The Month That Was - November 2020

I'm very late this month.  Travelling post Thanksgiving.  More to say about that next month.  

The first snow.  We had a couple of 70 degree days early in the month, and a couple of 60 degree days before Thanksgiving, but from now on it's nothing but cold. Part of me misses the years past when I could spend Thanksgiving betting football in Vegas and adventuring around the Southwest. I note a low level hum of concern in the air for what the combination of winter doldrums and social restrictions will do to mental health in general.  

For the longest time I had dreams of spending winters somewhere there was no winter.  Now I am more sanguine about the prospects. This is due to being a homeowner.  Winter is a multi-month respite from yard work.  Also the swarms of stink bugs and yellowjackets that plague the fall are gone.  A big part of mental health is finding reasons to be grateful.

Another good thing:  I think I have found my way around the fundamental conceptual hole in my latest manuscript.  It will take a bit of rework, but not as much as I had feared.

[Covid19] Coronatime, Month 9

[Rant, TV] Last Days of Cablerant-tv-last-days-of-cable.html

[Rant, Tech] Amazon Flood

[Covid 9] Coronatime, Month 9

This was paradigmatic good news and bad news month.  The bad news is the infection rate is soaring (yes, it may partially be because testing is way more common).  Worse, hospitalizations and deaths are rising although not as fast.  As is typical, everybody is blaming the "second wave" on the behavior of people they don't like. These second waves cross national and cultural boundaries.  If you think a certain behavior changed from the summer when things were getting better, and changed across many places in the world simultaneously, I suppose it's plausible.  I continue to believe that we are overstating the effect of our behavior on the infection rate and that we like it mostly because it let's us demonize The Other.  In any event, there is nothing close to comprehensive data, nevermind proof, of anything at this point.  The CDC now seems to think that most transmissions come from asymptomatic carriers.  How can you fight that?  Test everyone, every day, all the time?  Shut down everything?  Even if you could survive the economic disaster, no one would stand for it.  A solution that is not politically palatable is not a solution.

The good news is vaccines are coming and coming for real if we can believe our eyes. Big Pharma (both Pfizer and Modena), the political punching bag, seems to have come through.  And not in a small way.  For context, we have never successfully created a vaccine against a coronavirus before.  Since the common cold is a coronavirus, I would speculate that there have probably been close to a century's worth of attempts.  We have also never created an MRNA vaccine before -- an entirely new method of triggering the immune system versus the old way of infecting cells with an inert version of the virus as an immune system trigger.  Lost in all the sound and fury is how remarkable this is.  It's moonshot level stuff.  Do not underestimate what an incredible scientific achievement has just occurred. Not only that, there are also traditional vaccines coming on line (the famous Oxford vaccine and others).  In less than a year an intractable problem was solved using a new technology, just because it had to be solved. The next time someone asks why they don't have a flying car, point to this.

Of course, there are blemishes in our silver lining.  Specifically, it seems these vaccines are getting slowed by FDA bureaucracy who can't manage to push paperwork as fast as scientists can solve problems. I have no idea if cold analysis done after this is all over will indicate that we did the best we could.  But I feel confident that our regulators are going to come out of this looking pretty bad.  The nth degree of safety our agencies enforce may yield benefits to our lives in normal circumstances, but it's clear our judgement fails when assessing risk to ease regulations in times of crisis. (It appears the Pfizer vaccine is already approved in the U.K.)

[Rant, TV] The Last Days of Cable

I continue to struggle with what to do about cable TV.  I know the hip thing to do is "cut the cord" and use streaming services and I'm close to that, but I'm still not sure it's as big a money saver everyone thinks it is.  To reasonably mimic cable TV you would have to sign up for a broad-based non-premium channels service like Sling.  Then add $10-ish a month each for a handful of premiums.  Even then you lose your DVR. 

The topic of DVR replacement is interesting.  I don't know how much I'd use it if most everything is streaming.  I usually use it for series recordings to catch new episodes of shows I like, mostly on non-premium channels.  From what I gather, if you subscribe to a premium channel like HBO Max, everything is there all the time, it doesn't disappear.  That leaves shows on FX and AMC that I usually DVR.  Not sure how to address that yet.

So what would my viewing life look like if I cut the cord? Spectrum internet (really the only quality choice in my area).  I'd need a non-premium provider. Intriguingly, YouTube is starting a non-premuim service, YouTubeTV, and as much as I am loathe to give yet more of my money to the tech giants (YouTube is Google is Alphabet), it looks pretty solid, even providing a cloud DVR. Then for premiums I would have Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBOMax (I may have to ditch my Roku for that), Disney+.

Here's the rub:  I'm not sure how much this saves me.  Meanwhile, it puts me in the position of being at the pricing and policy mercy of that many more masters.  There exists the option for a potential half-step; to cut down to basic cable, then pick up premiums as I need them.  It's all so confusing AND I'M JUST A POOR, OLD MAN WHO WANTS TO WATCH HIS STORIES!   

One of the oh so delightful things I can do now is calculate lifetime savings.  I mean let's say I have 20 years of TV watching left.  If I can save $25 per month, that amounts to a lifetime savings of $6000 dollars.  I could own my home three month sooner.  I could buy one-tenth of a new car when I'm 80 with my savings and drive it 30mph on the highway.  When you start thinking like that it kind of puts things in perspective.  Still, I plan to obsess about this for a while.  You are warned.

[Rant, Tech] Amazon Flood

Amazon continues to amaze.  The NYT notes that they have hired over 425,000 employees this year.  That is truly astonishing.  You have to go back to WW2 to find hiring at that rate.  Amazon now has approximately 1.3 million employees.  When you add in another half a million contractors they are fast approaching Walmart as the largest U.S. employer. (Note: the Federal Government employs a little over 2 million, but if you throw in employees of Federal Government contractors, everyone else is a dust speck.) 

Walmart aside, the retail industry has little hope but to play along and at least have an option to sell through Amazon.  In other words, give tribute to The Crown.  It's interesting to ask what sort of retailers have the ability to hold out.  Let's see:

1. Anything you have to touch or try in person: Clothes, Furniture, etc.  Oh you can go to a real-life store and try things out, then go order them from Amazon, but that's not the smooth experience Amazon needs to stay ahead.  Also, you'll feel like a douche if you use a retailer as an Amazon showroom, and you should.  The retailer goes to a lot of expense to keep employees in the store. If you use them and then order on Amazon to save a few dollars you should feel guilty.  This needs to be a cultural norm.

2. Special assistance for complicated decision making.  Very important as we age and tech gets away from us.  The archetype here is the oldster who needs help with registering a new phone, or unnecessarily complicated sales processes like leasing a car. 

3. The product provides a cultural experience or status upgrade.  Apple for instance.  Even if Apple doesn't sell through Amazon (although I think they do, sort of) people will still buy Apple products -- either at the Apple website or in an Apple retail store. They need Apple for self-fulfillment more than they need convenience.  (Interesting note: airpods -- those white, dangly, Apple wireless earbuds, were they a standalone business would be the single hottest start-up in silicon valley. I'm going to have to write an essay on Apple and why I don't like it.)

There are probably others, but in the overwhelming majority of purchases, it's Convenience Uber Alles and Amazon wins.  

The other arae in which Amazon is the 900 lb. gorilla is cloud services.  This is mostly hidden from the public at large, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest vendor of back-end services for the cloud.  All that stuff you do that is now in "the cloud" -- meaning you access it through a browser or your phone exists on servers owned and run by Amazon.

You begin to see what an immensely powerful position they are in.  They control the front end and the back end of the bulk of commerce in the U.S. and much of the First World.  

I don't know how all this plays out.  Generally when companies get this big they butt heads with Government.  Cynics will say that the Government reacts to being threatened or simply wants tribute.  The naive say that at that size, they are too important to society not to face control and oversight.  Whatever the case, Amazon is on the fast track there.  "There" could be anything from an antitrust breakup to an East India Company style accommodation.  

It's also worth noting that Amazon is not (yet) all powerful.  Though AWS is the big gun, it faces stiff competition from Microsoft's Azure product, Microsoft being able to leverage their greater power in corporate infrastructure.   Their streaming services, while solid, aren't crushing the likes of Spotify or Netflix, although if they decide to truly leverage their Prime subscribers they could dominate.  Also, has Spotify ever turned a profit?  Their hardware ventures -- Fire phones and tablets -- are almost a joke, which is odd as you would think they could leverage Kindle to that end.  The Whole Foods and Washington Post purchases seem barely coherent at this point.

It's going to be fascinating to see this play out. By the way, I am generally a fan of Amazon.  I think for the most part they have done far more good than evil in the world and I would not want to go back to pre-Amazon times.