We were down earlier in the day, but we seem to be back up for the moment. Not sure what's going on.

Just a reminder that if this site is down, go here.

Going to call the current host tomorrow.

I stumbled across Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--for Better and Worse on Amazon. It makes the not-unreasonable case that computers in the classroom and in the home do more damage to children's education than it does good, but according to some it is more than a little too strident in tone. No particular desire to read the book, but I found this review interesting and something to file away for a future post on how book-reading is given a pass for many of the same things that are supposed to be demonstrative of the trouble presented by other media.

Also, over and over computers are blamed for not only preventing learning, but physically damaging our children. For example, in Chapter 4 "Computers and Our Children's Health" she bemoans the physical damage computers do to our children, while longing for the good old days of book-learning. However, couldn't the same arguments be made that reading books physically damages our children? Our bodies and minds have evolved to make us efficient hunters-gatherers. In nature, we focus most of our sight and energy to distant objects, hunting with an intense focus to any subtle sounds, smells, and sights that might show food or an enemy. However, with the introduction of reading and books children spend time alone (social deprivation) in quiet (deafness) artificially lighted rooms (blindness) huddled over (weakness) a book crammed against their faces. That is why so many children have poor vision, bad hearing, and are fat and weak.

Several years ago there was a guy by the name of Gary Graham that was on the death row in Texas. Graham was a cause celebrite at the time. Some said it was his execution that would change the tide of public opinion on capital punishment.

It certainly changed my mind. I was coming around on the death penalty, from the "for" column to the "against." Graham, however, temporarily pushed me back into favoring the death penalty. Graham became a celebrity because many victims magically materialized as the case got more publicity. The case against the case against Gary Graham was pretty weak, not least of which because even if he wasn't guilty of the particular crime he was convicted for, it was apparent that he was almost certainly guilty of others and would be guilty of more if ever set free. The more I read about this evil and erratic man, the more it sank in that because of the capital punishment that I was beginning to oppose, Graham would never kill again.

I cannot believe that I was the only person thinking the same thing. Gary Graham wasn't what was wrong with the death penalty, he was what was right about it. I couldn't bring myself to fully support his execution, but I couldn't bring myself to defend him.

As opposed to say Karla Faye Tucker, I could not understand why they chose to make an issue of this particular person. Their adamance, their tone, and their righteous indignation was such that I fervently believed that if there wasn't evidence exonerating Graham, they'd have to invent it -- in fact, even though I now believe that Graham should not have been executed, I was pretty sure that they did invent it.

Most of you following the news are familiar with Tookie Williams, the co-founder of the Crips that was recently put to death in California. He's the newest Gary Graham. Utterly unsympathetic to the average American. I respect some of the things he's done since landing in prison, but his conversion to the side of light seems incomplete at best. And it doesn't change what he did. It doesn't change that despite overwhelming evidence, he still claims that it was a racist plot. Blah, blah, blah. I ultimately found myself agreeing with the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:

Williams's case is about the power of redemption, his supporters say, but I think it's more about the power of celebrity. The state shouldn't execute Williams, but only because the state shouldn't execute anybody -- the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism that should have been eliminated long ago, as far as I'm concerned. But it can't be right to save Williams just because he's a famous desperado (or former desperado) with famous friends, and then blithely go back to snuffing out the lives of other criminals who lack his talent for public relations.

[...]

He was convicted of the 1979 murders of four people in two separate robberies -- convenience store worker Albert Owens, 26; and motel owners Yen-I Yang, 76; Tsai-Shai Yang, 63; and their daughter Yee-Chen Lin, 43. Williams has been on death row since 1981; that he has consistently maintained his innocence of all four killings hardly makes him unique. There's no dramatic new DNA evidence or anything like that to cast doubt on his guilt.

A lot of it, in my mind, comes back to Gary Graham. And the anti-death penalty industry. Whatever sympathy I have for their cause, they simply don't have any credibility with me. They are so charged in their point of view that it often seems that they will tear apart the fabric of reality if it comes between their cause and victory. Interestingly, I've discovered that I'm not the only conservative with this problem. Jonah Goldberg recently wrote:

And, of course, there's all the America bashing from a crowd that can cheer Yasser Arafat's Peace Prize but also can call Schwarzenegger a murderer with a straight face. Indeed, it's difficult not to conclude that, for many, the Tookies are merely convenient props to put the United States on trial. And, as we all know, props aren't responsible for their actions.

I find it revealing that a significant number of conservatives I know (and even work with) either oppose the death penalty on moral grounds or are inclined to. But they are consistently put off by the radical chic crowd, which has grown deceitful, narcissistic and married to agendas no conservative would ever sign on to.

It would be nice if the most vocal opponents of the death penalty pondered that during this teaching moment. But they won't, because they think they've got nothing left to learn.

And Tucker Carlson makes himself another case and point:

And what about the other victims, the three Taiwanese immigrants who Williams murdered in their motel? Does Susan Sarandon even know their names? Yen-I Yang, 76, his wife, Tsai-Shai Yang, 63, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin, 43, were shot at point blank range. Yee-Chen Lin had the left side of her face blown completely away, yet somehow lived for a couple of hours in agony. I saw the crime scene photos tonight. I'd love to put them on the air, but they're too gruesome. Williams later bragged about "blowing away" the family, whom he described as "Buddhaheads."

These are not accusations. They're facts, proved at a trial that presented truly overwhelming evidence (including damning statements by accomplices, relatives and passersby) of Tookie Williams' guilt. Yet Williams himself has never admitted what he did, instead blaming his convictions a racist plot. Are Tookie's celebrity defenders bothered by the fact he's still lying about his case, and has never apologized for murdering four people? You'd never know it from listening to them.

Instead, they talk endlessly about Tookie the "author," as if Williams wrote his own books (instead of relying on a "collaborator" on the outside), and as if it mattered anyway. It doesn't. There is no evidence that a single thing Williams has "written" has convinced a single kid not to join a street gang. Tookie Williams hasn't made America better. He took four lives and destroyed many others. Plus he's a duplicitous phony. If anyone ever deserved to be executed, it's Tookie Williams.

And yet it's people like Williams and Graham that they choose to put front and center.

I think a big part of my issue is that the elements leading the charge are, as Goldberg points out, using it as a leg to prop up a larger argument: The Case Against America. The reason that people like Williams and Graham get in front of these debates is because they are supposed to be indicative of several supposed failures of the American system: capital punishment, racism, urban degredation, and poverty. What's a better picture of America to an anti-American than a poor, inner-city black put on death row by a racist justice system?

And that's why people like myself can be opposed to the death penalty and yet squirm whenever our supposed allies speak up.

The fun continues.

My current domain host has alerted me that I have two days to renew the domain or this website is going down. The pending new registrar cannot take over the domain until it is unlocked by the current registrar. The current registrar does not unlock domains over the phone, so I had to do it by email. I have done so three times now and only heard back once, asking for more information.

It looks like the chances are better than now we will experience an outage for at least a few days.

There is an interesting debate on RogerEbert.com on the artistic viability of video games. It all started when Ebert proclaimed:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

I am at a slight disadvantage here because I do not regularly play video games. A lot of the games referred to in responses are ones I have never heard of. But the question of whether any existing games rise to the level of art is different from whether it is even possible.

It's the last two sentences of Ebert's comments that I have a questions about. The last sentence about how video games are used is logically irrelevent to the question at hand. It actually represents a personal distaste for video games (or at least the effect they have on us) that undermines the rest of what he has to say.

More interesting to me is the sentence prior to that. If something is a visual experience, isn't it almost artistic by definition? It's worth noting that the forums that he gives the artistic thumbs up to do not include what immediately comes to my own mind when I think of art: paintings. They are a visual experience that engage the mind. Approached in that manner, so are video games.

But, Ebert points out in the preceding paragraph, "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

And I would say that is a fair point. One of the reasons that I could never get into pen-and-paper RPG's despite my overactive imagination is that there was no mechanism for complete authorial control. I was a game-master for a little while in high school and frustrated that the character players just wouldn't do what I wanted them to. Since my artistic aspirations or moralistic in nature, that cuts at my vision of what are should be.

It is just that, though, my vision.

My preference in artistic work depends if not entirely on narrative, then almost so. My taste in music is largely defined by lyrical content. Be it the straightforward narrative of more country music or the more ethereal content in alternative bands, what counts is the narrative drawn by the artist and interpreted by the listener. Classical music and film scores may be pleasant for the ears, but they do little for me. I'll go out on a limb here and say that Ebert, who views composers as true artists, would disagree with my assessment. And he would have a point.

However, the less strong a narrative, the more experience-oriented art becomes. How one experiences Beethoven's Ninth is as much a listener choice as moving along a particular path in a video game is a player choice. Both represent a loss of control. Without explicitly declaring what something means, an artist leaves it more open to audience discretion. There is very little art that declines to give the audience any discretion -- and with good reason.

A composer or image artist has control over the actual content from which the audience can draw from, but similarly a game's designer controls nearly every aspect of the universe in which the game is being played. A painter cannot control audience interpretation, but they do have complete control over what they are interpreting. A game designer cannot control whether I move Zelda to the right and left, but they can define what is to the right and left of Zelda.

But as far as the narrative goes, Ebert is dead-on. Video games tend to make lousy movies and vice-versa because they tend to approach narrative differently. The more narrative-driven a video game is, in my experience, the less options there are for the character to explore. Laying out a bunch of hoops for characters to jump through and giving the player complete discretion as to how and when they jump through them makes for a pretty loose plot, which makes for a pretty lackluster movie. It often makes for a better game, though, because the player gets more control over the actions (and indeed the personality) of the character he is controlling. That does not make for compelling characters on the big screen.

This is where the strength of Ebert's argument lies. Video games and narrative-driven art are at cross purposes. Video games most frequently set out to give its audience as many options as possible. It's no accident that as video game systems have developed, controllers have accumulated an increasing number of buttons and knobs. Narrative-driven art, on the other hand, generally sets out to lay out as much of the story as explicitly as possible. Director's cuts are usually longer than the actual release because they are too explicit and it gets (in the mind of producers anyway) too tedious in its explanations.

I agree with Ebert that video games are on the whole less artistic than narrative art and to an extent experience-oriented art. I find it interesting, however, that Ebert uses the word "craftsmanship" as a description of what video games are. Writing a novel or directing a movie is often considered a "craft", though I would argue that in the same way that video game development falls short in the "artistic" category, they excel in the craftsmanship category.

And on further reflection, I think most works and types of work fall somewhere on a spectrum from art to craft.

Architecture, for instance, is referred to as both but in my mind clearly falls more on the "crafts" side of the spectrum. Architecture serves a practical purpose independent of aesthetics, just as video games do. Except in the most mundane examples, though, both incorporate aesthetic traits because those that both serve a function and are pleasant are more useful than those that simply perform a function. Even the most complicated video games could be reduced to 4-bit pixels, but why would anyone want that? Ultimately, though, it would be far more interesting than most video games that had wonderful graphics but no goal for the user to aspire to.

On the other side, aesthetic-oriented artwork serves little practical utility. A painting might cover a whole on the wall, but so would an empty canvas. A painting is special not for what it does, but for what it represents to us. The same, I'd guess, could be said of lyricless music.

Somewhere in between lies narrative art because it serves as a way to communicate concrete ideas or emotions. Those that set out to communicate emotions fall more on the aesthetic/art side of the spectrum and those that set out to communicate ideas on the utilitarian/craft side. They use pleasing or disturbing images and expressions as a sort of an enzyme that helps us break down whatever medicine they are trying to serve. Ayn Rand novels are famously crafty in their attempts to get the reader to comprehend certain ideas, without which the story would lose a great deal of its heft. Nora Ephron movies, on the other hand, primarily exist to elicit an emotional response and the story collapses if it fails to achieve that goal.

The spectrum, I think, runs more than just right to left. Crappy works implements neither art nor craft or (more likely) tries to implement one, the other, or both, and fails miserably. In the best of art, utilitarian craft and artistic vision feed off one another to create something greater that is amazing in both its artistry and its craftsmanship.

Video games, by-and-large, fall quite short of the latter category compared to other artistic expressions because very little seems to get through except the experience. I have no lack of admiration for those that draft video games, but my admiration comes from the logistician in me rather than the artist.

There is an interesting difference between the customer service you get when you sign up with someone compared to the service you get when you're switching away from them.

It is possible (probable?) that RAW360 will face an outage at some point soon. I am in the process of moving my domain hosting from one domain administrator to another. The current domain administrator, and former host of the site, caused an outage when I discontinued service with them. There isn't much reason to believe that won't happen again.

As it stands right now, the new domain administrators cannot take over my domains without their being unlocked by the current administrators. The current administrators have, thus far, declined to unlock them. As of right now, my account on the domain has expired. I was informed that it is theoretically possible that because I am beyond the original contract, it is possible that I could have to pay a penalty to get service switched elsewhere and that the penalty may exceed the cost of staying with my current host for another year, thus inducing me to stick with my current host.

I am extremely reluctant to do that.

While this is getting settled, I am making alternate plans and may be securing additional domain names and this site may come up again under a different name. If there is an outage, I will make any future announcements here.

So apparently when the temperature gets down to zero, and then it gets colder, the temperature reflects this by having the numerical values go up again except with a "-" in front of it. This morning it was apparently minus-sign-nine degrees in Pocatello and minus-sign-twelve in Idaho Falls.

You know how sometimes it's not as hot or cold as the temperature suggests? Yeah, this was not so much one of those times. It felt like my hand was going to freeze off just during the five minutes it took to scrape my windshield of that pesky cold, translucent film that seems to appear when it gets cold and precipitates.

Even the smokers around the office are going to forego their habit today. One said that he didn't even smoke on his drive to work because that would have required opening the window up a crack.

Apparently I don't have to worry about snow because they tell me that when it gets this cold it doesn't really snow. I guess that's a good thing. Also a good thing is that I will get to step all over the ice again when it starts getting a little warmer. I like the cracking sound it makes (when my foot is hitting the ice, not my butt when I slip and fall).

Even now at the height of coldidity, if you stand outside for a few minutes, you will almost certainly hear the sound of ice cracking somewhere. If you stand outside for a few minutes, you're nuts.

Some guy was washing his car at the gas station where I filled up this morning. First, I was surprised that the water even worked. There was a column of ice on the wall where the water coming out of the leaky hose had frozen. Second, I'm not sure whether he was actually wanting to clean is car from dirt or get the ice off. I can't help but believe that either would be a mistake.

My car's CD player doesn't like the cold weather. So for the first ten minutes of my drive I have to listen to the radio. Do you know how inconvenient a time of year it is for this to become part of my routine? I would have to endure 2.5 Christmas songs or so, were it not for the fact that I just find a station playing commercials and leave it there.

Human beings were not meant to live this way.

No idea why or how, but I got locked out of the apartment last week. I'm relatively certain that I didn't lock myself out, so my landlord's must have done it - they live upstairs. The next day it was back to being unlocked.

Now there's a for-rent sign out in front of the house. I'm hoping they mean the house and not the basement.

Or maybe I'm just reeeeeeeally slow on the uptake and they're too passive-aggressive to write a note.

I got an email on Friday from Kevin, notifying me that I had gotten a link from the Houston Chronicle's website. Sure enough, my referral logs had a fair amount of traffic coming from the Chron's site. I'm mentioned in "What they're saying around town."

So everyone, please do me a favor and don't tell them that I'm around another town 18,000 miles away.

Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

In the comment section of the Fireant Gazette post that inspired my Cable a la Carte post, the subject of parental control came up. One of the reasons given by the FCC for the a la carte plan was to allow parents not to get objectionable material to keep it away from their children (or their spouses or themselves, for that matter). Eric and I batted back and forth over the merits of this particular method of reasserting parental control, though in a friendly manner that was missing in my discussion with Nathan on the same subject.

The issue at hand is what responsibility an outside society (in this case, entertainment producers and distributors as well as the government) has in protecting our young from material that may adversely affect their dispositions. In other words, what can we do about the smut, the blood, and the commercialism and who can do it?

This is an issue that I am greatly conficted about. Much moreso as I consider the childen I hope to some day have and noticing, as I get older, that the biddies were not entirely wrong: Negative cultural influences do, in fact, affect society quite negatively. Violent video games do not compel someone to go out and kill people, but there is a case to be made that they do adversely affect our approach and reaction to the violence. Truth be told, though, I am personally more interested in the sex and materialism promoted by popular entertainment.

When we're young and impressionable, we take cues from the society in which we live. Our values are usually incorporated by what we consider normal and reasonable. It provides us with a frame of reference and a prysm by which we will see the outside world that can only be undone by personal experiences that contradict what we were presented in our younger years (or crass rebellion). That's why most children of Republicans grow up to be Republicans, most Democrats to be Democrats, most Christians to be Christians, and so on.

It is an unfortunate fact that from our youth onward an increasing amount of our interaction with society is done through television and radio. More unfortunate still is that the cues we pick up there then influence the society that we interact with when we're unplugged. It usurps our value system and before we know it, we've taken cues from completely staged events that are not accountable to honest human behavior at all. Anyone my age that can still say that we have compartmentalized popular entertainment and that it has had no bearing on our own lives and perceptions or the lives and perceptions of those around them hasn't been looking closely enough.

Entertainment smut didn't invent sex, but it has given us a familiarity with it unknown to previous generations (not altogether a bad thing, to be sure) and it has warped our view of it (a bad thing). Entertainment violence didn't invent violence, but again comes the familiarity (in this case probably a more bad thing than not) and given many of us a sense of detachment from it (a bad thing). The commercials on television and the pervasive nature of material goods (which are not altogether unimportant to a story in a visual medium such as television) didn't invent materialism, but it has given us limitless ways with which to be superficially materialistic (a bad thing).

So on one hand we have all of these things. On the other hand, there isn't a clear answer to me as to what we as a society can do about it. As individual parents and heads or co-heads of households, we can set our own parameters. Unfortunately, the mere act of doing so risks social alienation and casts boundaries between the kids and their peers, making them the exception and making it more difficult to integrate. If all the other kids are jumping off a bridge, your kid may be wise not to but he will forever be branded a coward. I believe that there is a trade-off to be made here, though I will probably fall more on the side of exceptionalism rather than integration than did my parents, who fell more on that side than did most other parents. (Of course, what I say I will do and how I react when my kid is crying cause he's left out of all conversations about the latest video game console are two different things. We'll see how that turns out.)

But ultimately, what other parents do will affect the environment in which our children will be raised. Therefore it is not enough, in my mind, to take the libertarian approach that no one should tell anyone else what to watch or listen to. This stuff matters! On the other hand, using the government to compell people to avoid certain things and limiting their access to said things is censorship. I don't believe censorship to be uniformly evil, but I do believe it to be unhealthy for a society and unless lines are clearly drawn before hand a difficult ball to stop rolling.

For the most part, that line has been drawn in two places: government censorship and advertiser accountability.

The first place is with broadcast entertainment, where it's been decided that the government (the FCC, in this case) can regulate what is and is not shown on the airwaves. The idea behind this is that the airwaves belong to the public and therefore the public, through its elected representatives, can decide what is and is not appropriate for it. Though I'm uncertain to the degree that I buy this logic, I do agree with the result. The broadcast market is inherently limited because there are only so many frequencies that can be assigned. Since somebody has to make those decisions, the government is the most obvious arbiter when it comes to matters of decency and to matters of corporate consolidation of media.

That logic does not, however, hold true for private entertainment venues including movie theaters, private performance venues, and to cable television and satellite (TV and radio). Because these are forms of entertainment in which the customer actively paid money for the entertainment, it is presumed that he or she is responsible for what they see and hear. If you don't want to see or hear it, some are quick to point out, don't buy it. However, cable and satellite television are subject to a different form of expression-limitation in the form of advertisers. The edgier a show gets, the more likely advertisers are to shy away from it and the less money they are likely to get. This form of self-policing is the only thing that separates regular cable from premium cable. Premium cable, like satellite radio and often (though not always) theaters and private performance venues, is only limited by whether or not they can bring in enough people to make money. Their only concerns are picketers and boycotters, and they are particularly vulnerable to neither and therefore not accountable to the public at large, provided they aren't doing anything illegal.

The FCC does not currently have the power to regulate the content of cable and satellite, though there have been noises made recently to give the FCC that power.

That's where I start getting awfully skittish.

I'm more conservative about what should be available for the consumption of minors compared to what I personally prefer to indulge in. I am an adult and believe that I am capable, for the most part, of determining what is and is not appropriate for me. Whatever limitations I may have, I put more faith in my own judgment than that of the government. I like edgier programming that doesn't pull punches. I have a particular distaste for gratuitous sex and violence, so I don't like sex and violence for the sake of sex and violence. But a lot of the stuff I like has sex and violence in it. Sometimes it's necessary and sometimes I wish it weren't there, but if people looking for that sort of thing contribute to a show's success (and therefore its continued production) then so be it.

So the problem is how do we try to restrict access to minors while allowing adults freedom of entertainment choice? It's a question with no clear answer, in my view. In some ways I think I've resigned myself to the fact that a lot of kids will continually be exposed to material that warps their minds because most parents do not monitor what their kids are watching, listening to, or playing. There is, unfortunately, not a whole lot that can be done about that without limiting options for consenting adults. However, I do believe that we ought to give concerned adults every possible paddle with which to swim upstream against the prevailing tides (to mix my metaphors).

A long while back I wrote about ClearPlay, a company in Utah that edits movies, puts them on take, and sends back a cleaner version to their customers. A lot of people apparently disagree because it endorses parental laziness and/or hinders the artistic integrity of the original work (Ironically, many of the same people are big boosters of the "Fair Use Act" a concept which allows people to do what they want with artistic works that they purchase, provided they don't start giving it away.), but I think it's pretty silly to prohibit parents from taking a more active role in shaping their children -- even if I don't agree with the methods employed (I would never use ClearPlay).

I am also a big supporter of satellite companies and their attempts to help parents set guidelines for what will and will not come through on their sets. DirecTV has Locks & Limits and DISH Network has Adult Guard, both of which can not only cut off certain channels but all shows above a certain rating (or below, depending on how you look at it). There is also the good ole V-Chip, which can block television coming from any direction (though it's not nearly as easy to use as the satellite options are).

The unfortunate thing, though, is that most of these methods are not really utilized. The V-Chip is something of a relic and it never really took off even among those trained how to do it. Though it only took a couple minutes to talk someone through OmniStar's parental control system, I got as many calls from people that accidentally turned it on as I did parents actually wanting to use it. Though I'd like to think that's just cause they figured it out, I doubt it.

The unfortunate reality is that cleaner television is something most parents say they really want, but a much smaller amount are willing to take even smaller steps towards that end. And ultimately I don't think a government can do parents' jobs for them. And unfortunately that means things are unlikely to change any time soon.

The FCC has made waves by strongly suggesting that cable companies offer a la carte packages. On first reading this, I was quite glad. On further reflection, however, I have serious doubts as to the viability of this plan and the impact that it will have on consumers.

The first question, which hasn't been answered (and that itself may answer the question) is "What about satellite?"

Whenever I read cable, I also read satellite beside it in my mind because I have yet to actually be a regular cable company customer. The closest that I've come is the crappy cable apartment complexes have provided me. On the other hand, my folks have had satellite for some time, I've answered phones for a satellite company, and when and if the time comes for premium television, I'm going with the dish. So I may go back and forth between the two in this post.

When you go to a fast-food restaurant, most give you access to the fountains so you can refill your cup as many times as you would like. A person that refills his 20oz cup four times pays the same as one who takes his cup to go. This is, to be technically unfair. The one-cupper can walk away with the feeling like he paid for five cups of cola that he didn't drink.

But don't expect that structure to change any time soon. Truth be told, the restaurants pay a fraction of the $1.39 the customers do per ounce. The price difference between 20oz and 120oz is negligable enough that giving people the ability to refill is worth more important than the theoretical lost revenue involved. The key is not how much they spend on cola, but getting them into the restaurant to begin with. 100oz of cola isn't nearly as bad as the customer who goes to the next place over so he doesn't have to worry about saving his drink. Restaurants have such high fixed costs that often the most important thing is just to get people in there, not worry about making a profit for every ounce of cola consumed.

The point of the above paragraph is that different places use different models, and though they may seem counterintuitive at points, they are often the best option all-around. If it weren't, some competitor somewhere would likely offer a different model to make its customers happier. Cable companies don't have other cable companies to compete with, but they do have satellite companies to compete with (and the sats compete against one another) and they all follow the same model because it makes the most sense for them.

For them. But does it make the most sense for us?

To be honest, I really don't know. But I am extremely reluctant to push them into a business model they are uncomfortable with cause I think it will yield me better prices. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that it will. In fact, I'm inclined to believe that it in the end it will cost most people more.

As with the cola fountain, cable and satellite companies have very high fixed costs and low marginal costs. The fast food place spends very little on the coke and lots on the real estate, electricity, and so on. All cable companies have to do to give people more channels is decline to block the signal (and presumably pay the extra channels a fraction of what they get). But the problem is that they have to maintain the infrastructure which is costing them money whether it's used or not. There is an incentive, then, to use as much of it as possible by selling as many channels as possible.

It's not about selling people what they don't need. It's about efficiency.

I think that a lot of people have tricked themselves into believing that since they pay $40 a month for 70 channels, they will be able to pay $25 a month for 40. From the cable company's standpoint, however, they have to pay for the lines whether they have 40 channels or 70. It's not a matter of dividing the number of channels per dollar spent. It's more like buying 15 channels and getting the other 55 for free. I cannot imagine a la carte channels going for less than $2-3 a pop. The satellite company that I used to work for actually did offer a couple of channels a la carte... for the same price as it would take to upgrade from the 90-channel plan to the 120-plan. Thirty channels or one... same price. Interestingly, we were discouraged from mentioning the a la carte channels to customers that didn't explicitly ask for them. They preferred to sell them in a bundle with 25 or so other channels for $7-12 rather than a single channel for $2.95. To stress: it was a better deal for the company to give 25 channels at at <$.50 than set up a single channel for six times that.)

At $2-3 a pop, you don't even get 20 channels before you're paying as much as you presently pay for 70. That's not even accounting for a basic connection cost. Some people may benefit from this. One of my former roommates wanted cable solely so he could watch professional wrestling. Since he only wanted TNN/Spike, he would have benefitted. According to an informal Wall Street Journal poll, nearly a quarter say they only want 10 or fewer channels. I expect that most of them are not including local channels in that total (I don't recall a single customer call I took for the satellite company with someone that had the option of getting local channels but chose the rabbit ears to save money. I recall many complaining that they didn't have the option to forego the rabbit ears and pay more to get local channels. Presumably the local channels would not be as expensive as the cable ones cause they would be bundled as satellite did with local channels... oh wait, I forgot, bundling is bad). Half would be between 10-24, which sounds more reasonable, except that they would be paying roughly the same that they do now. Even those that would benefit, however, would be costing the company money and one doubts that those costs won't be passed right back to the customers (both those wanting more channels and less).

Of course, saving the customers money isn't the only reason for this. In fact, it's not even listed as the primary one. The primary reason is supposed to be to give families more choice over what goes in to their homes. It's not a bad goal, actually. However, it's usually possible to get certain channels and shows blocked. The company I used to work for had a host of features with which you could turn your big, bad satellite television into a rated-G playground if that's what you wanted to do (without additional cost). If cutting channels out of the lineup is the goal, it's not that difficult to do. Chances are it's one of the 55 free channels and you're not paying for it anyway.

Now cable TV is granted something of a monopoly due to reasons logistical, and as such government does have some right to make demands of them. However, I believe the above demand is a mistake for both company and consumer alike. I am much more amenable to the idea of forcing cable companies to offer different kinds of packages rather than just a different sum of channels. I could even be convinced in requiring that consumers be allowed to pick out which channels to get (say 50 picked channels or a 70 channel package). Maybe.

In sum, this strikes me as yet another example of consumers (and government) telling an industry "You don't have to do things the way you do them" or "you don't have to charge so much" or whatever with no risk to their own financial safety. It's easy to be a cavalier economist when you don't have to live with the consequences of a poor decision.