Archive for April, 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 15, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Great. You paid your taxes again. So what is Uncle Sam doing with your money?
 This is the simplest and most accurate chart, in our opinion. |
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time in America when if someone said they were having a tea party, they were probably under ten years old, and pretending. I guess things haven’t changed that much; these days if someone’s talking about having a tea party, they probably have the intelligence of someone under ten years old, and I suppose being delusional is kind of like pretending. It’s pretty amazing that we get so riled up about taxes at all, we pay significantly lower taxes than most of the world. It’s arguably because of our revolutionary roots, but I think we’ve lost sight of an important detail: American revolutionaries weren’t just protesting taxes, they were protesting taxation without representation. If a contemporary tea partier had a better grasp of that fact, they would have been just as angry at the last (or last several) administrations as they are at the current one. The thing is, the vast majority of these angry people are really just that – angry people. Today’s New York Times Polling the Tea Party survey highlights that fact in an odd way; the majority of tea party supporters are Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. Sounds like a recipe for being angry to me, especially when a black man with an apparent sense of humanity is in office. Respondents also openly expressed that they believe the president is a Muslim socialist. Apparently they’ve never met Rahm Emmanuel or other rabidly capitalist key White House staffers. And in my opinion, the fact that the poll also suggests that many tea partiers are college-educated highlights nothing more than a failure of the educational system. Heh. Had to get that one in. So in honor of you having paid your taxes once again this year, we thought we’d help you figure out where your money went. There are lots of clever graphs and charts out there like Death and Taxes (2.4MB jpg!), which is a little too pictographic for my tastes, but is probably cool to have on the wall to ponder over time. There are also annoyingly distorted charts like this one from Turbotax that not only makes it look like your company’s CEO pays all the taxes, but uses the color pink for the defense budget. Personally, I found this info from the National Priorities Project to be the most straightforward, and they also clarify who’s paying the taxes, not just where your income tax dollars go. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m With The Brand: Musicians As Corporate Groupies
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 14, 2010 by admin in Music
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010You know it’s over when Iggy Pop Licenses “Lust For Life” to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines
If you’re a working musician who understands anything at all about how the music industry works and want to earn a decent living, you’ll quit your job right now and start a record label. Oh wait. That doesn’t even work anymore. So what’s a penniless musical genius to do these days to make a living? Well, if you’re Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails – the two acts always cited when talking about making a fortune online with your music – you’re all set. But the fact is that these are pretty exceptional cases, and both acts had a major label deal before their success on line. In reality, there probably are a lot of acts out there that are happy with what they’re making if they self-produce, choose the right distribution channels, and remember that oft-forgotten secret ingredient, HAVING FANS. We’ve come a long way since the days when the typical artist/label arrangement meant the band would sell a couple million units, the label would make a mil, and the band would end up 50 grand in debt. If you think that’s an exaggeration, read this classic piece by Steve Albini (probably best known for producing Nirvana’s In Utero) that breaks it down in detail, or this quick Wikipedia entry about “recoupment”. To get an idea of how many songs an artist has to sell these days – and how – before they make US minimum wage, check out this handy infographic. So while it’s possible these days to make some kind of living as a musician, how does one make “superstar” money? Well not by being Lady Gaga selling tunes on Spotify, that’s for sure. No, much like any other art-meets-business activity, whoring yourself is probably the best solution. Devo was one of the early geniuses of this, building their brand as anti-corporate rebels while making fistfuls of money as savvy and willing team players with Warner. More recently, according to this Wall Street Journal piece, we’d have to tip the hat to Black Eyed Peas. Apparently will.i.am pitches his band-slash-brand to major sponsors like BlackBerry with PowerPoint presentations. Yes, it’s hard to tell the band from the brands these days. In fact, try this clever FastCompany quiz to see if you can tell the names of the bands from those who name the brands. Read the rest of this entry »
Does PBS Frontline’s “Obama’s Deal” Indict Investigative Reporting Too?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 13, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010Now I know what the “BS” stands for, but what about the “P”?
Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, watching the PBS Frontline program Obama’s Deal may leave you with some rather muddled feelings. If you’re an Obamaphile, you’ll jump to the president’s defense saying “Yeah, well, it’s Washington. There have to be some dirty deals made to get anything done“. If you’re a conservative, you’ll probably be left scratching your head, saying “Jeez. I had NO IDEA this guy was so COOL“. The program comes across as a low-key indictment of the methods president Obama utilized to drive home his health care “victory”. Which I find a little ironic. Not that I think they’re wrong in their highbrow, liberal elitist tsk-tsking observation that Obama is in fact “just another politician”, and for mostly political reasons has just done more to benefit the insurance companies than he has to benefit the American people. No, it’s the fact that – as much as I love the brilliantly produced show – to bother with this topic at all is a sort of meta-ironic commentary on the sad state of investigative reporting itself. I mean, where was their “investigative reporting” when this was all going down? It’s sort of like if we all knew that Nixon was a conniving manipulative bastard who would do anything to achieve his ends, so engineered and executed the Watergate burglaries with public transparency, and then Woodward & Bernstein came along and reported it on it. Sorry Frontline, I love you. But if this is your idea of news, I’ll stick with the Daily Show.
Please Notify Kin’s Next Of Kin
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 12, 2010 by admin in Technology
Monday, April 12th, 2010The marketing of Microsoft’s new KIN may miss the mark in about a dozen ways, but at least it got the tech press talking about something other than the iP… PHEW! That was close.
Because even though it was born just today, we’re not sure how long it has to live. It’s rare that I’m utterly dumbfounded by the release of a tech product. But if you’re as perplexed as I am regarding what to think about Microsoft’s Kin, perhaps we can learn something together as I try to dispel my ignorance. There has been a quiet buzz about the product’s release for some time now (as codename “pink”), but today was the official rollout. Such as it was. According to available press materials, the Kin is targeted at “social networking-savvy teens and twenty-somethings”, but if you were aiming at this market, wouldn’t you want to roll your product out by having somebody like Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers pitch it, as opposed to a guy with a pot belly in a form-fitting shirt who – if you are a twentysomething – probably looks like your dad? The video below from Microsoft’s own press site blows it six ways to Sunday. It’s embeddable, but uses Silverlight; it’s presented by two fortyish guys who keep talking about their proposed market as “they”, sounding most of the time like their proposed market is a demographic they made up based on their ignorance and then created by looking for certain results; and it’s…well, BORING. I don’t think the device and related concepts are so far off the mark; I’d LOVE a phone that eases my transitions from social networking to web and e-mail to phone. And I mean one that isn’t the iPhone. But the promise of this sort of thing is inevitably so interwoven with the service that makes it work that I can’t imagine the Kin’s partnership with Verizon delivering all of this at a useful price. If you find the actual Kin site as annoyingly “hip two years ago” and cryptic as I did, Engadget has an expansive and thorough roundup of the product that puts all the pieces together. Which I think bodes poorly for the Kin, you really should be able to explain a product in a sentence or two if you’re marketing it to attention-impaired millenials. Read the rest of this entry »
Porn For The Blind
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 11, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, April 11th, 2010It’s an equal op-porn-tunity world. Bonus: Bill O’Reilly reads the steamy passages from his novel.
 “NSFW” in Braille |
A few years ago, as I fixed the porn-popup-infested computer of a friend (learn more about this strictly male phenomena here), we wondered jokingly what blind people do on the internet, since they can’t look at porn. On a lark we searched “porn for the blind” and came across – you guessed it – PornForTheBlind.org. Which, in spite of what it claims is its aim, is about as erotic as Bill O’Reilly reading the “sexy” parts (samples below) of his audio book Those Who Trespass