Is there a word for this?
It happens at Amazon, it happens at my local grocery store (sorry about the colour – it's a cellphone pic), and it happens every day all over the world. But is there a name for it?
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Jerry Falwell is Dead
This is why God invented Christopher Hitchens.
(Via)
Zipcar insurance, part 3
A couple of months ago, I spoke to three Zipcar executives about the Zipcar insurance situation. I reported then:
Zipcar told me that they're going to make it much clearer on their website that their liability coverage is pretty weak; this fact has been very, very buried up until now.
Two months later, what's happened to the web page saying that "gas, reserved parking and insurance are included in all of our rates and there's no crazy paperwork and waivers to fill out"? Um, it's still there. The main "How does Zipcar work?" page still tells you to "remember, gas and insurance are included". The only change is on the insurance page (part of the small print, and hard to find), which used to say that "Insurance is just part of your Zipcar membership" and now says that "Basic insurance is part of your Zipcar membership". They do now helpfully provide a list of state-mandated insurance levels, too.
The main thing that hasn't changed is the insurance situation. The amount of insurance that Zipcar provides (or doesn't provide) is exactly the same as it ever was, and you still have no ability to buy extra insurance from them if you want it. Instead, you're told to "consult with a licensed agent" to see if you can buy the extra insurance elsewhere – something which is both a major hassle and very expensive, since no one's going to sell you insurance for a two-hour car rental.
I've also learned something else about the holes in Zipcar insurance, thanks to a comment on my second post. It's not just liability coverage they lack: it's also uninsured motorist insurance. What that means is that if an uninsured or underinsured motorist runs into you, Zipcar's insurance will not cover your bodily injuries. And again, of course, they don't offer that even as an optional extra.
I sent Kristina from Zipcar an email two weeks ago, asking her what the developments were on the insurance front. I never received a reply. So this afternoon, at 3:39pm, I phoned her at her PR company, RF Binder. I was told she was working at Zipcar; I asked for her number there, but the woman answering the phone wouldn't give it to me. Instead, she took down my message, and said that someone would get back to me.
At 3:59pm, I got the following comment on my old Zipcar post, from someone calling himself "Jude Carlson":
Why are you so negative about Zipcar? Did you know that 100,000 people use it? Obviously, they can't all be wrong about the company. Morover, you are loosing sight of the fact that their program reduces gas emmissions at a greater rate than any other organization and helps people become more mobile at a reasonalble cost. It is easy to point out faults with anything or anybody, but one question we should all ask ourselves is; "Am I doing as much as Zipcar to improve the enviroment and the lives of a hundred thousand people? What have you done latley?
My Movable Type software helpfully logs IP addresses, and this one came from 75.5.124.17, which I looked up. And guess what? It's registered to Zipcar California Inc!
At this point, then, I've stopped giving Zipcar the benefit of the doubt. I think that they are not serious about fixing their broken insurance situation, and indeed it seems that rather than simply return my phone call and talk to me, they're much happier to leave sock-puppet comments on my blog – a classic sign of bad faith.
Up until now, I was reserving judgment. My commenters generally seemed to think that Zipcar was being deliberately misleading, while I still thought there might have been a genuine mistake. Now I agree with those commenters: I've caught Zipcar red-handed in one of the most notorious and devious tactics of all. Shame on Zipcar, and I'm going to start looking for an alternative car-sharing company.
John Adams at Carnegie Hall
Last night was great: Michelle and I went to an ACO celebration of John Adams's 60th birthday at Carnegie Hall, with the composer conducting three of his own works. The second half was a positively blistering and wonderful performance with Leila Josefowicz of the Violin Concerto – that girl can play! Tickets were cheap, for Carnegie: they ranged from $16 to $43, and our seats right in the front row (once a Prommer...) were $35 apiece.
And yet the hall was far, far from being sold out, the presence of a lot of the composer's friends notwithstanding. I don't think this is a problem with Adams, or with contemporary music; I do think it's a problem with Carnegie Hall. I get lots of mail from them telling me what's happening in May 2008, and there are lots of concerts coming up which look great but which don't go on sale for months. (Unless you buy a subscription.) But when individual tickets do go on sale, Carnegie never seems to let me know.
On the road
I had a glorious 35th birthday in Chicago on Saturday. The weather was absolutely perfect all weekend: bright and sunny without being too hot – great for architecture tours, bike riding along the lakefront, or just wandering around.
Not that just wandering around is a particularly Chicago thing to do, it would seem. It's not a walking city, really, and it's hard to get lost there – lord knows there are more than enough skyscrapers by which to orient yourself. The streets are big and wide and don't have a lot of street life – I didn't see a single street vendor, or sidewalk cafe. Presumably because of the bitter winters and hot summers, everything seems to happen indoors. And there seemed to be very little in the way of shops or restaurants outside their own designated corridors.
I'm hardly an expert on Chicago, of course – but I did like it enough that I'm definitely going back. I don't think I'll be staying at the W Lakeshore again, though. In fact, I'm not sure I ever want to stay in a self-consciously hip hotel ever again: I haven't liked the other trendy hotels I've stayed in, either. I think that now I'm 35, I'm officially old and boring – Groove Armada and purple lighting in the elevators just doesn't do anything for me.
Right now, I'm in the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Beverly Hills, and although I've only just got here, it seems much more my cup of tea. Good in a big, old-fashioned sort of way. Michelle and I had a less-than-fabulous experience at the Park Hyatt restaurant in Chicago, but their Gerhard Richter was fabulous, and in general I think I like the understated-luxury aesthetic.
As of tomorrow morning, I'm attending the Milken Institute Global Conference, and I'm quite excited about it. I'll be blogging it over at marketmovers.org – do come over and say hi!
Alice Rawsthorn loves Nick Knight
The NYT is running an article about Nick Knight today, written by Alice Rawsthorn. It's a big sloppy wet kiss of a profile, complete with gushing quotes from Nadja Swarovski, who's not only a major Knight client but who is also the lead advertiser on Knight's website, showstudio.com. Rawsthorn herself can't say enough wonderful things about the site:
In 2000, Knight founded the Web site SHOWstudio as a laboratory where he could experiment with interactive technologies. SHOWstudio has since produced more than 250 projects by Knight and others, placing him at the forefront of developments in 3-D scanning, digital sculpture, interactive film and a raft of other innovations...
Despite the beauty of his still images, SHOWstudio may yet prove to be Knight’s most influential project. He has bankrolled the Web site since 2000, at considerable personal expense. As well as enabling Knight to experiment, it has nurtured a new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists. When a famous face, like Moss’s, is featured on SHOWstudio, as many as 500,000 people log on in a day.
First, about that 500,000 figure: I don't believe it. Half a million unique visitors in a day? I just don't buy it. But I have a couple of friends at the website, and I'll ask them if it's remotely realistic, or what it's referring to. I guess it's conceivable that if Kate Moss gets naked on the site and it's picked up by the gossip blogs, then traffic might spike. Lord knows sex sells on the internet. But that kind of traffic hardly represents the "new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists".
And second, don't you think that Rawsthorn, when writing for the New York Times, might have disclosed that she was a founding editor of showstudio.com? This is America, where some people actually care about those kind of journalistic ethics.
On that illustration
There's been a bit of interest in the cartoon of me on the Portfolio website, but no one's worked out where it comes from. In fact, the source is my Christmas mitzvah from December 2005, when I drove a Zipcar around Manhattan giving lifts to people who were inconvenienced by the transit strike. What you can't tell, of course, from the line drawing is the fact that my suit is purple...
Market Movers
It's live! Up until now, I've been crossposting to felixsalmon.com, but now that portfolio.com has finally been unveiled to the world, you'll have to go there to read most of my finance blogs. You can always get there by going to marketmovers.org, in case you don't want to navigate through the Portfolio home page.
The RSS feed is here; at the moment it's truncated, but I've asked them to change that and serve the full content. In any case, if you subscribe to my "All blog entries" RSS feed or my "Finance and economics" feed, you don't need to do anything: the Portfolio blog entries should be shuffled in there among the (now necessarily much less frequent) felixsalmon.com entries.
When Free Isn't Good
Anil Dash has a wonderful piece of contrarian thinking up on his blog – it's actually a week old, but it's really timeless.
A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search...
Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I'm supposed to say "Wow, cool! Nice work, Google!" But... my initial response wasn't positive. My gut feeling was "Why the hell aren't they charging for this? That sucks!"
Now, I hate websites which make you pay money. And a constant problem for bloggers is wanting but not being able to point to articles which are hidden behind subscriber firewalls. But Anil's point is a bit more subtle than that:
Having paying customers would help focus the product team... If your product "may not be available at all times and may not work for all users" (as it says on the product's homepage), then either fix it or get yelled at by angry users. Either one is a good option. Don't hide behind a "well, shucks, we said it was beta, and it's free..." excuse. Being accountable to your users makes your product better...
Connecting people via VOIP or sending them an SMS, two of the key features of the new service, cost money. At Google volumes, they cost a lot of money. I want to have a service I can rely on -- which again means I need to invest in it...
Google's made the leap here before, by starting to charge for Google Apps. Even people who use the service for free were reassured by the fact there was a paid version.
Anil also has bad memories of great web products such as MSN Sidewalk which disappeared because they didn't make money. Me, I have bad memories of iname.com, which promised me free mail forwarding for life and then broke its promise.
As a rule, companies which give things away for free care much less about their free products and about their users than do companies who charge. This tax season, if you were given a choice between a free tax-preparation tool and one which cost say $20, which would you choose? Many people, quite sensibly, would choose the latter, just because it cost money.
Nothing makes me happier than services which are cheaper and better than the alternative; free-and-better, is, in theory, the best combination of all. But it still makes sense sometimes for people like Anil to want to pay a bit of money.
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