The actor Andy Hallett, who is best known for playing Lorne (the bar owner) in Joss Whedon’s “Angel”, has died at the age of 33 from heart failure.
I always liked Lorne. What a shame that the man who personified the character has passed so young. Hallett’s first acting job was playing Lorne, and he never acted again after “Angel” wound down – his life is something of a mystery.
H/T to Amp.
Many people seem to be under the impression that if the United States could attain energy independence, we could stop worrying about the war on terror/militant Islam because without our petrodollars, the mullahs would be out of cash. Would that it were so. Leaving aside the moral implications of abandoning a third of the world to rot under an oppressive theocracy, it’s not likely that the Islamic world is going to become economically incapable of bringing the war to us any time soon.
If we get rid of our dependence on foreign oil (a good idea on its own merits, so don’t think I’m arguing against that), we free up room in the consumption pipeline for Africa and Asia to increase their use of cars and other oil-burning technologies. Saudi Arabia is likely to stay rich no matter what we do; we might just make the multitrillion dollar investment to move America to renewable sources, but we certainly aren’t going to make the megatrillion dollar investment to turn China, Africa, India, and Indonesia (to point to the first four billion people who would like cars now, please) into Ecotopia.
So they will have leverage, despite the fact that we hypothetically-don’t need their oil anymore, because they will still have money and power. And quite likely nukes, since for some strange reason, President Obama’s hypercharisma has failed to convince Iran that they don’t need nukes because the community organizer has their best interest at heart, and we all know he doesn’t have the clankers to go after Iran in any effective way. Nuclear-armed states don’t need us to need their export products for us to be embroiled in conflict with them; the USSR had nothing that we needed.
And even if tomorrow morning Al Gore wakes up with a ready-to-go patent application for the Galt Engine and we all start generating a personal terawatt using nothing more than the morning dew, mild sexual desire, and bits of yarn, all THAT will accomplish is to launch the biggest boom in plastic production since Pamela Anderson went shopping for new boobs. Oil price crashes, plastic starts costing eight cents a ton to make, and we all start building plastic houses – and oil ramps right back up to $30/barrel. Plastic houses would be cool and all (I personally want them to make giant Lego bricks about 3′ long that people can snap together to build their own structures because that would be awesome) but would leave the ayatollahs with plenty of cash on hand.
In the long run, readily-extractable hydrocarbons will always have significant economic value, even if nobody would dream of setting them on fire.
This one’s for Joanne. Although in an effort to appease my only reader, I did put it in the “Things That Suck” category.
You have to admire the little fellow’s adventurous spirit.
…and Michael W. Chapman certainly does like to type “Dickey-Wicker“.
Ever get sick of the long anti-materialist “you Americans with your SUVs and your big-screen TVs” rants so popular among the hard economic left?
Full of awesome. Go, read.
Why can’t newspapers make money?
Let’s reinvent the daily paper, with the idea of concentrating on the critical elements of what a paper needs to do.
What do you need in a paper?
It needs to be tabloid sized. A little bigger is OK, but I don’t need an umbrella or a windshield replacement, I just need to read the news. Sitting in McDonald’s, I don’t always have an acre across which to deploy the paper.
It needs to be on my door at 6 AM. I am not going to my computer, printing out a crappy 8.5×11 version and waiting six minutes while my inkjet chirrups at me. Bring me the paper. (And I mean bring it to my GD door, not leave it somewhere in the vicinity of the storm sewers.)
It needs to have the big news of the day, the global “big picture”. It needs to have the editorial opinions of the paper’s writing staff – honestly presented. Not just the editorial elite or the ownership – every writer needs to appear on the editorial page, so that we can hold the sons of bitches accountable for their points of view. You, the reporter heckling the President – did you vote for him? Did you vote for that congressman whose ass you just kissed with a puff piece? What do you honestly think of the health reform bill – do you even really understand it?
It needs to have good local news coverage – many times the amount devoted to national news. Minimal/adequate national, good state-level coverage and excellent local/regional material. The Internet will tell me what President McBama said, the paper can tell me what the mayor said.
So front page should be the national news plus banners of any really earthshaking local stories. Second page should be the editorials. Third page should be the funnies. (Why do I put the funnies third? Because I can’t put them first or second.) Fourth page should be the funnies plus the features old people like, the crossword and such. (It keeps them from rioting about Social Security, so it’s worth the pagecount.)
The funnies should be large. That might mean only a couple of dozen on each page. I don’t care. There’s so much dross on the FP, you could start a dross-making business and make a fortune. (I apologize for that joke, but insincerely.) Just run the good ones.
Pages five through eight should be local and regional news. Page nine and ten are sports and entertainment news. None of these pages (1-10) have any advertising on them.
Pages eleven through sixteen are ads. Classified ads have space preference; if the classifieds don’t fill the space, banner ads fill the difference. Run PSAs if there are no ads. Local jobs should be the favored classified ad. Classified ad space is sold over the counter at a low fixed rate; banner ad space is sold on eBay or a similar online auction model on an inventory model; you can buy column inches that will run when we next have space for them.
We need four local reporters, one local editor, one national/state reporter who does hisher own editing – they’re just regurgitating Reuters, after all – and one managing editor to hang the whole thing together. We need a fresh-faced intern to handle customer service for the classifieds. We need one crotchety old bastard to walk around and bother people and tell them to quit pissing around with their email and get the hell back to work. We need one sweet-faced angel with people skills to be the publisher/editor in chief/grand high panjundrum of deciding what kind of coffee to order for the breakroom. (You can combine the latter two into one job if you find someone with the appropriate type of multiple personalities.)
That’s ten people for the editorial staff. They can bring their own computers to work. We’ll pay them $50,000 apiece the first year, so our editorial budget is $500,000. They’ll need an office. Ten people don’t need a whole lot of space. In Denver I can rent a set of offices for (checks Craigslist) for $2350 for about 1500 square feet, let’s call it $2500 a month. Add another $500 a month for all the telecomm stuff a paper needs – $36,000 for the year. It’s more space than we need, but we might expand quickly.
We will subcontract delivery, distribution, and printing – the “paper” means the people who create it, not the physical infrastructure of creation. It makes no economic sense for us to own our own press, so we will contract that out and just order our daily run from the printer who gives us the best deal. The paper will cost 25 cents on the newsstand, 50 cents delivered. The 25 cent delivery charge will go to the delivery contractor(s); 25 cents a delivered paper is an excellent wage for those guys and we will get outstanding response there.
So how many papers do we have to sell to break even? I confess I don’t know what it would cost to print up the paper as described – sixteen tabloid sheets, all B&W, on cheap but not shoddy paper. Ten cents a copy? That leaves fifteen cents to cover editorial salaries, along with whatever revenue comes in from the ad side. My budget above (which of course doesn’t cover every single thing, but which does hit the big ticket items) is $536,000 a year. Let’s call that $600,000 to give us some cushion. That’s 4,000,000 papers per year we’d have to sell – just under 11,000 papers a day.
There are one-man local circulars that can hit that. Is there anyone who thinks that you couldn’t sell 11,000 subscriptions to such a paper in Denver? Particularly if the paper’s focus and tone were friendly to its readers, and not highhanded preachiness? And then your ad revenue is just pure sweet gravy to ladle out on shareholders.
Get 100,000 subscribers, and you’re rich.
A paper built on this “value” model could expand, easily keeping its costs the same per copy and increasing the value per issue. There are doubtless inflection points on such a paper’s growth curve where redesigns could lead to better margins and better reader experiences – I don’t foresee where those would come, but presumably they’d be detectable once you were in business and talking to customers every day.
Obviously this business plan is less than complete. But offhand it looks profitable, and to just be hugely hubristic and dare the gods, easy. It’s a lot smaller than the paper of yesteryear – but the space that paper took up in the memesphere has been filled by other media. The paper will remain, and will remain important, but the profitable papers will be small in organizational size, lean in operation, and tightly focused on their local markets.
