Disney for infants

What? You thought Disney was already marketing to the newly born?

Not so, at least, not to the extent it will be from now on, according to the New York Times.

Late last month, the company quietly began pressing its newest priority, Disney Baby, in 580 maternity hospitals in the United States. A representative visits a new mother and offers a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit, a variation of the classic Onesie.

Disney sees a gold mine:

Disney estimates the North American baby market, including staples like formula, to be worth $36.3 billion annually. Its executives talk about tapping into that jackpot as if they were waging a war. “Apparel is only a beachhead,” said Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products.

...

“To get that mom thinking about her family’s first park experience before her baby is even born is a home run,” Mr. Mooney said....

And here's why the company will succeed:

Rachel Bernstein, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who is pregnant herself, said she was concerned about marketers using hospitals as customer hunting grounds. “But Disney is a nice company,” she said, “and I think my patients would actually be thrilled to get free Disney stuff.”

Disney is a nice company. Um, no: it's not.

Disney park employees may be unfailingly courteous and helpful, as they have been in my experience (even the Davy Crockett canoe guide who warned his reluctant passengers, "Hey, if you don't paddle, that's fine: they'll send a boat out to pick me up"), but that doesn't make the company nice. It's not. It's a business, one of the most successful of our time, and it is successful because it makes hard business decisions that promote its bottom line over all else.

What else might be a consideration? Well, how about growing up with different myths than the ones Disney promotes? How about imagining different worlds and possibilities than the ones Disney packages? How about the freedom not to be indoctrinated into the Mouse's ranks before your critical thinking faculties have developed?

Forget Agent Smith: the guy coming after Neo will have big, black, round ears.

Tiered security for airports

The New York Times reports that "a growing consensus" is emerging among certain stakeholders that the right way to address airport security is to "divide travelers into three groups — trusted, regular or risky — and apply different screening techniques based on what is known about the passengers."

The article paints an upbeat picture of the future as envisioned by groups like the International Air Transport Association, the U.S. Travel Association ("a travel trade group") and the Air Lines Pilots Association. Conspicuously absent from this list is any comment from a passenger association.

For "trusted" travelers, tiered-security advocates envision an expedited security process at the airport that would start long before, with a background check likely paid for by the would-be traveler. This sounds exactly like the Clear service, which was shuttered in 2009 in a dispute with creditors. Clear came out of bankruptcy with a new owner and restarted service in November 2010. Other companies are reported to be interested in getting into this market, too.

How are passengers to be sorted into the three groups?

Although many of the procedural details are still just proposals, the idea is to determine who may present a risk based on better use of government intelligence and watch lists as well as suspicious behaviors like checking in for a one-way international flight with no luggage.

Huh. Isn't that what is supposed to be happening today, modulo the (putatively) random enhanced screening process?

I don't care for being sized up according to some faceless bureaucrat's risk-assessment profile, but we put up with that kind of thing when we apply for life insurance. Neither is strictly necessary, though circumstances may prevent you from opting out.

The theory of the current randomized enhanced screening process, by the way, is that it avoids exactly the kind of profiling alleged by Arabs, Muslims, and anyone else who looks or sounds like the public's notion of a terrorist. They face the airport equivalent of "driving while black." It will be interesting to see if a move toward more objective risk-based assessment, which makes sense from a cost-effectiveness (not to mention a rationality) standpoint, swings the pendulum back toward headlines about unfair profiling. Indeed, it will be interesting to see how objective the risk assessments are.

AOL buys Huff Post

Via Daring Fireball, a pointer to a New York Times article on the acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.

This comes on the heels of the apparent leak to Business Insider of an AOL internal slideshow describing how the company will achieve a higher profile and greater profitability. My cursory perusal of the first third of those slides suggests that AOL's profit-oriented mindset and strong desire to secure the largest possible audience will not mesh well with HuffPo's strong political stance.

And the idea of giving Arianna Huffington "oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone" strikes me as downright weird. What does Huffington know of managing such a diverse portfolio of properties? Why wouldn't AOL have a half-dozen more competent internal candidates available?

AOL smothered Netscape because AOL's management couldn't figure out what to do with such talented engineers. AOL has demonstrated no creative vision, none, in its entire history. Technologically and socially, AOL is a joke. Its sole claim to fame is that it kept sucking dialup fees off of people long after broadband was thought to have killed dialup.

The trouble with AOL's acquisition of HuffPo, from my perspective, is twofold:

1. HuffPo's contributors never had to worry about a big corporation looking over their shoulders, until now. How long will they and Huffington herself be immune to the pressures from above?
2. I very much doubt HuffPo's internal culture, which I can only imagine was pretty loose, will mesh well with the tightly structured, highly bureaucratic organization described in the leaked AOL slideshow.

AOL, I daresay, will have the same trouble with any acquisition that it had with Netscape: its bureaucratic dedication to trendspotting as a substitute for creative vision will suck the life from and crush the souls of any imaginative and creative people that join the company through those acquisitions. The best will leave, sooner or later, and AOL once again will find itself without anybody to do the real work of generating good content (or making good technology, as the case may be).

If I had to bet, I'd say Huffington sees this as her best chance to make real money off the Huffington Post brand. She'll stay at AOL just long enough to fulfill whatever contractual terms were required for the sale. Then she and most of the other HuffPo writers she brought to AOL will head for the exits. Their audiences will follow them, not the Huffington Post brand. All Huffington and her cronies have to do is not to let their credibility be too badly tarnished during their stints as AOL employees.

Read the instructions

I attached a shiny new microphone to my computer to experiment with audio production at home. (The microphone is actually a few years old, but I never had a chance to play with it until now.) The occasion was an urgent request for a public service announcement, so time was limited; in spite of my unfamiliarity with the microphone and the audio/editing software, Audacity, I plowed right into voicing and mixing the spot.

After some fumbling about, mostly in Audacity, I got a marginally acceptable finished product. Although the music bed was fine, the voice was bizarrely tinny, as if it had been recorded in a high school bathroom with a portable cassette recorder. (Not that I'd know anything about that.) Considering this microphone was highly rated and recommended, I couldn't understand why it produced such a lousy result.

It wasn't until much later that I went back to read the booklet that came with the mike, and things became clear. Audacity had given me the option of using either the internal microphone, something called "built-in input," or "USB audio codec." I had no idea what the latter two were (I do now), but I knew I wanted a microphone.

Except that wasn't true: according to the booklet, I wanted "USB audio codec." That would be consistent with this mic plugging into the USB port on the computer, I saw in hindsight.

No, the word "internal" didn't register on my clue meter. Look, it was over 70 and sunny today: I must have been stupid with the heat.

I'm impressed that the computer's built-in microphone worked so well, especially since I wasn't directing my voice at it.

And my shiny new microphone makes me sound nasal. Damn its accuracy!

"Judgment Days," David Remnick

Courtesy Daring Fireball, a pointer to a New Yorker essay by David Remnick about the unrest in Egypt. It's short, reflective, and useful for understanding the limits of what the U.S. can do. Our role is circumscribed as much by history as by the specific conditions on the ground.

Further to my entry concerning Israeli opinion of Obama on Egypt, let me quote Remnick:

In diplomacy, the tension between moral and strategic considerations is always acute and often shaming—rarely more so than in the American relationship with Egypt.

Israel's only concern is strategic, but the U.S., by virtue of the myths it has told itself and everyone else for decades, has to honor the moral sphere as well. Israel, of all nations, ought to understand this, since U.S. domestic support for it has always rested on both.

On the domestic front, and perhaps internationally as well, Obama has been well aware of the tension between morality and power politics. As Remnick puts it, "He has favored ... a double game of tempered public rhetoric and concerted diplomacy, and this has, at times, thwarted the desire for a clarion American voice."

I have a deep personal preference for underpromising and overdelivering, so I appreciate Obama's approach. Americans have a bad habit of insisting that their leaders make large promises no one could keep, and then lashing out against them when the promises go unfulfilled. I'm trying to savor the novelty of a leader who doesn't play that game (at least, not as much as most), because being the fickle and shortsighted people we are, I doubt I'll see another such leader anytime soon.

It's almost trite to end every discussion of the Middle East with some reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Remnick follows the crowd without really convincingly tying the reference to Egypt proper. However, his mention of settlement building reminded me of something I meant to mention in the last entry, that Israel's security would be greatly enhanced if its government were not beholden to the most aggressively expansionist religious factions of its society, the ones that insist on inflaming Arab opinion by building settlements in disputed areas. Religion in the Middle East does not unite, it divides and antagonizes. The sooner everyone recognizes that, the sooner that troubled region can come to terms with the many overlapping and conflicting claims to territory, and with the lives lost and broken by the fighting.

(And now I've followed the crowd, too.)

Israeli myopia on Obama and Mubarak?

Reuters has a story entitled, "Israel shocked by Obama's 'betrayal' of Mubarak". It's a curious piece, since it portrays Israeli political opinion as bizarrely, universally, and stupidly parochial.

One comment by Aviad Pohoryles in the daily Maariv was entitled "A Bullet in the Back from Uncle Sam." It accused Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pursuing a naive, smug, and insular diplomacy heedless of the risks.

Who is advising them, he asked, "to fuel the mob raging in the streets of Egypt and to demand the head of the person who five minutes ago was the bold ally of the president ... an almost lone voice of sanity in a Middle East?"

"The politically correct diplomacy of American presidents throughout the generations ... is painfully naive."

Political correctness? Pahoryles is either a troll or an idiot.

Obama and the U.S. are in a no-win situation. Supporting Mubarak inflames anti-American sentiment, denouncing him jeopardizes alliances all over the world. Mubarak's willingness to maintain Sadat's peace may be the only thing that matters to Israelis, but the U.S. has a different set of priorities. The U.S. is trying to avoid creating another long-term anti-American regime. That might be an untenable goal, but it's one worth pursuing, and Obama's doing his best to find the path to that goal. Political correctness my ass, this is political expedience.

Fueling the protests? That's laughable. The protesters aren't shouting, "Obama believes in us," they're shouting, "Mubarak must go!" They didn't start gathering in the streets because the U.S. urged them, and they wouldn't stop marching if the U.S. denounced them.

What would Israel have Obama and the U.S. do, invade? That's about all that could save Mubarak if he has lost the support of the military, as appears to be the case.

I have a hard time believing Israeli opinion is either that united or that simpleminded. Did I fall for click-bait? From Reuters, yet?

Amen, Kottke

Jason Kottke on walking while texting. He has a couple of suggestions for making the streets safer, but he's bewildered by the phenomenon:

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you people?

I agree. You're relying on the rest of us to watch out for you. Uh, no: you're not five-year-olds. Stop acting like it or we'll have to find adult supervision for you.