In unrelated news, Smoosh's video is online

Check it out.

Why iTunes sucks, briefly

It's a great store, it's well-integrated, the selection is good, the prices are okay, I like the presentation and recommendations, but the songs sound bad. They don't sound horrible, and if you don't really pay attention you might not notice, but for all of iTunes' claims about the quality of what you're downloading, their format at 128 sounds crappy.

Purchased songs are encoded using MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format, a high-quality format that rivals CD quality.

Bullll fucking shiiiiit. There's no definition of rivals that covers "is obviously inferior".

Noooww, I'm not a crazy audiophile with the $9,000 platinum interconnects. But I was comparing two songs, one off CD and the same version bought a long time ago off iTunes, and I was amazed at how clearly bad the iTunes was. For instance, the drums -- the iTunes is a background dum-dum-dum, but on CD you can actually make out the strike.

So if you want to buy a CD online, you'll probably find it for under $15 and get a strikingly better listen than the same CD off iTunes for $10. And then you can rip it, which takes all of a couple of minutes... but if the difference in quality is only $5 and it's enough to drive me to purchase the physical version, why isn't Apple in that business? If I could spend $15 and get a full album beautifully encoded, I'd probably do it every time, since almost all my listening is while writing at a computer or while working out and listening on my iPod.

I don't get it. Why build a giant, beautiful storefront and stock it with shoddy merchandise? No retailer does that.

Yay for Southwest

Sure am glad I booked my next Seattle-San Jose flight on Southwest. Many disturbing things from this story on a problem with an Alaska-Burbank flight. First, the obvious:

Alaska Airlines Flight 536 was 20 minutes out of Seattle and heading for Burbank, Calif., Monday afternoon when a thunderous blast rocked the plane.

Passengers gasped for air and grabbed their oxygen masks as the plane dropped from about 26,000 feet, passenger Jeremy Hermanns said by phone Tuesday.

Eek. Were passengers provided with discreet dry cleaning?

An investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said baggage handlers had bumped the plane's fuselage with loading equipment and caused "a crease" in the side of the aircraft. The handlers are contract workers hired to replace unionized workers in May.

Oh, hey, that's great. I guess those fears about how breaking the union would create safety issues were totally exaggerated.

Alaska saw an increase in ground-damage incidents at Sea-Tac after it replaced 472 unionized workers in May with workers from Menzies Aviation, based near London, the airline said. The switch contributed to a sharp increase in delayed departures from Sea-Tac.

So breaking the union actually caused late departures, which hurts the airline both directly and in annoyed travlers. And safety problems like this.

The real kicker, though, came right at the end:

Monday's incident came as the Seattle-based carrier faces renewed questions about its quality-assurance procedures, almost six years after the crash of Alaska Flight 261.

In January 2000, the MD-83 plunged into the ocean off Southern California, killing all 88 passengers and crew.

Federal investigators concluded that the crash resulted from maintenance shortcomings — specifically the failure to lubricate a key part in the plane's tail section called the jackscrew.

Now the FAA is examining Alaska's repair practices after three incidents in the past year raised new questions about its procedures for lubricating the part, including Alaska's oversight of work by outside contractors.

The incidents involved three planes undergoing overnight repairs at the time.

So five years ago, a problem with this one thing caused 88 people to die. The FAA issues revised guidelines for how to maintain and when to replace that part. Aaaand Alaska's having problems doing it? Holy mackeral.

This kind of thing makes me regret flying Alaska all the time. Ugh.

The relief of madness

(I swear, I try to post daily, I really do)

As one of the proprietors of a leading internet niche site, as you expect I get a lot of emailed criticism. Much of it is of the form:

You guys are [some horrible thing]. I'm so tired of you [wishing the team would fail/acting as cheerleaders for the team].

To which I always want to reply "Could I introduce you to all the people who email us taking the other side? Because if you all could just come to a consensus about what we could do better, I'd be happy to move in that direction."

I read it all looking for reasonable opinions, but to the point of this -- I got an email recently that went so far beyond the pale of normal criticism or even angry, these-would-be-fighting-words-if-I-ever-met-you ranting. It was frightening to even think that a baseball site could get someone that pissed off. So before I replied, I ran the person's name through Google, and pretty quickly found that this person, in addition to hating us, held some shocking, paranoid racial/ethnic/religious views.

For a moment, I was relieved to know that it wasn't only us, and that for whatever reason, we were the hate magnet of the hour, nothing more. And almost immediately, washing over that was the knowledge that somewhere out there was a person who was at some level legitimately unhinged, and even if that meant this was nothing personal after all, the existence of someone out there was just as regrettable as the horrible possibility that our posts had opened a deep well of rage in someone.

It was a strange feeling.

Reichert votes on pension requirement changes

This is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Many companies have long under-funded their pension benefits through a bunch of different ways, the most common of which is to project far too optimisitic returns on the pension's investments. For instance, the stock market's historical return has been 7%. Many plans assume they'll get a return of 10% or more every year forever in order to pay their obligations. This, of course, fails, and then (shockingly) the fund's can't pay people.

And that's just one thing that's gone wrong.

The argument against was that in tightening requirements, it would discourage companies from having the plans, or encourage them to default now. This seems strange to me: it's like arguing that stopping the fraudulent sale of unicorns would prevent people from buying unicorns. If the pension plan can't pay because it's not funded, it's not any less solvent now.

This doesn't prevent financial hijinks, of course, but it's certainly a good step towards it. Clap clap clap.

Not that anyone I know gets any kind of pension benefits these days. We're all on 401(k) plans now.

The Wheel, Part 2

Now let's say you're a music company president (or heck, a movie studio head). How do you cope with file sharing?

You control it yourself. Leak rips of releases early, but make them bad rips. Put some pops in there, make the bitrate low, maybe only include the left-side channel... whatever you want to do.

This does a couple things:
- You prevent high-quality ripping. Those rips will spread all over the place, and because no one can get the actual CD to make a better set of MP3s from, they'll have to use and spread bad ones or go without. This makes it much more difficult later for good rips to get to people.
- You sell more music through legitimate channels.

That second one seems counter-intuitive at first. But if someone's already out there listening to pirated music, they're going to be:
- cheapies who aren't going to buy music, since there are many subscription services and alternatives like iTunes
- normal people who might buy a CD, but like to sample new music for more than the 30s iTunes has, and don't want to subscribe to a service
- audiophile collectors

Cheapies might be satisfied with the crappy rips you're polluting with. They weren't going to buy anyway, though, so you can at least be satisfied that their ears are slowly rotting away from listening to 96kbs rips.

Normal people would get enough to make a purchasing decision, but the low quality is likely to drive them to make a buy/delete decision. No one's going to listen to a track over and over if it's got one of those weird "blip" moments at :34 and 1:55 that interrupts the chorus.

Audiophile collectors will be driven nuts and forced to either buy and rip themselves or form some tightly-knit circle of quality MP3 traders. And that might be bad but it also isolates them from the mainstream, and actually helps you pollute networks with low-quality rips in the future.

Control of both the legitimate and illegitimate distrubition channels is a powerful strategy.

The Wheel Part One

Say you run a pharmaceutical company. You have a highly lucrative business manufacturing drugs that treat erectile dysfunction. However, at the edges of your business are a couple of problems:
- gray marketeers buy drugs bound for export and re-sell them in the states through shady means
- black marketeers sell counterfeit drugs

What do you do? Law enforcement's going to prove ineffective in the long run, and stamping out one results in another one popping up. Plus, the gray marketeers are harming your reputation because someone in Estonia can't get the real thing because it's been rerouted.

You enter the black market: control the high and the low. You don't even have to do it directly: given a distributor of sufficently poor morals, you can supply them with a ton of drugs at a really low cost and watch them flood the black market. Because your drug only costs $.01/pill, you'll still make a huge profit undercutting what they would pay to pick off those Estonia-bound drugs, and the gray marketeers are screwed.

And voila, your problems are solved (and you've created a whole set of problems for other people). Your involvement in easily-deniable cut-out companies now makes you a ton of money, protects the legitimate supply of the drug, and profits go way, way up.

Book update

Houghton Mifflin seems really happy with the first draft, but it looks like Spring 07 now: they want time to get full galleys out to everyone and their family so they can get quotes, and it's not a particularly timely book, so I guess that's cool.

So good news: it's looking good, everyone's happy
Bad news: another year? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn.

Another #3? What are the chances?

The supposedly third-most-important member of Al-Qaida may have been killed by a missle in Pakistan.

This makes, by my count, five #3s killed or captured. So... say that they all really were the #3 man, and also that Al-Qaida's a pretty strictly vertical organization. Since 2001:
1-2: no problems
3-7: killed or captured

If you were in Al-Qaida and the #8 man back then, at this point you need to either quit or kill the #2 guy, because the US is coming for you. No kidding. This country is serious about pursuing anyone in Al-Qaida who isn't one of the two guys right at the top.