The Iron Yuppie

Zach Braff's Garden State Blog - Very funny guy. I remember hearing once that it takes a very smart person to play a very stupid (or silly) character. I'd believe it. One of the things he does exceptionally well is completely sacrifice himself on the alter of dignity to get the laugh. It's a practice which requires giving up the ego for the sake of the work and he pulls it off exceptionally well.

I saw the movie this weekend, and thought it was very good. The script wonderfully captured the nameless angst that a lot of people experience when then return home and the direction of the movie was quite insightful, especially for a first time director. I was particularly a fan of the camera work; I saw both creativity and a comedic eye for timing and framing. He is a real fan of the overhead perpendicular to ground parallel zoom in shot and the reverse shot that is the exact reverse of that. I'm not sure if that had meaning involved, or was just something that he wanted to do. The supporting characters were fantastic; they added a real richness to the tapestry.

If there was one downside, I thought there were some scenes that could have been reworked to provide a little more depth and a little less cliche. SPOILER FOLLOWS: I found the ending to be an example of this. After so much subtlety, I found the ending dialog between the characters to be a bit stilted. Interestingly, I think that he was both writer and director probably worked against him. I just generally think everyone needs an external voice to weigh in on issues and being that involved in each step of the process makes for a situation where it is impossible to cut or alter scenes that you as the writer or you as the director have become wedded to.

As a long time fan of his work on Scrubs, I'm a huge believer in Mr. Braff's long term potential. Garden State is both very funny and touching movie, and I highly recommend it.

I'm going to be here for a week starting tomorrow: Bilbao, Spain. So, though I'm a lazy piece of crap, please take my lack of blogging for lack of internet access and vacation rather than active (or passive I suppose) neglect of my responsibilities.

I don't understand these jokers who are coming out against Kerry's war record: Swift Change Of Heart - August 20%2C 2004. First, either you lied then or you're lying now. Which is it? Either way you are a liar, and cannot be trusted. Second, the Bush administration's lack of denouncing the ad is disgusting. It's the worst kind of hand on the marionette strings behavior that nauseates the voting public. If it's not you, then denounce it. But it is you, just like it was you during the McCain primaries four years ago. Third, I'm not sure this is the kind of Pandora's box they want to be opening. Going through history of a candidate is always dangerous, especially when it is something that is absolutely meaningless for today's behavior. If you want history, how's this? Bush snorted coke in the 80s. Bush headed multiple failed business. Cheney was in charge of a corporation which is now under criminal investigation for behavior during his tenure. The Bush administration met with energy companies in secret to set administration security policy. I really do try and look at a lot of this stuff neutrally, but this just annoys me. Actually, my first sentence is incorrect; I do understand what they are doing, and they're doing it because it works. It's just sad to me that it does.

So much has been discussed around the controversy of prescription drug costs. I think the industry is hanging on to an outdated model (much like the movie and recording industries), but in the interest of presenting the other side, here you go: Kerry is on drugs

I agree with his math and logic. But I do have a fundamental issue with at least one of his assumptions.

"The problem comes in pricing the pill. Foreign markets are price controlled. This means that they look at the marginal cost of producing the product, and give you a markup on that and that's the price you sell it at. So let's say they give us a 10% markup. That means that the foreign price of our drug is fixed..."

He then goes on to explain how because the price is artificially fixed and below cost, they need to charge more in the US. I have to doubt this. First, it seems EXCEEDINGLY unlikely that foreign countries force selling the drugs below cost. If that was the case, why not just withdraw the drug? There's no way they base it on marginal cost, since the marginal cost of producing a set of pills is far less than the $2.00 he proposes. Second, he neglects the most important part of the foreign countries behavior. What the foreign countries have been able to do is produce a single and consistent way for negotiating enormous deals with the pharmaceutical companies through their state run health care. Because the US doesn't have this single and consistent way to negotiate, certain companies get better deals than others. Obviously this is beneficial to the pharma companies, so they're happy with it. And every time someone tries to add some structure to the American system (either through state run programs, or HMOs, or whatever), everyone is up in arms because their drug or operation or whatever risks exclusion within this system. Americans basically end up paying more for health care because they want Mickey Mantle to have a liver, even though he was too old and too unhealthy for a high likelihood of survival. Life does suck sometimes, and there will be a set of people left out in the cold with any structure, but either we have to decide to pay more to cover everyone or make some tough decisions.

One thing I do agree with him about, however, is that importing from Canada is not the correct answer. It's a stop gap. What we need is consistent negotiation with volume discounts. As an aside, the FDA's quotes about "ensuring the safety of the American consumer" has got to be some of the worst shilling I've ever heard. Except for the vanishingly small number of medications that need to be refrigerated from creation to use, pills are some of the most portable merchandise I've ever seen. You're telling me a $25,000 car can be shipped from Japan with no risk to me as the consumer, but a $0.0001 pill in a cotton filled bottle is too risky? Please.

Generally, the whole health care system just feels like one more example of people refusing to do basic math. If you have 100,000 doctors and each doctor can perform 50 procedures a year then there are 5M procedures per year that can be performed. If there are 8 M procedures that could be performed, then you have a shortage. This shortage leads to higher prices. Someone must pay for it, and that someone is either the end user or the government. If you were to ask the average person, they would say that everyone deserves to get every treatment for low cost. This is provably impossible, and I wish people could be a bit more rational about this stuff. I suppose it's hard to be rational when your grandmother is in the hospital.

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Google's New Price Absurd! If you asked Dan why he felt like $130 is too high, but $80 is more sensible, you'd get the most ridiculous answer you've ever heard, because he has no idea. In fact, they cut the number of shares being offered as well! Danny, why shouldn't that RAISE the stock price? What if they reduced it to one share only? Would you buy that for $2.5 M? I bet you would... now that it's actually trading the market will evaluate the true value of the company. But Dan's point still seems nuts. Even as it's trading right now, its market capitalization has a ton of emotional connection and future speculation as to growth built in. The numbers call this out... most valuations show that the price should be much lower if based on fundamentals only. What is Dan judging the actual value based on? Cash flow? P&E? Let this be a lesson that having absolutely no clue whatsoever has never stopped anyone from having an opinion (myself included!)

While I'm in the mood for chit chatting about google. For those that wanted to buy the Playboy just for the Google interview... too bad, you can get it free online: Amendment No. 7 to Form S-1

I find it funny that these guys have basically managed to screw up every aspect of the public offering. The stock has limited voting capability (I actually don't know what the condition is when a founder sells a share that is worth 10 votes to someone outside the organization. Does that mean that person gets 10 votes too? Or does it convert to a regular stock?), they talk outside of the quiet period (though again, it looks like that's just caused from delayed publication), etc etc. The guidance on repricing and the reduction in stock offering is particularly egregious. Basically, they had to guide repricing and reduce the number of shares to maintain a certain level because there were simply not enough takers. That's quite a bit of egg on their face. I know they'll be good to follow in the future, and a hell of a competitor for Yahoo and MSN forever, but this many mistakes is almost always a cause of people having too much power and not having enough people checking their behavior (I call it the "George Lucas effect").

To that end, checking behavior is a GOOD thing. EVERYONE needs an editor. The arrogance of people that would say I know better than everyone else is absolutely nauseating to me. If any of you ever catch me doing that, you have every right to slap me across the face. I'm not saying that people who try and implement their vision try and keep it as pure as possible, but having other people weigh in on your creation is not a bad thing. Listen to them! You might learn something.

Gigli (kottke.org) - I'm in total disagreement with this mediocre review of this movie. I sat the entire way through Gigli and it was god awful. So bad it hurt. Actually, I'm a complete tool of the marketing machine (see earlier posts for reference). When a movie comes out that gets anywhere NEAR this much publicity, I've got to see it, regardless of the reviews. It's not like it's a badge of honor or something; more just that I'd like to have an opinion on what everyone else also seems to have an opinion on. This had led to some painful discoveries including: From Justin to Kelly, Ballistic: Ecks v. Sever, The Next Best Thing and so on. But I'd rather have the opinion first hand than not. Not that I'll ever get those wasted hours back.

MS's stock buy back and dividend plan of a few weeks ago struck me as a real change for the company, but not in that "growth has ended" and "maturity is now here" aspect that most people seemed to focus on. The interesting part for me is how this, among other things, fundamentally changes the way that people will make money at MS. I remember at the beginning of Boiler Room, they talked about janitors and secretaries standing next to their ferraris and how cool that was. It was really cool, that basically waiting around at a company would give you all this benefit, especially based just on the growth of the company. I'm not saying they did not contribute to the sucess, but it is clear that at any normal company they would not have made anywhere near as much.

What strikes me is that is not and will never be the case again at MS. Someone who starts at MS and works for 10 years will see the value of their bonuses/options/etc at the end of that time be worth far more than the items at the beginning. This is exactly the reversal of what happened before. MS has always been a culture where even the lowest person on the totem pole was both significant to the process and massively rewarded because of their contributions. In the future, huge stock awards will be the only way to get really wealthy, which shifts the power to the top of the organization. Before, after a few years, you could be very well off, but with the average pay they offer today, employees will spend a significantly longer amount of time before they reach any significant level of wealth.

Mind you this is all hindsight... I'm sure at the time, no one knew what they were giving away, and the people at the bottom felt like they were getting just as much of the shaft as at every other country in America. I wonder what it was like in 1994, when the stock was still on a hockey stick upwards, but there were people who had still been their since 1986 and were already millionaires because of it. I would imagine a real faith at that time that the stock would keep rising forever, or at least long enough so that people who just joined would still have the chance to be millionaires. There's no question that those days are long gone.

[Updated] Made some grammar corrections.

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On one of the file download sites that I check on a semi-regular basis, there was an update to a tool I use quite a bit: Foldershare. I find it somewhat fundamentally weird that this isn't part of Windows to begin with. Why is it such a pain in all software applications to actually understand what's going on? Here's a hint, developers, when you're sitting their debugging with a thousand break points and wondering what's going on at each stage of your application, at some point, it's pretty likely that your users are going to want to know that as well. No, they're not going to want to figure out that the ttl is too short for the app you're building using the standard MS TCP library, but they WILL want to know "ok, it's not connecting because of a, b & c". You have to figure it out when you debug the problem. All I'm saying is that your users are the exact same way, they just don't have the source. They run into an error and want to know how to fix it. Oh, and as an aside, exposing that information should be turned off by default. Don't overload them and, at the same time, don't bury information they'll want to know. Yes it's a fine line, but use your mom as your proxy, and you should be ok.

One other thing... PLEASE don't tell me something is wrong and then give me no clue on how to fix it. It's so painful. You know how to fix it, or whether or not it can't be fixed. I saw the worst dialog box the other day. "Outlook could not save the meeting request." GEE THANKS. I proceeded to do half a dozen different things, and none of it was any help. Not even the log file, which theoretically should be every bit of information available, was of no use what so ever. This means actually spending some time to catch and split up the errors that get thrown. It's more work, but we appreciate it.

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Don’t mistake me for some kind of rational human being. But the past week’s election coverage has led me to wonder why people are having any trouble deciding on a political candidate. If you accept that most people are rational (which is probably a faulty assumption up front) the process seems to be pretty straight forward.

1) You make a list of drop dead choices where you will never vote for a candidate who supports them. An example of this may be your feeling on pro-choice/pro-life. In truth, I’d bet that though most people think they have a lot of these, they probably have very few. Outside of pure religious reasons, it just does not seem like there would be that many things that if you agreed with a candidate on A but disagreed with them on B through M you’d still vote for them. This is the type of issue that I’m referring to here.
2) If you found one of those, you’re done. If you have not, you make a list of all the things you care about, and how much you care about them (1-10). This can result in a list like the following:

Anti-terrorism 4
Sane fiscal policy 8
War in Iraq 3

And so on.

3) Independent of that, you make a separate list, with all the above issues and how much you think a given candidate will focus on them (1-10 scale, same as above).

Bush:
Anti-terrorism 9
Sane fiscal policy 4
War in Iraq 8

Kerry:
Anti-terrorism 8
Sane fiscal policy 7
War in Iraq 4

I am aware that this could mean that you could rate a candidate highly just because they focus on a issue, but I’m going to assume for a moment that if either given candidate focuses on an issue they will work on it until it is right. You could mitigate this by adding an additional factor of likelihood of success which you would multiply times the amount they focus on it (percentage from 1-100% which would reduce that number). Even this is not perfect, as if you didn’t care at all about an issue, a candidate completely focused on it, but they were very likely to fail, they would align with your issue on that matter, but they would be taking resources away from a different issue you presumably cared more about.

4) Now take the absolute value of the difference between each of the issues and sum. Lowest number wins your vote:

Bush:
Anti-terror = 5
Sane fiscal policy = 4
War in Iraq = 5
Total = 14

Kerry:
Anti Terror = 4
Sane Fiscal Policy = 1
War in Iraq = 1
Total = 6

Some day (hopefully soon) I’d like to write about how there’s a total lack of rationality in people’s actions today. It seems that everyone’s lost the ability to do even basic deductive calculations (all those who point out logic flaws in the above will be awarded brownie points).

I know I said that I really did not want this blog to turn into a political discussion, as I’m just as big a moron as the next person when it comes to deciding elections and having opinions, but in this case, I ran the above for myself, and I just don’t see any way to support Bush in the next election. Do we really think that Kerry will allow the terrorists to invade willy-nilly? Please. Flip-flop? Why should I care? Minus that, is there really any reason to support a Bush administration? I always try and see the other side, when possible, but exactly how do Bush supporters justify Bush’s behavior? I really am more than open to listening to the other side. As always, let me caveat this by saying I voted for the elder Bush and that I’m generally pretty seriously uninformed. But this is my view so far…

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