Topics Political

Comedian-in-Chief

Written by admin Sep 14, 2009, 6:31 am

One Comment • Related Topics: Political

Unfortunately, Karen, the president’s bizarrely controversial back-to-school remarks didn’t include any references to iPod use, so you’ll have to continue waging that battle on your own with the Swampkids. He did, however, address the issue of Facebook this morning at a visit to Wakefield High School in Arlington. In response to a question from a ninth-grader named Jesse who asked for advice on becoming president, Obama said: “Be careful what you post on Facebook.” Which is actually good job advice for pretty much anyone. (Attention potential job-seekers: We may have grown up playing Oregon Trail–look it up on wiki–but we still know how to work the interwebs.)

Obama also got off a Gandhi joke, because who doesn’t like a laugh at the expense of a martyred pacifist? When asked the classic “if you could have dinner with anyone from history, who would it be?” question, Obama thought for a moment before picking Gandhi, and then added: “It would probably be a really small meal.”

Meanwhile, the last remnant of people who object to the president telling kids to study hard and stay in school protested outside Wakefield High, carrying signs with messages like “Children Serve God, Not Obama.” Elsewhere today, Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler calls controversy over Obama’s speech “a national embarrassment.”

Guess What Texting Costs Your Wireless Provider?

Written by admin Sep 14, 2009, 6:26 am

No Comment • Related Topics: Business & Tech, Social Media

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When my teenage son ignores me while tapping away furiously on his cell phone, I have the consolation of knowing that he has joined the quickest-growing form of two-way communication in human history.

A decade ago, just about no one in the U.S. sent these messages, known as Short Message Service (SMS) texts. This year, we will zing out 1.2 trillion of them, predicts market-intelligence firm IDC.

That translates to a barrage of messages from each user, especially teens, who seem to be receiving new text messages — a.k.a. “blowing up” — more than they take new breaths. The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text messages per month, according to Nielsen Mobile. “With teens, the act of picking up a phone and calling someone is dropping away,” notes Christopher Collins, a senior analyst with Yankee Group. (Read “Texting and Walking: Dangerous Mix.”)

What’s most amazing about the texting craze is just how inexpensive it is for mobile carriers to provide this wildly popular service. SMS messages are not only extremely short (maxing out at 160 characters), but they also cleverly exploit today’s digital phone networks, leveraging transmission channels between phone and cell tower that were originally designed to coordinate voice calls. “They cost the mobile carriers so little that you could argue that they’re free,” says Collins.

That situation set antitrust alarm bells ringing when AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon all raised their pay-per-use costs of sending a text message from 10 cents to 20 cents over the past three years. That prompted Senator Herbert Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, to hold hearings on the matter in June.

At those hearings, Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and an expert on mobile computing, presented a detailed analysis of all the expenses that carriers incur in handling SMS messages. He showed that the wireless channels contribute about a tenth of a cent to a carrier’s cost, that accounting charges might be twice that and that other costs basically round to zero because texting requires so little of a mobile network’s infrastructure. Summing up, Keshav found that a text message doesn’t cost providers more than 0.3 cent. (Read “When Fingers Do the Flirting.”)

You don’t have to be a Wall Street analyst to do the quick math: with a carrier cost of one-third of a penny, when a customer pays 15 cents to send a message, 98% of that 15 cents is pure profit. (Of course, you already knew that in your gut; that’s why your stomach turns every time you examine your cell-phone bill.)

Carriers respond that pay-per-use covers only a tiny and dwindling percentage of use. “Generally, the structure of our pricing plans has moved away from paying ‘by the drink’ to buckets of messages at much lower prices,” Randal Milch, executive vice president and general counsel at Verizon Communications, emphasized at the hearing. Verizon’s average price is about a penny a message, he added.

That downward price trend worries vendors. (Read “Texting Drivers, Tempting Fate.”)

“Texting is a major contributor to the industry’s profitability,” says David Barden, a senior research analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Among the Big Four national players, texting brings in an average of $8 per month per customer in revenue, he estimates, and generates about 25% of raw operating profit (excluding equipment subsidies).

“But the carriers are very concerned that messaging isn’t generating the revenue it has in the past,” remarks IDC analyst Richard Murphy. “Consumers are becoming more savvy, buying just the buckets they need. Many are signing up for unlimited plans, which will only drive down revenues more.”

Cost analyses will stay flexible because SMS isn’t constrained by capacity, says Collins. He draws an analogy to amusement parks: “Once you build the park (or wireless network), the marginal cost of each customer (or text message) is minimal.”

“Eventually, every service, whether it be voice or simple texting or the most robust Internet application, will just be data riding on top of a robust 4G network,” Collins continues. “Focusing on the costs of individual components may be misleading.”

In the meantime, carriers aim to encourage more of us in middle age to start tapping. Their best sweetener? Hybrid phones that don’t carry a smartphone’s hefty price tag but do offer nice little QWERTY keyboards.

Dad texting? lol

Barack Obama’s Education Speech: The Not-At-All Socialist Indoctrination

Written by admin Sep 14, 2009, 6:23 am

One Comment • Related Topics: Political, US

At this point, most of the noise about Barack Obama wanting to indoctrinate school children in a back-to-school speech has mostly faded from view. Newt Gingrich has repudiated it. Historians (and White House aides) have pointed out that past Republican presidents–George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan–delivered the same sorts of messages. Some of those Republican leaders who made a stink over the President’s plan–like Florida GOP chair Jim Greer–are getting a Labor Day grilling from their local press. [UPDATE: Greer now says, "It's a good speech."]

But now that the speech has been released–see the full text here–there is a greater irony at play. Rather than any lefty, neo-socialist, communitarian brainwashing, President Obama’s speech to your kids reads like a paean to individual striving and free market capitalism, the sort of thing that Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater might have signed onto. At root, Obama’s message is one of individual responsibility, a disquisition on the freedom of American youth to fail or succeed on their own tenacity and merits:

[N]o matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it. . . .

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying. . . .
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things. But the truth is, being successful is hard.
True enough, at a couple of points the President mentions service to country–a principle that some in the Talk Radio/Fox News orbit now associate with a clandestine radical Marxist revolution. But the message about serving country is hidden deep beneath another one: Each child has an individual responsibility to succeed, to accomplish something, even to make lots of money, by working hard at school. Not quite Vladamir Lenin. More like Glenn Beck, from this 2008 interview with then Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
BECK: It’s time for some personal responsibility. It is time for people to take on the responsibility that they have for themselves. Why don’t we talk about personal responsibility anymore? Why don’t we reach out to the American people and say, “Hey, government is not the answer. Nine out of ten times government’s the problem.”GOVERNOR PALIN: I know. Let us preach, reaching people when they know there is a candidate willing to talk about this.
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