December 2010
5 posts
“Over $300 million :-) At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had...”
– Jan Brandt, former marketing chief at AOL, answering a question on how much it cost to print all those damned CDs.
Black Swan
The reason I got all animated about Netflix recently was because I wanted to share my thoughts on Black Swan.
The story is fairly straightforward: an innocent ballerina that must embrace darkness to depict it convincingly on stage, and the consequences of taking that path. The narrative is complicated by the distorted, dream-world point of view of that ballerina. It becomes less and less clear...
Netflix's war on social
I’ve been a fan of Netflix for years now, but I’m starting to lose patience with the direction the company is taking. Netflix used to be the place to come to discover new movies. Its library includes virtually every commercially available DVD. The ratings system was and is a triumph of crowd-sourcing. The company constantly improved their physical operations to deliver discs at the...
“[A]ll four Republicans [on the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis...”
– Reported by Shahien Nasiripour. When their asinine votes failed, they all quit the commission and rushed out a nine-page report that blamed everything (per usual) on the gummint and poors. Mike Konczal patiently reviews their output.
“A recent report by the Italian Association of Househusbands (a rather small...”
– Barbie Nadeau in Newsweek. Her whole piece on gender in Italy is full of crazy things like this. She points out that despite (or perhaps because of) all the patriarchy, Italy’s birthrate is the lowest in Europe.