SOPA, Super PACs, and Tech: Envisioning Media and Politics 2.0

So it's been a busy week in the world of technology and politics. As a big chunk of the tech industry got behind the day of SOPA/PIPA protest on the Internet, constituent forces were energized and some members of Congress actually shifted their public position. Across the Internet, there was a sense of victory. The tides had turned. Momentum on our side. But this was not the war. This was not even The Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Barely a day after the SOPA protests, the Justice Department and law enforcement officials in eight other countries shut down file sharing site MegaUpload, arrested a handful of MU employees, and seized "over $50 Million in assets." It was as if the pro-SOPA/PIPA message machine demanded a head, something that would enable the media to say, "See how much these guys make? See how bad this problem is?" Of course, the irony of the entire MU thing is that any legal action that results from the whole thing is taking place in an pre-SOPA/PIPA environment.

But let's look down the road. Here are a couple of links -- dots to help paint the picture taking shape in my thoughts:

Here's a link to a post, RFS 9: Kill Hollywood by Paul Graham at Y Combinator. Here's a snippet:

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily has some thoughtful insight into entrepreneurs taking down the Hollywood industry.

Also noteworthy is Michael Arrington's thoughts on the SOPA/PIPA fight. While I don't completely agree with him that the problem is "big government", I do think that he is spot on regarding the influence of lobbying money being the real underlying factor shaping this battle.

And finally, just to add a note of flavor, here is a post from Nicolle Belle at Crooks and Liars. This is just a nice reminder about how the media and the industry of politics all profit from this. This isn't just politicians, lobbying and Super PACs, it's ad revenue and it's content generation -- it's multi-threaded reality TV that dwarfs the Kardashian enterprise. 

Questions that I Keep Asking
Why is it that money and incumbent interests tend to drive the political winds with little regard to constituent interests or long-term value?

Why is it that, instead of faster Internet and universal broadband, we get laws proposing The Great Firewall of America?


Why is it that I have only found a handful of television programs in the past two or three years that I consider worth watching? Why is it that, with over 700 options being piped through the cable box, most of the programs that I watch aren't available there?

I sometimes wonder how come, with 12-15 channels devoted to "24 hour news" and another 30 channels that feature news programs, I find so little useful news or analysis on television.

Why is it that, somewhere in Hollywood, somebody seems to think that if they just delay giving Netflix and Redbox new release content, you and I will suddenly run out and buy that content on Blueray?

Do we really want -- or trust -- anyone sitting at the switch, deciding what content can come down our pipe, controlling what we can say, see, read or hear?

Deflating the SOPA Quackery: Facts, Figures and Fun Stuff

"Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?“ — Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian on CNBC. 

Politics. There is an element of absurdity that often emerges from the process of crafting laws that, regardless of your personal political values, you just want to through your hands in the air. It's like, in making the legal soup, when you through in ingredients like money, lobbying, special interests, the need for some sort of consensus, and maybe a little more money, you get this rich sort of political umami -- this taste that says, "we're getting ready to serve you a load of crap and tell you how good it tastes and how good it is for you." It happens a lot when they start to legislate around technology -- you get "a series of tubes" crafting laws controlling the infrastructure platform that many modern businesses depend upon.

Often, this load of crap and it's associated political umami is developed in the long, slow simmer of a PR echo chamber, stating and restating a misrepresented position as though it were fact. One reason why this works so well is that few of us will actually do the deep dive needed to question those raw ingredients making up the Spin soup. Eventually, the misrepresentations take on a life of their own.

In the midst of a day of SOPA protest on the web, I thought I would share some interesting reading that I've come across recently. First, here are a couple of great posts from Julian Sanchez on the underlying BS being used to justify the arguments.

First is a recent post, How Copyright Industies Con Congress, where he talks about the illusory accounting used to calculate the "cost of online piracy". Linked in that post is an older post, 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy, that he published in 2008 on Ars Technica as earlier legislation on this same topic made its way through the congressional kitchen.

Continuing on that theme, here's a great post, Forget SOPA, Hollywood Already Had a Field Day with the Justice System by Andrew Bridges over on Pando Daily. As per the post, the author is an attorney over at Fenwick & West who "has handled many important high-stakes and cutting-edge cases for tech, Internet, and consumer-focused industries, starting with the defense of the first MP3 player (the Diamond Rio PMP 300), which the RIAA tried to ban as a “piracy” device."

The really interesting thing about the Bridges post is not just the difference in scale in terms of damages being applied for "piracy" as opposed to other, similar crimes, it's the way that he talks about the use of terminology by the motion picture industry. Here's an excerpt:

It’s a great example of the way Hollywood chooses its words very carefully in constructing its propaganda wars. The old-fashioned and accurate word is “infringement,” but that word doesn’t create the visceral responses that “theft” does. So the bills refer almost exclusively to “theft.”

The trigger for this was Hollywood’s frustration several years ago that “file sharing” didn’t sound bad.  After all, we learned in kindergarten that “sharing” is a good thing.  The motion picture industry’s lead spokesperson, Jack Valenti, hated the term. He liked to compare a chocolate cake to files on the Internet: if you share some of your cake, you’re not supposed to still have all your cake, but when you share a file you still have the file. Thus, he argued, it’s not “sharing” at all. Of course, his inability to distinguish between chocolate cake and information — which is what music stored as bits really is – resembles Hollywood’s profound misunderstanding of the Internet today. One can indeed share information while keeping it.

Over the last ten years I have watched Hollywood loyalists, undoubtedly responding to some coordinated industry messaging directive, start talking exclusively about “theft” when they refer to infringement. One can tell who has signed on as a Hollywood partisan in the current debates by seeing who now uses the loaded term “theft” instead of the accurate term “infringement.” The facts that the bills overflow with references to “theft,” and that many government officials have changed their vocabularies to use the new, industrially correct language, reveal a lot about Hollywood’s capture of government... more

It's a great read -- check it out.

Politics and the Psychology of Marketing Spin
As you read the posts that I've linked to here, you'll find some classic examples of how the interests behind these issues use marketing techniques to drive opinion. From the selective use of vocabulary to color the issue to anchoring numbers that they use to inflate estimations of the scale of the problem, it's hard to imagine the average "constituent" not being pushed and manipulated by these techniques. This is how "no big deal" gets transformed into a crisis.

But imagine the politicians behind this legislation. What would you bet that some of them have infringed upon a copyright? Maybe used an image that they didn't have permission to? Maybe used some music that they didn't pay for? How many do you think have relatives that might have downloaded some content that they didn't pay for? Maybe it's just that the stuff that comes through their tube is all free.

The Criminal Irony of SOPA: Broadcast Referrals vs Online Referrals

Over the weekend, I happened to catch one of those commercials where they advertise gold collector coins. The commercial lists a "$50 coin" covered in "the purest gold". Whether you've seen the commercial or not, you can probably imagine the flow of the spot. Basically, they talk about this coin with descriptors that make it sound like it was gold coin that the government issued, then changed their minds. Based on the size and weight, it would probably be worth a lot if it were solid gold coin (a conclusion that the commercial tries to lead you to make), but it is a plated coin with no description of how thick or how much gold is in the coin. And, just in case you didn't think you were getting over on them with the gold coin part, they'll sell you this "$50 coin" for $10.

Of course, most of us are not foolish enough to purchase these items, but deep down we have a pretty good sense of who the ads are targeted at. While it may not constitute fraud, you can bet that the people who wind up buying these coins probably were confused and didn't know any better.

Like snake oil of old or the "natural herbal male enhancement products" of a more recent era, the sellers are profiting on a product that they know will not meet the purchaser's expectations. You know it, I know, and the broadcast companies know it. So why do they run the ads?

This is the irony that occurred to me over the weekend. Nobody suggests that Comcast should be liable for all of the people that lose money buying these "gold collector coins". Caveat Emptor, right? And yet, here they are, profiting on selling a pointer to a bogus deal that skirts the edges of fraud.

Contrast that with the online world, SOPA, and the laws that Hollywood and the media companies are driving through Congress. That law essentially hopes to "turn off the channel" on a site that links to content with reported copyright violating content. Imagine if you could call Comcast and force them to take down a channel because they ran one of those "natural male enhancement" ads.

The difference is that, if you send money to the coin seller, that's your money. The broadcasters don't care about your money. The media companies look at the copyright material online and they see their money. If they have somebody willing to buy broadcast ad space (and they can get their money), they could care less about the other side of the transaction.

In what might even be a greater irony, Google is probably more conscientious about advertising content -- kind of funny when you think about how the media companies behind SOPA characterize the search engine giant as the bad actor.

Giant Hairballs of Corporate Bureaucracy: The Problem With Teams

One of my favorite books about creativity is Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace. For me, it's a great book about creativity under the corporate umbrella. The title of this post is an allusion to the book, but the issue that I'm writing about today doesn't directly relate.

Recently, I came across an interesting document. It was a process diagram, charting the workflow of a business process. As someone who has occasionally found myself wearing something like an IT hat, it's not unusual for me to have a hand in these kinds of things, but what struck me about this one was the process description. Within the process description, there were details like, "and then the form goes into the green folder". In all, there was a surprising level of detail mandating minor aspects of the process.

Several years ago, this process came under management scrutiny for taking way too long. As part of a reform effort, a team was formed to review the process and streamline it. After several weeks of study, review and effort, the team produced this multi-page flowchart diagramming the process. As for restructuring, they proposed adding a step with a pre-process screening to determine whether projects would go through a light version, a medium version, or the full version of the process.

The Myth of Collaborative Reform
This story is just one example of conventional wisdom that suggests that if you put a bunch of people together in a room with an overall objective, that those people will work together to achieve the objective. In the previous example of process reform, each of the members of the team were stakeholders and streamlining the process would mean losing some element or aspect that they had established -- letting go of their good idea.

Democracy. It's a great idea. But if "one man, one vote" holds true in process reform, then "the green folder" may hold the same importance as an actual processing step.

In the case of the process above, one of the key failures took place during the process mapping. Beyond the "what do you do" questions, they didn't effectively capture the why. How is the product of your step used? What are you trying to accomplish in this step? How is your step important in the overall process?

Often, an entrenched process starts out as a rule to achieve a specific objective. Then, over the course of time, the rule is taught to others who don't understand the objective but accept the rule as dogma. Eventually, the dogma of the rule becomes the objective. By this time, the the zealots and the process fundamentalists will argue the importance of adhering to the rule, even when the entire context for the rule has shifted. What happens when your culture is no longer a nomadic populace wandering the desert? More importantly, what happens to "the green folder" when the process becomes electronic?

I know it sounds crazy, but these are issues that you often have to deal with when you try to change things or "move the cheese." Questioning the "why" is a fundamental part of the design process. But often, people don't like to question the why, because explaining the why is a good way to show that you don't really know. It's the difference between learning and memorization. So questioning the why can be a threat to some people.

If you don't understand why, then you can't really reform. You can't simplify because you don't really know what is important -- whether it's process steps, product features, or sales collateral.

Wrapping Up 2011: My Noteworthy Stories from the Year

The end-of-the-year rehash of stories has been going on for ever -- for traditional media, it's a great way to rerun content and occupy time and space during the holiday break. Some blogs that publish regularly like to do the same sort of thing. In my case, I really wanted to come up with some sort of stupid, bad-marketing award for UPS and their international shipping. But then, as I looked back over the year, I realized that 2011 was packed with stories that seem bigger, stranger, and stupider.

For me, I think that the biggest WTF story of the year has to be the Netflix trainwreck. Netflix took shoot-from-the-hip to a whole new level, alienating their customer base and destroying their brand equity. For me, the service went from a small, unquestioned recurring charge for the convenience of new DVDs and occasional streaming content to an unnecessary expense. But beyond the "what this means for me as a customer" story, the whole thing unfolded in such a bizarre way. While you might want to use elements of the story as "a teaching moment", it sort of begs the question of how you might find yourself down that path in the first place.

If you had to pay for subscriptions to Techcrunch, 2011 would have been the year that I canceled mine. Somewhere between the AOL acquisition and the subsequent merger of AOL and Huffington Post, the site made a pretty significant pivot from the type of content that had initially drawn me to it. Gone were the insider stories that brought you trends and insights from the technology world; instead, their content became sort of a yet another 'press release+' site. Even when I occasionally click back looking for old content or for any news on a slow news day, I remain put-off by the layout. In contrast, Michael Arrington's personal blog tends to be much more of what I liked in Techcrunch -- real analysis of some of the things going on in the high-tech world, punctuated by a post about a company. Ironically, I just clicked over to catch this story about yet another departure from the Techcrunch old guard, Heather Harde.

I wrote several posts on the economy, jobs and hiring in 2011 that generated some good traffic. My post Growth Hacker vs VP of Marketing drew the most traffic for the year, with my post on daily deal sites following close behind. None of my posts will break any traffic records at Comscore, but sometimes it's nice to know people actually do read your posts.

Themes That Sparked My Brain in 2011
There are several areas that really lit a fire in my thoughts and will probably continue to shape my thoughts through the next year.

• Moneyball, Stats, Analytics, and Big Data
• The Internet of Things
• The Psychology of Customer Experience

I think that these topics are converging in ways that will shape and reshape our world for years to come.

One of the Most Interesting Things that I Read in 2011
While I didn't post a link to this on the blog, I find that it keeps coming up for me in conversations. Long and short, here is a link to an interesting post from a Google engineer on what's wrong with Google+. I love the way that he explains platform -- and the unexpected repercussions when implementing platform at Amazon. It's a long post, but after you get through it, you'll walk away with an appreciation of why even some Google products that seem awesome just don't work the way that you might expect them to -- or evolve in the way that you might have liked them to.

Anyway, I think that's enough rehashing 2011 leftovers for me. Here's wishing everyone a wonderful new year.

Cool Tech from the Holiday Blogging Desk

Apple sent out a post-Xmas promotional email this morning that featured an interesting device / gift, the iBike Dash Cycling Computer.  They also sell the deluxe model. Being the cyclist and technology nut that I am, this link actually pulled me through for a look.

In years past, my friends and I have talked about how cool it would be to be able to use your iPhone as a bicycle computer. In our minds, it was the potential of being able to carry one less device combined with all of the cool functionality that is native to the iPhone that held such great promise. So I clicked through to check it out.

Brief Aside: My History of Using Cycling Computers
My first cyclometer was a Cateye Solar. This wonderful device logged speed, distance and cadence. When my Cateye Solar died, I didn't replace it (not much money and most cyclometers didn't display cadence). When I upgraded to my current bike, I went ahead and purchased a new Vetta cyclometer that just logged speed and distance -- my main interest at that point was simple distance tracking. But when I started training for The Death Ride, a coaching seminar that we attended recommended using a heart rate monitor. I have always been skeptical of heart rate monitors -- I've seen to many people addicted to the tech of cycling and miss the part about finding love in basic time on the bike. But the argument for using a heart rate monitor -- to maximize your body awareness and better manage your pace for demanding rides -- made sense to me.

My next (and current) cycling computer is the Polar 720i. It tracks all of the important cyclometer stuff -- distance, speed, and cadence -- but it also adds heart rate, elevation and temperature. It also uses this data to do an approximate calculation of calories burned. You can even add a power calculation by taking measurements off the chain, but I didn't see any ROI in investing in that option. Having logged many miles using the Polar, I can say that there are things that I like about it and things that I don't, but it has become the standard by which I measure other cycling computers.

Several years ago, Garmin introduced a cycling computer that integrated a GPS into the system -- functionality that I feel like marked the next logical advance in cyclometers. But when I looked at the early models, it seemed like there were some issues that outweighed the cool features for me (I think software support was one issue). Since then, I've hoped for improvements, but I haven't been logging enough miles to actively track the technology evolution.

Using the iPhone as a Cycling Computer: the iBike
The iBike brings the promise of using your iPhone as a cyclometer to reality. Basically, the unit is your iPhone, combined with a waterproof handlebar mount, and some Bluetooth-based sensors that can allow you to track speed, distance, cadence and power. Since it uses your iPhone, you have GPS tracking for route and elevation. All cool features.

One thing that I've always hated about the Polar is that it only works with Windows -- there's no software support for Mac -- it's one of the only reasons that I actually own a PC. Since the iBike works on the iPhone, I would expect that their software might have actually be better than the Polar, but I haven't explored it in detail. Another thing that might be cool about the iBike is that, since it uses the iPhone, they have more flexibility in designing the interface. In short, you might expect that this flexibility would translate to more options for you, the user -- I don't know if that's true, but it could be cool.

Of course, after looking at it more closely, the iBike has a pretty serious downside -- battery life. The site specs say "5 hours of continuous operating time when used with the spare battery". While this might be great more than enough for casual riders or shorter weekday rides, if you want to log serious distance on this thing, I expect that your going to wrestle with battery issues. This strikes me as the fatal flaw with this whole concept -- say what you will about the capabilities or problems with the Polar watch, even if you ran it continuously, you don't have to change the battery more than about once a year or two. It's also unlikely that your battery will die when you're in the middle of a ride. That may not be a big issue when you're riding back and forth to work, but if you've been out to Pescado, just left San Gregorio and you're on your way up Tunitas Creek, you're probably not going to find a place to plug in and recharge.

Imagine the Possibilities: ANT+
All that being said, the aspect that I found most interesting about the iBike is it's use of ANT+ sensor technology. Before reading about it in the iBike specs, I was unfamiliar with ANT+. Here's a clip about ANT+:

ANT+ facilitates the collection, automatic transfer and tracking of sensor data for monitoring information anywhere, anytime.  The key advantage of this unique managed network is device specific interoperability which enables wireless communication with other ANT+ products.  This interoperability function (added to the base ANT protocol) now facilitates the reliable transfer of data between sensors and display devices such as watches, heart rate monitors and bike computers.  Applicable in sport, wellness management and home health monitoring, ANT is proven with several million nodes shipped to date.

ANT+ is basically an interface standard for communicating with these motion sensors. On the site, they also show an announcement at Interbike where Fox has combined ANT+ sensing with their mountain bike shocks and a special adjustment mechanism to make dynamically adjusting shocks. Imagine your mountain bike adjusting it's suspension based on the terrain and your desired ride characteristics. Cars have been doing this kind of stuff for years, but there are wires and electronics and systems. With ANT+, small wireless sensors can be integrated into devices that previously would have been implausible. When linked to an intelligent central brain, imagine the possibilities. Very cool.

Unemployment Numbers and 'Given Up': The Hidden Side of an Economic Stat

With the economy still swirling around in the toilet and the politicians attempting to use the unemployment numbers to support their various positions, we are treated to a monthly dose of "the unemployment rate went up, down, or remained at fill-in-the-blank" from the news media. Often, this is published with the same matter-of-fact indicator status that one might use to confirm body temperature. Are we getting better? Are we still sick?

One number that they talk about not being counted are the number of people who have "given up", people who have been out of work so long and been unable to find work -- so they have essentially given up looking (or at least going through the vehicles typically used to track unemployment). Of course, this number gives come conservatives fits. "How could you just 'give up' when you don't have a job" is one of those threads on conservative channels that I've blog coverage of. 

But there is a hidden side to the unemployment numbers, and my guess is that it would probably be a better measure of the "health" of the economy if you could adequately measure it. Think about all of the people that you know who are frustrated or unhappy in their current jobs. Think about all of the ones that are actively searching for work even though they currently have a job. Now imagine the number of employed people who are working and would like a new job, but have given up their search.

Most of us work under "at will" employment conditions. Basically, this is sort of an agreement between you and your employer that says, if you don't like it, you can always quit and do something else. As a society, we've established this as a theoretical free-market check-and-balance against the demands of the work environment. And it works. Sometimes.

When someone is hired for a job, they often came from an existing job. When the job market is bad, people don't get hired and they don't change jobs. They are stuck in their existing work environment. Sure, they may have been looking for work from the safety of their existing job, but they have been looking for work. But if you already have a job and you make the effort to look for work -- if the economy is bad and there are limited opportunities -- at what point to you take that time and energy and focus it on something else? What does 'giving up' look like when you already have a job?

While it may be impossible to estimate the number of people with jobs who have given up looking, you can imagine the hidden cost on the economy. When it comes to marketing through customer service and front-line employees in the service industry, employee happiness is often correlated to positive customer experiences. And regardless of how much work they do and how much output you get from them, your unhappy, wanting-to-change-job employees are probably giving less than 100% of what they are capable of -- it's like an audience watching a bad movie, just because they haven't walked out of the theater doesn't mean that you have their interest.

What Real Economic Recovery Looks Like
When I hear the government and the media promote declining unemployment numbers, I prefer to look at the situation in a different light. Back in the dot.com era, the job market was so strong that many companies couldn't find bodies to hire. During that time, we often had to hire people who sucked simply because they were the best available body -- and you didn't feel bad about cutting somebody loose who sucked because they were likely to be picked up by some other company. We truly were free agents at that time.

In a recent piece, economist Paul Krugman called what we're in a depression instead of a recession. He noted that, while it wasn't as bad as the Great Depression, just because things don't suck as bad doesn't mean that they don't suck. How will I know that the Great Economic Downturn is over? It will probably start with a few handfuls of key employees jumping ship for another company. Then, like when key Google people started jumping for Facebook, established companies will start adding salary and benefits instead of cutting them -- they will need to remain competitive. Next, you'll start getting lots of emails and phone calls again, from recruiters desperately wanting you to consider some company.

Sadly, I don't think that we're anywhere near the start of that world, because it isn't going to come from austerity, belt-tightening, and tax breaks for 'job creators'. If you look back to the dot.com era (not as a bubble but as the time when there was economic job security in as much as there were opportunities to work for anyone that was willing), then you might suspect that real recovery will only take place when we experience some of the conditions associated with a bubble or a boom -- namely more job opportunities than we have bodies available.

So what do the dot.com era, the housing bubble, the social networking boom, and the green tech boom have in common? In the early days of all of these growth spurts, a new market appeared. In the race to compete for these opportunities, people invested time, effort, and money chasing the potential windfall -- like sailing and trying to catch that puff of air to fill your sails and carry you along.

Some of these booms are short-lived. There are only so many opportunities for an entrepreneur to build Angry Birds and dominate the iTunes App Store before their software becomes yet another game in the half a million apps. Large competitors learn from the fast-swimming pioneers. But a bigger part of the problem that we have is that the entrenched interests in our system have enough influence to strangle the life out of the up-and-comers, like traditional energy interests lobbying to undercut green tech or the ILECs strangling the competition out of broadband.

Remember back around 1998 and the Internet Tax Freedom Act?  
You might call it early-boom, but 1998 was in the time before e-commerce had really taken hold. There wasn't a lot of money being made on the web. There was no streaming media. Traditional media was still the main source of content. There were no blogs, no Adwords, or Adsense. Maybe it's because there was so little money there or maybe it was a brilliant, prescient moment -- but somewhere within the halls of the government, they managed to come together and protect the Internet from being taxed.

I write this not from some sort of pro-tax/anti-tax canard; but rather, here is one example government legislating the protection of potential economic bounty -- the future interests of competition -- from the lobbying, money, and powerful influence of the existing, entrenched players. Imagine if, back in 1998, Time-Warner had the foresight to see their empire collapse. Imagine if media companies could have lobbied for a tax on streaming traffic -- or perhaps a tax on any content that wasn't streamed.

Today, the entrenched players can clearly see the potential money in the Internet and they work to reshape their control market using things like DMCA, SOPA, and Net Neutrality. Imagine if, instead of attempting to rein in these markets, we were pushing to expand the markets through things like universal broadband internet access. As strange as it may be to imagine, there are people without access to the Internet. Remember when Google announced it's extremely high-speed Internet access initiative? There was almost a mini-boom of cities lobbying to win that contest. Why? Because the benefits of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access is easy to understand -- not to mention that it would also likely translate into jobs.

I Know, I Digress...
Sometimes when you are sailing and there is no wind, you find yourself scanning the water looking for signs of a breeze. The media is always looking for stories, looking for changes to report. Most recently, as a result of the holiday shopping window, they report that consumer confidence is higher than it's been in quite some time... but employment prospects look to remain flat in early 2112. They take you on a roller coaster ride with the news.

Recovery? For some, that may be as simple as having money to spend -- or less of a sense of guilt (or a political agenda) for not spending it. And while the economist definition of a depression or a recession may be measured by an economic tick here or a stock-market indicator there, for me, I'll believe it when I feel the winds of an economic boom blowing and that sense of energy and excitement of new possibilities on the horizon. Until then, we just have to fend off the damned cannibals that want to keep us trapped in a stagnant life raft. Does anybody have a motor and a compass?