Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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She does, but it's not all that unreasonable
[Read the article: Go ask Alice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you don't have the flexibility of a writer, or live in the right-sized town, what she's proposing is pretty close to impossible now. Nothing she's saying is original, as someone else said Europeans have been eating like this for centuries, and Mario can't go 20 minutes without saying "buy what's fresh at the market that day and cook that". But that doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be said, and I'm glad she's saying it.
What's wrong with food is a symptom of what's wrong with the country, the ways we went off track, and I'm not just referring to the fast food mentality.
Why isn't there enough land to grow all this food? Because not only did we build shopping malls on our farms, we put a higher dollar value on the land if it can be a mall instead of a farm. Are our priorities just the slightest bit skewed?
Why do we work 50 and 60 hours (or more) a week? Taxes, plain and simple. The cost of living in some parts of the country has doubled in the last 50 years while the cost of goods, services, and real estate (adjusted for inflation) has remained fairly flat, but taxes have gone from about 8% to close to 60% of annual income. Again, does this seem like any way to run a railroad?
There are thousands of reasons why we can't eat the way Alice wants us to. None of them are good. Most of them will take a very long time to address, but the sooner we start the better off we will be. And we'll never start if nobody says anything.
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It's a start
[Read the article: Hulu: NBC and Fox's amazing TV-show bonanza]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The first of many, likely, but this is a good one.
Tens of millions of people pay a lot of money every month for TV with commercials, so the monetization strategy is sound. The quality of the content is there. Allowing you to embed TV into your site is slick and innovative, and will serve to give them more ad impressions, so it's good business too. Success or failure will probably come down to marketing and competition.
The 5 current episodes is very encouraging. If the networks see that they can make money from those, they will expand it. Good job by Hulu to get them to take that step.
Someone has gotten the networks to understand that things really are changing. If they can ever get hard numbers on how many people are skipping commercials with their DVRs, how many are illegally downloading from BitTorrent, etc..., things will change even more. Nobody is going to write "illegally downloaded Friday Night Lights and watched it on my Media Center today" in their book. They will just say they watched it. The networks don't really want to know, and I think the major advertisers and their agencies don't either. But ad impressions for commercials are decreasing daily, adverisers are paying for impressions they aren't really getting, and sooner or later that model will change as well. Maybe networks will go all subscription based like premium cable, or partially subscription based, with a static interactive ad next to the video the whole time it's playing.
As for overseas streaming, yeah that sucks. Right now, as I understand it, streaming any media overseas is next to impossible if you want to do it legally. Domestically, the rates are set and everyone knows what they are doing and how much they can make. Streaming abroad is a whole nother licensing deal and everyone seems to be waiting for someone to step up and make an offer the media providers can't refuse so a price precedent can be set. Sellers think they can get more if they wait, buyers think they can pay less. Mexican standoff for now, but there is too much money to be made for it to last forever.
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The difference between Android and Linux
[Read the article: gPhone: Android to ring in thousands of Google phones]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is that Linux isn't optimized to allow Google to monetize access to any and all services.
This is Google's new approach, having apparently realized that they simply can't take on Microsoft head to head in the software arena, much like Apple has. Apple moved to being strictly a hardware and services company, and Google has become the access company. Open Social is another example - 25 seconds after they lose out to MS on the Facebook deal, they announce that they want to open source the entire social networking universe. Open Source is Google's friend.
But you know what? I'm fine with that. The open nature of the architecture they envision ensures that the quality of the access they provide will remain high and improve constantly if they want to continue bringing in the billions, and someone is always going to monetize access now that Google has shown them that it can be done and how to do it. And if, as an added bonus, I no longer have to reboot my phone once a week that's all the better.