This blew my mind, from Andrew Sullivan's The Dish. The ongoing discussion for this topic was about paying for cable channels via bundle, as people already do, or offering a la carte options.
At last, someone is writing about this. But you are missing the elephant in the room. Cable bundling has enabled the corruption and radicalization of cable TV news. It the basis of Fox News' business model.
Here's how it works. Fox charges cable companies about 70 cents a subscriber. That fee provides about half their profits. So everyone who has Fox News on his or her cable system is compelled to pay Fox 70 cents a month. No matter how much I loathe Fox and what it has done to our political discourse, I have to pay them 70 cents a month. What this means is that Fox pays no economic price for stoking extremism. The opposite is true. It can cater to a mere three or four million Americans, 1 percent of the population, a ratings bonanza in the chopped up world of cable TV, while collecting a fee from tens of millions who detest the network. It boils down to this: I cannot stop paying Fox News no matter how much I hate it. I'm captive.
If Fox became a la carte, the results would be dramatic and immediate.
Tens of millions would drop the channel immediately. Black and Hispanic viewers would flee the network en mass. It would suffer crippling losses in the Northeast, West Coast and parts of the Midwest. The channel would be left with an overwhelmingly older, southern and evangelical viewership. Needless to say, the loss of such huge demographic swaths would cause many advertisers to jump ship.
In short, Fox would pay a heavy economic price for its lies and distortions. It would either reform or face becoming a niche network with much diminished power and influence. A la carte would have a similar, although less extreme impact on MSNBC. And that would be a good thing. We can never solve our problems if partisan media propagandize instead of inform. A la carte cable is key, perhaps the key, to reforming our politics and government.
I've long thought the bundle deals were silly. I imagine the bundle deals are part of what keeps many cable channels alive though. Kill the package deals and people will drastically cut their list of channels, including some they may have considered watching once in a while. As a result new channels won't stand a chance and a lot of other channels will just disappear eventually.
If nothing else, I'd say there's a certain logic to banning news stations, especially political news stations from being part of a package deal.
This is a bit of self promotion, but I've got a blog I'm starting now.
This isn't just a blog about my day. Recently I decided that I would read through the Bible from start to finish just to see what it says when read literally and since I don't really have anything to say when I have discussions with Christians who tell me "it has this amazing unity and prophecies and such". Ryan suggested that I blog my journey so he can read it too, so I thought I'd share it here. Feel free to ignore it, debate it with me on my blog, or whatever. Just thought I'd publicize it a bit.
So....., last post was in July and we never even made it out of Genesis. What's up?
Sorry, Dustin. I sort of steered this towards a Christian bashing convo again. I know not everyone here is a full-blown anti-theist. Let's all go to Andrew's blog and make fun of Christians over there.
This is fun. If you dug a hole through the earth, where would you end up? It turns out that if I were to dig straight through, I'd pop out in Argentina in the wilderness somewhere.
Rob, if I ever find myself in Kuala Lumpur, you have to go around road E45 east of Cuenca to the General Plaza Gutierez. We will be on EXACT opposite sides of the planet.
You can't see it in that picture, but at the base of that smoke trail is a line of fire going about a mile that is just flowing through the woods like a meandering stream.
EDIT: About 5 miles away now. Oh well, time for bed. At least I don't have leprosy.
Huh. And I've just kinda been laughing at all the fire alerts they've been showing all over the place the past couple weeks. Seems crazy to imagine dryness after basically two solid years of wet.
Yikes. Don't get burned? Unless you're actually a witch. I guess burning witches is what you do with them but I don't think you're actually a witch so don't get burned. Unless I'm wrong and you ARE a witch in which case you can get burned if you want to I guess?
Yeah, it was interesting that we had just been raised to a red flag fire warning that morning because of the dryness and very high winds. It was well announced, on every radio station. Luckily, there were no casualties, a couple thousand acres of preserve burned and a few homes and one or two commercial buildings. I don't think it's technically "out" yet, but it's controlled and there aren't any flames. There're still some hot spots. But, yeah, when it's dry and windy, don't burn shit. If you do, you're an asshole, no matter how lucky you get and how often you don't set the woods on fire. It's not because you know how to control your fire, it's because you've just been lucky so far.
EDIT: On the plus side, it burned down a whole line of transmission poles, so I'm probably getting some nice overtime soon.
Sex experts are urging Hong Kongers to strip off their reputation as some of the least active lovers in Asia to get more out of their sex lives and overcome challenges of privacy in a cramped city.
"People say Hong Kongers have the least amount of sexual knowledge in the world. One of the reasons is they have no place to have sex," said professor Emil Ng, associate director at the Family Institute of the University of Hong Kong.
Financial pressure, career-driven mentalities and limited space are seen as key drivers of a fertility rate that is one of the lowest in the world by some measures, with an average 1.04 births per woman according to the World Bank.
Ng, who believes monogamy in general is "behind the times", thinks another factor driving Hong Kong's sexual timidity is sky-high property prices.
Younger Hong Kong residents typically live at home deep into their 20s or 30s because they can't afford to marry and move out earlier, meaning that many sleep in close proximity to their parents in cramped apartments.
"Hong Kong is too crowded and lacks the privacy people need to have sex," said Ng, who organised the fifth Hong Kong Sex Cultural Festival which took place last month.
The festival, held jointly by the Family Planning Association of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Sex Education Association, aimed to promote more liberal views on sex in the socially conservative southern Chinese city.
And in a sign that traditional Chinese attitudes towards sex may be changing, a record number of visitors showed up at the recent 2012 China Adult-Care Expo of adult wares in China's biggest city of Shanghai.
This year's expo -- Asia's largest trade fair for the adult industry -- was the biggest in the event's nine-year history, attracting thousands of visitors, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.
When it comes to going under the covers, Hong Kong couples are content with having sex less than twice a week, according to a 2011 survey published by City University's Community College.
More than half of the women questioned in the Hong Kong survey admitted feigning illness or tiredness to avoid sex when they were not in the mood.
The study of nearly 1,000 adults aged 36 to 80 showed that men were satisfied with having sex an average of 1.9 times a week, while women were content with 1.6 times.
This compares with the top rate of more than three times per week in Greece, more than twice in India and less than once per week in Japan, according to British condom manufacturer Durex, whose 2008 survey found Hong Kongers ranked third lowest in the world in sexual confidence.
"Hong Kong is always near the bottom of the list in terms of sexual frequency in those Durex annual surveys. It may not be a very scientific research, but it still says a lot about Hong Kong," said Ng.
A similar Durex survey released last year also showed a decline in sexual activity in China. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they were sexually inactive, a 15-percentage point increase from 2006.
The problem is worse for heterosexual women than for men in Hong Kong due to cultural issues tied to status and wealth, and social expectations about the role of women, said Dr Petula Ho, a sexologist from the University of Hong Kong.
Making matters worse for women, they vastly outnumber men in Hong Kong. There is less than one man for every 1.2 women between the ages of 20 and 39, according to official figures from last year.
"Straight women in Hong Kong are in poverty in terms of sex. They have few sexual possibilities and options. Even if you're a male truck driver, you can find a woman in rural China," Ho said.
No, this works in your favor. The major problem is that everyone else can't take them back to their place. Once you get your own apartment, chicks'll be lining up.
Comments
Why pay for channels you don't watch? Ctd.
If nothing else, I'd say there's a certain logic to banning news stations, especially political news stations from being part of a package deal.
So....., last post was in July and we never even made it out of Genesis. What's up?
Some of us do.
My apologies.
It all makes sense now.
This is fun. If you dug a hole through the earth, where would you end up? It turns out that if I were to dig straight through, I'd pop out in Argentina in the wilderness somewhere.
Rob, if I ever find myself in Kuala Lumpur, you have to go around road E45 east of Cuenca to the General Plaza Gutierez. We will be on EXACT opposite sides of the planet.
So also in the middle of the ocean.
http://www.youtube.com/googlemaps
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/li-firefighters-tackle-huge-brush-fire-1.3650232
You can't see it in that picture, but at the base of that smoke trail is a line of fire going about a mile that is just flowing through the woods like a meandering stream.
EDIT: About 5 miles away now. Oh well, time for bed. At least I don't have leprosy.
EDIT: On the plus side, it burned down a whole line of transmission poles, so I'm probably getting some nice overtime soon.
I have made a terrible mistake.