Same Product, Different Face

Amazon releases the Kindle Version 2 today, ho hum. This is a perfect example of a product designed by a Marketer who has no idea of what the public wants, but they know exactly what they want to sell. Doesn’t matter what the consumer wants, just look at the benefits of locking the consumer into your store with a device that reads only your DRMed media content. What else could a marketing exec ask for? The Kindle version 2.0 offers nothing new worth having.

The Kindle’s New “Features”

New specs include; A thinner unit, 10.2 ounces (instead of the old 10.3 oz, wow!), a screen with 16 shades of grey (instead of the old 4) at a resolution of 600 x 800 at 167 ppi (pixels per inch), 25% longer battery life, more storage space, a 20% faster page refresh, and a text-to-speech option using a computerized voice. Formats supported; Kindle (AZW), TXT, MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.

What’s Missing?

What it still has that it doesn’t need; A butt-ugly chicklet keyboard, Sprint 3G “Whispernet” access which bloats the price, text-to-speech (do we REALLY need this?), a proprietary DRMed format (AZW) so that you cannot trade your ephemeral products with your friends or read them on other devices.

What it still doesn’t have; A reasonable price, an SD card slot (why would you remove the most useful feature?), a touch screen, a use outside the US of A, support for Word and Excel files, and a colour other than white.

One of the new features includes something called “Whispersync,” which allows you to switch between devices while you’re reading a book and pick up where you left off. This implies that you were stupid enough to buy multiple units. “No computer needed,” so why do you need to charge it via a USB cable? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Also, I thought one of Amazon’s selling points was the fact that your library is all online, so why do I need more storage if everything is online?

Target Demographic

The Kindle continues to be targeted at business-type people who think it might be a “good idea” to be able to read their Financial Times or a book while traveling, but they are much too sophisticated to be seen carrying a newspaper or a book, the techno-geek who wants all the newest gadgets no matter the price, and the blogging media. People who actually want to read books wouldn’t want this product, at least not at this price. Sadly, people will still buy this product and wave the Amazon flag while yelling, “Hey! Look at me! I’m a geek on the cutting edge!” Sad really.

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The Other Side of the Coin

On the other side we have a company called Plastic Logic that actually appears to understand what people want in an eReader. Here’s a product that’s due out in 2010 with an 8.5 by 11 inch form-factor aimed squarely at the business consumer. We can only hope that Plastic Logic will look at the mistakes that Amazon is making now and not follow them in the future. One can only hope that they will take this same technology and apply it to a smaller, paperback-sized device aimed at bibliophiles like me.

What’s Offered?

For specifics on the device, you should go to the Plastic Logic’s website and have a read.

The short list is as follows:

• Less than 7mm (about 1/4 inch) thick
• Weight less than 16 oz
• form factor, as mentioned, is 8.5″ x 11” (or a full letter-sized page)
• battery life measured in days not hours
• support for a wide range of document types including PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel & PowerPoint, and others
• E Ink Active Matrix Display
• A touchscreen interface
• Tools for acquiring, organizing and managing information
• Wireless and wired access to content

It also states that the device uses a “version of Win CE from Microsoft, but the features of the operating system are not directly visible to the user” and it “will support digital rights managed content,” which should keep the marketing grubs happy. One can only assume that DRMed content will be only one of the many formats offered and that it will support a wide variety of other non-DRM content. Since the unit will support native PDFs, there will be all sorts of copyright free content available from Google books. There will also be supporting software that runs on Windows and the Mac, which makes one assume that it will be easier to download and organize content. There is no specific mention of support for an SD card, but the hi res image of the device offered on the website implies that there is a port for them. As well, they hint at a colour screen for future devices.

Also there is no mention of an estimated street price for this unit (to be announced in 2010), but one hopes that Plastic Logic is keeping their eye on what Amazon is doing and realizes that the average book reader will not pay that sort of money for the technology when they can get something ultimately more useful, like a Netbook, for the same price. If they found themselves in the $100-$150 range for a trade paperback-sized (5″ by 7″) version and around $200-$250 for a full letter-sized version, I think they’d be in the ballpark.

So here’s a vastly superior device with a touch screen giving you the ability to do markup right on top of your document and use gestures to flip pages and type on an actual on-screen keyboard! I have high hopes for this product, hopefully Plastic Logic does not disappoint.

YouTube Video

Here’s a short product demo video from Plastic Logic.

_{Image credits; Amazon Kindle from John Pastor on Flickr. Plastic Logic eReader from the Plastic Logic website.}

eReaders in the News

There has been a lot of interest lately in eReaders and electronic books and with the expected release Amazon’s new “Kindle v2.” So I thought, as an avid reader and self-confessed bibliophile, that I would offer my opinions to the world on why the current crop of eReaders will not work. The primary problems right now include the price of the reader unit and the lack of a cross-platform format, but the problems don’t stop there. Publishers also need to rethink the way they market books.

eReader Contenders

There are a few different eReader units in the market today, but the top contenders are obviously the Amazon Kindle, the Sony eReader, and to a lesser extent the Hanlin eReader V3 (which was sold under various names depending on what country you were in). A quick look at Wikipedia will also give you the names of other eReader devices—The Digital Reader 1000 and The Iliad by iRex Technology, the Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen, as well as some other lesser-known devices. All of these devices use the same sort of display technology called electronic paper which was designed to mimic the appearance of conventional paper and claims to be less fatiguing for the reader’s eyes.

Design Weaknesses

I believe that the manufacturers of eReading devices need to stop, step back and look at the design of their device before they get too excited about electronic books. For starters, let’s look at how people hold a book—Most readers will hold a book in one hand, generally using their thumb on the spine of the book to hold it open and their fingers to support the book, they’re not going to hold your 7″ by 5″ device in two hands as you see in so many advertisements, it’s just too uncomfortable. So the design of your eReader needs to have two equally-weighted halves to it, possibly even two screens as people (in the Western world) naturally want to read from left to right. A two screen model could also have the advantage of allowing one screen to refresh while the user is reading the other screen, and having the ability of using one screen to perform other functions such as dictionary searches, bookmarking, indexing, etc while the other screen displays the current content the user is reading.

Another advantage to using two smaller screens instead of one large screen is the price of the screen itself. A larger surface area, especially if you’re using touch screen technology is more expensive than say two smaller surfaces. And while we’re talking sizes of screens, let’s talk about the optimal size for an eReader—think paperback novel. Your average paperback novel is around 7 inches high by 4 inches wide, so if we made our eReader approximately 8 inches high by 5 inches wide and less than half an inch thick, we would probably be around the optimal size for most readers. Now think about this, you have two screens 8 inches by 5 inches, turn the reader 90 degrees and what do you get? You get a screen that has a form factor almost the same as a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Now you could use your dual screens to display letter-sized PDF documents at 94% of their actual size. So I’m thinking 2 small screens that when sitting flat lock together to form one larger screen with a thin bezel between the halves.

Alternatively we could keep the single-screen tablet-type model. It would be cheaper than a double-screen, and you would want to keep that golden 5″ by 8″ screen size. But we also need to keep in mind how we want to hold this device. It should be the same thickness throughout, not thicker on one side as the Kindle is. If anything, it should be thinner near the bottom edge and thicker near the top edge so that when it’s sitting flat on a tabletop it angles slightly toward the viewer. Also there should be a bit of a groove down the left and right sides along the back so that when the user is gripping it the fingertips have some place to grab on to.

Also, what is it with the klutzy chicklet keyboard on the Kindle? We have cheap touch screen technology these days, why do we want an ugly push-button keyboard cluttering up our eReader? Let’s take a page out of the book of Apple and get ourselves an on-screen keyboard in this thing. And while I’m on the topic of the Amazon Kindle, let’s lose the proprietary “Whispernet” connectivity that only works in the USA, there’s a whole planet outside the borders of the USA people! This wireless connectivity is just adding a huge unwanted cost to the base units. Nor do these units need to have the ability to play MP3s. Sure, it’s a nice bonus to be able to listen to music while you’re reading but all you’re doing is sucking power from the battery when you could be using a smaller battery and lowering the cost again. We have MP3 players, we don’t need them in our eReaders.

What are you selling anyway? You’re selling an electronic book reading device. You’re not selling a portable web-browsing device, we already have those and they do a much better job of it. If you want to actually get your eReader device to the masses, you need to drop the price way down and lose all of these restrictive and useless “features” that you think you’re adding. This device needs to cost somewhere between $100 and $150. Personally, I would not pay what Amazon is asking for the Kindle—$359 for an eReading device is far too high, even if it did work in Canada, which is does not. The Sony eReader device is a bit cheaper at $250 for the lower end model, $400 for the higher end model. And the iRex iLiad runs as high as $600.

Media and Accessibility

Now let’s talk file types; We need an ebook format that will work across all types of readers and on computer screens. Nevermind your DRM crap, we already know that the DRM model does not work. Why must you keep beating a dead horse? These readers should also support, but not be limited to supporing; Plain text files, rich text files, Excel files, Word files, PDF files, ePub files, HTML, XML, JPEG, (static) GIFs, BMP and PNGs. In short, I should be able to plug an SD card into this device and read any sort of document that I want to. Of course this device will have an SD card port, and a mini USB port so that you can sync up your eReader to your computer. Your computer is the device you should be using to download new media, not your eReader.

I also need to make a comment about the media, or the actual eBooks themselves that publishers who want to sell books to the public should know—I will not purchase ephemeral products. In other words, you will not be able to sell me MP3s, downloaded software, or downloaded eBooks. I will not pay $10 for a book that does not exist outside of the ether. When I spend $10, I want a physical object in my hand that I can read, save, put on a shelf or pass on to someone else to read. I am not going to spend my hard-earned money on data that is here today and might be gone somewhere else tomorrow. If you want to sell me an eBook then you need to take that data and put it on to something that I can physically possess. You can’t take a packet of data and put it up on a shelf to save for a future generation, nor does data appreciate in value as time goes on. I am a bibliophile, I have shelves full of books that I can touch and appreciate at any time that I want to, I don’t have to rely on an over-priced electronic device in order to access the words they contain. I can take one of those books off my shelf and pass it on to a friend any time I want to without having to worry about some stupid publisher’s DRM system getting in my face.

Want to Sell More Books?

Here’s what to do; publish your book as a trade paperback, then take the text of that book and put it on an SD card or a mini CD and then include that card or CD in the back of your trade paperback so that people with electronic reading devices can read your book on their eReader. Want to sell your books at the airport? No problem, sell the customer a pre-loaded SD card the same way you sell audio books on CD. Then they can pop that SD card into their eReader and read your book anywhere they are.

Make your book accessible to the devices that people want to use to read them and lose this proprietary data nonsense. Get your books out there to the public by offering free preview chapters in eBook or PDF format and the readers will come. Get your books out there by offering free audio podcasts. You’ll sell a heck of a lot more books if you make your media accessible to the masses in more appetizing forms. Stop telling people how you want them to consume your product and listen to how they want to consume it.

Want to Sell eReaders?

Lose the stuff that doesn’t need to be there. You’re selling an electonic book reader, you’re not selling an iPod Touch. Electronic paper does not have the refresh rate or colour depth to make it an effective wireless media device. It was designed to display static type, use it for that.

I am not going to spend $400 on a device that is “something” like an iPod touch when I already have a much superior device in the market, nor am I going to spend that sort of money on a device that can connect to the Internet when I can buy myself a Netbook for the same price and have 20 times the functionality that the eReader has.

So if you want to sell more eReaders, stop trying to make a device that does everything and just make a simple electronic book that works!

_{Images from the stock.xchng}

Is Reading a Lost Art?

The other day I was having a discussion with some people about how reading was becoming a lost art, and how publishers could sell more books to more people. This also led to a discussion about hardcover books vs trade paperbacks vs mass market paperbacks and the amount of resources each format uses, which in turn led me to thinking about things like eBooks and eBook readers. Book publishers are finding it more and more difficult to sell old-fashioned dead-tree books in today’s world.

“But Herne,” you think, “I’m reading right now.”

Well, yes, you are reading, but are you thinking as you read? Chances are you aren’t thinking about a whole lot as you read. Our current level of technology has taken a lot of that cumbersome thinking stuff out of our hands. For the most part, most of us use very little of our brain’s power or imagination in day-to-day life, we certainly use less of our imagination than we used to anyway. With our level of technology and the Internet, we don’t need to imagine what we’re reading about, the Internet provides us with convenient pictures and narratives to tell us what we’re thinking. So is the Internet and technology making us more stupid?

No, the Internet and technology is not making us as humans more stupid, but it is making us more lazy.

Book Formats

But back to the discussion at hand—Publishers want to sell more books, how do they do this? First of all, let’s briefly take a look at the different book formats; Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Mass Market Paperback, Audio Books, eBooks, PDFs, and Podcasts (Podiobooks).

Hardcover books: Pros—Durability, better paper therefore longer life, higher markup for publishers. Cons—Higher costs, more (paper) resources used, larger format means the product is heavier, less portable, and therefore more costly to ship.

Trade Paperbacks: Pros—Durable though not as durable as hardcovers, often better paper used therefore longer life, price markup for publishers decent, lighter than hardcovers so shipping costs are lower. Cons-Still cost more than mass market paperbacks, resource use still fairly high, larger size means less portable than mass market paperbacks.

Mass Market Paperbacks: Pros—Cheaper for consumer, small format means several can be shipped for the cost of one hardcover, fewer resources (less paper) used to create them. Cons—Lower price point means less money for the publisher (and author), less durable, cheaper paper used.

Audiobooks: Pros—Often more palatable to the consumer because they don’t actually have to read the book themselves, more portable. Cons—Production requires the use of voice artists or readers, which increases production costs, not to mention the costs of getting the audio files to an audio medium so that the consumer can purchase it.

eBooks, PDFs, and Podcasts: Pros—Very few resources used to produce the content, self-publishing is a breeze. Cons-Harder to control the distribution and copyright, also requires some sort of technical device (eReader, computer, MP3 Player) to consume the content.

The Secret to Selling Books

So you want to know how to sell more books? Well, let me give you my opinion, one simple bibliophile’s opinion on how to sell more books. I purchase and read a LOT of books per year, and you know what entices me to buy more books? Content and pricing.

“Well duh!” You say, “Of course content and pricing is going to influence how many books people buy!”

Well here’s the thing… You want to sell more books and I want to buy those books, but I am not going to purchase a “fluff” fiction book for the same amount of money that I would spend on something like a technical computer book or a high quality photography or art book. So here’s the secret to selling more books: Give the consumer what they want for the price they want to pay! Duh!

I am more than willing to spend $30, $40, $50 for technical books on computers, or guides for software, or for instructional books on photography, but I am not willing to spend that sort of money on the next “New York Times Bestseller” or some other kind of frivolity that is here today and forgotten tomorrow. I’m also smart enough to know that publishers spend a fair amount of money to get their products on these lists, so I’m not falling for that old gag. So how about we sell books at prices that people want to pay? Whoa! Simple concept! Publishers don’t seem to grasp it, though.

Publishers historically release new titles to the market in hardcover at the highest price point and hope that they’ve generated enough interest in (or spent enough money on) their product that people will be willing to shell out around $35 (on average) to purchase this product. Yes, books will sell at this price because there are always people who are willing to purchase first run hardcover books; libraries, institutions, people who follow “best seller” lists without thinking, etc. So publishers will spend a bunch of advertising revenue to get their new books on the “best seller” lists and sell 20 or 25-thousand copies of the book at this price and about 6 months later they’ll often come out with the trade paperback version of the title. Many of the people who wanted the book when they first saw it come out in hardcover will now look at the trade paperback, now at around $20 (on average) and think maybe they should buy it now. So the publishers will sell another 25 thousand copies or so of the trade paperback. Then, finally, after about a year after the book first appeared on the shelf as a hardcover the publisher will produce the mass market paperback edition of the book, now priced around $10 (on average) hoping to persuade the hold out readers to purchase their product. This would traditionally also be the time to introduce the next hardcover book in the series, assuming that the first edition did well enough to warrant a second edition.

This “traditional” schedule of publishing worked well in the past, but consumers have come a long way in the last 10 or 15 years. Now we have the Internet and electronic devices and we want instant gratification for everything! If you’re waiting a year to get your book into the hands of Joe-average consumer, then you are losing sales hand-over-fist. Publishers need to wake up now, take a hard look at what’s happening on the Internet and in the “new media” environment that is so commonplace today if they want to keep selling books in the future.

As I said, I am a bibliophile—a book fanatic—and I’m not going to wait a year to purchase your book. If I’ve seen your hardcover book and it seems interesting to me I might make note of it to look it up later or purchase it secondhand but I am not going to shell out $35 for your average fiction book, and chances are I’m not even going to remember your publication when you’ve decided to publish it as a mass market paperback a year later.

If you want to sell more books then you need to produce more titles in more formats so that people who wish to purchase them can do so more easily. Sure, you can certainly continue to produce books in hardcover format because there will still be those people willing to pay more for this perception of a “better” product, but most people like myself who consume a lot of content are smart enough to realize that “premium” does not always mean “better.”

You need to start offering your products simultaneously rather than consecutively. I would much rather see the hardcover and trade paperback editions released simultaneously followed shortly, say within three months, by the release of the mass market paperback edition. I think you would sell a lot more books if you gave the consumer what they want to consume rather than making them wait for it.

Premium Content vs. Premium Pricing

When I think of “premium content,” I think of more content or something special that’s not included with the regular, lower-priced model.

So how about we add a little carrot to those hardcover sticks we want to sell? How about we start including an eBook version of the book with every hardcover book we sell? Think of how little that might cost versus the large gains you would get back. Most publishers are using a page layout program such as InDesign or QuarkXPress, so it costs them nothing to export a second copy of the postscript file off into a PDF creation program. You take that PDF and you burn it on to a mini CD, and you include that CD with every book! Now we’re talking! Now I might be willing to spend that extra bit of money to purchase your book so that I have the option of reading it on my eBook reader of choice, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

In that blog post I want to talk about why eBook readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Digital Reader could be amazing products, but are not making the impact on the market that they could because of the huge price points, the lack of a standard eBook format, and the paranoia called “rights management.”

_{Image from the stock.xchng}

That’s always the way, isn’t it? You always have something to blab on about, you set yourself up a blog to say it and then you run out of time or steam.

I’ve been short of both lately, so there’s been very little activity here. I’m also trying to get myself together and create a custom theme for this blog and for other domains that I own. Combine that with the “busy season” at work and you never get things done when you want to…

So, anyway, here we are heading into 2009 and I’ve got lots to say about nothing.

More soon…

The Global Recession

They say that Canada isn’t in a recession, but recently the company I work for did something I never thought it would ever do. I’ve been working for the same Canadian Educational Book Design company now for about 10 years and recently, as a direct result of the USA’s financial crisis, my company laid off almost 20 employees and cut the remaining staff’s remuneration by 10%.

Everyone was in shock.

Yes, we knew that the economy was bad and we knew that we didn’t have as much work running through the company as we usually do for this time of year. We’re not a new company, we’ve won all sorts of awards for Textbook Design, we may even be the most prestigious Textbook Design company in North America, certainly Canada. Yet here we are struggling to make ends meet. Sure we’ve had slow spots before, but nobody ever got fired or laid off. We all got together and reduced the number of hours we spent on the clock or took holidays when things we slow, but this time it was bad. Really bad. For the first time in the company’s 26 year history, the boss was actually forced to reduce the numbers of staff and it hurt.

The “New” Economy

Here’s the problem in a nutshell, as it were; “Offshore pricing.”

Places like China and especially India have huge numbers of people who will do hours of mindless and repetitive labour for peanuts. Someone figured out that if you put enough of these people in front of a computer and let them hammer at it long enough, eventually they could get things done. And the best part is that you can pay them about $3 per day and they’ll be happy to take it. There are “comp houses” in India that will run a couple hundred people in three shifts for six days a week and pay them next to nothing. Turn over is huge, but they don’t care because there will always be someone else willing to take their place. We’ve all seen the results of low ball pricing recently, with toys covered with lead-based paint and melamine in food, but it’s all about the bottom line isn’t it? Who cares who gets hurt?

So what’s happening now is that all of the major US publishers are being run by the bean counters. These people have no concept of book design, content, production, or anything else related to creating a usable textbook, all they do is count beans. The fewer the number of beans it takes to get the job done, the better. They don’t care about how many man-hours a book takes to complete the job, or the extra processes that were involved because the editors rewrote four chapters, or the fact that a lot of work goes into preparing the electronic files so that they can be reused or re-purposed, all they care about is the bottom line. So when once a book design company would get $50-60 a page for a book, now they get $15-25 a page. And don’t try to negotiate these prices because if you do, then the bean counters will blacklist your company and you will not get work from them again.

On the other side of the fence we have the authors, editors, and all of the other people who write these books and they’re expecting the Book Design companies, like the one I work for, to do the same quality job that we’ve always done. What they don’t realize is that for the money that we’re getting per page now we can hardly meet our day-to-day expenses never mind make a profit. You get what you pay for.

And the bean counters don’t talk to the editorial side.

Burning Bridges

Recently a bean counter told us, “Don’t even THINK about asking for more money.” It’s almost like spitting in our faces—Take it or leave it! These people have no concept of reality. In some cases we are actually subsidizing the creation of the book because we are losing money on every page that we create! But we have to take every job that we’re offered because we have to keep the people that we have left working. So how can anyone stay in business when they end up paying out more than they’re taking in you might ask… Well, that brings us to the problem we’re having right now.

These idiotic bean counters are burning bridges at an alarming rate. As more companies go into receivership, the number of people that they can screw goes down, however the companies in India are still there with their hands out saying, “Oh, we’ll do it for $3 a page. No problem.” But, when you pay $3 per page, you get $3 worth of quality and it shows in the end product. Think of that the next time you shell out $100 for a textbook for your child and you find glaring errors all the way through it, and then thank the bean counters for a job well done.

What’s Coming?

The US Presidential election is coming soon. With it comes promises of more spending for education, which means more textbooks. Also, 2011 is an “adoption year,” which means that all sorts of States will be updating their textbooks to new State Standards. This means a lot of work for a lot of people and when all of that work hits, the bean counters will be falling all over themselves trying to find someone to do that work for them. That’s when all the crap that they’ve dished out now, when times are lean, comes back to roost for them. They may have saved themselves a dollar today, but they’ll find that they’ll have to spend five dollars tomorrow just to catch up and that’s when the North American Book Design companies will have the last laugh.

We just have to survive until then…

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Billions in Bailout

So the US Government is talking about a $700 billion (with-a-B) taxpayer-funded bailout to end the ongoing mortgage company problems and stem the gushing flow of money flowing from the US economy. This would push the US National debt to its highest level since the second World War. The US debt would amount to 70% of the country’s gross domestic product! But what will this short-term solution do to the economy in the future? Are we looking ahead to blue skies and rainbows or massing thunderheads and destruction?

Startling Observations

As of September 2008, the total U.S. federal debt was approximately $9.7 trillion. [source: Wikipedia] Each citizen’s share of this debt is $32,336.00. The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $2.32 billion per day since September 28, 2007. [source: US National Debt Clock]

Forget “original sin,” we’re talking “original debt.” A child born in the USA today will have a $37,000 debt before they even finish taking their first breath! What happens after an additional $700 billion is spent to bail out Wall Street?

The government reaching the requested debt limit would entail every man, woman and child in the U.S. owing more than $37,000 each. The median U.S. income last year was $50,233. [source: The Toronto Star]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the U.S. Treasury Department have warned that debt levels will increase dramatically relative to historical levels, due primarily to mandatory expenditures for programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest. Mandatory expenditures are projected to exceed federal tax revenues sometime between 2030 and 2040 if reforms are not undertaken. Further, benefits under entitlement programs will exceed government income by over $40 trillion over the next 75 years. The severity of the measures necessary to address this challenge increases the longer such changes are delayed. These organizations have stated that the government’s current fiscal path is “unsustainable.” [source: Wikipedia]

This means that if the United States of America does not stop spending more money than it generates that it will self-destruct, and soon. And we’re not talking about 2030, we’re talking closer to 2015. You cannot keep printing more money to cover today’s debts, just look at the current crisis in Zimbabwe where they are facing an inflation rate of 11.2 million percent. If you think gas is expensive now, just wait…

Once upon a time you had to have a dollar’s worth of gold to guarantee your printed dollar, now all you need to do is print up as much money as you need. What is a dollar worth these days? What happens when countries all over the world bring in their bits of paper and start demanding payment for the “promissory notes” that you’ve printed up?

Where Does the Money Go?

The President’s budget for 2008 totals $2.9 trillion. Just a few examples; they’re spending $608 billion on Social Security, $386 billion on Medicare, $481 billion on National Defense, $145 billion on the “War on Terror” (which might as well be under DoD), $34 billion on Department of Homeland Security (again, DoD), $56 billion on Education (which is just over one third of what they’re spending on this “War on Terror”), and only $20 billion on Agriculture. [source: Wikipedia]

So we’re looking at something like $660 billion on “Defense and Security” or nearly one-quarter of the budget.

Bailing out Wall Street

So now the whole world is waiting for the big bailout of Wall Street. Why should we in Canada care if the US goes under? Well, unfortunately a lot of our economy is tied to America’s. Every time the US Stock Exchange takes a dive, the Canadian stock market (and the UK markets, and the EU markets, and the Asian markets) get sucked down with them. This sort of thing needs to stop. In my opinion, Canada needs to start thinking about Canada and stop sniffing after the US markets. How about us up here in Canada start dictating terms to the USA in regards to imports and exports instead of the other way around? NAFTA did nothing good for us here in Canada despite what the “experts” say. Talk to the man in the factory and ask him what NAFTA did for us.

Everyone is waiting to hear what is going to happen in Congress. The fear-mongering continues. Bush is flapping his lips about “shoring up the economy.” I mean, who started this slide into oblivion in the first place, Georgie? It was you and your little “War on Terror,” wasn’t it? You were so busy screwing around in someone else’s country that you let yours go to hell. Nice job.

It should be “interesting times” for the next few days, that’s for sure.

_{(Some images from the stock.xchng, manipulated by Herne.)}

Canada and the USA then…

I live in Canada. The Canada/USA border is approximately 8,891 kilometres (5,525 miles) long and runs roughly along the 49th parallel. Canada has had a friendly relationship with the USA for more than two centuries, once we got over that little skirmish called “The War of 1812,” where Canada beat the US. The border was demilitarized shortly afterwards and became the “longest undefended International border in the world.” We had always enjoyed a large volume of trade and migration which helped strengthen the ties.

The US had become Canada’s largest market, and after the war the Canadian economy became dependent on smooth trade flows with the US so much that in 1971 when the US enacted the “Nixon Shock” economic policies (including a 10% tariff on all imports) it put the Canadian government into a panic. This led in a large part to the articulation of Prime Minister Trudeau’s “Third Option” policy of diversifying Canada’s trade and downgrading the importance of Canada – US relations. In a 1972 speech in Ottawa, Nixon declared the “special relationship” between Canada and the US dead. [Source: Wikipedia]

From then on, the US-Canadian relationship headed downhill. NAFTA, tariffs on softwood lumber, bans on beef, restrictions on wheat, magazines, and television, it all started looking bad for us here in Canada. The United States had stopped looking to us as a “partner” and started seeing us as the annoying little brother that was always tagging along with the big boys.

Once a Canadian could cross the US/Canada border with only a photo ID or a driver’s license shown to an agreeable US Customs agent at one of our many border crossings, pop over to the US to do some shopping and return the same day without question. Once, in order for a Canadian to fly into the US we only needed to show our ID to the airport agents, answer a couple routine questions and then be waved on through. We were comrades, we were trading partners, we had collaborations and friendships.

No more thanks to the events following September 11th, 2001.

The USA to come?

Here is where I see the USA in 10-15, maybe 20 years if they continue down their current path.

Imagine the entire country encircled by a 20 foot high wall similar to the wall between the USA and Mexico, only imagine it bigger, higher and defended by an armed militia representing “Homeland Security.” Guard towers, video surveillance, nobody enters or leaves the USA without prior written permission from a governmental authority. Imagine random security checks on average people for just walking down the street or for taking a photograph in a public place. Permits required in order to carry out conferences, assemblies or to be out after dark. If you’re thinking of the right of “freedom of assembly” given by the Constitution? Forget it. You happily gave up several of your Constitutional rights in the name of “a safe America.” Imagine special permissions being required to own a motor vehicle, there’s an oil shortage you know, and you can only operate that vehicle during certain times of the day, week and month depending on where you live and how important your job is to the country. Imagine the USA demarcated into “security zones,” possibly broken down along political lines where ordinary citizens are forbidden from crossing state lines without the proper security clearances and permits. Imagine a USA-only Internet, firewalled off from the rest of the world “for your own safety.”

Sound impossible? Improbable? Maybe. But maybe not.

Continued paranoia about the “forces trying to destroy the American way of life” is destroying them as surely as the “terrorists” are. Military spending is out of control. A war (or was it an invasion?) with Iraq started in 2003 continues to destroy the American economy. Technically the war was over about two weeks after it started, but the occupation of Iraq continues because the US claims the region is “fragile.” Billions of dollars of been spent fighting a war based on a lie in retribution for the attack on the World Trade Center. Someone had to pay for those attacks and they did. But where does the revenge end?

The USA is spending more money on a military action in another country that it is spending to keep it’s own people educated, fed, and sheltered. One B2 stealth bomber costs the US approximately $2.1 billion dollars and yet the education budget for the state of Arizona was only $1.5 billion dollars, and they have 30 of these bombers in service. Hundreds of people in the US go hungry, without shelter and without proper health care each day, but instead of spending money to help these people they spend $4.35 million on an M1 Abrams tank and they have approximately 5900 of these tanks in service. Imagine how much good the money from just a couple of these tanks could do.

Thousands of people are employed right now in order to keep this war going. But why? Is it because the war provides a convenient rally point? Is it just to keep them employed and doing something? Or perhaps it provides a convenient distraction from the real problems at hand—The US is destroying itself in order to keep it’s citizens unaware of what is going on around them. Every day we hear about security policy that takes another bit of freedom away from us. Air travel into the USA is becoming more and more impossible, soon we’ll all need to have travel permits and visas in order to cross the border. Normal citizens are under suspicion for “anomalous behaviour.” Everyone is a suspected terrorist until proven innocent.

America will soon cease to be the world’s “big brother” and the European Union will take over as the leader in World economy, if it hasn’t already. The oil standard is sure to switch to Euros in the next 5 years anyway. I see the EU expanding more quickly in the coming years to encompass a third of the planet. Already Iceland, Norway and Switzerland have signed up to be European Free Trade Association states and 10 or 11 other countries are poised to join the Union.

There is a grim future ahead for the USA and the rest of the world, especially Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia by association. With the upcoming election, hopefully the irrationalities of George Bush and his cronies will be reversed or at least diminished. I had hopes for this Obama character, but it seems that he has stopped looking at a “better America” and has started playing into the old political feuds of the old guard. Isn’t it time America started solving America’s problems and let the rest of the world worry about itself for a while? If they continue down the current path, I see America ceasing to be “The United States of America” and becoming “The American Republics” as the country breaks down along political lines and goes the way of the USSR.

The terrorists don’t need to destroy the American way of life, America is doing a fine job all on it’s own.

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I Can Haz Rants?

So I guess I should welcome people to TheHerne.com.
You asked for it, you got it.

This will be my own little place on the Internet where I can post the sorts of comments that I want to post without any fear of ticking off some administrator somewhere and getting my backside banned from someone else’s blog.

This is my space and therefore *I* make the rules. You are welcome to comment on my posts, but now I am the administrator that can ban your backside! (queue maniacal laughter)

What to Expect

I will not be making daily posts. Hell, they may not even be weekly posts, but then if Cait can go for months without making a post on her blog, then I can get away with it too! You get what you pay for here on TheHerne.com, and you ain’t paying a helluva lot.

In between postings of various rants, I will also try to get around to compiling and writing up a couple of my travelogues that I had originally posted over at Blogger. I’ve been meaning to update them into something resembling legibility for some time now, but I’d never gotten around to it. In addition, I hope to get around to putting some stuff into my “theherne” Flickr stream so that people can see where I’ve been.

I’ve just started playing around with making voice recordings, so I would also like to include small audio files from time to time (as soon as I figure out how to do that), possibly some full-length audio files of the rants that I send to the Aussie Geek Podcast or other podcasts, or just me generally going on, laughing insanely, or brushing my teeth. (Hey, it worked for Knightwise.)

I read when I get time, so expect me to write up some reviews about books that I’ve recently read. But don’t expect to hear about anything that’s listed on Oprah or the New York Times Best Seller list because I go out of my way to avoid the crap that they put on those lists. My interests tend toward Sci-Fi, Fantasy, History, Travel, and just plain odd stuff.

Oh, I should mention that I listen to several different podcasts, not just the Aussie Geek Podcast and the Knightcast, and I will be adding those links and others to my sidebar. I also listen to several podcasts, like G’Day World, from The Podcast Network down there in Australia and others.

You can also find me on Twitter, but you probably already knew that.

I’m still in the process of modifying and updating this Wordpress thing, so don’t be surprised if the “look” of the blog changes from time to time as I figure new things out.