Peter Krupa

No one ever accused Apple of price-consciousness, but come on: four freaking dollars to rent a movie over the Internet? Someone didn’t get the memo that the Internet is supposed to make movie rentals cheaper, not more costly, considering you don’t have to run a physical store to rent them.

So much for progress. Guess I’ll stick with the $2 bootlegs I rent down the street.

UPDATE: Sorry, I have to add, this is why “Mac” people are so annoying, as is the Apple-obsessed media: Because none of them will call bullshit when something is legitimately bullshit. Four dollars for a movie rental in the year 2008 is an insult to modern innovation.

When I lived in the states I paid $15 a month for Netflix. Unlimited rentals. True, I couldn’t transfer the movie onto my iPhone/iPod/iWhatever and watch it three times in three different sizes over a 24-hour period.

But show me a person who wants to pay $4 to do that, and I’ll show you me, backing away slowly and making no sudden moves that might stir that lunatic into conversation.

I just got one of these, but now I really want one of these. It’s funny, they seem to be marketing the ASUS Eee PC to kids or some shit. Tiny, 7-inch screen, 4-gig flash memory hard drive, 900 mhtz processor. Maybe it just screams “child’s play.”

Perhaps I have a unique situation, but I see a much greater possibility, a newer market niche: The robable laptop. I mean robable from the perspective of the owner - as in, I would carry around my digital camera, but no way in hell I want to risk my $1,500 MacBook getting ganked.

Again, maybe I have a unique situation. I do live in a city where at least 600 known and repeat muggers wander around and no one does anything about it (one guy’s been arrested 80 times!). I also work as a journalist, so I love, love, love the idea of having a tiny, useful, cheap laptop that I can whip out anywhere to take notes or take advantage of a hot-spot without advertising that I am carrying around the local equivalent of three monthly salaries.

At $400 - roughly the cost of a nice digital camera - it would make sense to carry this laptop around, and I wouldn’t cry if someone stuck a gun to my head and took it away. Seriously, this is brilliant - the second laptop. A truly mobile, useful laptop.

A robable laptop.

From the New York Times:

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Chávez’ vice president had a comment for the representatives of the FARC upon the release of two hostages yesterday:

In the name of President Chávez, we are paying close attention to your fight. Keep up the spirit, keep up your strength, and count on us.

The FARC is a communist narco-terrorist group that operates in Colombia and Venezuela and funds its activities through drug trafficking and ransom from kidnappings. It currently holds 25 Venezuelan hostages, none of whose release Chávez has lobbied for.

Venezuela is planning to build two Kalashnikov rifle factories, and in 2005-2006 spent $3.4 billion on Russian arms.

Jack Shafer on the media’s odd obsession with bipartisanship:

When we devote ourselves to working together in the name of national unity rather than obsessing on our differences, injustice loves to strike. Writing slavery into the Constitution was perhaps the greatest triumph of nonpartisan compromise in U.S. history. The denial of suffrage to non-property owners and women ranks up there, as do prohibition, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the so-called war on drugs, declared by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and waged bipartisanly by every president—Republican and Democrat—since.

Full take-down here.

There is this principle in economics - and I have no idea what it’s called - that goes something like this: With certain commodities, supply and demand are always chasing each other, and therefore overcompensating.

We therefore see cycles of highs and lows. If there is a glut of, say, pork on the market, prices will go down, and farmers will raise fewer hogs. Their decision to raise fewer hogs isn’t felt until a year later, when suddenly there is less pork on the market, so prices go up. Farmers then decide to raise more hogs, and the cycle repeats itself.

Or something along those lines.

Applying that basic observation to oil, Portfolio columnist John Cassidy says we’re in for a big price drop. The reason is simple: High prices have encouraged an overwhelming amount of oil exploration, projects which take several years to bring online. Within the next few years, there will be a lot more oil on the market, bringing prices down:

Already, in Texas and California, hundreds of mothballed, low-producing stripper wells have been brought back into production. In Africa, the Chinese government is making development deals with Sudan, Chad, the Congo Republic, and other impoverished nations with unexploited reserves. In the Canadian province of Alberta, Shell and other energy companies are building massive strip mines to access local tar sands, which can be converted into synthetic oil or refined directly into petroleum at a cost of roughly $30 a barrel. Some experts believe the sands contain more oil than the subdeserts of Saudi Arabia.

Not very long ago, energy companies were slashing their exploration and drilling budgets, refusing to finance any project unless it could generate crude for $15 or $20 a barrel. But since 2003, when the price of crude rose above $30 a barrel, the industry has relaxed its financial assumptions and beefed up capital spending. In the past four years, Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company, has invested more than $60 billion in exploration and development. Between now and 2010, the company plans to begin pumping oil or gas from no fewer than 20 new projects.

It’s an interesting observation, and makes quite a bit of sense. It would be nice for me, since currently gas in Costa Rica is over $4 a gallon. It would be extremely bad for Venezuela, however. That country’s national budget - with its massive social handouts - assumes oil prices of well over $40 a gallon.

Can someone explain to me why Chuck Norris has endorsed Mike Huckabee for president? In these troubled, post-9/11 times, it’s so hard to tell what’s The Onion and what’s not. Also, Rudy Giuliani (God, I hate spelling Giuliani) promises to resolve all this “War on Terror” business in one hour, either that or destroy the entire Muslim world.

How to write about Africa:

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

There’s a nice story in the New York Times about how Chávez is becoming a failure. First he lost the referendum, now his hostage rescue gimmick has been called off. (Also for you readers at home: The FARC holds 25 Venezuelan hostages. Chávez has yet to lobby for their release.)

It goes along with something Ona and I noticed on our 10-day visit to Venezuela over the holidays: Despite the unbelievable amounts of cash swilling into the economy thanks to the country’s oil boom, there are few signs of prosperity.

No big construction projects. No new highways. People have to wait in line for food staples like flour, milk, and sugar, if they can get them at all. There is plenty of imported whiskey, however, and plenty of state-purchased propaganda billboards, newspaper advertising, and public television channels. (Remember RCTV? It’s now a state owned channel that broadcasts Cuban baseball games.)
There are also plenty of cars and new car dealerships. It’s cheap to drive thanks to massive government fuel subsidies. I watched my father-in-law put 52 liters of gas in his Ford Explorer for about $2.50.

Along with that, inflation last year was at 22 percent - the highest in Latin America - and crime has grown wildly out of control, with 30 or so bodies turning up in Caracas every weekend. In some districts there is literally not enough morgue space.

See, here’s the thing that Chávez and his supporters have missed: Ideology is all well and good, but to get things done you also need a good manager.

Almost a decade into a Chávez administration, I think we can finally say that his tenure has been a failure. He had billions of dollars in cold cash at his disposal, and he built nothing that will last. He has invested nothing and created nothing other than bitter political division.

Chávez won’t be remembered as a dictator. He’ll be remembered as a bad president who squandered his country’s wealth.

Another chapter in the sad story of petro-states.