Apathy Sketchpad

I am reading a thing in the Guardian about people’s opinions of TV stars’ pay. Or rather, I have read it, and now am writing a thing on Apathy Sketchpad about people’s opinions of TV stars’ pay.

Four out of five people thought the huge salaries paid to top TV stars were excessive, a YouGov poll of 2,000 people found. And Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan least deserved his high earnings, it found.

…

The TV personality whom the survey found most justified their pay was travelogue host Michael Palin, with 30% of respondents saying he was worth his salary. He was followed by QI host Stephen Fry, with 27% support, and Question Time host David Dimbleby, with 22%.

I’m not convinced of the relevance of this.

It seems to me that if 6% of the population think Piers Morgan is worth a million pounds a year, that’s still 3.6 million people. If they each watch 40 pence’ worth of adverts, that more than covers Morgan’s salary, and it’s clear that a large fraction of the remainder aren’t principled enough to boycott his output on those grounds.

photo credit: rhett maxwell

These figures are compared to Premiership footballers, of whose wages it is claimed that 93% disapprove. This is not true. What we know is that 93% of people will say in a survey that they disapprove, but their actions betray them. I’m pretty certain that between Premiership Plus, match tickets, replica strips and other assorted tat that Premiership clubs flog to their respective acolytes, far more than 7% of the population actively pay the wages that they claim not to condone. (7% of the population is 4.3 million people, and here is Wolfram|Alpha’s useful graph of how ‘7% of the population’ has changed with time.) I know they’ll say that they don’t approve of how the money is spent, but what the hell else do they expect the club to do with it? If it’s worth millions of people paying £973 a year to their chosen team, plus the ad revenue from everyone watching on TV, that dictates what the players who can draw those people in are worth paying. They may not deserve it, if for some reason your criteria for salary decisions is acts of great moral worth, but the fact is that they earn more than that for their employers and everyone who watches the matches is complicit in that. Were I a TV star I’d be rightly miffed if I reliably brought in millions for the station and earned some paltry normal-person wage. I’d want a company speedboat. All this tells us is that 93% of people earn less than Premiership footballers, and we already knew that.

Who cares if 79% of people think Jeremy Clarkson is overpaid? He’s not expected to appeal to everyone. If 21% of the population like someone then I should consider them very popular and well worth paying to hold on to. Who, come to that, cares if 74% of people think bankers are overpaid? I’m certain 74% of people don’t understand or care what bankers actually do. Their reckonings as to their entitlement to the lifestyle their profession still mostly affords them should be dismissed out of hand along with their post-pub theories about who would win in a fight between Chuck Norris and a rhinoceros. The rhino would kill him. Because it’s a rhino.

Ultimately, it matters not a jot what people think of TV stars’ salaries: anyone who will ever be in a position to decide them will be so because they understand that, pragmatically, the stars will work for whoever offers them most, so you should offer them as much as you can before it makes the profit margin too small to be worth the bother. (Obviously the mechanics are different with the BBC but the principle is the same.) Sure, it’d be lovely if doctors earned more than footballers and nobody watched shit TV shows presented by attractive and enthusiastic but otherwise loathsome simpletons, but the world doesn’t, won’t, and can’t ever work that way. You might as well conduct a survey and ask people if they approve of cancer or death or the eventual heat death of the universe. We have literally zero chance of eradicating any of these things, so what the hell is the use in YouGov pestering 2,000 people for their opinions of them?

How is the world a better place for the inclusion of this knowledge?

Normally if I read in the free newspaper on the bus that Gordon Brown was being branded cowardly for failing to speak out about the release on compassionate grounds of the Lockerbie bomber, I’d defend him. I’d ask why he should have to voice an opinion about everything that happens. I’d think it right and proper that he allow the judiciary to go about their business without interfering the whole time just because a few people who are mostly lunatics don’t approve.

But given that, in that same issue of that same newspaper, he was quoted congratulating the England cricket team, that goes out the window. I presume that if he has time to write to reality TV stars like Rhydian or Andrew Flintoff then he also has time to look over every single case for compassionate release.

No. Obviously I don’t presume that. Gordon Brown can write personal letters to whomever he wants, just like I can. His will be in the news because he’s Prime Minister. Mine won’t, because I’m just some guy.

But… at the same time, I don’t believe Gordon Brown watches the X-Factor. I’m prepared to believe he genuinely followed the Ashes, but the point is that he’s not writing these letters personally. He’s doing it for publicity. Which is fair enough, but who does he think he’s impressing? I don’t know anyone who wants Gordon Brown out of office because he’s out of touch, and anyone that does…

Well, they’re hardly going to vote for the Conservatives, are they?

Recently, I got a new phone. My old phone, a Sony Ericsson K610i, was just annoying me too much. It was falling to bits, the joystick didn’t work, it filled with dust, the screen was tiny, the paint was coming off the buttons, and the tariff was shit. So, I switched tariff and got myself a Nokia 7100 into the bargain. I’m not sure how the naming works, since I’m sure I had a 7110 years ago. I’m not sure when, exactly, but you can look it up because it’s the phone Neo used in The Matrix. Given that we owned The Matrix on VHS, I’m guessing we’re not talking about majorly up-to-date technology here. It had a black and white screen.

Anyhow, that was fine. That phone worked well. I’m bitching specifically about the 7100. It’s a great handset, don’t get me wrong. It feels satisfyingly sturdy, it’s got a decent camera and a good screen, it has a good four-way switch instead of a flimsy joystick, and although the button in the middle of that is too easy to press accidentally, it is, physically, one of the best phones I’ve ever used.

No, my problem with the 7100 is the software it runs. I’ve had it a few weeks now, in fact almost exactly three weeks, and I’ve already noticed the OS is crap. Here are my reasonings:

• When I open the phone, it takes two seconds to activate. That’s not a long time, but two fucking seconds? It’s a phone? What’s it doing?
• Google Maps doesn’t work. That’s the main reason I wanted a big screen. Not wanting to be unreasonable, I considered writing a hack on my webspace to feed the raster maps you get when you do a regular Google search to my phone. But…
• Even basic online content doesn’t work. I consider Twitter to be the basic, simple thing that any phone should be able to do. It’s simpler, even, than just being a phone. But if I try to use slandr.net, the phone locks up, sometimes whining about memory, and won’t do anything again until I take out the battery and hard-reset it that way.
• Today, an option was missing from the menu. I had no way of knowing what that was or if it was important.
• Today, the phone refused to lock the keys because it had a text it hadn’t managed to send yet (because it had no signal). Not sure what sense that made, but I guess the handset was never tested in a pub.
• Looking up contacts take a long time. Scrolling takes a long time, and it generally just takes a long time to do anything.
• The main menu is a 3×4 grid of icons. There is a 3×4 grid of buttons on the phone. The two do not correspond. Who thought that was a good idea?

I just can’t see how this can happen. Today I was in Tesco looking at the bread, and I thought, no, the bread I want is elsewhere, so I went to get that, but got distracted by one of the two hundred and ten other products in between. So I forgot to buy any. I realise this is partly my fault, but Tesco lost money on this (and so would I have if I didn’t have plans for lunch tomorrow anyway). I remember thinking that, by now, Tesco must have run enough shops for long enough that they’d be pretty good at it.

And I feel the same way about Nokia. By now, they should have written an OS for a telephone that could basically go from closed to making a phone call in maybe five seconds. It can’t. It massively can’t. It’s just not satisfactory on any level. I don’t see how Nokia, of all people, are still so shit at writing phone software.

And Sony Ericsson can do all that, but their handsets (while sturdy enough to be run over twice and keep right on truckin’) are shit. They fall to bits and fill with dust and the joysticks don’t work. But the software is great. You can run Google Maps, even if the screen’s not up to really doing it justice. The menus are fast and intuitive…

Is there a phone manufacturer that can do both? And that can do both with a real, actual keypad that isn’t a touch-screen with numbers drawn on? And if not, what the hell are these morons doing?

(Incidentally, I saw an advert today for LG phones, which advertised them on the basis of their interface. That’s amazing to me. It’s not why people buy phones — they buy them for the look and the features — but you spend days staring at and using the interface, so that’s exactly why they should buy a phone. It’s like an advert written by Aaron Sorkin!)

picture credit: ssoosay

Advances in technology are already leading to the development of robots that mimic human appearance as well as movement. And security experts fear terror groups could diguise them as innocent pedestrians in future plots.

The key word here, I think, is ‘future’. I’m thinking maybe… forty years hence? I mean, maybe mankind will be able to create a realistic replica human in the next decade, but not at a price some wingnut religious fundamentalist would be able to afford. Certainly it won’t be cheaper or easier than radicalising a disillusioned student any time even remotely soon.

The call [for ideas for anti-terrorism gadgets] is part of a new terrorism science and technology strategy and echoes the fictional boffin “Q”, made famous in the James Bond stories.

Yes, thankyou. Just report the news and I’ll relate it to my experience of popular culture myself. Further, I hypothesise that any article that uses the word ‘boffin’ is a load of shit. You don’t even need a clever idea to spot an android posing as a human. A cheap (by then) thermal camera will do it, I should think. A weighing scale will probably suffice. Analyse its gait. Fire random EM pulses about the place.

Millions of pounds could be available to fund the right product and one idea that has already found success is a maritime “stinger” able to stop a terrorist speedboat.

Terrorists haven’t got speedboats. They’ve got flour and vegetable oil. They’ve got rucksacks and bus passes. They dig up corpses and bomb cars. They use mobiles and email and trains, just like everyone else. The only terrorists who have speedboats are the fictional ones made famous in the James Bond films. People with easy access to speedboats wouldn’t bomb in such crude ways even if they wanted to — which they wouldn’t because people who’ve got speedboats tend to be pretty chuffed with the status quo just the way it is, thankyou very much.

Some of them have missiles, mind, so the problem of ‘how to blow something up without being there’ isn’t one they can’t solve already.

Experts with ideas to counter future threats are urged to get in contact.

Okay. I have some ideas.

First, I thought that we could counter the clear and present danger posed by terrorist androids posing as humans by the invention of the Android Detection Kit. It’s small and fits in a handbag, and although it looks like one of those little flexible magnets people used to use to distinguish aluminium cans from steel ones, with the writing crossed out and ‘android detector’ written in, it is in fact a highly technical robosensor unit.

Next, we should definitely develop some kind of teleport jamming field, because the danger that a terrorist might simply beam a bomb into the middle of a shopping centre or a train station is– well, not a train station, obviously, because we’d all be teleporting around the place instead, but maybe the car park outside the teleport shop.

Although I suppose they’d just teleport your teleport to you. Never mind.

Lastly, I think releasing a gaseous form of Carex into the environment would help. It would be designed to work on humans rather than bacteria, and would kill the bad humans while promoting the growth of good humans, such as homo immunitas.

I’ve raised this issue with Facebook twice now and they’ve not responded, so I’m blogging it.

The crux of the matter, I think, is that Facebook wants me to see it as an entity in its own right, whereas I want it to be a tool. It’s arguably a meaningless distinction, but it can make a big difference to attitude. The email alerts are a big part of this. Because here is what happens when someone sends me a Facebook message:

1. Facebook emails me to tell me I’ve got a Facebook message from my friend.
2. I visit Facebook to read the message.

From: Clare Hunter <message1083610240352@facebook.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew+facebook@gmail.com>

Subject: Stuff to do

How about going to see a film tonight?

View message in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Alter alert settings: http://www.facebook.com/account

From: Facebook <notification+5euiut_h_@facebookmail.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>

Subject: Clare Hunter replied to a thread on Facebook…

Clare sent a message in reply to a thread.

Re: Stuff To Do

“How about going to see a film tonight?”

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

___
This message was intended for taylor.andrew@gmail.com

Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications&md=bXNnO2zME0Zy5MjcMDMbODg0O3Q9MTA209NjM1zYxMDMjt0bz02MTQxNzM0Nw==&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Facebook’s offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304

Firstly, almost the whole of that email (including the entire first paragraph) is non-message related, which is to say, wasted space. But worse than that, I’ve got an email from Facebook instead of a message from my friend. My email software (in this case, GMail’s web interface) knows how to file messages. They’re from someone, to someone, and on a subject. So, if I want to search for messages from Clare about stuff to do, I can do that. Except I won’t find it, because this email is from “Facebook” and is about “Clare has sent you a message on Facebook”. It appears in my inbox as a generic Facebook message and I have to read it to see which it is. It threads with other messages Clare has sent me instead of other messages in the same conversation, and the whole thing just isn’t satisfactory. This sort of thing was fine in 2001. Now, it’s not good enough. The web has matured and Facebook hasn’t done well at keeping up.

Now I realise that the email above does include my friend’s message in its entirety, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve no reason to actually visit Facebook unless I want to reply. But if someone replies to a message before I’ve read it in Facebook, I don’t get another email. Facebook reasons, in the manner of those quaintly archaic ‘forums’ that just about still exist, that once I’ve got one message I’m committed to visiting Facebook to read it. So there’s no need to keep me posted. Here, again, Facebook is acting as if it is a website I actively want to interact with. It isn’t. I want it to be transparent to the point of being invisible.

It’s no longer good enough to import. It’s no longer good enough to be an application. Facebook has to become a server that I can use however I like. That is how it will survive. Twitter’s massive growth has been mostly put down to its excellent API that allows people to use it however they like. Facebook can import my Google Reader items and blog posts, but its outgoing RSS support is patchy at best. It can import my tweets, but it can’t tweet my statuses. It can email me when I have a friend’s birthday coming, but it can’t export them to iCal format (although someone made an app that does). Facebook has two RSS feeds and an impenetrable and limited pseudo-API that’s mostly used to annoy users with shitty quizzes. Recently I’ve been discussing with a professional network administrator who can’t figure out how to synchronise a Facebook page and an external website, because it doesn’t occur to Facebook that anyone would want to.

Facebook has ideas well above its station and needs taking down a few notches. Then it can focus on actually doing what users want it to do instead of what it would like to do.