Here’s Upton Sinclair on Scott McLellan’s new memoir:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Apparently McClellan came to understand many things once he was no longer on the White House payroll.
Politico editor in chief John Harris wrote a sort of meta-piece on the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s invocation of the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as an example of a Democratic primary that was still going in June. If you really read the piece, you’ll find it’s a sort of shameful confession of the fundamental sleaziness of the political media. His main point is, “Yes, we suck, and we’re surprised to find that the more established outlets suck just as badly as we do.”
Here’s how he puts it:
As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news — sometimes big news, sometimes small — that drives that day’s conversation.
We are unapologetic in our premium on high velocity. In this focus on links and traffic we are not different from nearly all news sites these days, not just new publications but established ones like The New York Times.
Here’s what John Harris said in January, 2007 when Politico launched:
We won’t usually be chasing the story of the day. We’ll put our emphasis on the “backstories” — those that illuminate the personalities, relationships, clashes, ideas and political strategies playing out in the shadows of official Washington.
Guess the race to the bottom lasts about 18 months.
John Gruber flags a report that Apple sells two thirds of the computers sold at retail stores for over $1,000. I didn’t realize that Apple was doing that well or that the bottom had fallen so far out of the PC market. Are people who are buying high end PCs buying them online? What does this mean for the game industry, where the latest games need more powerful PCs to run?
With the news this morning that Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton supporters are openly pushing for Barack Obama to choose Hillary as his running mate, it has become apparent that the Clinton camp is going through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model of coping with death or tragedy.
Stage one is denial. I think we’ve all seen that in the fact that Hillary keeps loaning her failed campaign millions of dollars even though Obama’s delegate lead is insurmountable and the superdelegates keep shifting away from her.
Stage two is anger. We’ve seen Clinton’s anger on display for the past couple of weeks as she’s blamed the media and sexism for her failed campaign, and she’s tried to push the decertification of the Florida and Michigan primaries as some kind of civil rights issue.
It’s apparent that we’re now in stage three — bargaining. The Clinton camp are trying to bargain with the Obama campaign to get her name onto the ticket.
Personally, I’m ready for depression and then acceptance to kick in.
When all else fails, blame a programmer. Credit rating agency Moody’s blames a software error for granting inflated ratings to certain securities. However, as Andrew Leonard points out, it just so happens that Moody’s rival Standard & Poors rated the same securities identically. I guess it’s easier to blame the software than it is to admit you were cooking the books to help out your customers.
Peter Merholz on the habit of overwork among designers:
One of the things I’ve seen among many in the design profession is a willingness to put up with crappy jobs. Jobs where their talent and labor is exploited (this is doubtless true in other fields, but I suspect it’s especially true in ours) . The thing that cheeses me off most is overwork. It’s not uncommon for services firms to have their staff work 50+ hour weeks. I wouldn’t mind that if people were compensated accordingly. But most are simply compensated for “full-time” — there’s no over time. The thing is, I know their employer is billing out every one of those extra hours to the client. Which means that person is bringing a LOT of money into the firm, and not seeing it herself.
He suggests that designers put up with this because they don’t understand the economics of the business, but I doubt that’s right. It doesn’t take a degree from the University of Chicago to know that generally the rate your agency bills your time at is usually much larger than your hourly rate if you divide your salary by the number of hours you work per year. Indeed, in many cases people fail to understand the more complex economics of agency work. You have to fit office rent, employee benefits, non-billable employees and all of the other costs of running a business into that gap between the salary of billable workers and the amount that’s being billed. Plus, no matter how efficiently an agency is run, nobody bills all of their time.
That said, I do think that any agency which has built its business model around paying people for a 40 hour week and then “encouraging” them to work 50 hours a week is poorly run and operating in an unethical fashion, and it’s incredibly common. I remember being told in an employee review at an agency job years ago that I was perceived as going home too early. I was already working more than 40 hours a week, but my boss always worked later than I did and expected the people who worked for him to do so as well. It was that sort of corporate culture that contributed most to people working lots of extra hours.
It’s also worth noting that this sort of practice is common in many industries, and it has little to do with prestige. Graduates of the best law firms in the country are worked extremely hard in their early years as associates, and the entire medical profession is built on the exploitation of residents at hospitals. Game companies are notorious for overworking and underpaying their employees, and they have the luxury of doing so because so many programmers are eager to work on games rather than business process automation or other less glamorous projects.
Ultimately it’s up to the employee to decide what they value. If you’d rather work 80 hours a week on the new edition of Starcraft than work 40 hours a week on a payroll application for the state government, that’s a perfectly valid choice. Or if you’re working 50 hours a week and picking up skills and experience you couldn’t get any other way, who’s to complain? In the end, your relationship with your employer is like any other — just be sure that it’s one that works for you and that you’re getting out of it what you put into it.
In any case, if you’re are a Web developer or Web designer in the Raleigh area and want to work at an agency that doesn’t exploit its employees (by rule or by convention), please send me an email.
Last week we went to go see The Swell Season, the traveling name of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s band. If you don’t know who they are, go get the DVD for the movie Once and watch it immediately. The story behind the movie is pretty incredible in and of itself, so be sure to read that, too.
The concert was at Meymandi Concert Hall, and judging from the sound in our seats at the back of the upper balcony, otherwise known as the worst seats in the house, the acoustics of the room are impressive. Hansard sang the first song of the concert without a microphone or amplification of any kind, and we could hear him perfectly well from the very back. The view was not quite as good, I could barely see what the people on stage were doing.
The bad seats were the result of bad user experience. I knew what day the tickets were going on sale but I could not find them on the Ticketmaster web site. A couple of days later, I found a way to buy them going a completely different route, and judging from the seats, I was lucky to get them at all.
One thing that surprised me was the number of people taking pictures and video with their mobile phones. Trying to take pictures of a backlit subject in a dark room from a long way away with a non-zoom lens just isn’t going to work, people. I’m sure all of the pictures came out as white blobs in the center of a black field, but people were undeterred. There was also some guy a couple of rows up texting on his phone throughout the concert. All of these shenanigans would be fine except that a glowing mobile phone screen is really distracting. Just put your phone on vibrate and leave it your pocket during the concert. Thanks.
When we left the concert, at the merch table there were a bunch of cards provided by playedlastnight.com, a site that sells recordings of the concert you just attended. With the code on the card, you can buy the recording (in MP3 format) for $6, which seems to be a steal. They don’t have the recording of the show available for download quite yet, but when they do I’ll certainly buy it. This seems like a really nice way for bands to supplement their income, and I was surprised to see that the only two bands on the site right now are Iron & Wine and The Swell Season. I suspect there are other sites doing the same thing, but I don’t know about them.
Overall, this show left me wanting to go see more shows. If you have a chance to see The Swell Season, don’t miss it. The overall level of showmanship and audience engagement was outstanding.
Tobacco companies found themselves facing the need to argue that some of the scientific evidence used to support laws banning smoking in public places is “junk science“, but quickly realized that a campaign focused on tobacco-related research would be dismissed as transparently self-serving. So they instead spent their money to a create propaganda campaign that attacked scientific research on many fronts, including research that supported smoking bans. The end result? The execrable Web site JunkScience.com. I’m sure John Stossel fits in here somewhere as well.
Seems like there’s a little discussion percolating about whether it makes sense to support wiki-like markup languages for formatting text fields in your Web applications or to just support HTML. I took a position in this debate last year. That position was to favor supporting Markdown.
Here’s what I said:
I’ve basically decided at this point that whenever I write applications that allow users to enter blocks of text to be displayed on a Web page, I’m going to provide Markdown support. It follows conventions that people have been using in text-based email for years, it’s unobtrusive if you don’t know what it is, it plays nicely with embedded HTML markup, and it takes care of turning line feeds in text into paragraph tags in HTML. Best of all, text with Markdown in it is not only readable, it’s eye pleasing. What’s not to love? I’ve been using Markdown when posting to this site for a long time now, and have included it in some applications, but my thought at this point is, why not include it everywhere?
I’d stick by all of those arguments today. I like the idea of the raw content of the text fields in my database being readable before and after rendering, which HTML does not provide. Also, Markdown is not incompatible with HTML, so if you want to use HTML you can.
Also, for any sort of text field, you need to convert line breaks into paragraphs anyway, otherwise users who just want to enter a couple of paragraphs of text are forced to bring their own paragraph tags to the party, and that’s never fun.
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Would you want to work for this guy?
Here’s a quote:
It’s from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with John McCain. Would you want to work for this guy? The question was, “What do you think motivates Iran?”