now, the naïve and gullible reader will ask himself a simple and natural question: why? Why would the software industry be so happy about a law that seems to make it illegal to do something that it has, supposedly, always been illegal to do? That is, violate the shrink-wrap agreement on your software application?

For fifteen years, we have all been installing these software applications and clicking on the ubiquitous “I Agree” button every time before being allowed to install the application.

Imagine if you read in the paper tomorrow that the government of Ontario was passing legislation making it illegal to speed on our highways. You would be rightly perturbed. If this legislation makes it illegal to speed now, why did I pay my tickets before this legislation was passed? Right….

The consumer-citizen has the right to make a few logical deductions here and invoke the natural right of expediency in order to respond to this blatantly hypocritical piece of legislation.

1. All software issued before this legislation was passed can be freely copied and distributed as you please. Obviously if the shrink-wrap agreement now has the force of law, it did not have the force of law before. So go ahead– copy away! Give Office 97 to all your friends! Make sure everyone you know can play with Photoshop 5.0! Sell copies of Quicken 98 at your fruit stand! All of these products were sold subject to agreements that, according to Virginia, did not have the force of law.

2. Since the principle of secondary contract agreements that take effect after a transaction is concluded (the shrink-wrap agreement is entered into after you already bought the software, when you install it on your computer) is now enshrined in law, the consumer should also take advantage of it. For example, you can send a letter to Microsoft saying this: “Acceptance of my payment for Microsoft Office constitutes an agreement between Microsoft and the purchaser that the purchaser will be compensated at his average hourly wage for any time spent attempting to recover work that was lost due to the deficiencies and instabilities of Microsoft products.”

You may be aware of the fact that, in spite of the shrink-wrap agreement, which states that the purchaser must return the software to Microsoft and receive a refund if he or she does not agree to the terms, Microsoft virtually never, in fact, refunds your money. Neither will the store that sold you the Microsoft product.

So get yourself a good lawyer, because it’s going to be a ride. Here’s what might happen: Microsoft will reject the agreement and demand that you either agree to the shrink-wrap license as it is written or… or what? Return the product? Ha ha! Now, I’m not so cynical as to think the worst of everybody, but some people obviously will simply make a copy of the product onto a CD and then return the original disk to Microsoft.

Fat chance. Microsoft knows that.

If enough people try this, I think we could have a real movement going.

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Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads. Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage.

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. It was easier to blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you could elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

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Bezos

Americans love to believe that with hard work, determination, and a bit of brains, anyone can be successful and rich. Like Bill Gates. Or Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon.com. Or Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape.

This belief in this myth of equal opportunity is one of the reasons that America, of the industrialized nations, is the harshest on the poor. It’s your own fault. If you had only worked harder and studied harder and saved your money, you could have been successful. See—look at Bill Gates! Look at Jeff Bezos! Look at Donald Trump, Paul Allen, Stephen Ballmer, Michael Dell…! They all started with nothing. They worked hard. They became rich. You can too.

Americans need to believe in this myth, or else they would feel badly about kicking people off welfare, or locking them up for twenty years for robbery or drug offenses, or executing them for murder. We don’t care about your disadvantaged youth. We don’t care about the hopelessness of your life. We don’t care about how you have been treated by others. You broke the rules. You had a choice. You have to pay.

Time Magazine chose Jeff Bezos as its man of the year. Why? Because he is rich and successful. Time Magazine can’t imagine that Americans would want to be like someone who is smart or creative or compassionate or fair, unless this guy is really, really rich. We all want to be rich! But we don’t want to think we are greedy. And thus the myth-making begins. And because the poor have no voice in our civilization, there is no one to counteract the incredible nonsense you are going to read about Jeff Bezos in Time Magazine.

This is the Time Magazine version of Jeff Bezos: a young man with amazing talent works hard to develop his skills. He is rewarded with good jobs, through which he hones his already impressive managerial abilities. He notices the internet (well after the really smart people did). He has a brilliant idea (an idea that isn’t really new). He convinces people to invest in his idea (using connections he already had). He pushes his idea forward with passion and intelligence (other people’s passion and intelligence). He demonstrates brilliant leadership (he bullies his employees).

Suddenly, bingo, he is filthy rich.

He is worth about $24 billion dollars right now. I’m not kidding. And to emphasize that he has earned every penny of this obscene amount of money and that he deserves all this fabulous wealth, Time Magazine includes pictures of Bezos rushing here and there, leading meetings, shouting at people, jumping up and down—what a busy, industrious man! He leads a meeting at which people toss out ideas. Brainstorming! Bezos selects the great ones and puts them into practice. Wow! What a genius! He deserves every penny of that fortune!

What Time Magazine doesn’t want you to believe is that Jeff Bezos got rich because he was already rich or because he was lucky or, heaven forbid, because he was possessed of an overwhelming lust for wealth. In other words, the difference between you and me and Jeff Bezos is not that he has money and we don’t. And it’s not that Jeff Bezos knows powerful people who help him out at every turn and we don’t. And it’s not that Jeff Bezos is just plain lucky and we’re not. The difference, according to Time, is that he is more virtuous than we are. That’s why he has $24 billion dollars and we have big balances on our Visa cards. And an economic system that creates men like Bezos, and Gates, and Michael Eisner, and Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan, and so on and so on, is good, because it rewards virtue.

Uh… scratch Mike Tyson.

Now the truth is a little different from the gospel according to Time Magazine. The truth is that, yes, Jeff Bezos works hard, and yes, he is smart. But there are lots of hard-working, smart people out there, and they aren’t as rich or famous as Jeff Bezos. So why is he different? He didn’t think up the idea of doing commerce on the internet, and he certainly didn’t think up the internet, and he certainly didn’t write the software that handles orders for his company. But he did have friends with lots of money to invest. In other words, he had rich friends, and his family was well-to-do, or he wouldn’t have had any rich friends. And these rich friends are richer today because they were already rich. And the truth is that he was also just plain lucky. He started his business at the right time. He received favorable publicity at the right time. He has investors who are willing to put up with a pile of losses for a long time on the somewhat irrational faith that Amazon.com will eventually make money. And he has a host of people mad with investment fever who really think they’re going to cash in big-time on this Amazon.com property.

And those people may be in for a very rude surprise. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

This is the truth about most “self-made” men and women. The first thing they do, when they hit the jackpot, is attribute their success to the qualities in themselves that are perceived to be “virtuous”, like hard work and dedication. They look back at their lives and suddenly everything they did seems to have been consciously directed towards the spectacular result. It must be very, very hard for a very rich person to not believe that he or she deserves success, just as it is very, very hard for a poor person to believe that he or she deserves to be poor. [I just read an article about Lottery winners that said the same thing; furthermore, it highlighted the fact that people who were suing the winners because they weren’t in the pool the particular week they won, also have that same sense of entitlement. 2011-02]

The funny thing is that Amazon.com is not really successful at all. It lost $350 million last year. It does not look like it is going to make a profit anytime soon. So why is Bezos considered a success? Because the stock market thinks that most people think that Amazon.com is going to be wildly successful, so Amazon’s stock keeps rising, making his initial investors very, very rich.

[2022-04-12: I was wrong about Amazon not being successful, though it is somewhat more complicated than simple profitability.  Amazon churns through an unbelievable volume of purchases while it’s actual net profitability at any given instant is questionable.  It doesn’t matter, and I didn’t foresee that net profitability would not matter in the way that it doesn’t today.]

It is quite possible that Amazon’s stock will completely collapse next year. It is quite possible that Amazon will never make a penny. But Jeff Bezos will be very, very rich no matter what happens. When a company collapses, the workers lose their jobs and frequently their pensions and insurance and often even their back pay. The top executives drive off in their limos to “new opportunities” with big fat golden parachutes in their pockets.

If you look at the wildly rich entrepreneurs of the past twenty years, you will find that not a single one of them actually had the genius to invent the device or process that made them rich. The people who did have that kind of genius—real genius—are still working for a living, teaching, or inventing, or researching. And when you read about them, you quickly realize that they were driven by a desire to know, to learn, to improve things. Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Who is Gary Kildall? You don’t know? They made Jim Barksdale and Bill Gates rich. Ah… .now you see. They were the real geniuses. They had ideas. They made them work. Then someone else with more money and the determination to make more money came along and cashed in. I don’t mind if you think Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates is smart because they made a lot of money. However, I think it is really disgusting when they start trying to credit for things they have no right to claim the credit for, and when we begin to explain their success as the product of inventiveness or virtue rather than acquisitiveness.

They were driven by a desire to make a pile of money. They put all their energies and intelligence into the idea of making money. They knew how to negotiate deals that were more beneficial to themselves than to their partners. They knew how to drive employees to work hard for modest pay. They knew how to drive competition out business.

Bill Gates is the classic case here. As the Department of Justice investigation has shown, Microsoft cheated and lied and bullied and extorted it’s way to the top. None of Microsoft’s products were really very good at all. DOS 1? DOS 2? DOS 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3? Heaven help us—DOS 4! (DOS 5.0 was okay, if five years behind the Mac). Windows 3.0? Give me a break! Windows 3.1? Garbage. Even Windows 95 and Windows 98 are still full of bugs. Internet Explorer and Outlook are minefields. They can’t get it right.

But Gates was smart enough to negotiate brutal agreements with companies like Compaq, which required them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sold regardless of whether the purchaser wanted Windows or not. Brilliant! And illegal. Would you please deduct $24 million from your $500 in profits? Thank you– now don’t do it again.

And he was smart enough to change the API’s on Windows 3.1 so Word Perfect for Windows would crash and Lotus 1-2-3 would choke. He was smart enough to realize that by “giving” away Internet Explorer for the moment, he could drive the only competition for the most important market of the next 25 years out of business: Netscape. That is called “dumping”. It is usually illegal.

And Jeff Bezos was smart enough to realize that he could make his prices very attractive and then whack people with “shipping and handling” charges. Smart move.

And Time Magazine, which can conceive of no higher purpose for the Internet than to shop on-line, chooses him as “man of the year”.

Will Amazon be a big success five years from now? Consider these factors.

Bezos says he plans to expand Amazon’s offerings to all kinds of products other than books. All of these products will require extensive delivery services. I’ve never liked delivery services. I think there is a ceiling here. Someone has to be home to receive the deliveries, if it’s something that doesn’t fit into your mailbox. And if all the items ordered are not ready on time, you have to make two, or three deliveries, or delay the order. Orders also tend to get mixed up– we don’t pay delivery boys very much and can’t expect much better from them. I still think we are society of people who drive their cars around and pick up things. I don’t think we want to have everything delivered. The next genius will think of way to reduce the cost of driving around.

[Again, I was wrong.  I didn’t foresee that it would be cheaper for Amazon to abandon products on your doorstep and suck up the losses from theft and misadventure than it would be to make sure someone actually received the package and signed for it.  My bad.]

IBM and other companies are working on a electronic paper, that can receive books electronically via the internet. Music is already changing to a format that doesn’t require a delivery: MP3. Maybe that’s why Amazon is diversifying as quickly as they can.

Amazon’s service charges are outrageous. They are brutal. Time didn’t mention anything about that!  [Amazon has since modified their service charges so that many products can be delivered “free”.]

But, hey, if you think other people believe that Amazon is going to make a pile of money, you might be wise to invest in it.

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Yamahaha

You can play a complete Mozart concerto with one finger. It’s true. All you need is the Yamaha “Disklavier GrandTouch” electronic piano.

This keyboard instrument is programmed with actual great performances by famous musicians and orchestras. The keyboard “prompts” you for each key that you are supposed to play, and automatically provides the amazing accompaniment.

My question is, why would anyone want such a device? Why why why?

If you were to buy this keyboard primarily for the pleasure of hearing the music already programmed into it—the “great performances” by well-known musicians– why wouldn’t you just buy a CD of the same music and play it on your stereo? Or an MP3 file and play it on your computer? Or, if you wanted the thrill of seeing the music itself scroll by, how about a midi file? This has got to be the world’s largest, clunkiest, clumsiest, stereo system.

If you already know how to play music, why would you want to buy a piano that is programmed to play music performed by other musicians? What kind of satisfaction would there be in having the computer “accompany” you? Is it possible to be moved or inspired by an algorithm? Would you be proud of your performance?

And if you don’t know how to play music, why would you want to deceive yourself into thinking that you can, by sitting behind this keyboard?

Who would you think you were fooling?

As technology advances, the dreamers and schemers at the big and not-so-big high-tech corporations keep coming up with idiotic ways for you to spend your money. At $10K a pop, this keyboard is a particularly bad value. What kind of a society invests so much money into deceiving itself? This instrument represents the cosmetic surgery of creative talent. If your breasts are too small, you have them augmented. If your penis is too small, you buy a gun. If your brain is too small, you buy a Disklavier GrandTouch.

* * *

Consider some other deviant hybrids from ages past:

  • the programmable typewriter (with the tiny LCD screen). It cost as much as a computer, for less than 1/10th the functionality.
  • the moped
  • the umbrella hat

and of course, one of the real winners for instant technological obsolescence:

  • the winmodem

Personally, I think those big camper trucks—Winnebagos– are the same thing, but obviously people have yet to be convinced. You see them everywhere. They’re too big to travel around with in cities, and too small to provide a comfortable home on the go. They cost $45,000+. Think about that. How many days a year do you use it? Ten? Twenty? It would cost about $2,000 to stay in a good motel for twenty days. It would take about twenty years for the Winnebago to pay for itself. And that’s only if you don’t include insurance or gas.

Get a car and a trailer, I say, or, better yet, go to a motel. And if you really want to play the piano, take lessons. And if you can play the piano, buy a piano. And if you want to program music into a keyboard, buy a midi-compatible keyboard and a computer. That will only set you back $3,500. And you get a computer out of the deal as well.

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Reversing Progress

Progress that isn’t

Innovations that took the world by storm while leading us backwards

Have you ever looked closely at photographs from the 1950’s? Then look closely at photographs from the 1960’s. Colour! Right! Great, eh? Except for one thing: resolution. Try this—try scanning in your pictures on a computer. Set the resolution to 600X600. Chances are, your black and white pictures from the 1950’s look great, especially if they were taken with a typical Kodak Brownie. Chances are your pictures from the 1960’s look like shit, especially if they were taken with a Kodak “Instamatic” or one of those awful, disgusting, contemptible, “pocket” cameras.

Do your photos all have that nice, flat, “satin” finish? Right. That’s what you want, right? Because it looks so nice. Right. Well, scan those in, and you’ll see why I always order my pictures printed on “glossy” paper. Do you want to know when and why they invented “satin” finish? That’s right—in the 1960’s and 70’s. That’s right—when they invented those crappy little camera’s with the lousy little negatives and plastic (not glass) lenses. The satin finish makes those pictures look better than they really are because, with a satin finish, you can’t notice the lack of detail.

Now look closely at a Polaroid photo, if you have one. Well, you probably don’t have very many. Why not? First of all, they weren’t much of an improvement over the Instamatic. The resolution is a little better, but the colour reproduction is not as good. But, as everyone knows, Polaroid pictures were very expensive, compared to other colour pictures. And anyway, I never could figure out why anyone would want a picture instantly, while you could still see the thing you were taking a picture of. I suspect that the biggest use of Polaroid cameras was for pictures you might be embarrassed to send to the local photo shop for processing.

Then we really did have progress. In the 1980’s, everyone went 35mm. Good photographers had used 35mm for years, but in the 1980’s, the general public suddenly developed an appetite for better pictures and these complicated but excellent cameras became quite popular. One of the reasons they became quite popular was because they suddenly became automatic or semi-automatic. You still generally had to focus the camera yourself, but shutter speed and aperture could be set automatically. Good. That’s progress. Look at the pictures from the 1980’s. Aren’t they great? Well, they would be, except that we still use that ugly satin finish. Why? The pictures were now good enough to look good, once again, on glossy paper. So why do most processors still use the satin finish?

Probably because many people still use the stupid little “Instamatics” and pocket cameras, and a lot of people buy disposable cameras, and the processing companies will be damned if they have to buy two kinds of paper.

So now it’s 1999. And what do we have? The electronic camera! Hurray! Progress again! But wait a minute. Look at those prints! They’re awful! What happened? Well, how about that. For a mere $1200 you can now buy a camera with a resolution of 640 by 480: the same quality as a Kodak “Instamatic”. Yeehaw! And you even get to give up your telephoto, wide-angle, and zoom lenses for a good old-fashioned fixed-mount single-lens camera! [Note: a decent 35mm photograph has a resolution of 1200×1200.]

I can’t believe that people are going out and spending over $1,000 for electronic cameras with a single fixed lens such poor resolution. Why? I figure these cameras should sell for about $125. Even better, someone should market an adapter that lets you shoot electronic photos on your existing 35mm equipment, so you can keep using your valuable lenses, flashes, filters, and other accessories.

The one part of electronic cameras that makes great sense is the cost of processing. Zilch. Zero. Nothing. You just download it onto your computer.

Do you realize that anything that cost nothing will eventually be worth nothing? Electronic photos will never be valued as highly by people as printed photographs are. But that does mean that your old printed photographs will be valued very highly, in the future. So don’t throw them out. They will be loved, as artifacts of an age of strange progress.

Other products that took the world by storm but were inferior to the products they replaced

  • VHS (replaced the vastly superior Betamax).
  • Microsoft Windows (annihilated OS/2, Geos, the Macintosh, Amiga, and numerous other superior operating systems).
  • the CD: a lot of people won’t believe this but a well-made turntable attached to a good amplifier produces better sound than the best CD player does. This is because sound has to be filtered and reduced in order to fit on a CD. Imagine if the same amount of innovation and design that was invested in the CD had been invested in turntables. So why did CD’s win? Because transportation is one of the largest costs of distribution. You can transport about five times as many CD’s as LP’s in the same space. But, as the music industry quickly discovered, you can charge the public more for the CD! The CD case is also one of the worst designs ever foisted on an unsuspecting but gullible public—it’s flimsy and awkward and stupid.)
  • the computer mouse (the truth – and every good keyboardist knows this— is that the keyboard is way, way faster for doing anything on a computer than a mouse is. The difference is, a mouse makes it possible for any moron to use a computer. The mouse has a legitimate use for graphics, but that’s about it. That’s commercial progress, but not a technological improvement).
  • the ball point pen (replaced the elegant fountain pen, and the utilitarian pencil, with this sloppy, blobby, leaky contraption). And how come you never see ads for pens anymore? Kind of strange, isn’t it? Remember all those Bic ball-point pen ads, showing how indestructible they were? We still see ads for disposable razors and diapers and toilet tissue—why not for pens?
  • rear-wheel drive (don’t forget that front-wheel drive was invented not in the 1980’s but in the 1950’s. It lost out to American-made rear-wheel drive behemoths for almost 30 years, until the Japanese proved it’s superiority, a thirty-year detour of unimaginable mass idiocy).
  • television (vs. high resolution tv. do you realize that you’re looking at a color picture that was designed in the 1950’s and first mass-produced in the 1960’s? Yes, your television picture is obsolete, but nobody wants to invest in the hardware required to improve it. The U.S. government has finally shoved the industry, kicking and screaming, into the next century, with requirements of HDTV broadcasts within the next five years. By that time, of course, the technology will be outdated again.)
  • Sound in Movies: If you ever in your life summon the self-discipline and determination to do something unusual and exotic, go to the video store and pick up three or four of the better silent films and sit down one night and watch them. Until you do, you probably have no idea of what was lost when films gained sound. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were unparalleled geniuses whose work almost disappeared entirely when sound was introduced and the movie-going public flocked to see and hear the novelty. Try Chaplin’s “City Lights” or Buster Keaton’s “The General” and remember, there were not computer-generated special-effects in those days and Chaplin and Keaton did their own stunts. And what did we gain in sound? Movies shot entirely in rooms in studios. It took years for the camera to regain it’s mobility and for Hollywood to master sound editing and effects. For all that, name a single movie produced in the last twenty years that is as good as “City Lights”, if you can.
  • Winmodems- the “mopeds” of the computer world. Real modems do a good deal of the work of converting packets of internet data into digital 1’s and 0’s so your computer can understand them. Winmodems shove all of this work onto your computer’s main CPU. Think about that. If Windows 98 is so fast on your computer that you would just love to slow it down a little so you can save $50 on a modem—please go for it.
  • And while you’re at it, you might want to look at this beautiful typewriter with a LCD display I’m trying to sell….

So why are Winmodems so popular? Did you ask for one? Did you tell the computer dealer—”hey, I think it would be a great idea if my next modem slowed my computer down a little”? No, you didn’t. But the profit margin on Winmodems—which actually consist of nothing except a pipeline from the phone line to your CPU—is much higher than on real modems.

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Banning MP3

It’s been quite a while since the Recording Industry Association of America tried to have MP3 players banned but I am still so steamed about this issue that I have to give it another rant.

Think about this. The Diamond company created a little portable device called the Rio that allows you to listen to music that has been recorded and compressed into MP3 files. That’s all it does.

Anyone with the right software and hardware can create an MP3 file on a computer. You can record yourself, or you could take the Windows sound effects, or you could take a CD or tape you already own and record it onto the computer and convert it to MP3 format.

What’s the big deal? How could anyone have thought this should be illegal?

Well, the record industry says that you could take a commercial, copyrighted recording and convert it to MP3 and play it on your portable MP3 player. Again, what’s the big deal? You paid for the CD. You are perfectly entitled to convert it into different formats so you can listen to it on different devices.

Ah—but the music industry thinks that we will all shortly start copying our Celine Dion and Back Street Boys albums onto our computers and giving copies away to our friends! Then your friends won’t want to buy the albums (especially after hearing the Back Street Boys).

Well, well. So it appears that you could do something illegal with an MP3. Well well. The truth is, you could also take your Rio and bang someone on the head and kill them, but you don’t see the government trying to ban them for that reason.

Now you have to remember here that the government of the U.S. allows almost anyone to buy a handgun at any time, on the assumption that just because a person buys a powerful, easily-concealed weapon that can blow a hole the size of an orange through somebody’s head does not necessarily mean that this person is likely to commit a crime with it.

This government also allows people to buy alcohol, gasoline, rope, fertilizer, and Barry Manilow records. All without the slightest restriction.

What we have here is a classic case of the rich and powerful throwing their weight around and abusing the legislative and judicial processes in order to exploit the hapless consumer. They have already succeeded in preventing DAT tape drives from getting a foothold in America. And the Disney corporation has succeeded in extending the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character. How? Easy. You simply pour money into the re-election campaigns of influential senators and congressman.

It is shameful and disgusting. At the next election, ask your congressman how he feels about this issue. If he supports the RIAA initiative, jam your Diamond Rio up his nose.

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The Vinyl Record

Do you have any vinyl records? Threw them all out after you’d amassed a serious collection of CD’s, did you? Vinyl records are analog. CDs are digital. Bad, bad vinyl. Throw it away.

Too bad. Big, big mistake. Let me tell you why.

Everybody knows about MP3 by now. Just in case, I’ll refresh your memory about the salient details.

Since computers started becoming bigger, faster, and more powerful, the average user has had the capability of recording music or any other sound into a computer file that could be played back through an amplifier. The format most computers used for this was called “wav”. It wasn’t a very efficient format. To record a three-minute song at good fidelity required about 25 – 40 megabytes of space. Even with today’s 10 GIG hard drives, that’s a big file. Too big to circulate on the internet, for example.

MP3 is nothing more than a file compression format. It takes that humungous 25 MB wav file and converts it into a sleek little 3 MB MP3 file. Best of all, when you copy an MP3 file, you don’t lose one megahertz of audio quality. Think of it: the 50th copy is just as good as the 1st.

This, of course, has tremendous implications. It could mean the death of the popular music industry. And some of the smarter people at Sony and Warner Brothers know that. And they are having fits. If music can be downloaded off the internet and copied endlessly, who will buy CDs?

Well, they aren’t taking this lying down of course. Various music companies have combined– isn’t that illegal (yes it is)– to work out a new standard for digital media that will allow them to prevent people from making copies of their music. They want to this by putting a secret code in the computerized music file. This code will tell a recording device not to make copies of the music.

What nobody seems to realize is that this, at long last, will mark the definitive end of the vinyl record. Vinyl records cannot be encoded to prevent copying. Why would they issue music on CD’s designed to prevent copies, and then issue vinyl LPs which would allow anyone with a decent turntable to copy the music onto a computer and generate the numerous illicit copies they so dread?

Of course, why issue music on vinyl at all? The most amazing thing about the success of the CD format is that it was accomplished by persuading people to buy a new copy of music they already own. And that is why the “industry” is very, very excited about DVD or whatever else is going to succeed the CD as the standard format of musical recordings. Once again, everyone who dearly loves music will have to go out and buy new copies of their favorite CDs. And you can take your old, obsolete CD’s and stack them right next to your obsolete vinyl LPs.

Sony just announced the release of their own proprietary digital format. They say that you will be able to download Sony’s copyrighted music off the internet. After you pay, of course. Sony thinks you should just rush out and buy the new portable player for Sony’s new copyrighted format, which cost over $400, because, after all, don’t you want to be able to play Celine Dionne on your computer?

Think about this friends: you have a choice. MP3 allows you to make as many copies of a piece of music as you want. You can download music in MP3 format from all over the world, for free. So you probably want to rush right out and buy the new Sony player instead, for $400, so we can all put an end to this free music and start paying again!

If Sony was really smart—and I don’t think they are, on this issue—they would be giving their player away. I’m not kidding. Sony—if you’re listening—I want $1 million for this copyrighted idea (Copyright 1999, all rights reserved, Bill Van Dyk). Here it is again: give your portable player away, for free, and give away as many as possible as quickly as possible. Give it away at concerts, with free cuts by the artist. Give it away at record shops, with free samples by your leading stars. Give it away at trade shows and press conferences. Give it away in breakfast cereals.

Think, Sony. If you give your player away, people will want music to play on it. Where will they get that music? They will get it from your web site. How much will they pay? Well, don’t be stupid and try to charge them $1 a track. That would mean that a CD-length work would cost $20. That’s what we currently pay for a physical product that is pressed, labeled, packaged, and distributed. You just have to upload these files to your web site and set up people’s accounts. How about 25 cents each? You’ll win the digital music war!

My guess is that Sony is not as stupid as you might think and that the $400 is a ploy. My guess is that Sony wants you to think that the player is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 so that when they start giving it away for about $99 near Christmas time, you’ll think you’re getting something really valuable, even though each device will only cost Sony about $5 to manufacture (no moving parts, no belts, no drives, just cheap silicone chips, an LCD, and a “play” button). My guess is that Sony is going to try to charge people $2.50 a cut for music for their machine. My guess is that their market research will show that people are pretty stupid and will pay two and a half times as much for a recording that cost Sony 1/5th as much, to produce and distribute, as a CD copy. People will pay this because they will want to be “cutting edge” and show off to their friends.

Will this fool a lot of people?

Yes.

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Ikea

I used to look through Sears and Eaton’s catalogues mainly because there were pictures of women in their underwear. Once in a while, I would accidentally look at some of the home furnishings. What I saw nearly sickened me.

Where did they get those homes from? Nobody I knew lived in one. They were immaculate, in a perverse sort of way. The furniture was new, polished, slick, plastic. There were no signs of life, no clothes, no magazines tossed aside, no half-eaten bagels or half-empty cups of coffee. There was never any chili or soup in any of the pots. There were never any towels hanging half-folded over the sink or bathroom counter.

What was the message here? You were supposed to look at this catalogue and think, “Wow! That’s so beautiful! That’s what our house should look like! That’s what will make our friends think we’re smart and rich!” And you would buy this furniture and put it into your house and for a few days your home would look like a Sear’s catalogue but soon everything would be ugly and messy again and you’d realize that you just don’t measure up to the ideal.

Have you ever seen an Ikea catalogue? Here it is. Here is a picture of a place setting. The glass is half empty—someone’s been sipping. The silverware is scattered around as if someone just got home from work and didn’t have time to lay it out perfectly before the chili boiled over on the stove.

And here’s a picture of a pull-out pantry. By golly—there’s food in there, with the labels showing! And here’s a picture of a shoe cabinet. It’s full of papers and magazines that look as if someone just dumped them there. There’s a backpack beside it on the ground. What’s that doing there? And—can I bear the sight—here’s a bed…. and it’s unmade! Someone has actually slept in it!

Just gazing at the Sear’s ideal, you can sense the overwhelming sterility closing in on you. You get a sense that the customers of this store have no idea of what money is for, so they buy ostentatious, phony, bland, useless ornaments for their homes, and then sit around like manikins all day, admiring their silver-wear and doilies.

Ikea gives you a sense that people actually live in these furnishings. They enjoy them. They sleep on the bed, drink from the glasses, work under the beautiful halogen lights. They store things in the cabinets and eat off the tables. They have busy lives.

Ikea must be the only major furniture catalogue I have seen that shows a man with long hair tending a baby while preparing supper.

The Americans have some things right and some things wrong. They have furniture wrong.