Lemkin

Predictably thoughtful take from John Gruber on the broader tablet strategy that Amazon is taking up in light of the new Kindle/Kindle Fire product line. You should read the whole thing, but a couple of points really stand out. First:

Apple’s primary business is selling devices for a healthy profit, and they back that up with a side business of selling digital content for those devices. Amazon’s primary business is as a retailer, including as a retailer of digital content. They back that up with a side business of low-cost digital devices that are optimized for on-the-fly purchasing of anything and everything Amazon sells.

This is exactly right. I’d extend the idea all the way out to its limit: Amazon should buy Qwikster from Netflix.
While this move would, to Netflix, be akin to selling Babe Ruth to your direct competitor for a few grand and a bag of balls, what other company out there understands shipping better than Amazon, has a built-in pipe for selling overstocked used discs of yesterday’s blockbuster movie, could seamlessly merge the “this isn’t available to stream, shall we ship it to you right now” experience, and, most importantly, has the leverage with the content owners to actually, you know, offer a lot of content from their streaming service? Clearly the answer ain’t Netflix. It’s Amazon, who can go to content-owners and say: “Do you really want Apple to dominate your pipeline to the consumer? We have the customers, data about those customers, and the access to them. Use us a leverage against Apple and we’ll give you a marginally richer cut in exchange.” Even in an era of increasing disintermediation, the Apple model shows quite strongly that if you pile up enough content that people want, it’s ultimately easier to sell from those fewer, larger silos. Nobody wants to search ten sites to figure out which has Transformers 18: This Time It’s Personal available to stream this week only to have said stream expire mid-movie because you had to pause it at an inopportune moment. In that model, T18:TTIP pirated torrents become king. And yet this is fairly precisely the situation we consumers and our content-overlords increasingly find ourselves in. The future is most definitely not 35 separate “Apps for that,” each of which has to be painstakingly consulted on movie night. There’s room for two, maybe three, giant content aggregators. As of today, I’d say one of them is pretty obviously Apple. The other sure seems likely to be Amazon; even more likely once they’ve sold a few million Kindle Fires. Hell, since Netflix likely won’t sell a direct competitor the keys to Quikster, Bezos should just buy both Quikster and Netflix, re-brand the sexily named “Amazon Instant Video” service Netflix and milk the Quikster “physical media” approach for as long as it makes sense to do so (as part of a broader package ultimately tied to Amazon Prime membership…which, of course, is mostly a deal-sweetening mechanism designed to drive unrelated sales for Amazon as a whole). As always: fewer choices for the consumer means more money for the provider; you draw them in with the enticing product or service, then completely empty their pockets on all the other stuff they hadn’t previously even thought of buying. It’s precisely Apple’s strategy, but attacked from the perspective of the content instead of the device.

Interesting point two:

Amazon is a data-driven company. I’ll bet the $40 premium [for a Kindle that never serves you “offers”] is based on how much money they expect to make from the ads they sell and products they promote via the special offers. Last year the special offer Kindle was only $25 less; the data must show that the special offers are worth more than $25 per Kindle to Amazon.

Taken together with the previous point, it’s clear that there’s potentially much, much more value in that premium. With Silk, Amazon will quickly have a huge dataset covering the browsing habits of their users. They already have a huge dataset on the buying habits of those users. In the user’s hand at the moment of the “offer” is a device purpose-built to grease the skids of said content purchase; just as easy to grease the skids for any kind of purchase once you know what the user wants or is looking for outside of the “content” world. And Amazon just so happens to sell that stuff, and will drop it on your doorstep quicker than seems possible with your annual Prime membership…which, oh yeah, you need because of all the content! Worth something to Amazon to be sure, but worth even more to the content owners and other potential advertisers who will presumably pay handsomely to get targeted sales…and Amazon will be able to show them exactly how well the campaign worked.
It’s simply not possible to do ad-word jiggery-pokery when an actual purchase (as opposed to a view) is the outcome metric. So I’d say it’s crystal clear that it’s in Amazon’s interest to gradually raise the heat on “offer-free” Kindles until, at some point Kindle purchases more closely resemble contract and contract-free purchases of mobile phones. That, I suppose, is when the ads start to intrude on the reading. But that’s a whole other post.

Timothy Noah nails it:

You still can’t say [publicly] that Fortune 500 chairmen need to maximize their incomes, but it’s now perfectly OK to say that real estate speculators and day traders who pay taxes as S-Corporations to dodge Social Security and Medicare payments need to maximize their incomes. By God, they built this country!

Yep. Twenty years of message discipline gets you places. The Democrat could learn something from this sort of thing but never does.

Newish TNR man Timothy Noah weighs in on Politico, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, Obama, and reporting in general (emphasis in original):

The main problem with the Politico piece is that its central example is Daley’s mishandling of the scheduling of Obama’s jobs bill speech. Obama wanted to give it in the House of Representatives on a Wednesday and Boehner said no dice, you have to give it on a Thursday. This somehow became a two-day story and a referendum on Obama’s impotence and the House Republicans’ incivility. I don’t care about how Daley handled this trivial scheduling conflict. I care about how Daley advised Obama during the disastrously drawn-out debt-ceiling negotiations, in which Obama really did look impotent and the House Republicans looked not merely uncivil but bent on destroying the economy. But Politico has nothing on that except a passing reference to Daley cutting Senate leaders out of the loop during the negotiations. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently called Obama to complain that Daley keeps him in the dark. That’s interesting.

This simply isn’t done. In one short paragraph, we have Noah pointing out the vacuity of a competitor, sure, but to me this reads as broader indictment of the Beltway style of political “reporting” in general. Noah actually seems aware of objective reality, makes not one “pox on both their houses” hedge, and points out a real point of contention between a Democratic power center (Reid) and the White House, all while noting that none of this gets covered in the “who won the day” obsessed political press and what does get mentioned is not only often plainly wrong but in a different zip code than anything approaching reality. More please.

(h/t Jason Zengerle)

Steve Benen notes the systematic nature of claiming “zero jobs” created from the stimulus despite the conclusion from the Congressional Budget Office that

“President Barack Obama’s stimulus package may have created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs last quarter and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percentage points”

Let me make this as clear as I can: The Facts Do Not Matter. Unless and until Wolf Blitzer stops the debate and says “then how do you square that statement with the findings of the CBO and 99.9% of world economists who have all concluded…” we will make zero progress.

The modern GOP is entirely predicated on empty boilerplate, outright lies, and brazen platitudes specifically designed to play well for the low information, low attention voter. That is the essence of the Tea Klan: I want all the government services I prefer to be provided for free, everyone else can kindly go die in the streets; here is my entirely unsubstantiated “plan” to make that happen. The cheers at the notion that an under- or un-insured 30 year old in a coma should simply be allowed to die coupled with boos at any notion of immigration being a powerful and useful economic engine for the country say pretty much everything you need to know about the broader movement. God help us if these folks ever discover just how much of the “Texas Miracle” occurred at the hands of legal and illegal immigration into the state. Thus it should come as no surprise that the audience questions last night reflected this sort of poisonous vacuity relative to the actual state of affairs of numerous, seemingly straightforward issues facing the country.

By way of example, there was a long, multi-participant disquisition on how waste, fraud, and abuse totaling in the tens of millions and maybe even into THE BILLIONS could impact the deficit and debt of an approximately four trillion dollar budget. Not one candidate stepped in to even imply that these maximally estimated waste numbers were extraordinarily small potatoes in the context. And neither did Wolf Blitzer. So what was he doing there, exactly?

The same goes for Social Security. Interminable amount of discussion about a program that is largely self-funding and will not be a significant deficit driver for decades and need never drive the deficit should the government choose to make long-term, minor adjustments to the program. Cost growth within Medicare will have destroyed the federal government long before we ever have to think about Social Security as a threat to the solvency of the government. Did that merit a mention? Did Wolf hold anyone to account for that seeming incongruity?

The same goes for “Obamacare.” Each of the candidates begged for “market-based” private insurance solutions to health care delivery in this county. Precisely what, pray tell, do they think “Obamacare” is? Did Wolf bother to ask?

This is all before we even touch lengthy discussions of tax policies featuring 0% rates, 9% national sales taxes, and every other kind of pie-in-the-sky nonsense without even a whisper of how such a rate of collection could even partially pay for existing military budgets, much less everything else dread government does (but don’t cut my pet program!). Was any of this even tangentially addressed? Did anyone get asked what sort of total spending their wonderful tax plan would presage and how that would change federal priorities as we know them (assuming for the moment that the candidate pushing their idea got exactly what they were asking for)? Doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing a moderator should be doing, Wolf?

Of course not, because within our modern media construct the facts do not matter. The facts are the last thing they are concerned with. This was an event entirely predicated on and existing only to produce new sound and fury signifying nothing that will nonetheless be dissected and replayed purely from a horse-race perspective until the next one of these intellectual disasters transpires. It’s why they’re having 52 of them: to feed the mill. What, you thought it was to better understand the relevance and relative merits of the various platforms?

Until we in America force the broader media to start doing its job (by taking our eyes and ears elsewhere), we will continue to get exactly this kind of crap, which is precisely the sort of leadership such an electorate deserves. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

John Cole at Balloon Juice officially wins blogging for the week:

In the long term, assuming [some version of an Obama jobs] plan gets through the House (it won’t), then we get to go through our usual drama of the blue dogs from Red States (Manchin, Nelson, Landrieu, McCaskill, etc.), Lieberman just so he can continue to be the world’s preeminent douchenozzle, and some others I am sure I am missing. They’ll cockblock it on the Senate side, moaning about the program being a deficit buster while conveniently ignoring the fact that each one of them represents a welfare state sucking at the federal teat. Finally, at the 11th hour, Snowe and Collins will swoop in and offer tax cuts for the ultra-rich as a sweetener and they will support it. At this point, Bernie Sanders or whatever progressive hero of the moment will claim he can’t support anything with tax cuts for the rich in it. This will bring things to a standstill for a couple more weeks until another shitty jobs report comes out, and the Senate, acting in the fierce urgency of when-the-fuck-ever will pass some piece of shit that is too small, unfocussed, and does nothing other than provide the left with another opportunity to fracture and start flinging shit at each other. Republicans will have spent the entire time using procedural tricks to slow things down while having Frank Luntz work on the framing of the issue so that by the time it is about to hit the President’s desk, they will already have a cute name, the talking points will be distributed, and we’ll all be hearing about the new “Porkulus” or “Obamacare” or whatever the fuck childish name they come up with. In three months time, when employment hasn’t picked up because we are actually in the same god damned depression we’ve been in since 2007, Rick Perry can claim that Keynesian ideology has once again been disproven. Because everyone hates the bill, Friedman, Brooks, and other members of the Centrist jihad will claim this as proof that the bill is great.

Read the whole thing.

Dean Baker, once again, pointing out an inconvenient truth:

… a study by Charles Rivers Associates suggests that the main impact of the regulation would be to hasten the replacement of old polluting power plants. This could help to create jobs in the private sector in the next few years, a period in which all projections show that the economy will still be suffering from substantial unemployment.

In other words, if Obama was interested in an action that he could take unilaterally that would create jobs, supporting the EPA on the ozone restrictions probably would have topped the list. In nixing the regulation, Obama went the job killing route.

This is precisely the sort of thing that happens when you adopt the framing of your opponent. You end up painted into a political corner, rhetorically speaking, and pretty soon it seems reasonable and even advantageous to make boneheaded moves like this one that are not only economically counterproductive, but work to dishearten your supporters and embolden those of your opponents. Well played, Democrat.