While this blog entry might be considered self-serving (then again, what blog isn’t?) I need to tell you about an interesting Web site I found. It is interesting both for authors and for people who like the read. Those of you who cannot read probably aren’t reading this post anyway.

Harper Collins, one of the mega publishing houses with many imprints, has finally caved to the constant bitch-slapping it received about printing the same five books over and over again. They created a Web site which lets authors post some/all of their work for public review and comment. Book readers can communicate directly with the authors. If they like a book they can choose to “back” the book on the site. There is a convoluted formula to calculate ranking with. The site welcomes regular readers. Actually, it encourages the regular readers to join. It’s all free. Yes, the site has some technical problems, but those are mostly for authors trying to upload things.

What does HC get out of this? Well, periodically it takes the top N ranked books and forces their in-house editors to review them (along with the user feedback) for possible publishing contract. Of course, we have those who shouldn’t be writing out there trying to play ranking games to keep their book on the editor’s desk, but I could care less about that. I posted the promotional version of Infinite Exposure on the site mainly to get the feedback from readers. I’m not going to change anything in the book since I have it finalized for printing, but I will attempt to incorporate the comments into anything new I write.

http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=13804

So far the only major drawback I find with the site is that there is no manner of reading off-line. I don’t currently have a net-book (and until they get the battery life up to seven days instead of 70 minutes, I don’t want one). This means I have to read sitting at my desk, or lugging my laptop with power cable, into bed. This has become a regular occurrence for much of the business world it appears. Rather than fix the battery problem, the hard drive problem, and the software problem, a new product is created to make all of those problems more bearable.

http://www.brookstone.com/home-office-computer-accessories_e-pad-laptop-lap-desk.html?bkiid=categoryLandingPage_Home_Home_Office|C4CategoryProdList1FDT|6905345

Oh well. If you like being able to read books before they are published, and in many cases helping to shape their content or helping them to actually get published, you should check out http://www.authonomy.com.

I’ve actually been pondering this question for a while. I haven’t done any significant amount of numbers research, but it does look quite possible. I mean, Target should go after Amazon.com since Amazon has infringed on many of Target’s more profitable markets. Unlike most of the other brick and mortar chains in “blue collar to low end white collar” shopping world, Target has a reputation for having stores which are clean and bright and workers that actually feel a sense of pride about working there. Walmart, on the other hand, has states attempting to get legislation banning it from opening any more stores, not to mention documentaries put out about the horrors of the company, along with news stories about illegal alien cleaning crews…not going to be the type of chain anyone wants to see get bigger.

Kmart, what can one say about Kmart? For many of us, it was the place our parents had to shop. The chain was big in many areas which had been factory towns at a time when the factories were closing down due to jobs being sent overseas (sound familiar?) This was long before they had “Big K” and “Super Kmart” locations. It was a place you went for blue collar basic clothes, dress clothing which was mostly polyester, and cheap-enough-to-let-the-kids-play-with sporting goods supplies. Both JC Penny and Sears had better dress clothing, not good, but better. Along came a movie named “Rain Man” and Kmart became the definition of un-cool. It began to crumble financially, then somehow, Sears, a company which invented the catalog business then went bankrupt at it, had enough money to buy Kmart. Not too many weeks ago there was a story on the WBBM noon business wire about Sears being in financial trouble yet again. It’s kind of sad, because the addition of appliances and what could now actually be called a valid tool and automotive section has helped the larger Kmart locations at least look like they could be turning around.

In order to do something different, you have to have vision. It took a while for me to understand why Target got into the $9 hardcover book fight with Walmart. I’ve come to the conclusion that the retail analysts you hear interviewed on business radio and TV simply don’t have a clue. Target isn’t after Walmart because Walmart will implode on its own. There are too many lawsuits, too many news segments, too many documentaries, and too many governments passing “living wage” and “big box store” laws aimed directly at Walmart for Walmart to remain a viable company. Few companies in this world have a lower reputation for employee respect than Walmart. Quite simply, the days are numbered for that company. When the economy comes back all of the way Walmart will simply go away. It’s done the “dine and dive” on too many taxing bodies and retail site owners.

A visit to the Kmart web site doesn’t show any evidence that they have gotten into the $9 hardcover fight. I don’t expect they will. I firmly believe Walmart did it as some flash-in-the-pan marketing tactic, in part to take news cycles away from the Bruce Springsteen music CD backlash. Given Walmart’s reputation I cannot see a lot of independent author/publishers doing an exclusive deal with Walmart. They have a long history of shafting their vendors and you can even find articles about it in magazines like Kiplinger’s. A store with a good reputation, like Target, could make the entire thing work.

I’ve kind of covered the economics before, but you might not have understood. As an independent self-published author, I can get a 5.5 x 8.5 hard cover book with dust jacket of roughly 400 pages printed for around $4 per copy if and only if I have an ink print run of roughly 5,000 copies. Under the current author-publisher-distributor-bookstore model, I would front the entire print run for over eight months before I saw a dime from a book store. I would also be paying a lot of shipping charges for returns from chain store locations. The $20K for the print run would have an additional $8-12K in marketing expenses along with $2-4K in shipping. I would be financing that one way or another for at least eight months before I received payments from the book stores which may or may not cover the cost of the print run, let alone the other expenses. The list price on that book would be $24. The distributor would take a 55% discount which would mean $10.80 per copy (less withholding for potential future returns) would get sent to me. Anywhere from 5%-20% of that print run is going to come back “damaged” if it was stocked in an actual retail store. Trust me.

At the end of eight months on store shelves approximately 4,000 copies would be in sellable condition, the rest would have to be given away or pulped. So, I would take up to $36K out of pocket for eight months in the hopes of receiving $43K back and netting a whopping $7K. For the sake of argument, we will assume I had the cash on-hand and wasn’t financing part of this on a credit card at 20%. Publishers want a “run-away-best-seller” not just so they can make a fast buck, but because they want less than 5% coming back as returns.

Let us take a look at the $9 hardcover market. I still have the printing costs, but there are no returns. There is a one time freight shipping cost of less than $1000 to ship to a Target (or other chain) distribution center. Terms are net-30 or net-45 depending upon how negotiations went. I sell the books for $6/copy and get paid for all of them. $30K - $21K = $9K in under two months. Granted, I would be doing a lot less marketing. I would probably be willing to spend about $2K (what most major publishers actually spend marketing a new book by a new author) on getting reviews done, but the rest of the marketing would be up to the retail chain which has its own massive Web site and is creating sale flyers every week.

The downside for Target is they would have to hire 5-10 “readers” at the corporate level. These people would have to actually read at least a few chapters of every submitted book and decide what to stock on the shelves. I believe currently much of the stocking requirements are driven by automated reporting from book sales rating services much like the recording industry has/had for record sales.

Of course, Target (or the chain store that does it) could take it one final step. They could strike right where Amazon lives. The country has many printing firms which use actual ink and specialize in book print runs of less than 50,000. If target had the readers making choices, and the self-publishers had everything ready to go, Target could simply sign a contract with the self-publisher, pay $2.25/copy to the self-publisher for every copy they print, and contract directly with a printing house. They would probably need to contract with one near each distribution center, get them unified in equipment, and split the print runs across each location to minimize shipping costs. You know Target (or the chain which does this) is going to get a much better price than the self-publisher for printing. The printing will be done with actual ink so it won’t be a tacky and disgusting POD book like many being sold on Amazon today.

In truth, once Target finishes heading down this path, I see Kmart/Sears following suit. Anyone who has shopped those two chains knows that they are both used to having exclusive slices of overlapping markets. For those of you who don’t have to do your own shopping, let me spell it out: If I want Irish Spring scented Speed Stick, I have to get it at Kmart. The powered or talc scented stuff I have to get at Target, or the other way around. Both chains carry the product line, but each store appears to have certain scents you can only get there. As consumers, we are used to having to make more than one stop to get everything we need.

There are certainly more than enough self-publishers out there for both Kmart and Target to have a couple thousand titles which are only available in print form at their store. The really bad stories would be relegated to using POD and being sold on Amazon. The ground breaking works of fiction would most likely still sell via the traditional channels since there would be a much higher rate of return. Of course, we are only talking about general fiction and young adult book types here. Reference, research, professional, etc. would all still do best going through regular channels, since the margins are usually higher on those, I don’t see that changing. Fiction, however, is quickly becoming a commodity.

Oddly enough, the timing is just about right for Target/Kmart to make a play into the general reading market. There are a lot of print shops that would drool to get the business, and eBooks are poised to take the bottom end of the market out. The paperback novel is quickly heading the way of the buggy whip. Quite simply $9 hard cover and $4 or less ebook pricing will vaporize the $4 paperback market. (Out of politeness, I won’t say what it will do to the $10+ paperback market.)

One or both chains should have no trouble adding ebook sales to their Web site. I just received an announcement from what used to be ShortCovers. They have changed their name to Kobo and spun off from their parent company. I found this paragraph interesting in the announcement:

Through its new strategic partners, Kobo has distribution in the U.S., Canada, UK, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and other territories. Core to Kobo’s strategy is making eReading available through partners everywhere and as such, the company will be working to enable a broad range of retailers, device manufacturers, and operators who will benefit from our leading eReading service.

I don’t know what all of the ins and outs are with the deal. I do know that Borders is one of the investors, which struck me as odd given the above paragraph. Perhaps they have come to the conclusion that it’s better to take a small cut than try to lock the market? I don’t know. It definitely sounds like the new company is looking to add more retailers and views itself more as a bundled service they could offer than a competitor.

I do know that Amazon has had a ToolCrib site selling tools to customers. I also know they have some other site selling housewares since I was searching for a wall lamp on-line and that store came up. Everybody knows they have been into books, movies, and video games for a while. I haven’t dug to find what else they sell, but when they branched out to compete with other retailers in traditional markets, they basically offered up the challenge for those retailers to venture into Amazon’s market.

The real question I have right now is: Will Barnes & Noble create their own on-line video rental business to compete with Block Buster and Netflix, or will Target do that too? You see, most of us already have to go to Target and Kmart to buy things like pit stick, socks, and undies. We could drop off our rentals while picking other things up. There would only be outbound shipping charges for the rental service. These chains have a lot of 24hr locations now. For people like me in the boonies, returns might not be so easy, but being able to drop them off and midnight and know they were scanned into the system at the same time would be nice. I would think it would reduce the number of damaged DVDs as well.

Barnes & Noble has a different problem if they want to go into the rental business. The “drop off” feature won’t have the 24hr benefits. I would hazard a guess they would move towards more of the traditional video rental business, not because it would make money directly, but because it would keep customers in their stores longer. BN doesn’t stock milk, eggs, and undies. Not a lot of people read books today. Most people who buy movies from a retail store (instead of on-line) tend to buy them from a store they are already in.

Ah well. It will be interesting to see if Target takes the gloves off and tries to drive a stake through the heart of Amazon in 2010. The chain certainly has the financial muscle and marketing savy to take them out, especially if Kmart follows suit. Of course, the natural extension of exclusive titles is for each chain to have its own book club.

I knew that if I didn’t manage to stay away from the family farm this day would finally come, but I had kind of put it out of my mind. Today it hit me.

You would have to understand a little bit about the situation to understand why. I grew up on a family farm back when being a neighbor actually meant something. Some of my earliest memories are of when I finally became old enough to bail hay with him and his wife. Everybody had livestock back then So everybody’s kids had to follow the bailers around. His wife passed away a few years ago and has been deeply missed by those who remember her.

He was always quiet. His wife tended to be the one who did most of the talking, yet he could talk up a storm when she wasn’t around. I must admit I had heard people say he tried to make up for lost time when she wasn’t around, but only those who really knew them would say such things and they would be said with affection.

He had a dry, and kind of sly, quiet sense of humor. It worked well with his voice. Not a lot of people caught onto it at first, but it was quite entertaining for those who were aware of it.

We had a running joke for many years. Today would have been the day it would have been told. It wasn’t a joke most outsiders would get, but perhaps those who are farmers would understand. You see, the grain bin they had to hold soybeans simply wasn’t big enough to hold the crop most years. Every year that I happened to be home to help with harvest I would always get stuck with the job of hauling in. (Pretty much the worst job at harvest time. Hooking and unhooking wagons, in and out of the tractor 100-150 times per day.) Invariably, about the time the bin would be full, he could come over to chat.

“We got a little problem” I would say.

“Oh?”

“It’s not all going to fit in the bin.”

“Well jump up and down on it, that should help.”

“I did that already.”

“Oh.”

“I’m about to take this one down and bring back another wagon. Do you think you can climb up there and add another ring to the bin before I get back?”

“I’ll get right on that.”

Of course, if you don’t know what a “ring” is in a grain bin, or the fact they have to be added from the bottom, not the top, it’s probably not that funny to you. Probably means even less if you don’t know the man was in his 70s and shouldn’t have been climbing ladders at all.

Today, I was helping put the last wagon of soybeans in the bin. Today was the day we would have had our once per year joke. Today was the day I realized I missed him.

There are those among us who live to travel. They get a gleam in their eye packing and thinking of some place new. Sometimes they travel for weeks or months on end, but, for the most part, they always come home.

For most of us, there is something incredibly special about home. Even when we move away and create lives in another location, it is a very long time before that “home” replaces home. In large part, I think several of the annual holidays, while formed around some religious themes, were actually created more due to our need to come home and for those there to have us come home. When we are in our youth and away it is more because those there need us to return, some time after we cross 40 it is more because we need to go home and remember.

Even when you don’t have kids of your own, you can become so caught up in the what and the where that you lose track of the most important “w” of them all, who. When you start to realize you don’t know who you are anymore, it is a comfort to go home and find yourself again. At times I wonder just how bad off our country is going to be given so many families have lost their homes. Their kids won’t have a place to come home to later in life. Oh, I’m sure their parents will find a dwelling of some kind, but it might not have that feeling of home.

Oddly enough, this essay isn’t about the economy or politics or even IT. This little soul bearing has to do with my grandmother. She’s about to turn 95 and has the advanced dementia which sets in when Alzheimers has taken root along with the body starting to shut down. For her it has been a slow and horrible exit. Some times she remembers me, but I don’t expect it anymore. When she does come around into quasi-lucid conversation she cries about wanting nothing other than to go home. She doesn’t have a home anymore. Even if she did, she has to have the full-time medical care that could only be provided by a facility much like the one she is in. She is in the best to be found around here. We know this because she has been in other places before.

Still, there is a twisting of the knife when you hear that. It is conditioned into use from childhood from those first times we were separated from home and no matter how great the place was we were at, we only wanted to be home. With Grandparent’s Day around the corner it’s an extra turn of the rusty blade.

There has been a lot of chatter from politicians about “ euthanasia panels” for a government run health plan. They use it as a scare tactic to try and defeat any kind of change in the medical industry. I can tell you right now that I would be the first to sign my name up and say, before I get like this, let me sleep the coming sleep.

Perhaps I can blame this all on “Royal Pains”, “ In Plain Sight”, or “Torchwood: Children of Earth”, but I’ve been seeing this “Hand Me Downs” Subaru commercial a lot lately. What a great concept from a marketing firm. Scavenge eBay and garage sales for a few “almost working” iconic things from the late 70s and early 80s, then show a kid being handed down all of them. What better way to hook the “long in the tooth crowd” into watching.

Shortly after the “Space Invaders” game, you see the kid lugging a huge monitor and keyboard of brownish color down a hallway. What struck me was the fact the keyboard on the top had its function keys on the right. The geek in me remembers that particular trait was iconic of a few brands/models, prior to IBM moving them to the left, then deciding the left really sucked and moving them to the top. Their only saving grace was that they put the numeric keypad on the right which is used a lot more often by OpenVMS developers editing in a terminal emulator.

Was that computer really a VIC-20? The only pictures I can find show them in white. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=252 It would make sense if they chose that particular computer. It was the first “personal” computer to sell 1 million units. It is even funnier if you think about the story of how it came to be. Jack Tramiel mandated the company build a new computer which could be sold through retail outlets for $300 to use up the surplus 1Kbitx4 SRAM modules and this 22 column VIC chip which had no other market. (Full story here: http://en.allexperts.com/e/c/co/commodore_vic-20.htm)

Admittedly, the VIC-20 had every design flaw known to the industry, at least in retrospect, but they also had a killer ad campaign. Knowing that a very high percentage of computer geeks were Star Trek fans, they got none other than William Shatner to ask kids and parents alike “Why buy just a video game?” Another major marketing catch phrase around the product was “The one to grow with.” The real problem was, you couldn’t grow at all…at least you couldn’t grow the computer…you couldn’t get it to have both an 80 column screen and 64K of RAM..at least not at the same time. Everything kept re-using $A000 so nothing worked together.

What is even more astounding about the VIC-20 than its success, was the fact it knew the price point. Even in the 1980s when computer programming graduates started at just under $20K per year the target was a $300 computer. I ran across a snippet in an article found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/958307/Sunset-Days-VIC-20-TPUG-Feb-1985 that I want to share with you:

All that is needed to revive the VIC-20 is ideas. Maybe they will be your ideas. Give it some thought. In the meantime, remember: it’s now how much you get, it’s how little it costs. Caveat emptor.

Time has proven that author correct. Today, we have a new VIC-20. Like the VIC-20, they have what passes for a real keyboard in the current market and the successful ones sell for that magic $300 price point. We don’t call them a VIC-20 though, we call them Netbooks. I read a lot of disparaging remarks from “industry analysts” and others whose personal wealth is directly or indirectly related to the profitability of the companies producing chips/computers. None of them can see a user wanting a $300 computer. None of them probably know anyone who still has a computer running Windows 98, but there are a lot of people still using those old PS/2 Model 50 computers major corporations tossed from their desktops nearly two decades ago.

What we don’t have, yet, is a Netbook manufacturer smart enough to only use the hard drive for booting and forced user storage, but use a flash or thumb drive for all /tmp and swap storage. I know we don’t have this, although there is rumor that the Netbook specific version of Ubuntu is heading in that very direction. Why? Because the market wants a $300 Netbook with a real keyboard and 7 day battery. Perhaps we will even let them cheat and put a solar panel on the cover which can bleed some power back into the battery whenever it sees light.

People who say Netbooks aren’t game changing don’t understand the power of cheap computers. They don’t understand the thinking behind “One Laptop Per Child” and they don’t know computer history at all. A young Linus Tovalds was given a VIC-20 as his first computer. Torvalds later upgraded to a Sinclair QL, then to a 386 PC. For those of you who don’t know, Torvalds later went on to write the Linux operating system kernel.

I’m still not going to buy a Subaru, but their marketing company does know how to put together a very memorable commercial. Now if Subaru only knew enough about building cars to make one that could get out of its own way when you are trying to do ordinary life threatening things like merge on a Chicago tollway.

Now that we have finished planting and are about caught up with the crop spraying, I’ve had more time to catch up on my reading. It may shock many of you, but I don’t subscribe to any geek magazines anymore. I think there is a DB2 magazine that keep showing up, but that is only because I haven’t figured out how to get myself off it. Hell, I’m not even certain why I started receiving it, but I believe it had something to do with my days of subscribing to DevCon for my OS/2 development.

Much of the reading I’ve been catching up on has to do with the writing magazines I receive. I actually pay for these magazines, unlike the vast majority of geek magazines I used to receive. When you take the time to pay for a magazine in this day and age, it means that you actually read it…or that you are in that financial world which spends $20 million per year on “entertainment and living” expenses and simply can’t keep track of all the $20 magazine subscriptions you have floating around the world.

I have noticed one thing which strikes me as quite odd in all of this reading. The bulk of the “successful author” interviews I’ve been reading talk about how they force themselves to write 1500 words per day when they are writing. What struck me as odd is that so many seem to be tossing out this exact number. It is almost as if the magazines themselves agreed on that number and stick it into every interview article. Perhaps these writers don’t partake of nicotine, caffeine and booze? Mayhap the publishing industry won’t exist if they raise taxes on any of these. Okay, they can raise taxes on coffee all they want since that is the beverage of the damned, but not the other sources of caffeine. We’ve all read the statements and seen the television commercials which talk about how Hemingway was “at his best in the morning”. If you actually read up about Hemingway you will find that he was thought/known to be an alcoholic and that he smoked various forms of tobacco. The TV commercials simply didn’t finish out the sentence: “Hemingway was at his best in the morning when he was imbibing caffeine and nicotine to get rid of the hang over.”

Back in mid-April I gave up on the nicotine, not because it was ruining my life or health, but because they jacked the tax on it yet again. (See blog about Holier Than Thou Tax.) I have noticed that my writing, when I have time to write, doesn’t come as easily without it. Oh, I have things to say, but I simply can’t “chase a roll”. When I was writing “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be An Application Developer” it was nothing for me to write 18-26 hours at a stretch. I’m working on four books right now and haven’t managed to put more than a four hour stretch into any of them. I have to jump to a different project rather than chase a roll.

What really strikes me about 1500 word comment is how unrealistic it sounds. Just a little while ago I completed the blog entry “Book Publishing and the Porn Industry”. According to OpenOffice the article weighed in around 1300 words. I didn’t spend 45 minutes on the thing. (Yes, I have to use OpenOffice for blog entries because Lotus Symphony doesn’t have a plug-in to publish directly to my Blog.) This article will weigh in at more than a few hundred. The question which keeps haunting my mind is “Do they hate what they are writing or is it simply because they cannot type?”

This blog entry will expand a little bit more on why you don’t buy books, and you owe it all to the lady who cut my hair today. I didn’t even ask her name, so I cannot tell you exactly who to blame. No, we didn’t talk about porn while she cut my hair. Like far too many people in the world, she’s a closet writer. We talked a little bit about writing while she was lowering my ears.

She claimed her problem with writing wasn’t the writing itself, but the fact she had to outline and stick to it rigidly, otherwise when she started writing one story it branched out to three or more stories that had nothing to do with the first one. I told her a good writer would simply add one more chapter before the ending and tie them all together. She wasn’t big on that idea, but admitted she hadn’t tried it.

Hours later, after I was home and catching up on email, I began to think about the easiest way to blend her stories together. I could actually hear her shock when I thought about….”simply set the story in Wisconsin and have a fuel truck fall off an overpass into a brewery parking lot.” Oh, don’t call that story contrived. It wasn’t all that long ago when that exact thing actually happened. I remember watching it on the Channel 7 news. All of the reporters were saying just how lucky the place had been. Had the truck went off the overpass half an hour later, people would have been lined up waiting to be let into work. It wasn’t too much later in the day when we got all of the follow up stories about everyone on the planning commission who was opposed to building an overpass with that sharp of a curve for just this reason, and the documents stating all of the buildings had to be moved out from under the overpass in the name of public safety.

I went searching the Web for this story so I could post a link, but that story must have been from back when I was in college. There did seem to be quite a few “truck fell from overpass” stories though. During the month I was driving an 18 wheeler around the country, I often wondered just how many went off overpasses. Have you ever driven south to north on the overpasses in St. Louis where they seem to go up forever, but limit truck speed to 45MPH?

At any rate, that got me thinking a little more about background and back story. It also got me thinking about the TV series Crash. I watched some of the episodes of Crash, and liked the concept, but I missed some, and kind of got out of the groove on it. Crash is/was a STARZ series that actually came out stating all of the different story lines were going to collied like a traffic accident and you wouldn’t be able to look away. I must admit, while some of the story lines were kind of “Soap Opera” in nature, others were quite good. It was somewhat difficult to see how they were going to bring it all together. It might have actually been a better sell if they hadn’t told people they were going to do it. While it pulled me in to watch it initially, it did take some of the magic away from the show.

In today’s publishing world, a person would have to self publish a story which culminated with a tanker truck falling off an overpass into a brewery parking lot tying all/most of your story lines together. We’ve heard the old maxim “If your story doesn’t really get going until page 56, throw out the first 50 pages!” It wasn’t until today that I realized this is exactly what happened to the porn industry.

When VCRs first came onto the market (and standardized on a format) the porn industry was a license to print money. Movies had good budgets and people really liked them. Okay, some people watched them only for the sex, but others watched a real movie which didn’t have to be coy about the sex. In the case of my brother, I think he was simply going alphabetically through all of the titles in the back room.

I was in some form of college when he brought home “Corporate Assets”. I think I can say in all honesty that this is the last porn movie I ever watched. Yes, I’ve seen 3 minute snippets here and there, but I haven’t actually watched a porn movie since then. Here is some information on it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196472/

Had they wanted to get into regular theaters, they could have simply cut about 15 minutes of hard core and done well. This was a well written story, and for porn, incredibly well acted. Most people do not see that massive left hook coming at the end, I know I didn’t. Some reviewers call this “the last movie of Adult’s Golden Era”, and I have to agree. It has been more than 20 years since I’ve seen it and I still remember it.

What is striking about this tale is that immediately after the release of that movie, porn adapted the maxim “If your characters don’t start having sex until page 56 of your script, throw out the first 50 pages.” Porn basically devolved into videos where characters didn’t even start with their clothes on. It went from being something most women liked to watch to something which disgusted them, and rightly so. Hell, I wouldn’t even rent it, and I was in my 20’s then. Occasionally someone would tell me about some incredible moment in some otherwise worthless flick and I would rent it, fast forward as far as they told me, watch the scene, then rewind and return the video. Usually I wouldn’t even bother to do that. Porn simply became a bunch of “collections from the cutting room floor” in my mind.

Of all of those scenes I was told to watch, there is exactly ONE that I remember. I even kept the movie a while and showed the scene to some female friends. A guy had built this round table with a whole in the center which was just high enough off the ground for him to lie down under. A girl got on top and well…yeah…but the cool part was the table had ball bearings so it could be spun while they were doing that. It was totally unexpected. Nearly every 20-something girl I showed that scene to said they were game to try it if I could build the table…I just never got around to building the table. I still remember that table though. I don’t remember anything else about any of the other things. Eventually, as I got older and my friends got married, I stopped getting recommendations about porn to rent. Everybody says that free amateur Internet porn is killing the porn industry. Well, no. What is killing the porn industry is the fact that the stuff being passed out for free on the Internet is just as bad as the stuff being pressed onto DVD, but we will tolerate it for free. You haven’t put out a movie like “ Corporate Assets” since 1985 and everybody knows it.

Perhaps “Corporate Assets” needed the porn scenes to keep the lesser minds involved in a story which wasn’t going to really get going until the last 15 minutes. Shakespeare had to sprinkle jokes and humor in his plays to quiet the rabble in the pit. Two things are certain. Shakespeare wouldn’t get published and “Corporate Assets” wouldn’t get filmed today.

Yeah Right.

Some of you have probably already found this link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/making-microsoft-nicer-through-patents.ars. I had to laugh my ass off when I read it. Can you say “Scared shitless about a new Justice Department Probe?” Knew you could.

Microsoft has always operated like the right hand of the Antichrist. Many even believe Bill Gates is the embodiment of the Antichrist himself. You will hear them quote things like “His deeds and doctrine will eventually expose him to the world.” Well, it appears that Microsoft itself has recognized the merit of that quote. They are now on a massive PR campaign with a book, interviews, and Bill Gates giving away tons of cash to try and divert attention from themselves. I’m just waiting to hear either Bill Gates or Microsoft is “giving the land to Isreal” followed by 3.5 years of peace.

Let’s be real here. Microsoft has been Patient Zero when it comes to Corporate AIDS. Every company which gets in bed with them eventually contracts a “Wasting Disease” which rots it away. Just look at that poor bastard who developed the Mosaic browser! MS shafted him with a “percent of sales” deal, then bundled the browser into the OS (which still wasn’t an OS at the time) for free.

How about Lattice? Remember MS selling private labeled Lattice C compilers and their agreement not to develop their own? Remember when MS suddenly launched their own C compiler and it was incompatible with all previous object libraries? Is Lattice even in business anymore?

Then there is Novel. Remember when Novel was the king of PC network file servers and purchased DR DOS? MS used every underhanded and blatantly illegal trick it knew to make it almost impossible to get a reliable Netware connection. Then corporate America emptied its colon on MS for such underhanded tactics. Novel purchased DR DOS, which was far more robust than any release of MS DOS, and suddenly the Antichrist found itself burning on the corporate cross. It entered into a “negotiation” period with Novel to “improve cross networking functionality”, but mandated they stop all development on DR DOS while the negotiations were occurring. Next thing you know, MS comes out with a new release of DOS, breaks off negotiations, and starts shipping its own, far more buggy, networking products. Novel, for all intents and purposes, went out of business. Now, almost an actual company again with SuSE, it gets into bed with MS one more time. The Linux community has re-written most of the OpenSource licenses to basically remove Novel’s ability to ship much, if anything, with SuSE.

Now we have MS doing pratfalls, chuckling about how much it had in common with Spain during the days of the Conquistadors, and basically promising to “wear a condom this time, honest injun!”

Of course, when they find out three little things, it will probably all backfire. One, like every expression on the face of the planet, some find it offensive. Two, there’s actually a film company called Honest Injun Films Ltd. Three, the massively religious group most likely to recognize the antichrist find condoms offensive.

Once again, MS could get it right even when they try to steal it.

Talking heads and media pundits are all talking about how we are nearing a bottom or “leveling off” of the current recession. Personally, I don’t think we’ve found the bottom yet. I think once we find the bottom, the world is going to stay there for a long time. The “turn around” everyone talks about will simply get us back to the condition we were in several weeks prior to the bottom, then we will stay there a long time.

I’m not basing this line of thought on doctored up accounting data or other reports seer sizzled up by the same accounting firms who participated in the stock market and mortgage fraud cases we’ve been hearing about. I’m basing this on current trends and human nature. I think it will be at least a 30% contraction and it will last for 3-8 years.

Prior to our finding out just how void of ethics the mortgage/housing industry was (we always knew about the Realtors), the credit card companies were held out as the bowels of the Antichrist. They would issue credit cards to people’s dogs if an application had been filled out. (That’s not an exaggeration, I know someone that actually got a credit card for their dog.) Credit card companies had a seemingly endless list of tricks to jack up interest rates or charge excessive fees. Consumers got used to being rectally violated by these practices and started playing the “ 0% Interest Balance Transfer” game as a way of getting even. Of course, that game would only yield victory to those who stopped using their credit card for anything until the entire balance was paid off. You see, you had to pay the 0% balance off before any payments were applied to your new charges.

Eight years ago, it was nothing to run into someone with five credit cards in their wallet. Nearly everyone of these cards would have some kind of balance that was older than one month. There was a large group of people who thought it was OK to buy $140 pair of sun glasses, then make minimum monthly payments to their credit cards. Of course, the credit card companies encouraged this behavior. They even paid Congress to change the bankruptcy laws without lowering the maximum allowable interest rate. Retailers flocked to accept credit cards and also encouraged consumers to pay it off over time. If it wasn’t for consumers living well beyond their means, CEOs couldn’t possibly get those multi-million dollar bonuses.

Today, we see that the White House is about to spank the major credit card companies like they’ve never been spanked before. When they left the meeting in Washington almost none stopped to talk with reporters. They knew it was coming. There has been a mad rush to jack up interest rates on every card out there. Granted, a lot of that money grubbing is because the credit card issuers had a lot of exposure to the mortgage crisis. They think if they squeeze unemployed people who are behind on their mortgages harder from the credit card side, those people will suddenly pay things off. Make no mistake, it is usually “mortgages” for these people. They bought a house, went hog wild with the Martha Stewart decorating thing, ended up with massive balances on their credit cards, took out a home equity loan to pay off the credit cards, then ran balances up again. Now they are upside down on a mortgage and have just had their credit card limit slashed below their outstanding balance to generate more fees for the issuer.

Being a consultant, I try to never carry balances on my cards. I also try to never finance a car. I’ve seen too many consultants rack up large debt while on a long term contract only to have that contract suddenly end due to some funding/policy issue at the client site. Those are the consultants you find slithering into those absolute shit contracts offered up by EDS or the worse ones offered up by Verizon through the illegal alien vendor management system. The billing rate doesn’t even begin to touch a living wage, but it generates cash flow to keep gas in the tank and food on the table. It won’t begin to pay off a single debt. Those consultants will spend each day on the phone continuing to look for a new contract which actually pays a living wage. It doesn’t take long before they are fired, not because they couldn’t do the work, but because they put forth the level of effort such a wage deserved.

Enough consumers have either now been thrust into this undesirable situation or know people in such a situation, that credit card practices are going to change. The credit card companies have already started one massive push to bleed people while they can. I just got rid of my Bank of America card because they sent a letter stating the new interest rate minimum would be 8.65%+ the highest prime rate published in the Wall Street Journal for the prior two weeks. Talk about assholes! Since I don’t carry a balance, I called to cancel the card. My final bill arrived today. I also ordered them to remove me from their contact list. Most people forget that step. They have to actually remove you if you request it at the time of card cancellation. This stops all of those annoying “We Want You Back” letters.

I don’t think I’m alone in my actions. While I don’t consider myself the cream of the crop for credit card companies, (and since I locked down all of my credit to avoid identity theft, they can’t tell what I am), I can’t imagine people who don’t have a balance on a card getting a letter like the one I received and not cancelling the card. There was a time I was one of those people with five credit cards in my wallet (though I usually didn’t carry a balance on any), now I’m a person with exactly one credit card. From what I hear a lot of people are getting down to one or fewer credit cards. Now that most banks pass out debit cards for free and you can even use them to buy on-line through any vendor that accepts the credit cards of the same label, I don’t see a lot of overspending happening in the future.

How does this equate to a 30% or better global economy reduction? Many economies relied on Americans living well beyond their means. Some countries had even banked their entire economic and infrastructure growth on being able to sell as much as they wanted to American consumers. China is feeling our downturn even more than we are feeling it. The world economy isn’t ready to face American consumers having fewer than two credit cards in their wallet and never carrying a balance, but that day is quickly approaching. Once we hit bottom, that’s as high as we are going for a long time. It took over 50 years after the Great Depression hit before Americans started to live beyond their means in any serious way. It’ll take twice that long now. This time we don’t have to carry cash and checks.

Over the past few weeks we have been hearing stories about how every government in the Union is trying to increase revenue since the corrupt bastards that run the banking system were deregulated during the Clinton administration and allowed to continue running unchecked through the Bush administration flattened the economy. Since all of the elected criminals…errr…I mean officials view themselves as holier than thou (at least trying to portray such an image until we find out about cigar use in the oral office), the first thing they reach for is a new “sin” tax. Here in IL, that tax increase, plus mild price hikes by the manufacturer nearly doubled the cost of tobacco products a couple of weeks ago.

You know, this holier than thou sh*t has really gotta stop. They have already fraudulently lowered the blood alcohol level so far that you cannot walk through a room and smell an open can of beer with any hope of passing. Before they did that they taxed alcohol nearly out of existence, then they wondered why all of their tax revenue vanish. Gee, Einstein, what do you think happened?

Here in IL, and pretty much every other state that I have been to, the police departments have been horribly corrupted by both the legislature and the people who run them. Now; every raise, bonus, promotion, equipment upgrade, set of brakes for the squad car you’re driving, etc. all hinges on how many DUIs you issue. Law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to be law enforcement officers anymore. The system has forced them into becoming revenue generation machines simply to draw a paycheck.

Recently there was a big round up of police officers in Harvey IL on corruption charges of renting out their badges to provide security for drug dealers. The TV news had all kinds of officials putting their face in front of the camera saying how shocked they were that law enforcement officers would so quickly rent out their badge and the public trust. Yeah right! You manufactured them! You, the same person they are interviewing and a member of that same holier-than-thou cult which give us Al Capone, Murder Incorporated, and the first Heroin pipeline into America. You couldn’t remove all sin and form your religious Utopia with Prohibition, so now you are trying to get all sins taxed out of existence. I mean why wouldn’t you? Just look at the rousing success you had with Prohibition! That raid in Harvey was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your current round of success. In less than two years people will look back on the historic reports about corruption in the New Orleans police departments as the Norman Rockwell era.

I have finally figured out how to put this highly detrimental movement in check and help balance the budgets. The Holier Than Thou Tax. A $3 tax on every bible printed or imported into the United States. Doesn’t matter if they give them away, if it is created, it is taxed at the time of creation. Tax must be paid prior to the units leaving the printer. Same tax on every Tanakh and Quran and any other bible type book I’ve forgotten about. A $10 meeting tax will be levied for every service or other religious event occuring in a place of worship with the tax to be paid within 7 days of the event or service. Furthermore, the tax exempt status of all religious groups will be null and void, they will pay the same tax all other businesses pay.

Taxation has been favoring a religious agenda for far too long. It is time to enforce the separation of church and state by implementing the Holier Than Thou Tax. Uncle Sam will start looking forward to Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. They might even find the funds to help the Post Office stay open 7 days per week to keep the stream of revenue coming in.