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Category: Political musings

Ryan Holiday “sex sells” is dead, long live “outrage sells”

Ryan Holiday “sex sells” is dead, long live “outrage sells”

How does that old adage go, “Sex sells”? I always wondered what would take its place. Now, I think we know. The new adage appears to be: “Outrage sells”.

In this excellent article, Ryan Holiday talks about how he created a marketing campaign in 2009 on a shoestring budget about a fictional internet blogger Tucker Max in order to promote an independent film. They then proceeded to troll the public and our institutions on their way to huge sales. They reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, sold out college bus tours, and made millions in ticket, dvd, and book sales. Often using our public institutions and media against each other – all for publicity.

“But my favorite was the campaign in Chicago—the only major city where we could afford transit advertising. After placing a series of offensive ads on buses and the metro, from my office I alternated between calling in angry complaints to the Chicago CTA and sending angry emails to city officials with reporters cc’d, until ‘under pressure,’ they announced that they would be banning our advertisements and returning our money. Then we put out a press release denouncing this cowardly decision.

I’ve never seen so much publicity. It was madness.”

It all worked. Ryan Holiday published all the manipulation he did and how uncontrollably successful it was in his book, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He’s been approached by numerous people saying that this book is now ‘their bible’.

He describes his book thusly:

You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.

I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can. In today’s culture… Blogs like Gawker, Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post drive the media agenda. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines.Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch-online and off. Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it.

He talks about how outrage can be leveraged with ruthless exactness:

Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity: Because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility. Someone like Milo or Mike Cernovich doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning.

While many worried about “normalizing” their behavior, that’s the one thing they don’t want to happen. The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience.

Let’s say 9 out of 10 people who hear something Milo says will find it repulsive and juvenile. But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him. If a CNN story reaches 100,000 people, that’s 90,000 people all patting themselves on the back for how smart and decent they are. They’re just missing the fact that the 10,000 new people that just heard about Milo for the first time. The same goes for when you angrily share on Facebook some godawful thing one of these people has said. The vast majority of your friends rush to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for the first time.

His solution is an observation:

I realize there is legitimate fear of normalizing repulsive behavior. I’m not suggesting anyone give credence to real Nazi doctrine. However, historically, it’s usually true that banning and blocking usually has the opposite of its intended effect. Effective counterinsurgency usually involves bargaining, partnering and the reestablishment of norms—not hardlines.

In this, I think he’s hit the nail on the head. We must admit these things are out there. But instead of trying to silence them, ban them, shut them up, and break their windows – we must engage and defuse them. We may not like it, but other tactics only pour gas on the fire.

Personally, I think this is where a person could take a few notes on how God engaged with our broken humanity. I hear a fellow went out teaching this and they wrote a lot of that down in a book somewhere… 🙂

A few points to consider on that front:

  • The Christian always separates the infinite worth and beauty of the individual human person who is “created in the image of God” from their sin. This can be brutally hard at times – especially when that person wishes you real harm. This is how evil is disarmed. It is hard to hate others when someone sees the infinite beauty and possibility in you that they often do not see themselves. Hate is disarmed by love.
  • The cross is the center of the Christian life. It means dying to yourself to do what is best for others. As Louis CK said: The only time you should look at another’s bowl is to see if they have enough, not if you got your ‘fair’ share. It may require you to turn the other cheek. It might even cost your life as in the case of Christ.
  • A steadfast peace in your heart that comes from deep and daily relationship with God. With this relationship, cultivated in daily prayer and silence, you find something that can endure any trial and bring peace to any situation.
  • Trust in Christ that when you follow him in this wisdom, you will be taken care of. I have seen this many times in my own life and the life of my friends who have become priests. It may not be what you expect, but those that follow Christ are never abandoned.
  • Speaking only the truth. Without hyperbole, exaggeration, or outright lies. Let your ‘Yes’ mean yes, and your ‘No’ mean no. Anything else is from the evil one.
Hawking joins voices saying automation and AI are going to decimate the middle class

Hawking joins voices saying automation and AI are going to decimate the middle class

Steven Hawking added his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned that AI and automation are going to decimate middle class jobs, worsen inequality, and increase the risk of significant political upheaval.

Article here

A report put out in February 2016 by Citibank with the University of Oxford predicted that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation. In the UK, 35% are. In China, it’s a whopping 77%. Hawking writes that automation will, ” accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.”

This is what I’ve said for some time. AI allows you to replace whole swaths of employees. We can see how this is playing out by looking at the economies AirBnB and Uber are setting up. Instead of these nationwide chains of workers facilitating this new industry, the work is largely done by servers and AI on commoditized server farms. Instead of that money coming into a company of thousands, machine learning and automation can do it with only hundreds. Those hundreds are in narrow job titles with many traditional disciplines no longer needed. Further, it’s not hard to see how this concentrates money from a nation-wide chain into an incredibly small number of pockets instead of a host of employees they might have hired in years past.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for putting our heads in the sand and ignoring these new economies or saying we should stop them. That’s impossible. However, as Hawking and economists note,  “We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.”

So what will be lost and what will be left? Just like the industrial revolution – certain kinds of jobs will be affected, but others will not. Creative, supervisory, and health care roles are likely safe. Skilled workers that know how to build and maintain AI server systems as well. But jobs like cashiers, tellers, secretaries, logistics, quantitative marketing/planning/strategy, financial planning, truck drivers, possibly even train conductors or airline pilots could all see major parts of their job functions replaced with machine learning algorithms. We’re already seeing this with automated checkouts, automated driving vehicles, and logistics AI’s are already out-performing replacing live counterparts. Even if one’s job is not replaced, there might only need to be one or two persons in the cockpit instead of 3 to 5.

This is going to come to a head in our lifetimes, and it’s very important we start talking and thinking about it now.

Genic.AI is 4 for 4 on presidential elections

Genic.AI is 4 for 4 on presidential elections

The polls have consistently shown Hillary Clinton with a lead over Donald Trump, and yet, Trump just shocked the media, the polls, and the world with his victory. But it wasn’t a shock to some. Especially Genic.AI – a company that specializes in AI’s to solve complex problems. MogIA predicted his win months ago.

Genic.AI wrote a machine learning AI called MogIA that predicted the primaries and the last 4 elections perfectly. MogIA used 20 million data points from online platforms like Google, YouTube, and Twitter to come up with its predictions. It correctly predicted the past three presidential elections as well as the Democratic and Republican primaries. Now it’s 4 for 4.

“While most algorithms suffer from programmers/developer’s biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and develop expert systems without discarding any data,” Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai who developed MogIA, told CNBC. In October, Rai declared that Trump’s social media engagement had overtaken that of Barack Obama’s in 2008 by 25%, foreshadowing a Republican victory on November 8th. The predictions are now true.

Consequences.

It is not just that AI’s are doing complex tasks, it’s that they increasingly doing complex evaluative tasks better than the best humans in the whole world. These AI’s can be written by a few (or just one) persons using off-the-shelf compute. This makes it available to almost anyone – at prices far below the price of an average yearly employee salary. – Me 2014

Some are calling this the Truman defeats Dewey moment for our elections. What happens when several, or even one, cheaply made machine AI’s can now predict the results of huge upset elections months in advance better than thousands of people working at polling companies and the most astute political campaign machines like Mrs Clinton’s? Do those old companies and employees have any value anymore?

What would an election look like if we threw out the usual political rulebooks and went fully into AI guided campaigns? How will the face of online companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google that trade in your postings, opinions, and data shape our elections? How do we protect against their manipulation – such as the case where former Facebook employees admitted to regularly and actively censor conservative news? Or worse, protect against manipulation by domestic/foreign agents that might be able to write counter-AI’s to manipulate postings.

I think we’re very much on the breakthrough moment of AI’s taking over these very kinds of decisions and jobs in our society. I also believe we need to start looking at how to protect ourselves from equally capable AI’s that will attempt to manipulate results (such as we see today with AI bots writing product reviews) and companies that will attempt to skew data.

Englightening

Englightening

This is a graph of the ‘majority’ faith of each county in the US as of 2000.  According to the chart, a ‘majority’ religion can claim more than 50% of the county’s population.  I didn’t realize how Catholic most of the country is.  I’m also surprised there aren’t more gray counties where it’s split between 3 or nobody has a ‘majority’.

I happen to know the Oregon numbers seem strange.  The local paper listed Catholics as only 35% of the general population (statewide).  Yet it is still the largest denominational church attended in Oregon by a wide margin.  Why?  Because more than 50% of the population don’t profess to belong to any denominational faith.  Hence  I was expect more grey squares.

I think a lot of folks (especially the average person in the pew) do not realize how powerful and how much they can influence things in our country.  With voter turnout averaging less than 50% in a good number of elections, 50% of the country isn’t being represented.  So in essence, each person that is voting is getting 2 votes (one for the guy that didn’t vote).  Seen in that light, it’s no wonder our president and our congress have such amazingly low approval ratings (you did know congress has a lower approval rating than Bush right?)

Are we in a spiral?  We’re dissatisfied with our public leaders so we don’t think our vote will matter – so we vote less.  This makes our public leaders elected by fewer, more active/vocal voters who likely do not represent us or our values well. Wash, rinse, repeat?

Yet the cure is very simple – get out there and vote.  Participate in the process, and it will start reflecting you.

Two interesting thoughts from recent discussions

Two interesting thoughts from recent discussions

Thoughts from recent talks with friends/coworkers:

  1. If we went to government funded healthcare, it would likely have an impact on lawsuit cases. Instead of the astronomical lawsuits for injury claims, it is likely one could no longer sue for hundreds of millions for their medial care – since that care would be ‘freely’ available. Now, they could probably still sue for loss of limbs/ability to work/anguish/etc. They might also still be able to sue for special care needed for rehab or the like – depending on where govt care ended… But the burden of payment on these injuries would shift to the government (us) where it might be much more reasonably paid for (discounted rates) and half of it wouldn’t go to the lawyers.
  2. Having the tight urban growth boundary around Portland that we do (a line around the city where nobody can build houses outside of) has arguably kept it from experiencing a lot of the recent mortgage collapse pain or falling prices. The price of housing is a local phenomenon – primarily dictacted by demand, incomes, and availability. An urban growth boundary has kept availability lower than other places (no urban sprawl), and even if demand or average area income drops, the boundary keeps availability tighter and helps cushion any downturns.
2nd worse market day of 07 and mortgage bottom 9 mo away

2nd worse market day of 07 and mortgage bottom 9 mo away

As if it couldn’t sting more. It’s a painful article to read.

News article

The prediction now is that the bottom of the foreclosure and mortgage woes will not be till mid-2008. AIG reports that currently 10% of all sub-prime mortgages are 60 days or more delinquent; and an estimate 20% of all sub primes will default by 2011. Overseas lenders are having to freeze and inject funds to prop up their shaky markets. Unfortunately, the pain is spreading in the markets – driving folks to bonds. Could be some very rocky markets in the next 3-4 months.

Biggest problem is if this starts badly snowballing and collapsing. The slowing/dropping prices of homes causes people to default more than just gracefully selling/bow out since they can’t just sell the property and cover their mortgages. The defaults cause houses to come back on the market. If enough of this happens, a surplus develops – which drives the prices down – making it more likely you’ll default on your ARM since you can’t sell your house at enough to cover your loan, which drives house prices down, which …wash, rinse, and repeat. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be getting out of control, but people are going to take a pounding – investors, owners, and mortgage companies. Question is, how much of a pounding.

Fast and loose mortgage collapses and the stories on the radio

Fast and loose mortgage collapses and the stories on the radio

Nationally, the sub-prime and fast-and-loose mortgage broker collapses continue to grow and spread. The tone darkened as a Bill Wheaton, an economist from MIT predicted that nationwide, several million folks will probably end up losing their homes.Overall, though, I have mixed feelings about this situation. Even in the boom, I wondered where the heck the government, investors, and brick-n-mortar banks were on watching these guys. It was absolutely ridiculous what people were pulling on these mortgage contracts – such as no income verification to speak of (put whatever you want down for your annual salary, etc). Too many people were getting into mortgages that even 10 years ago would have been laughed off the table. When I took a cursory look at some of the mortgage deals people were pushing through a few years back – I could tell these guys were used car salesmen at best. Now we hear lots of stories about people who got into a house or refinanced and were ‘tricked’ and ‘duped’ into these products. Yes, there is a lot of blame to be laid on these sleaze-ball lenders and front-men who are now slithering away to have the company take the fall for them – they definitely ruined lives when they themselves knew the products were bad for most people. Those front-line scum, and the managers that pushed it, should see jail time or at least lengthy loss of licensing for financial products. It’s also time for some

But wait a minute people – didn’t *we* do our homework? There is still a bit of blame to be placed on us as consumers for not picking up “Mortgages for Dummies” and doing the most basic, bare minimal amount of work you needed to do. Ten minutes looking at historical interest rates the last 20 years, understanding the bare minimum of how a sub-prime works, and doing some math with what your budget can take would have shown you what would happen. There’s definitely a shame-on-you that I’m sure many are now getting in very painful monthly doses right now each time their ARM goes up; or for that roof repair you didn’t plan for, or your car unexpected breaks down, etc. I don’t envy or place tons of blame on all consumers for what is happening. However, it’s time we grew up and learn that living paycheck to paycheck in NOT the way to run your life; and that proper budgeting involves much more than just thinking about what monthly payment you can afford next month – as this guy knows. I find it staggering that so many folks entered into the biggest investment of their lives and didn’t do any more homework than read a brochure they gave or just took their word for it. Just doing math to figure out your next monthly payment isn’t doing your financial homework or being a well-informed consumer – it’s a recipe for disaster. We can all read crazy amounts of stuff about the latest fad diet’s detailed food analysis, or which renewable resource our products are coming from and ban those we don’t like – but can’t spent 1 hour on the biggest outlays of cash in our lives? Did we all fail high-school economics? The question now is what do we do to ease these folks out of something they couldn’t afford in the first place; and have an orderly exit to keep the market from collapsing (which seems to be happening at a reasonable pace right now).

That’s right – and orderly exit for these folks. Not a bail-out. Not a subsidy for 20 years. People and families are going to lose houses – houses they should never have been in in the first place. Should they lose everything and end in bancruptcy – absolutely not. We have a duty to make sure it doesn’t become a whole-sale disaster. But it is time to be honest. If you cannot afford the home you bought, it’s time to get out and move into something you can afford. We as a nation should help ease that process with generous helping hands and creative helpful financing, but it’s time to live more sustainably – and I’m not just talking about paper or plastic.

As Americans, we are disgraceful financially. In China, the savings rate is about 40% – thats 40% of their take-home pay goes into savings/investment verses less than 1% rate in the US, while other industrial nations are at least in the 15% range (as were we until 10-20 years ago). In the US, almost 50% of all people don’t even have $1000 on hand for an emergency. While the average credit card debt spread over all American cardholders is more than $8000 (misleading – but true and climbing), the median balance on an American’s credit cards is still at $1900. It’s time we stopped feeling ‘entitled’ to living beyond our means with a bail-out always at our back. While I think it’s a bit overly-conservative, Dave Ramsey recommends that you buy no more home than you can pay off with: a 15 year fixed mortgage who’s monthly payment constitutes no more than 40% of your monthly take-home pay (after-taxes/15% saving), with a large enough down that you don’t need a second mortgage. Then, when you have that number, you go looking for houses in that range only. Yes, it’s smaller than you expected, but you can afford it. And afford to live a little, and afford emergencies and repairs that will always come up.

It brings up the question of always bailing someone out vs forcing personal responsibility down their throats. I’ve seen both methods fail, and have thought about this a lot recently. But more on that tomorrow….

What’s the real story anyway? Thoughts of a potential buyer

What’s the real story anyway? Thoughts of a potential buyer

So, I started a little research into buying my first place. After doing a little number crunching, it looks like at least next year before it would be feasible. But I’m having difficulty trying to find an honest appraisal and state of Portland’s housing/condo market. It’s pretty clear that the meteoric rise of housing prices we saw the last 5-10 years has stopped. But things beyond that get very fuzzy. Previously very desirable neighborhoods seem to be seeing stagnation, new areas seem to be gentrifying fast, other areas are very hard to read, etc. Condos vs houses have conflicting anecdotal evidence. And that’s the problem – I can’t find any solid information other than what is gleaned from news stories and looking at the latest for-sale lists. Problem is, individual selling prices are all over the map – disproportionately high/low levels depending on the sellers motivation. It’s hard to get a read if a location is losing favor since people are all trying to sell at pre-slowdown prices. And that’s what I need to know as I make a minimal 5-10 year investment – will it be going up or down in the next 5-10 years? What’s the trending by location? What’s the trending by type: home vs condo?

It’s curious that local realtors’ websites are still quoting figures from the boom 2-3 years ago while updating their for sale lists every day. It kind of makes you think they know something you don’t. How come they could get those numbers in the heat of the boom, but they can’t seem to get them now? Why all the hush-hush? It makes me as a future buyer feel uncertain – and uncertainty is not a good thing when buying – makes me want to keep my money on the sidelines until patterns become clearer. The fed just announced no rate change, and inflation is ‘not a concern’. Sure, investors are pulling their money out of these high-risk, fast-and-loose mortgage places – so money is going to be tougher to get if you have tarnished credit. But if you’ve got good credit, there isn’t much to worry about. Prices are definitely not meteorically rising anymore and interest rates are likely to stay flat – so the pressure to buy isn’t there either. If I can save/invest my down payment and earn 8%, that’s roughly the same as investing in a housing market that’s growing by ~5% (for tax breaks, etc).

My concern is that I don’t want to pay a bunch of money and find out my property/area is in the middle of a decline that will probably last 3-5 years – and I just got in at the top of that drop. The few real estate agents I’ve talked with all seem overly up-beat about everything and don’t say squeak about any place’s declining values, etc. All three realtors I’ve chatted with were like: go ahead and buy now! It’s all good! And their not totally wrong, but they get more quiet when I ask where isn’t a good place to invest in.

If I were to guess, there is a lot of re-adjusting going on as the money leaves the market. And money is leaving the market as a whole; but there is no crash going on. Overall, things are probably cooling in some spots of Portland more than they thought. But where are those places? The hot and not spots of town are definitely moving around – just based on watching how much foot-traffic and cars wander through. If I had to guess, NW Portland is cooling – 23rd and 21st aren’t nearly as busy and hopping as they used to when I moved in a few years back. Alberta on the east side is going nuts with activates, new businesses, bars, fairs, etc. Hawthorn is flat to down. Condos? With lots of new buildings half-done, I suspect that unless they stagger their openings, there could be a glut. This condo developer seems to think so. But he did it too – oh – everything’s perfectly fine. I’m completely changing my business model – but there’s nothing going on at all. Yeah. I don’t think that’s the whole story.

I have been left with a bad taste in my mouth from the realtors. It almost feels like there’s this big inside secret – an elephant in the room – they won’t talk about. Because if someone does, then folks will start being told that their properties up in NW or the Pearl or Hawthorn, or wherever will -gasp- not be as good a buy as the area is slowing (or even declining) in value a bit more than other areas. And if somebody stands up to say the emperor’s clothes are off, and that certain areas are not such a good ‘buy’ – that might mean the prices for the whole area drop. And if the prices for one place drop, maybe the curtains will come down other places that are slower too. And then what will happen to our business as sellers? It’ll get tougher. What is going to happen to all those realtors that were coming out of the woodwork from real-estate school during the boom as there are less folks to sell to or a more competitive market? You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot needlessly. It’s simply not in their interest to be honest – it’s in there interest (and indirectly the seller) to get the sale. They’re long gone by the time you come around to sell again. So there is incentive from everyone in the industry to just shush, and let people wander around on their own.

This probably isn’t as dire as I’m painting it. The few figures I have found say the market is growing at the 5-7% year on year rate – pretty darn good really. But the lack of information that certainly MUST be out there and being done by these condo/housing developers isn’t getting out. It sure got out during the boom of how good things were, now, not so much – which tells you something in itself.

Can you guess what it was?

Can you guess what it was?

Here’s a little clip of information taken directly from a recent article I was reading. I replaced the parts that would give away what it is, see if you can guess what it is:

Even as project proposals were being submitted, a 53-year-old structural engineer secretly already had the job sewn up. He had met with the government official in charge of funding and the official had rigged the process so that only this engineer could possibly win the bid. When the construction was started, more than 300 prominent [inhabitants] signed a petition protesting the [construction]. They claimed that [it] would “disfigure and dishonor” the city.

There was a great deal of protest surrounding the construction as well. A [prominent] mathematics professor predicted that when the structure passed the 748-foot mark, it would inevitable collapse; another expert predicted that the [construction]’s lightening rods would kill all the fish in the [nearby river].

The [local] edition of the New York Herald claimed the [construction] was changing the weather; and a daily newspaper ran a headline story claiming The [construction] was sinking. “If it has really begun to sink,” [local paper] pontificated, “any further building should stop and sections already built should be demolished as quickly as possible.”

What was this abominable construction that would destroy the environment and be a disfigurement to the city? It was none other than the Eiffel tower.I always try to keep things like this in mind when confronted with the scads of ‘disaster is imminent’ reports on everything from new public/religious social programs, to dams, to global warming, to whatever. Whatever you’re in the middle of, by nature you are going to be very myopic. Now, this is not to say that disastrous human endeavors do occur and are often foreseen but warnings ignored, but it reminds me that you need to look at the real data and know that expert ‘opinions’ are just that – and are just as equally wrong as right on both sides.

Instead, the only way to denounce critics or lend credibility for a plan is in a *lot* of careful research and number crunching before one begins. A great example is a task force in Portland that have done some great research on homelessness patterns and found that often times the current feed/shelter system simply prolongs and perpetuates the homeless’ problems (this is not to say that homeless help should go away – but that their influence and role needs to change in a new way). Some of their findings

There has also been all this talk of carbon-neutral obsession, bio-fuels, etc. This is all good, but simply reducing environmental impact down to your ‘carbon-load’ doesn’t take into account scads of other toxic stuff you release. Use an air conditioner in your car/home? What about your freon load? What about your arsenic load? What about your estrogen loads ? (yes, estrogens from shampoos and birth control pills goes right though water treatment and has long been known to be mutating fish/river life. That one sure doesn’t get as much press as blowing up damns now does it) Now we hear that bio-fuels aren’t that much better than other fossil fuels as far as the environment goes.

I guess my point is that productive change in the right direction requires people not being reactionary, over-simplifying the problem, or lately appealing to sentimentality or emotionalism, or even spiritualism about ‘mother earth’ (I could go on about that one being even worse than the religious appeals made in the middle-ages that everyone loves to decry) – but really put some pencils and pens to paper and do the math and science. Real science that isn’t myopic ‘experts’- or we’ll end up looking as silly as the Parisians did to future generations.

Price hikes for internet radio and how petitions should work

Price hikes for internet radio and how petitions should work

I’m not much of a zealot about most grass-roots stuff, but the Copyright Royalty Board has raised rates for internet radio stations by hundreds of percent to play songs online. I, for one, listen to lots of internet radio at work – and this stinks because it will put some good stations out of business.

These guys (http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/home/) have a great system that allows you to enter your name/address and it will find your reps – then allow you to automatically fax or email them.  You can also print and snail mail them. Takes about 30 seconds total unless you want to customize the message. This is the way petitions should work.