Dana Blankenhorn

Why Tech Should Buy More Media

Ever since Microsoft tried, and failed, in cable news with MSNBC, tech has been leery of investing in media.

There have been exceptions. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Marc Benioff bought Time. But these were personal investments, not corporate. They were made for political reasons, not business ones.

The result is that the media remains run by conservatives, by junk men, and by useful idiots. Fox News has been joined by OAN and Newsmax. Local papers are being destroyed by hedge funds like Alden, who are more interested in the tax breaks than the product. CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times  remain committed to “both siderism,” which allows the right to drive the agenda.

This is threatening the country, the economy and (most important) tech. Billionaires like the Smith family, which owns Sinclair, come from the resource industries. They see labor as fungible. They see the world in black-and-white. They don’t see change and they don’t want change.

Change is what tech thrives on. It’s what tech produces. Brains are the gating factor to technology growth and it’s clear that today’s conservatives hate brains. Otherwise, they would have endorsed the vaccine and wouldn’t have pushed Trump.

A half-century ago the right saw this kind of threat and acted. The myth of the “liberal media" is based on the idea that reporters were professionals, but it didn’t understand how Vietnam was a Cold War activity. It didn’t see the coming resource wars. Only the resource industries, the oil guys and lumber guys and real estate guys, saw that.

Dealing with MAGA Abuse

America is in an abusive relationship with most of the Republican Party.

What do you do if you’re in an abusive relationship?

Every expert says the same thing.

You walk away.

This is what Democrats need to do. Walk away.

It’s hard, I know. When you turn away from an abuser they escalate. They scream. They threaten violence. Their lies become ever-more extreme. They’ll even make all sorts of promises if you just give in this once.

It’s hard to leave any abusive relationship. Women have died trying to leave abusive relationships. So have children. That’s why we have so many people doing the hard work of protecting the abused from the abusers. God bless them.

Behind the Housing Crisis

Today’s housing crisis is the perfect storm of demographics and inefficiency driven by politics.

The demographic thing is easy. I’m 66 and I’m not moving. There are lots of us boomers. Staying alive. Enjoying our homes. This means fewer homes for younger people. Eventually we die and the baby bust enters the housing market. We become Japan. Just not now.

Housing has resisted Moore’s Law in 3 ways. Most of the costs are political.

1. State building codes keep out new building new technology. That’s politics.
2. Local zoning keeps out all but politically-connected builders. That’s politics.
3. Transactions resist automation. This can be fixed.

Right now, it can cost 15% of your equity to move. That’s about 6% on each side of the transaction, buying and selling, then 3% for the actual move. The idea of a starter home, a home for kids, then downsizing means 45% of your equity goes out the door during your life. The only people getting rich are the agents and brokers taking your money.

Political Secrets of Madison Avenue

Next time you see an ad, any ad, look closely.

It’s telling you which way the wind is blowing.

Advertising is a psychological mirror. It offers images of what we think ourselves to be. It must do that to do its job. We see the people in an ad, we identify with them, and through that we identify with the product or service being sold to us. If we don’t identify with those people, we don’t buy the product. Thus, ads can’t make mistakes.

Look at the history of advertising, and you’ll see that clearly. You will see it in cleaning products, in cooking products, in cars and insurance ads. It’s why Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were beloved brand names for a century, until we saw the racism inside them. It’s why Toyota ads never change.

In 2021 ads are shouting one word. Diversity. They’re showing mixed-race couples far more often than you see them on the street. They’re showing same sex couples in the same way. Most spokesmen are now spokeswomen. An ad for VMware shows Cyrina Fiallo wearing sneakers and casual clothes  telling viewers to “welcome change.” What’s striking about the new Verizon ad with Kate McKinnon is that she’s wearing heels. Then again, Verizon is a conservative company.

Law & Order Takes Time

Lefty Twitter has its undies in a bunch (as always).

It’s all about Trump and his henchmen. (Law & Order: SVU has now been on the air longer than the original show.)

The complaint is that justice has not yet been visited on any of them. In its way, a valid complaint. The fantasy that Biden might order Trump’s immediate arrest upon taking the oath was always just that.

What’s happening now is precisely what needs to happen. It’s far more delicious than the liberal fantasy.

After January 6, the FBI immediately began its investigations. As requisite prosecutors have had nominations approved, the Department of Justice followed.

Hundreds of insurrectionists have been arrested. More are being sought. Several have begun to squeal. A few have been sentenced. Others are awaiting trial.

Mugwump

Mugwumps were a now obscure group of 1880s intellectuals who wanted honest government. (They were also a 1960s folk group , but that’s another story.)

Mugwumps started political life as Republicans who supported the civil service reform and regulation policies of James Garfield. They wound up switching sides in 1884, dooming any political ambitions, and supporting Democrat Grover Cleveland. (Theodore Roosevelt, who identified with them, didn’t switch in 1884, preserving his political career.)

The term originated with a man named Dana, in this case New York Sun editor Charles Anderson Dana. It sounds like it could have been coined by Mark Twain, who identified as one. It supposedly derived from an Algonquin term meaning “war leader,” and Mugwumps were derided at the time as political fence-sitters, their “mug” being on one side of the divide and their “wump” being on the other.

Mississippi: The Model Republican State

The Civil War isn’t over. It can still be lost.

The Civil Rights movement isn’t over, either. It is being lost.

Nowhere is this truth more obvious than Mississippi.

Mississippi had about 2.1 million people in 1960. In 2020 it had 2.9 million. It was only two states to lose population during the decade of the cloud. Its economic growth is anemic. Growth is best when federal receipts expand during recessions, or during economic boom times when gambling rises.

If Mississippi were a country, and not getting federal aid, it would be part of the Third World. It tried to build an oil economy, and a lumbering economy, but the big draw is still casinos, which line the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast. What happens when online gambling, and online sports betting, eliminates the need for casinos? It’s a question no one even asks.

Mississippi is a case study for current Republican priorities. Jim Crow never left Mississippi. He just adapted, giving local power where blacks held local majorities, but maintaining power through an all-white power structure that still survives.

Cloud Czar Conundrum

In 2021, governments around the world hate the Cloud Czars.

They don’t like seeing companies both build infrastructure and rent it out to competitors. They don’t want Amazon to compete with Netflix or Walmart. They don’t want Microsoft hosting Salesforce, then building its own suite. They don’t like Google doing search while it rents its cloud. They don’t like the Apple app store. They blame Facebook for Trump.

It’s not just here. China is doing all the things Americans just pretend to want, taking down Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu with new regulations and demands. Of course, the same people who want Facebook destroyed pretend that China is going after Alibaba because “it’s communist” and Jack Ma a threat to the regime. (As if Mark Zuckerberg isn’t?)

Here’s the problem. Clouds are expensive. The price started a decade ago at $1 billion/quarter. Now it’s about $5 billion/quarter. That money isn’t borrowed. It all comes from cash flow. The game was said to be too rich for AT&T, too rich for IBM, too rich for HP and Verizon.

Real Estate is the Republican Industry

There is an industry whose interests are solidly Republican, whose actions could derail both the technology industry and democracy itself.

That’s the real estate industry.

Real estate is the most inefficient industry we have. It’s all rent seeking, from plotting with government on what to build, through construction techniques that are a century ago, to a transaction model that’s as efficient as paying alimony with pennies.

A pro-business government would make sure housing was where the jobs were. A pro-business government would encourage new building technologies. A pro-business government would minimize real estate transaction costs.

We don’t have a pro-business government. We have a government in the pocket of the real estate industry.

The reason housing costs are so high is because, in league with government, the real estate industry makes certain of it. Everything is regulated locally, meaning it’s easy to lock-out affordable housing, which thus has a bad name everywhere else. Local building codes mandate that most homes and apartments be made of sticks and separates land uses with strict zoning laws. State regulators, working on behalf of the industry, create mountains of paperwork on every real estate transaction, driving up costs and creating artificial scarcity.

Why Business is Becoming Progressive

Most people don’t know this, because the relative positions of our political parties reversed during the Civil Rights era. For most of our history, business has been on the progressive side of politics.

There are reasons. In the late 19^th century, land grant policies that opened the West were considered progressive. In the early 20^th century, regulatory regimes kept input prices low for manufacturers and were progressive. During the middle of the 20^th century, spending that kept demand high was progressive.

It was only in the second half of the last century that business became politically conservative. That’s because resource industries don’t need people. The gating factor to growth is land. Control the land and you control the oil, the minerals, the agriculture, the market. The only people you need are cops and soldiers to enforce your control over the land. The dominant political players of the Nixon era were oilmen, or resource oligarchs like the Koch Brothers.