Saturated Solution
After my recent trip to the Bay Area to report a PBS story about labor in the tech sector, I was struck by this (h/t Sullivan):
“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”
The Wired piece cites the “billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of” which also struck me, as did similar ads on Caltrain.
Timothy Lee argues the problem is housing. He has a point: San Jose and parts of the Peninsula seem ripe for higher-density development.
But I think Lee misses something when he refers back to the original Wired piece’s formulation — that “the natural resources of the startup world” are “people, real estate, and support services”. Isn’t capital one of those “natural resources”? And isn’t it possible that what Hartz (the VC profiled in the Wired piece) means is an overabundance of capital? Can the VC market allocate resources efficiently when there’s an overabundance of those resources?
Lisa Simeone’s Firing
My fellow public broadcaster Lisa Simeone will no longer host the public radio documentary show Soundprint because she was a leader of and spokesperson for the Occupy DC movement. The AP is reporting that she was fired; Soundprint itself implies that the decision was mutual (check the link above).
On one hand, I can see why. Listeners, readers, and viewers are right to question the word of journalists with ties to organizations and movements with clear agendas. In the case of Soundprint, Lisa’s role as host could have resulted in listeners calling into question the veracity and verisimilitude of the work of a lot of talented reporters who produce work for the show.
On the other, I can see why some public radio listeners might see this as unfair. Juan Williams, after all, was both an NPR staffer and a Fox commentator for years before he was fired. And he wasn’t the only one.
During this pledge period, I urge everyone NOT to take this out on their local member stations by withholding pledges. Your local public radio station didn’t make this decision. Your pledge dollars support essential local programming and a lot of great national reporting; Soundprint gets only a tiny portion of that — if the show’s even carried in your market.
If you feel strongly that this is wrong, and if Soundprint is carried on your local station, I suggest that you call in and make a pledge of $1. Tell the person on the other end of the line — or say in the comment box at the online pledge page — that you’ll give more once public radio as a whole gets its house in order. Which is to say once Mara Liasson no longer contributes to Fox, and once Cokie Roberts is more clearly treated as a commentator and not an éminence grise on NPR’s air, at the very least.
Californian
Why do UK journalists insist on treating California differently? What I mean is that Google, e.g., is typically referred to by the BBC and Guardian as a “Californian company”. New York Life is not a “New Yorker company”, and Wrigley isn’t an “Illinoisan company”. Thank God that Eli Lilly isn’t a “Hoosier company”. (I doubt even the Brits would attempt to use “Indianian”.) So why does California get its own adjective?
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Very good. Very funny. See it.
Idiotic New York conventional wisdom
It’s bad enough having to hear Boomers drone on about how New York has lost its edge. These tend to be folks who rarely leave Manhattan and have almost certainly never been to, say, an illegal Todd P show in Bushwick, surrounded by naked dancers and kids doing lines in plain view. Distressingly, though, this loss-of-edge notion has gone global:
“I’d hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitized away in New York,” said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.
Ms Adler, please contact me before your next visit, and I’ll show you a thriving “alternative art scene”. In Brooklyn. Which is still, last I checked, part of New York.
The World What?
My latest World Cup-themed podcast for PBS’s Need to Know is now available. Includes gratuitous clips of right-wing nutjobs bloviating about a sport they hate.
The “Little Pink Pill”
My new PBS podcast examines Big Pharma’s rush to find a sex drug for women. It’s a kind of preview of a piece that should air on Need to Know on June 11 or 18.
Dust to Dust: PBS podcast, episode 3
This week’s topic is the finale of Ashes to Ashes, with some thinking about the future of digital media, of course. Earlier episodes on vulnerable voting machines and l’affaire iPhone are online. And yes, we’re working on getting it syndicated to iTMS. That ain’t so easy in the PBS world.
The Cloud -v- the Paradise of Infinite Storage
In other words, what’s the value of the cloud when the cost of storage is declining precipitously? Or, conversely, what’s the point in buying lots of storage — however cheap it is — when we all have access to the cloud pretty much whenever and wherever we want?) Last year, my pal Sandy Pearlman and I discussed this during a session at the Future of Music Coalition‘s annual Policy Summit in Washington DC.
Below the fold, I’ve posted an essay Sandy wrote to set up the topic, followed by a couple of responses:
(more…)
World’s Worst Blogger Award
Six weeks? I am crap, aren’t I? Not even ambitious-but-crap. Just crap.
