This looks like a good start on that $15M commitment to promote the film:

(via Deadline Hollywood)

From my perspective, corporates are “people” only as a legal convenience: they are better thought of as devices that operate inside the economy. The economy takes in labour, land and natural resources; it spits out goods, services and pollution; money, in the form of wages and capital gains, flows around:

Concrete inputs and outputs are easy to tax. Money is abstract, but because wages and capital gains are attached to people, they can easily be taxed. Whereas corporate profits are an abstract thing that exists entirely inside the economy.

I feel like taxing corporations just adds friction to the gears of the economy – wouldn’t it be better to run at full steam and tax the interfaces? As Doug Saunders points out, large corporations are good at avoiding taxes (eg: Ikea and GE pay no taxes). Because corporate taxes are inside the economy, depending on elasticities taxes could ultimately be shifted to any part, including wages and consumer prices. For example, HST is a corporate tax cut, because it reduces the taxes paid between corporations through the supply chain, but it could result in lower prices and more jobs (nobody knows what its long-term impact will be!).

It seems like we should cut corporate taxes with corresponding increases in taxes on land, natural resources, capital gains and pollution. But although corporate taxes may not work very well, they might be more politically viable than other taxes, and are better than no taxes at all – the federal Liberals and Adrian Dix’s BC NDP are both campaigning to raise corporate taxes. And there might be no point in unilaterally cutting corporate taxes lower than other jurisdictions.

I’m a member of the Coast Capital Savings credit union. Their board of directors has staggered terms, so every year they have an election to replace some of the board members.

The outgoing directors form a nominations committee, which recommends some of the candidates. This strikes me as vaguely corrupt, but Google tells me that they’re common for both private and non-profit boards. They are correlated with bad performance and corruption when the CEO or current board members sit on the committee, but I couldn’t find anything bad about outgoing directors, although external directors are considered the best people to have. Given that the recommended candidates usually win, it does make me wonder about the democratic value of the membership merely certifying the recommendations?

This is the first year they’ve had online voting, which is interesting because I consider online voting impossible to secure. But a credit union board isn’t exactly a high-stakes election and banks spend more time worrying about securing their websites than anybody else. (Another option would be voting by ATM!)

Another thing that I don’t think they’ve done in the past is that Coast Capital Savings will donate $1 to charity for every vote. It’s a bit ironic that if you don’t vote you can presume that the money will be indirectly given back to you as a member in the future, but I suspect it will increase voter turn-out in this case.

$1 to charity is much more of an incentive than a few dollars back to you on your tax return, which is what some people have proposed to raise turn-out in public elections. I can’t imagine how this would work for public elections: vote and we’ll increase social services, don’t vote and we’ll lower your taxes.

Canada’s Dark Age Lost Years continue with this new nonsense about bandwidth caps and usage billing. It’s clear from this debacle that everyone who works at the CRTC should be fired for incompetence — time for a fresh start.

I run a small media business. It’s a one-man show — small pieces, loosely joined — and I move around gigs and gigs and gigs online monthly, of licit content. For example, Apple iOS SDKs are about 1-4 gigs per update. That’s just a bandwidth cost to stay in the game, it doesn’t account for moving around digital assets like my film, photography, sound, and graphics work. Let alone the bits I push in my “spare” time.

Usage billing will annihilate my business. Whatever you think of me and my work, I think it’s clear it’ll do the same to scores and scores of small time operators, and not just in the media sphere. I can’t imagine a more effective way to cripple Canada’s small business high-tech sector. This is a cynically-clear corporate jab at services like Skype, NetFlix, and YouTube, and a direct result of ignoring net neutrality — the Internet is a public highway and the road crews shouldn’t be allowed to set up toll gates. Clearly.

Think of the effect on media students — the regulations don’t just regressively tax-farm average users, they also shred the future:

Student1: I set up an FTP, could you send me the new audio for the documentary?
Student2: Sorry, my student loans ran out. How about I mail you a CD?

Worse, the reason there’re no CanCon requirements online is that Canadians, in theory, provide it themselves. By stifling the widespread, free, social use of media the CRTC is working to reduce the amount of CanCon. Since one of their goals is to foster national content the entire staff should be fired immediately — both to punish their idiocy and to complete their monkey-simple, more-bananas-better-than-fewer organizational objectives.

It is extremely frustrating that taxpayer-subsidized media channels are being operated in a manner so disrespectful to the taxpayer, and indeed to the tax base. A change this drastic in billing formula — a change this big in the social contract we’ve been operating with — should trigger wholesale renegotiation: we should revoke all spectrum licenses and demand immediate payment on all infrastructure loans and then re-auction and re-finance once the contractual terms are up for discussion. I want the opportunity to start a competing carrier that offers a flat rate, and I want to stop all subsidies to groping, gouging, profiteering gluttons.

Adding useless technical friction to small high tech media operators will cripple Canada’s tech industry — why make something that might get big fast and bankrupt you, like Skype, NetFlix, or YouTube? Why is an organization with “Radio” in its name making decisions about Canada’s future online? By asking that did I somehow violate telegraph or rail regulations? Did I offend my postal carrier? What fucking century is this?

Usage billing is ridiculous, worth leaving the country over. Why live here when Europe has better architecture; faster, cheaper Internet; and health care? And they wonder what causes the brain drain!

If you still believe in democracy, here is the OpenMedia petition (click through to sign socially):

I’m a business analyst and I often struggle to explain precisely what that entails. I’m currently working on a project to develop software for some Very Important Users, who don’t have much time to meet with me, never mind the development team. Agile methodology says that the users should hang out directly with the developers and business analysts are useless, so it’s my job to prove them wrong.

So I got as much time with the users as I could, and then made up a requirements document based on my best guesses about how they’d like to do business. When the developers ask me questions, I make up answers. I can do this because I’ve learnt just enough about the users’ business that I can model the users in my head, and then do two things with the model:

• abstract and reduce their unfocused desires into a pure kernel of business need
• figure out what they want in the future based on what they say they want in the present

Business analysts are a lot like criminal profilers, who learn what they can about a criminal (in fiction usually a serial killer), build a model of the criminal in their head, and then do two things with the model:

• abstract and reduce into a pure kernel of criminal intent
• figure out what they’ll do next based on what they’ve done in the past

My two favourite fictional profilers are Frank Black in Millennium, who has a superpower of being able to see the world the same way the criminals do, and Fitz in the British version of Cracker, who is a professional psychologist with plenty of his own dysfunctions. Maybe someday they’ll make a TV show about how cool I am?

To tech-oriented business geeks like me, this article about the resurrection of The Atlantic as a media property is a bit of a relief. People seem to be getting it, or the people who get it are starting to get respect. Turnarounds have the potential to be fantastically successful investments, and the article contains a bit of business-think that is super-key:

“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic”

Note this is a Barthes-esque Structuralist Art Theory argument applied to business: “A writer’s form is vulnerable to becoming a convention, however, once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity is an on-going process of continual change and reaction.”

Or maybe post-structuralist? Deny the formula that used to work, and assume it requires its own deconstruction.

Lady Gaga is the Chief Creative Officer of Polaroid.

Let’s take a moment to deconstruct that rather-complex piece of information. Yes, there is still a Polaroid. Yes, the Lady Gaga. Yes, in the executive suite, presumably to turn around the retro-dead brand.

I hate CES, but I think you understand why this story caught my eye. Now that we’ve eased into the context, here’s the salient point: Gaga has designed a new Polaroid system called the GL line (“Gray Label”).

It’s made up of three products: a Polaroid-esque digital camera with a built-in printer, the GL30; a standalone photo printer, the GL10; and a pair of massive sunglasses (pictured, via BB — apparently the captured images project outwards?) with a built-in digital camera, GL20. Supposedly they’ll eventually be made aware of social networking services.

This has kitsch niche written all over it. Hopefully it outlives Polaroid. Basic question: who still prints photos? I do it because I’m a photo geek.

Gotta make a comment on the business side of this too: music celebs are implicitly assuming the role of audiophiles and lending their brands to things like headphones and sound systems. 50 did it with some new wireless phones at CES, Gaga is doing it with earbud jewelry, and Dre (correct me if wrong) was first on the scene endorsing Monster phones and laptops. Or was it George Lucas with THX?

Anyway, it’s great business. I love to see artists getting paid. Still, could Clooney sell a television with the pitch: “Next time you’re watching one of my films, make sure you can see my winning smile in the highest possible quality.”

Or did George Takei beat him to it?

(via CNN)

It turns out that Gene Simmons is a dick about file sharing, so Anonymous nuked him. Check out his site — at this writing it’s no longer there.

Here, roughly, is the question I asked David Cronenberg during the inaugural “film school Friday” at the TIFF Lightbox (from the point form notes on my phone I was speaking off):

I’m Jack Mizurak from the Advanced Filmmaking program at Fanshawe. This is a question for David:

Given the rigidity of the film industry — that it’s a battle to get financing and another battle for distribution — and given your experience with releasing films on YouTube — do you think it’s possible to circumvent those gatekeepers and make money by connecting directly with the audience through digital distribution?

And as a part “B”, for both David and Ronald Sanders:

Do you have any upcoming projects that I can intern on?

After the laughter we exchanged some quick dialog (from my memory):

Ronald: Wow, I can’t believe it took us this long to get to the internship question…

David: You are all invited to intern on my next film… And I don’t remember your actual question?

Jack: Basically I was wondering if you thought it was possible to use digital distribution over the Internet to get around existing industry power structures, given that they’re so conservative?

David: No. Not if you’d like to make real money.

The situation now is similar to what it was like at the start of my career. We were doing a lot of underground film, shooting our own pictures and displaying them on a sheet outside in Toronto, for free — just to get an audience. We were inspired by the underground movements in New York and LA — Andy Warhol, et al. [he went into a bunch of names I didn't know] — and we formed a film collective to jointly own equipment and show our work.

But at a certain point, some time in the 70s, I had to consciously make the decision to become a professional filmmaker — to make my living from making films — and to do that you need to work with established companies.

Today the situation is similar. You can film anything you like and put it on YouTube to get it in front of an audience, but if you want to make a living you have to work within the existing power structures.

I don’t like jargon words but they always talk about “monetizing” the Internet. No one has really done that — unless you’re Apple with iTunes, and they don’t commission new work.

I don’t fully agree. Yes, it’s rough monetizing the Intertrong. But the answer isn’t, “don’t try”. Historically when industries get rigid and controlled new technology revolutionizes and destroys. Netflix is on the march. Microsoft is trying their “be-second-to-market” strategy in digital distro. Both will want content (the CRTC or similar should step in to force that want with CanCon regs). And, yes: there is always Apple (though with the close Disney-Pixar-Apple partnership they’ll never want for amazing content — but they might have a legislated want for Canadian content in the future).

YouTube can be used as what Fiddy called a “tester” — a sample of drugs given to fiends free to test quality and build hype.

The winds are shifting, if slowly. The scent of revolution is in the air. The 50th Law has a lot to say about digital distro in the music biz, and how Fiddy has been harnessing it. I also dig The Null Company’s approach to digital distro — lots of free stuff paired with hi-fi, physical, paid copies. And there’s always begging, like Pioneer One: “If you liked this vid, donate so I can make more.” Torrents allow for greatly-reduced bandwidth costs, somewhat mitigating Canadian cable providers stabbing net neutrality in the throat.

My plan is to do something roughly similar to those pro models, see what works, and constantly innovate. It seems feasible, if not easy, to exist at least partially outside of the establishment — avoid being one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Maybe set a few fires of my own…

There aren’t enough “Books” tag-entries!

I just finished The 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50 Cent. It’s a well-done sequel to The 48 Laws of Power in that it doesn’t require reading the previous edition, but the work has more dimensionality if you have.

I’ll break The 50th Law into two guiding principles (call them laws 49 and 50) that round out the previous 48 to an even half-century:

49. Constantly change and improve. Comfort and security are dangerous illusions because they kill the desire for, and fun found in, adventure.
50. Death is the source of beauty — the sublime. Existential stoicism is a better response to this than nihilism: everyone dies, you might as well spend your time being awesome.

The book is heavily illustrated with examples from the criminal underworld and entertainment business in which 50 Cent matured and eventually rose to power. These illuminations are intercut with example personalities from business, politics, history, war, science, and the arts.

Yes, a shameless self promoter writing a book about why you should be a shameless self promoter deserves some incredulity. That said, the book advises arguing with every book you read, all meta-styles. I also wonder to what extent the criminality detailed in the book is fictionalized — how many scams can, or will, a dedicated hustler actually admit to?

Those caveats in mind it’s a great read (or listen — I audiobook’d it — Fiddy reads bits).