Levity

Taken from an article entitled “The Great American Bubble Machine” from Rolling Stone magazine:

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren’t much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

Source: [LINK]

I lived through this kind of insanity in Vancouver and Ottawa during the late 1990s and this description made me laugh heartily. I have some friends and colleagues that are building solid web-based businesses but it bears remembering how far off the rails we can go when we suspend disbelief.

As if life isn’t crazy enough these days, I’ve recently decided to start looking for my birth parents with my Mom’s blessing. My Mom and Dad have always been great and I’ve never felt very compelled to look for my birth parents in the past. I was adopted by my parents in 1978 at 10 days old. I don’t know what it’s like to not be adopted (I get that question all the time – “what’s it like to be adopted?”). My parents couldn’t have kids of their own and I was available so it worked out for all parties involved. I was, of course, the perfect child.

In recent years, I’ve had some questions about my birth parents. I don’t feel like there’s anything missing from my life but they’d be 49 this year and I’m curious to see what they’re like. In a way, I wish I could meet them without them knowing who I am because I feel there’s a lot that could go wrong but…. after my Mom encouraging me to look them up, I think I’m ready.

As with the rest of my life, I like to share everything with the people I know so in the spirit of full disclosure – here’s everything I have in terms of paperwork on myself:

If you click on the link, you can download the paperwork I came with after my adoption was finalized. It’s got some interesting stuff in there. Apparently my birth parents were hobbits. I’m 6′2″ so I’m not sure how that happened. I’m also getting the paperwork rolling with the government to access my original birth record. If my birth mother hasn’t locked down her records, her name will be on that form! Crazy!

I’ll post more on this when I find out some information. Just thought some of you might be curious to learn about this aspect of my life.

I learned an interesting lesson a few years ago when I was helping a friend sell a used boat trailer that was worth roughly $1,000. At first, we were trying to sell the trailer on Craigslist at a deep discount – around $300. We didn’t get any calls in four weeks. Then I remembered some of my grad school economics theory and said “let’s try premium pricing and see if that moves it”. We put it back up on Craigslist at $2,500 and it sold on the first day with three other offers as backup. Why did this work? Let’s check with Wikipedia:

Premium pricing (also called prestige pricing) is the strategy of consistently pricing at, or near, the high end of the possible price range to help attract status-conscious consumers. A few examples of companies which partake in premium pricing in the marketplace include Rolex and Bentley. People will buy a premium priced product because:

1. They believe the high price is an indication of good quality;
2. They believe it to be a sign of self worth – “They are worth it” – It authenticates their success and status – It is a signal to others that they are a member of an exclusive group;
3. They require flawless performance in this application – The cost of product malfunction is too high to buy anything but the best – example: heart pacemaker.

I don’t usually direct-quote but I couldn’t put it better myself. In the case of the boat trailer, people were pounding down the door to buy it at almost ten times the price we were willing to let it go for because they believed it the higher price to be an indication of good quality. You can try the experiment yourself next time you want to sell something. Be prepared to play around with the price. We lucked out by guessing the right price on the first try. Here’s an excellent example of premium pricing in action:

This is a tough market. Selling $2 hugs right next to someone giving hugs away for free. Why would anyone take the $2 hug? Either people would do it to piss off the guy giving the free hugs or they really want a hug and believe that the $2 hug is better. A third person could have taken this hug experiment a step further by offering $20 hugs. This would drive increasing business to the $2 hug in a strategy called “Goldilocks Pricing”. Goldilocks Pricing is when you put a range of product offerings in front of consumers with one base-model product, one mid-range product and one ridiculously over-priced product.

The theory is that the overpriced product will make the mid-range product look even more attractive to the consumer. The lower-end product does the same thing if it enhanced the perceived value for money of the mid-range product. So, if we had someone offering $20 hugs, it would drive business to the $2 hugs because the $20 hugs don’t seem like good value. As the guy in the video demonstrated, by highlighting the flaws of the free hugs, the $2 hugs seem like good value. While I don’t recommend mud-slinging to enhance your own business, you could have three people from your own company selling hugs and play around with these pricing strategies.

I’d suggest having someone relatively unattractive (like me) with garlic breath offer up $0.50 hugs. Have a clean and reasonably attract person offer up the $2 hugs and have someone ridiculously hot offer up the $20 hugs. I would bet money that at the end of the day, the $2 hug person would make the most money.

Today is a pretty depressing day in Vancouver. A major bridge on a rush hour corridor route was on fire over the weekend and will be out of commission for at least a month. This morning saw announcements for a few more housing projects that can’t get enough financing to get to completion. Some 2010 Olympic infrastructure is also experiencing financing problems. The recession has finally hit BC in a number of sectors. Even the Daily Mail says that today may well be the most depressing day ever. [READ] It’s been a pretty depressing month overall. However, there are some things to look forward to that I want to highlight in an effort to cheer you up.

Global Warming

Global warming is bad news for most people. Some pundits say that British Columbia (particularly the South Coastal areas) may become warm enough to grow sugar cane this century. If the polar ice caps melt, water levels could rise by 20 feet. That means that where I live, I’ll have water-front property all of a sudden. Sweet! Maybe I can grow sugar cane in the back yard. [Check out the flood map to see where your property will sit] I’m not saying we shouldn’t worry about global warming but you can’t blame a guy for trying to find the bright side!

Labour Shortages

By 2015, there will be more jobs than able-bodied adults in BC. That means one important thing for people like me who are still in the early days of my career – bigger pay. When demand outstrips supply, the price of labour goes up. I’m making good money now but I can’t imagine what my time will be worth when people are literally going out of business for lack of labour. Mwahahahahahahahaha. There’s also a ton of work that needs to be done post-2010. There is a lot of aging infrastructure in BC that needs to be replaced or retrofitted in the years to come.

New Technology

I’ll admit it – I’m a gadget freak. I’m really excited about what the next few decades are going to bring in terms of technology. Organic LED (OLED) displays are coming. That means (eventually), display screens that cover a whole wall and go up like wallpaper. New energy-efficient technology and distributed node infrastructure might mean that I make my own electricity at home and potentially sell it to the grid. There’s also exciting new vehicle and transportation technology coming.

So forgive me if I sound chuffed but I am looking forward to a bright future where I can enjoy mojitos on my waterfront sugar cane plantation while I telecommute for ridiculously over-inflated pay and lounge in my hover-chair.

I don’t know if they’re serious or not but the US pornography industry is the lastest industry group to appeal to the government for a bailout. [READ] I don’t normally write about porn on my blog but it was hard to resist in this case. Joe Francis (of “Girls Gone Wild” fame) and Larry Flynn (of Hustler fame) are saying that they’re going to ask the US Congress for a $5 Billion bailout. In 2006, the porn industry represented a $13 billion industry (surprizingly, South Korea and China’s industries are both nearly double the size of the US industry) [READ]. Claiming that smutty DVD sales are down 22% in the last year, US pornographers want the kind of help the US auto industry is receiving.

Safe For Work: Look! They have to mend their own pants now!

Taking a step back, this smacks of opportunistic pan-handling to me. Clearly, the porn industry is a significant player in the US (no surprize there) but are their current economic woes all due to an economic downturn? The porn industry has more in common with the movie and music industries than it does with US automakers. In other words, they’ve been having problems for years and it’s nothing to do with the economy.

The porn industry, like more mainstream media, suffers from piracy problems (made easy by the Internet). [READ] While going into your local HMV to buy a DVD or a CD has never been socially unacceptable, going into your local adult video store has huge psychological barriers. Any system that makes it easier for porn connoisseurs to get their fix without spending time in a sleazy, sticky adult video shack is going to have huge appeal – legal or not. While initially, the porn industry embraced the Internet with open arms, traditional porn publishers whose empires were founded on video and magazine sales, have been increasingly less competitive in the Internet era.

Back to the question of the bailout – should the US Government tuck some cash into the g-string of this ailing industry? In my opinion – no. Not unless they are also willing to bail out Hollywood and the US music industry. There has been some talk (mostly unofficial talk) that movie studios and record labels are expecting a slump in sales despite previous recessions in which they were relatively stable. Personally, I don’t think the auto industry should get a bailout. Call me insensitive but when an industry dies – let it die. People can get new jobs and towns will re-invent themselves. The auto industry is a basket of problems that I don’t want to rant about right now but I am going to suggest that it might not be worth saving in its current form.

Quick post on a post I read just now on Treehugger [READ]. The thing that caught my eye was up in the upper right-hand corner where “dark green” (implying good environmental sense) meets “cutting edge” is “working from home”. It made me laugh because I’ve been doing it for five years. Like many “cutting edge, green” solutions the real incentive for working from home isn’t to help the environment – it’s a financial incentive.

Working from home generates valuable tax credits (if you’re self employed) and save on gasoline, wear and tear on your vehicle, emissions from public transit and parking. There are negatives though – as most people who work from home will tell you, you’re going to be in the fridge three times as often as you normally are (wasting energy) and you’re going to have the heat on when, if no one was home, you’d have it off.

It’s always a balance and I’m not denying that working from home is better for the environment than commuting to an office. My point is that incentives (and disincentives) is what drives people to go green – not the warm, fuzzy feeling they get from doing good. Not all of use have Al Gore’s money and apparently emission-free jet.

Has all of this hype about suicide bombers in Middle Eastern countries been grossly inflated? Turns out that when given a chance to get within spitting distance of the worst US President in the history of the country, a pair of shoes is the weapon of choice.

He should have thrown a pretzel.

Someone arrest those Keebler Elves, damnit!

In other news: was anyone else amazed at how nimble Bush is when dodging shoes? He must have taken incoming fire-dodging lessons from Hillary Clinton.

The holidays are upon us and for some of us, that means the holiday crap from vendors and service providers has started to roll in. While some Christmas well-wishings are welcome (cards are always a classy touch), others seem poorly though through.

Exhibit A: the calendar I received from a financial company that I do business with.

It's about me.... going to jail???

This reeks of Engrish.

I'm not working it my way with you guys watching.

I accept that times are tough in the financial sector and that they might be tryong to cut back. To clearly forgo the graphic designer altogether in favour of Microsoft Office ‘95 clipart paired with very odd messaging is not an effective use of marketing funds.

It’s too sincere to be ironic. The paper stock is lovely so this wasn’t a cheap mailout. What the hell were they thinking?

Well, happy holidays!

At precisely 18:23 (PST) on September 12, 2008 at Steamworks Brewpub (latitude: 49.28482762264301 longitude: -123.1109368801117), the Vancouver CERN LHC Armageddon party successfully fired up with no major catastrophic incidents.

Nearly 60 people attended and had a good time. Check out the pictures of all of the beautiful people who attended:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Thanks again to everyone who came. I had a great time.

Congratuations to Susanna Parvianen who won the Canucks tickets and to Lori Thiessen who won a copy of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Tonight is the big CERN LHC/ARMAGEDDON party in Vancouver where me and 50 of my closest friends are going to tip some pints to celebrate our impending doom. The problem is that I can’t be a dilligent CERN LHC watchdog once my BAC gets over 0.08 so I need someone to keep an eye on Geneva for me tonight.

Any volunteers?
Here’s the location for the live webcams:

Live CERN LHC webcams.

Just check in every now and again to make sure nothing bad is happening.

Thanks in advance,

Aaron