Tag: Premium

Why Do We Buy TV In Bulk?

Derek Thompson argues that, for the TV industry, “live sports is the keystone keeping the roof from collapsing”:

Networks have recognized that sports has unique social currency in live viewing, and they’ve stormed the marketplace in the last few years, throwing egregious sums of money in exchange for exclusive deals. Those costs are trickling up. As Patrick Hruby explained, “big time sports are taking a minimum of $84.90” out of each family’s budget even if they don’t care about sports. This amounts to a “sport tax” on families forced to pay for something they don’t watch. Cable companies sensing this backlash are starting to resist new sports networks. There is even chatter about what would happen if sports existed on a separate “tier” that untied the Gordian Knot of TV.

In a follow-up, he finds that TV a la carte is likely to be more expensive than the bundle. Relatedly, Meghan Neal believes that Google could threaten the cable companies:

Google’s certainly been lining up the resources to offer an All Access television experience. It has original programming on YouTube, TV shows and movies on Google Play, and the Google TV software (albeit in need of a redesign) to aggregate and manage the content while also looping in online streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu.

That’s a decent hand, but Google Fiber is the ace up the sleeve. The high-speed broadband and digital cable service is available in select cities, already offers a robust lineup of channels, including, for an extra fee, HBO. As of now most people still have to pay Comcast or Time Warner for broadband internet, which incentivizes their cable packages. If the fiber-optic network spreads nationwide, it’ll be the biggest threat to the cable giants in decades.

Kirsten Salyer adds:

Just don’t cancel your cable subscription yet. Google had discussions with media companies about a similar service about two years ago, without luck, and it’s not clear how far along plans are today, or when it would launch. There’s no guarantee Google could get the licensing deals it would need to put together a service that could compete with cable and satellite providers. Media companies might be reluctant to upset existing contracts in favor of a new online service and are generally more likely to give the best prices to providers with large numbers of subscribers.

The Campaign To Sell Obamacare

Yglesias emphasizes its importance:

The people most in need of health care services will presumably be the most motivated to sign up expeditiously on their own. From a humanitarian viewpoint, that’s fantastic. From a program stability viewpoint, however, it’s a bit of a problem. The state officials running marketplaces—and the federal ones running the marketplaces in the large number of GOP-controlled statesthat have refused to set up their own marketplaces—face the challenge of enrolling enough young and healthy people to create balance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that out of the approximately 20 percent of the population that’s currently uninsured or insured on the individual market, about 7 million people will sign up for an exchange plan in Obamacare’s first six months. The administration believes that in order to make the math work, out of that 7 million, about 2.7 million enrollees should come from the 18-to-30 age bracket.

To get the job done, they have essentially three arrows in their quiver: campaign-style demographic targeting, partnerships with people outside the formal federal health care apparatus, and substantial subsidies.

Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff detail the administration’s strategy:

Can the federal government convince young, healthy people to buy health insurance?

[David] Simas [director of public-opinion research and polling for President Obama’s reelection campaign] is focusing his formidable analytical resources on understanding this group. He begins clicking through a Powerpoint that holds reams of data on these young adults. “What do we know about them?” he said. “They’re overwhelmingly male.” Click. “They’re majority nonwhite.” Click. “One out of every three lives in California, Florida or Texas.” Click. “We have census maps breaking this down into the smallest geographic units.”

A couple more clicks and Simas is showing which television channels they like to watch (Spike TV, among others), which social media platforms they use (Twitter and Facebook), and who they listen to (“No surprise. It’s mom.”). “We can figure out the message that works best for this group,” Simas said.

The focus on young, minority voters. The heavy reliance on microtargeting. The enthusiasm about nontraditional communications channels. The analytics-rich modeling. It sounds like the Obama campaign. And administration officials don’t shy away from the comparison.

Racism And Richard Cohen’s Reality, Ctd

More readers talk about overcoming their discomfort of neighbors of a different race:

I’d like to add my $.02 to the thread, from personal experience.  Years ago, I was assaulted in my apartment in L.A.  At least ten of my white friends either assumed or asked if my attacker was black. I told them no – the only black guy around was my big, scary-looking neighbor who rushed to my rescue when he heard me screaming.  When the attacker was caught, he turned out to be (a) a serial rapist, suspected in hundreds of crimes and (b) a white, married Mormon.  I hadn’t thought much about racism up to that time, but the lesson couldn’t have been more clear, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Another reader:

A few years ago, I lived in and around NYC jumping from sublet to sublet with two travel suitcases and one condition: $500 rent. This brought me to a plethora of places I had never experienced in college: Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, etc. And my Mom was terrified. And honestly, I was too. A child of the ’80s, I had grown up with the firmly held belief that New York was a war zone. This was on top of the fact that I lived in closet spaces that had a curtain (or hung up sheet) in place of a door.

But money was tight, so I just buckled up. And after a few months, it barely even registered. I felt safe – safer than I had ever been. At first, I wrote my parents off as paranoid, but over time I began to realize that things just used to be a lot worse.

Having said that, I’ve never erased the dread that seeps in when I find myself on an empty street – late at night – with a stranger my brain identifies as poor, male, and non-white. But there’s a difference between having that fear and acting on it – and certainly institutionalizing it. I could concede to Cohen that his idealized version of racial profiling could reduce even more crime, but like terrorism, there is a point where pure, practical security infringes upon liberty and justice for all.

Another:

I currently live in Crown Heights, a notable, new and exciting (and “gentrifying” – wink, wink) part of Brooklyn.

There’s still lots of black people here, and I hope it stays that way. There’s some tension in that regard, but I like to think the twenties to thirties-something white folk (and rough white equivalents – Asians/Indians like myself) and the black folk of all ages get along pretty well. There’s one bar in particular around here that’s known as a very mixed spot and it’s always a great time and no one – white or black, Asian or Jew – fears being shot. New York’s gun laws must help – so too, I will admit, the city’s policing tactics. NYPD is everywhere, but not in a very conspicuous way. It’s very smart, and I honestly admire their tactics, in this regard at least.

Some of the black people in my neighborhood are undoubtedly “thuggish” to the outside world. Sometimes they stand in groups of 8-10 dudes, maybe a few chicks, and they are not dressed in corporate attire. I’m not going to pretend some uneasiness didn’t cross my mind the first few times I walked through such groups of people. But I got over those feelings very quickly and now it’s like whatever. Sometimes I hear echoes of those feelings whenever my parents ask me if living in Brooklyn is safe, which makes me cringe every time I hear it. Granted, I’m a tall brown dude myself. But all the white girls I know, including my roommates, travel pretty long distances on foot at night without any trouble.

So I understand the feeling Richard Cohen is describing, but so do most people, and we all got over the feeling very quickly. That’s why Ta-Neishi is so spot on with calling it banal racism. Yes, we all sometimes feel afraid around people who are unlike us. That’s almost the most uninteresting point ever made. The interesting part comes in learning to overcome that feeling.

Another:

There is a video that has been making the rounds lately, and if memory services, The Dish featured it [we did]. It’s of Dustin Hoffman being interviewed about his role in Tootsie. He makes the point that society’s stereotypes about what a woman should be had “brainwashed” him into cutting himself off from meeting many, many interesting people. That idea also applies to race.

In the past two weeks in Denver, I have been checking out at a grocery store and a Target, and black ladies were the checkers. They were warm and I just felt that they were very loving people. When I was younger I had a lot of black male and female friends, mostly acquired by playing sports. I loved being around these friends. I don’t know what it was, but they were just warm and full of heart and funny. Not that my other white friends weren’t also, but it was different.

Now that I am a middle-aged white guy with a family, I find that the opportunities for those friendships are simply not as easy. It’s like after school – high school and college – my path just does not cross with blacks. And I really miss them and that opportunity.

They’ve Shut Down Red Square!

Mass protests have broken out in Moscow following the show-trial conviction of opposition leader and Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny, whose final update on Twitter urged supporters to congregate at Manezhnaya Square. Tweets from the scene:

https://twitter.com/ilyamuz/status/357882813468512258

Of course, there have been indications of censorship:

https://twitter.com/ilyamuz/status/357859509856772096

And some ironies:

The situation is developing rapidly:

Within the last hour – and within hours of the start of the street protests – the regional prosecutor’s office announced that it had appealed Navalny’s detention. Navalny had announced earlier today that he would drop his mayoral campaign, but just minutes ago, RT reported that Navalny would in fact continue to run if released. It remains unclear how this news will affect the demonstrations, if at all.

Meanwhile, the European Union, the US ambassador to Russia, William Hague, and Mikhail Gorbachev have expressed concern about Navalny’s five-year sentence, and Russian stocks have tumbled following the news. Arrests have been reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Daniel Sandford reports that Navalny was defiant at the sentencing:

In his closing remarks to the judge, Alexei Navalny was unrepentant. “We will destroy this feudal society that is robbing all of us,” he raged. “If somebody thought that on hearing the threat of six years in prison I was going to run away abroad or hide somewhere, they were mistaken. I cannot run away from who I am. I have nothing else but this, and I don’t want to do anything else but to help my country. To work for my fellow citizens.”

Navalny supporters say the election campaign will continue even if he is jailed. “This can’t go on forever,” he added. “A situation in which 140 million people in one of the biggest and richest countries in the world are subjugated by a handful of worthless monsters. They are not even oligarchs, who built up their wealth through shrewdness or wisdom. They are a bunch of former Komsomol activists, turned democrats, turned patriots, who grabbed everything into their own hands.”

The Economist says the conviction likely won’t be the end for Navalny:

Although only half of the country knows anything about the case against Mr. Navalny, most of those who do see it as retribution for his anti-corruption campaign, not as a way to stop him running for election. Yet jailing him for five years will mean that Sergei Sobyanin, the incumbent mayor, wins a tainted vote on September 8th. As it happens, Mr. Sobyanin was ahead of Mr. Navalny in the polls, partly because Muscovites see the role of a mayor as administrative, not political. Indeed, from a political viewpoint Mr. Navalny could have been hurt more by an apparent defeat in a mayoral election than by being sent to jail. …Mikhail Khodorkovksy, a former oil tycoon who challenged Mr. Putin over corruption in 2003, has been in jail ever since and is unlikely to come out even when his second term expires next year. Mr. Navalny’s sentence is also unlikely to be his final one. But as he himself said, “If anyone thinks that I or my colleagues will cease our activity because of this trial…they are gravely mistaken.”

The Interpreter and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are live-blogging. Live-feed here.

When Can A Fetus Feel Pain?

A 19 weeks old fetal bone development is

Ronald Bailey reviews research on the subject. On the one hand:

[Dr. Maureen Condic, an associate professor of neurobiology and adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine] does acknowledge that the “long-range connections within the cortex that some believe to be required for consciousness do not arise until much later, around 22-24 weeks.” But she believes that the fetal neural structures needed to detect noxious stimuli are in place by 8 to 10 weeks of development. She further asserts: “There is universal agreement that pain is detected by the fetus in the first trimester. The debate concerns how pain is experienced, i.e., whether a fetus has the same pain experience as a newborn or an adult would have.”

As evidence that it is possible to feel pain without a cortex Condic cites the fact that children born without a cortex and animals whose cortices have been removed will withdraw from pinches, burns, and so forth. As further evidence for fetal pain, Condic cites studies showing that various medical treatments applied to fetuses in the womb boost their stress hormone levels.

On the basis of this evidence, Condic contends, “Direct experimental evidence from adult humans contradicts that the assertion…that mature pain perception requires cortical circuitry.”

On the other:

The RCOG’s report, Fetal Awareness: A Review of Research and Recommendations for Practice was issued in March 2010. “In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence in the fetus,” it found, “it was apparent that connections from the periphery [of the fetal body] to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation.” In other words, while fetuses can react to pain, at the 24-week stage of brain development there is no subject present that is capable of experiencing pain.

(Photo: A 19 weeks old fetal bone development is displayed in VAM Design Center of Budapest on April 2, 2012 during an exhibition of the ‘Bodies2’. This unique exhibit is a display of several authentic human specimens, including whole bodies, individual organs and transparent body slices preserved through a special process called plastination. By Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.)

An Authoritarian Fanatic For Wyoming, Ctd

Ponnuru sizes up Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign:

It’s definitely not going to fly if people think of her as an outsider who’s just trying to establish a dynasty. She has to avoid any hint of that. But I do think she has at hand a critique of Enzi that might work with Wyoming Republicans. When he was running for the Senate, Ted Cruz said that he would consider himself a disappointment if all he did with his time in office was to compile a conservative voting record. He presented himself as someone who would be more of an activist than that. Enzi has a conservative voting record, but some Republicans in Wyoming might want someone who has done more to move the debate than he has. Cheney, if she wants to run that way, could find that Republicans agree.

But there’s one more wrinkle: She (presumably) favors same-sex marriage, while Enzi doesn’t — which would make this an interesting test of how important that issue is to Republicans.

Chait sees her visibility as a drawback for the GOP as a whole:

No. 1 problem here is that Cheney, if she wins, will become a high-profile spokesperson, and will join the Limbaughs, Palins, and Glenn Becks as defining the GOP as the party of crazy.

No. 2 problem is that she will make it hard for other Republicans to nudge their party to the center, or even to prevent it from moving even farther right. One of the problems faced by the pragmatic wing of the party is that its elected officials can’t say even mildly heterodox things without incurring the wrath of the true-believing faithful, and Cheney could become one more loud true believer flaying any colleagues who gesture in the direction of sanity.

Liz Cheney won’t cost the Republicans a seat in Wyoming. The real fear is that she’ll cost it seats elsewhere.

Francis Wilkinson’s view:

If she wins, which she well may, her victory may prove to be another dose of self-administered poison for Republicans. One lesson will be clear: No one is conservative enough to be safe from internal attack.

Earlier Dish on Cheney’s campaign here.

The Story Of “Nigger Jeff”

11-court-west-birmingham

Alan Jacobs tells it:

All I can say in my defense is that I never hurled a stone at him, or shouted abuse. But I stood by, many a time, as others did those things, and I neither walked away nor averted my eyes. I never held anyone’s cloak, but then I was never asked to. I watched it all, gripping a rock in my hand as though I were preparing to use it — so that no one would turn on me with anger or contempt — and I always stood a little behind them so they couldn’t see that I wasn’t throwing anything. I was smaller and younger than the rest of them, and they were smaller and younger than him. In my memory he seems almost a full-grown man; I suppose he was eleven or twelve.

We called him Nigger Jeff. I have never doubted that Jeff was indeed his name, though as I write this account I find myself asking, for the first time, how we could have known: I never heard any of the boys speak to him except in cries of hatred, and I never knew anyone else who knew him. It occurs to me now that, if his name was Jeff, there had to have been at least a brief moment of human contact and exchange — perhaps not even involving Jeff, perhaps one of the boys’ mothers talked to Jeff’s mother. But we grasp what’s available for support or stability. It’s bad to call a boy Nigger Jeff, but worse still to call him just Nigger. A name counts for something.

Continued here. Update from a reader:

I read the story about “Nigger Jeff” and it brought back a memory from almost 62 years ago.

I was raised in a small coal mining town in Southern Illinois.  My dad owned a grocery store that served everyone in town, the black population included.  We all, of course, knew each other anyway (how can you not know everyone when there are only 350 people in town?) and as a young child, I remember our black neighbors as well as our white ones.  One in particular was a woman of generous size who made the best barbeque in the world.  Every year, twice a year, like clockwork, the smell of barbecue roasting on her outdoor huge grill would permeate the town and everyone would run to her house to buy ribs, pork for sandwiches, etc.  I can still taste it and have found nothing to compare.

She shopped at my dad’s store and one January she came into the store when I was there.  I had gotten a black doll from Santa that year and I ran to her and said so proudly…”look at my nigger baby”.  She sat down in the one chair in my dad’s store, said “come here baby” and sat me on her ample lap.  I’m not sure what the words she used but she made it clear to my five-year-old brain that that word was just not acceptable. I still have trouble saying it (writing it is hard enough).

I suppose if more of us had those kinds of connections with people who are not like us and who were willing to educate a five-year-old little white girl about the harm that a word can cause, the world would be a better place …

Dope Dealing Doctors

Obama Admin. Unveils New Policy Easing Medical Marijuana ProsecutionsThe Colorado State Auditor checks in (pdf) on Colorado’s medical marijuana industry:

As of October 2012, a total of 903 physicians had recommended medical marijuana for the 108,000 patients holding valid red cards. Twelve physicians recommended medical marijuana for 50 percent of those patients, including one physician with more than 8,400 patients on the Registry.

Mark Kleiman is uncomfortable with how medical marijuana laws have been exploited by such doctors:

The strategy of using quasi-medical legalization as a means of normalizing consumption and moving the political acceptability of full commercial legalization has been a great success; apparently most voters either have short memories (of when they were being assured that “medical marijuana” was all about the patients and had nothing to do with full-on legalization) or don’t mind being bullshat in a good cause. And I’m not unhappy with the outcome. Nor am I naive about political tactics: Bismarck was right about laws and sausages.

Still, the whole deal – and especially the role of the “kush docs” – makes me a little sick to my stomach.

So smoke some weed, dude. It’s great for nausea. If that is the worst that can happen – fee-for-service medicine capturing yet another simple medication – I’m not so downcast. Peter Guither responds:

Yes, many legalizers came to the issue without much knowledge about the medical benefits of marijuana. And yes, they discovered that medical marijuana was also good for the legalization movement. They realized that the mass public would be less likely to be scared by a product that was used by grandmothers with cancer, which could defang the decades of government propaganda. And so they learned more about medical marijuana. And, lo and behold, they discovered it was really true. And they met inspirational people whose illness was transformed by using medical marijuana. And so they became legalizers who also cared about medical marijuana. It was not incompatible at all. Sure, they were “using” medical marijuana as a foot in the door for legalization, but only because that was the best way to also insure that sick people would be able to get their medicine.

(Photo: Dave Warden, a bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a non-profit co-operative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty.)

And The Greatest American Novel Film Is …

A reader writes:

I have read The Godfather. Once. While I agree with  some of Mr. Ferraro’s points on the substance of the story, it is the writing that should instantly disqualify it from being anyone’s candidate for “greatest American novel.” Sloppy, juvenile, repetitive, rambling, indulgent, oblivious to the ghosts of Shakespeare and Proust face-palming their way through every page. I boggled at the number of times Mario Puzo went out of his way to describe the unclenching anal sphincter of a mobster in the throes of death, like it was his favorite bit of trivia (I feel for his party guests). And not even the film adaptation – a classic, indeed – could make any damn sense of what Michael was up to during his year in Sicily. This trash makes Stephanie Meyer’s oeuvre seem downright tolerable. If we’re going to nominate it for anything, how about the next eight or nine Poseur Awards?

Another piles on:

I found Prof. Ferraro’s pick LUDICROUS.  Aesthetically speaking, The Godfather is a disaster.  Terrible prose, rioting metaphors, ham-fisted plotting.  It’s my go-to example of a terrible book that made a wonderful movie.  Here’s a typical passage:

Luca Brasi was indeed a man to frighten the devil in hell himself. Short, squat, massive-skulled, his presence sent out alarm bells of danger. His face was stamped into a mask of fury. The eyes were brown but with none of the warmth of that color, more a deadly tan. The mouth was not so much cruel as lifeless; thin, rubbery and the color of veal.

There’s more where that came from – so much more. I feel that either Prof. Ferraro was deliberately provocative, or has somehow confused the book and the movie.  He offered this as something to sit next to Lolita, for God’s sake!

And another:

By happy coincidence, I picked up the novel and read it a couple of months ago.  I love the movies (I and II).  I can’t pass one up when I’m flipping channels.  But the book is really awful.  Coppola took the good parts, transcribed them literally, and made them much better with that fabulous cast and magnificent ambience.  But the stuff that didn’t make his script (subplots about Johnny Fontaine’s drunken Dino-like sidekick and the size of Sonny’s girlfriend’s vagina) are preposterous and wretchedly written.

I’m glad Mario Puzo developed the myth, but even more glad that Francis Coppola turned it into something magic.

Readers are also listing their picks for the greatest American novel on our Facebook page.

A Family-Friendly Glass Ceiling

After moving to France with her child and confronting a brutal job market for mothers, Claire Lundberg asks how “a country that is so outwardly progressive [is] still plagued with such basic workplace inequalities”:

While France has a wonderful safety net for women, much of it is designed to promote the growth of families as a way of boosting the birthrate. Indeed, families in France receive numerous supports and subsidies the more children they have. A family with two children is eligible for an automatic monthly stipend of 125 euros, regardless of income. With three children, a family is designated a “Famille Nombreuse,” which includes a raise in the automatic stipend, a possible further subsidy of up to 500 euros a month for the mother if she chooses not to return to work, and even reduced admission for transportation, museums, and amusement parks. And, at four children, a woman becomes eligible for the “medaille de la famille,” an honorary medal from the French government.

Douthat responds:

Family-friendly socialism, [scholar Kay Hymowitz] notes, does seem to encourage more women to stay in the workforce after they have children. But it also helps explain the persistence of “the glass ceilings, as well as stubbornly large wage gaps in more progressive countries,” because working women tend to be shunted more decisively onto a mommy track than they are in the United States. And it shunts them in other ways as well: To borrow an insight Neil Gilbert, the author of one of the must-read books on this topic, the social-democratic combination of high tax rates and a large state-run caregiving apparatus creates a strong economic incentive for mothers to leave their children with professional caregivers while taking a job … as a professional caregiver. This boosts workforce participation and G.D.P. — but whether it boosts actual female welfare seems at least somewhat debatable.