The Weakening of Nations: How Tax Work-Arounds Undermine Our Society - International - The Atlantic
Loopholes, poor regulations, and off-shore havens allow corporations and the very wealthy to draw on the benefits of a strong nation-state without fully paying back in, eroding a system that’s less tested than we might think.
What is Zynga making per paying user? Nobody, not even Zynga, will ever know.
Good insight on the difficulty on nailing models and how, at the end of the day, you have to stop trying to get the perfect model and go with the best you’ve got.
In the end, for the purposes of arguments about how much money a company is making, the only numbers that matter are: how much money is coming into the company each month? How much money is leaving the company each month? Everything else should be viewed with utmost suspicion.
Services I Can’t Live Without (and Some I Can)
(edit: added in “Dead” as a last category. hat tip @dromano)
I was just thinking about this the other day and wanted to break down what services I use and love and those that I only begrudgingly continue to use.
I’ve broken it down into three groups: services that are here to stay (i.e. I’m not leaving them unless you pry them from my cold dead hands), on the border (close to here to stay status but some days I forget to check it), obligatory (everyone else is on it so I have to keep it but it has lost its grip on me) and dead (uh, dead). I’ve also ranked them by my love/addiction to them.
Here to stay:
1. Twitter - Considering how skeptical I was when I joined Twitter nearly five years ago (I thought it was just a service where you tweeted about your lunch and bowel movements and, wow, it’s been that long?), I am genuinely surprised at my level of addiction to the service. I can honestly admit that I’ve had to deliberately keep my Twitter client closed on my computer so that I can focus and work because if I left it open, I’d probably be checking in on it every other minute, which isn’t the greatest for productivity. Right now, I check it on the break phase of my pomodoro timer. You know it’s a problem when you have to create rules around it.
1a. Tumblr - I give credit to my wife here; she found Tumblr before me and introduced it to me. I also assign her blame for the thousands of hours and posts and likes and reblogs that I have tallied over the years. Tumblr is such a close second to Twitter that I had to assign it 1a because I have the same rules setup around it that I do for Twitter. I only check it during my breaks, because otherwise, I’d spend hours and hours on the site, liking and reblogging and going down the rabbit hole and never coming out.
2. Reddit - I used to be a Digg fanboy but when their v4 rolled out which killed almost all community, I transferred over. And I’ll freely admit that it does the whole social news aggregation service a lot better than Digg ever did. Subreddits, meta-humor, political movements, the depth of Reddit knows no bounds. Glad I finally saw the light here.
3. Steam - The de facto PC gaming platform, Origin be damned. I can barely understand how I used to buy/play/build a community around any game I used to play before Steam came along. Just a great example of how building a better service and treating your customers right is the best way to battle piracy.
4. Instapaper - the best, very best, tool of upping my productivity. I no longer break up my work day by reading random things that I find but instead save it for later and consume it at the end of the day. It’s like curating my very own newspaper. Easily one of my favorite services. You should use it, and you should buy it and support it; Marco Arment is a great developer and deserves it.
5. Feedly - My RSS reader. Lightweight, iPhone and iPad versions, great look and feel, and the user experience gets out of the way so you can read your feeds. Even better after the hackjob Google pulled on Google Reader. I tried Flipboard and other RSS apps, but I like this one the best.
6. Dropbox - A no brainer. I move between my PC, my Macbook Air, my iPad and even my iPhone for work and couldn’t do it without Dropbox. Use it every day without even thinking about it. Worth paying for extra storage to keep everything in the cloud.
On the border:
7. Instagram - My go to service for sharing photos, or as I like to call it, “I am doing something cool, look at me, aren’t you jealous”. It’s great to see all the experiences in photos from all around the world without the noise of apps, status updates, shared articles to muddle the experience. See: facebook.
8. Spotify - Pros: I love having nearly every song in the world at my fingertips. Well worth $9.99 IMO. Cons: iPhone app is horrid; no native iPad app; can only sync playlists and not albums; using clients as P2P nodes to alleviate streaming load on Spotify servers while hosing end users upload bandwidth is super lame; missing a lot of the classics (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan). The cons outweigh the pros just enough for me to consider trying Rdio.
9. Band of the Day - Recently started using this; so far, it’s part of my morning ritual, firing it up and listening through to the tracks from the band of the day a couple times as I get ready. The bands are often hit or miss, but I like that I’m being exposed to new music consistently.
10. NPR for iOS - I work from home and don’t have a commute any more, so this is how I get my morning news. I listen to the news segments after I listen to Band of the Day and get caught up. It’s a good way to keep on top of events.
11. Foursquare - I check in a lot less now (probably due to the reduced usage of the app within my immediate social group) but I do like using it for Explore. There was a time I was addicted to getting points and badges, but that time has long passed.
Obligatory:
12. Facebook - Everyone I’ve ever known is on here and is my friends, so I have to keep using it. But I don’t like it for the very reason why I have to keep using it; Facebook changed the definition of friend from “whom I am friends with now” to “any person I’ve ever might have been friends with in my whole entire life”.
Using Facebook feels more like a chore than fun, sifting through inane status updates, app invites, app shares, etc. The very nature of Facebook (“what all of your friends are doing at any point in time”) makes it a crazy experience for me. My feed can go from someone posting baby pictures, to a sports update, to a political news article being shared, to a game share/invite, to birthday wishes, to a chain status going around (“make this your status if you’re against FB charging users!”).
It doesn’t seem like a service to keep updated and connected with your friends so much as a voyeuristic service to peek in on the lives of any person that you’ve ever met; a better method of comparing your life against that of everyone you’ve ever met. That may say more about me than it does about the service, but it is what it is.
That said, I have to keep using it because every damn person I’ve ever met in my life is on there and my friend. They have social lock in.
Dead:
13. Pinterest - I am using this service because everyone else is on there and I wanted to see what the fuss was about but uh, is this a service for a) wedding planning, b) women’s fashion, c) cute objects and a) wedding planning? Because that’s all that that ever shows up in my feed. It honestly feels like a really nice online version of Vogue or Vanity Fair or something. That’s great, just not exactly what I was thinking of when I signed up.
14. Pandora - Sorry Pandora, you got cannibalized by Spotify; when it comes to listening to music of my choosing or doing it radio style, the former wins out. I used, loved, and paid for you for years, but Spotify won out.
Source: 9-bits
Which School Has Better Programmers? UCLA or USC? Find out at the Hackathon!
Come on UCLA! The hackathon this weekend in LA; wish I were down there to attend.
Being in marketing for Budweiser (and Anheuser-Busch) must be super cushy. Seems like you just sit around, watching Youtube videos, pick the ones that go viral and then recreate them for your Super Bowl commercial.
This compared to these:
http://improveverywhere.com/2008/04/07/best-game-ever/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp0ksbz0mtE
Oh and previously, a Miller Lite commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq43grUtmLM
And the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgf60CI_ks
So, I guess being in marketing for either of the crappy beer brewers means you have a cushy, Youtube watching, viral video copying job.
Marketing Campaign of the Day: Budweiser Canada surprises two recreational league hockey teams from Port Credit, Ontario, with professional-league-grade theatrics, including a flock of fans, play-by-play commentary, and other accouterments of a professional game.
Sure, it’s (still) nothing new — but it’ll warm your cold, cold heart just the same.
[bud.]
Source: thedailywhat
Peep the poster on Zuck’s desk the day Facebook filed their S1.
Right. On.
via TNW
Source: brycedotvc
The Zynga Abyss - The Atlantic
“I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.”
Best explanation I've ever seen of why tech/product time estimations are really just kind of guesses.
Best part:
“I continue, “if you can commit to walking 16 hours a day, we can make up the difference! It will be hard, but this is crunch time. Suck it up!” My friend yells back, “I’m not the one who told our friends we’d make it by Sunday in the first place! Don’t blame me for this!”
Love it.
Why Not Try An Infinity-Day Window?
The 56 day window is just the latest of the stupid moves made by Hollywood. I’ve learned to live with these arbitrary windows with my subscription to Netflix, appreciating new stuff whenever it does finally get on there but not everyone has that kind of patience.
I have plenty of friends who were once hardcore music piraters who now buy music legit from Apple/Amazon because it’s easier, because they don’t have to mess around with ID3 tags or renaming MP3s, and because it’s way more convenient than going to the music shop to get a CD. Hell, it’s way more convenient to buy it and get it NOW on their phones than it is to even order the CD online. They converted because the service got so good, they were compelled to go legit.
These same friends I’ve tried to convert to using Netflix, or VUDU, or what have you and they always ask if so-and-so new movie is on it yet. And invariably, because of these idiotic windows, they are not. And you know what their response is?
“Oh well, I’ll just download it.”
These are people who have a track record of going from pirating media to purchasing it legit and Hollywood is stopping them from conducting a legit transaction. It’s crazy to me how Hollywood doesn’t see that their current business model is old and busted and that their policies are in fact pushing potential customers into the arms of the pirates. And with this new 56 day window, I foresee more and more potential customers turning into customers of the Pirate Bay.
Matt Drance on Warner Bros. idiotic new 56-day DVD rental window:
Also under this new deal, pirated movies remain free of charge, free of non-skippable ads, free of five-minute load times, and are now nearly three months ahead of the competition.
And:
iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing. Most people made the value judgment that ten bucks for a clean, legal digital album was worth the alternative of fishing around for files that may or may not be damaged or infected.
It’s really — honestly — surprising that Hollywood doesn’t understand such a simple concept. Even stranger is that they can look to the music industry as an example and learn from the mistakes there, but they refuse.
Hollywood isn’t going to die anytime soon — but it won’t be from lack of trying. The pain is coming. In a big way.
Source: parislemon
How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy?
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
And:
So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects. There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.
Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.
Source: parislemon
This fartstep video is gold, Jerry, gold! Thx @bennettk!
Gaslamp Killer Live(Fartstep Version) (by AndyRehfeldt)
Source: youtube.com
venomous porridge: The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:
This restriction — that…
Source: dwineman
Watch this all the way through… wait for it… wait…
This is one of the reasons why we at Shelby.tv have blacked out our site today to protest SOPA / PIPA and why I am attending my first ever public protest.
I am going my part. For the kittens, cats, koalas and GOATS!
Save the Internet!
Best SOPA/PIPA protest page out there.
Source: theoatmeal.com
I want them to remember that lawmakers and lobbyists who don’t understand the Internet have no business trying to regulate it.
(via newsweek)
Source: thedailybeast.com
