Vladimir Cole / Vlad Cole / VC

Signed up for a 14-day free trial of Zune Pass but won’t renew. Here’s why:

• Tried to buy an album (730 MS Points) — half of the 10 songs downloaded and the rest refused to download. I had to spend half an hour on the phone to resolve the issue. The album still isn’t purchasable and they advised me to avoid trying again, calling the album “bugged.” To their credit, phone support was top notch and also surprisingly nice. But ecommerce needs to work Amazon flawlessly for me to want to continue to engage in it. Also, it’s annoying to use MS Points instead of standard dollars. I know why they’re used (having worked at Microsoft), but I feel that Microsoft has way underinvested in improving the MS Points architecture, infrastructure, reliability and consumer-facing features. It’s old and increasingly a weak point for products that use it.  

• The catalog is infested with DRM’ed music. I should be able to change a preference so that no DRM content is ever shown to me. I won’t buy it and don’t want to be shown it. Of the “millions” of songs in the catalog, it felt like half were DRM.

• The Zune recommendation engine is broken. Pandora does it well. Zune doesn’t. I just clicked on Zune’s “songs for you” and they recommended Justin Timberlake. Are you frigging kidding me? I’ve played 2,673 songs through on Zune at this point and you push JT on me? Are you trying to make me retch on my keyboard? The software should have a *very* good idea of my tastes. Pandora nails this. If only Pandora’s Music Genome technology were part of Zune! So, in order to find good new music, I had to run Pandora for the recommendations, then I had to punch in Pandora’s recommendations to see if Zune had the music (it often didn’t, or when it did, it was often crippled with DRM).

• Unavailable content. I couldn’t find ANY content from (just to name a few) Man Plus, Truckasaurus. I also couldn’t find some very important content from Ratatat. Of Ratatat’s available content, much was available only through a whole album purchase. This is not a great consumer experience, but I realize it’s a business and licensing issue. The music industry makes it far easier for me to pirate. Here I am, a paying consumer, looking to buy music that I like and it’s EASIER for me to find it outside of a legit content service like Zune.

• Favorites list is crippled. This one I blame the Zune team for. In my first couple of days with the Zune pass, I’m blithely listening to music and tagging certain content as “favorite” thinking I’ll be able to go back to these favorites at any time (as I might a “favorite” within a browser). I even imagined that I’d be able to assemble a playlist out of my favorites. Instead, the “favorites” is just 8 songs long. This was probably done so that server-side storage per account was kept reasonably low (a cost savings) and maybe even because licensing restrictions made long favorites lists problematic. But this is broken. Avid music listeners certainly have more than 8 favorite songs — we might have dozens or hundreds, depending on the mood that we’re in.

I could go on, but these are the most egregious issues that prevented me from renewing my Zunepass subscription. It’s too bad. I want to see something like this succeed.

I am still on some press lists … and am usually pretty well behaved about obeying embargos, but this one I’m going to break because (a) it’s from my former employer and (b) it’s awesome news and I want to be the first to out it!

The Economist to Launch London Theme Park

Media brand branches into experiential space

London, UK–  As part of a strategy designed to broaden the revenue base, leverage content over new platforms and promote The Economist brand to a young and dynamic audience, The Economist Group is delighted to announce the development of a public-entertainment facility that combines the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics.

After six months of negotiations with the British government, The Economist Group can confirm that Econoland will be built on a former industrial estate in East London, close to the beating heart of the City and thus to a large potential market of financial-sector employees.

Thanks to issues relating to its previous use, the site has been acquired at an advantageous price. Most of the toxic wastes have been cleared and levels of carcinogens appear to have returned to normal. High unemployment in the area will only increase the facility’s attractions, as former City workers seek to recapture some of the excitement they enjoyed in their professional life. Heavy investment in security and a landscaped moat and electric fence will neutralise any potential threat from the growing anarchist presence.

Among the thrilling experiences Econoland will offer are:

The currency high-roller: Float like a butterfly with the euro and drop like a stone with the pound!

Chamber of horrors: Tremble at the wailing of distressed debt!

Fiscal fantasyland: Watch the economy shrivel before your very eyes as you struggle to stop growth falling!

Bankrupt Britain: Pit your wits against the government as you try to sink sterling and bring the country to its knees!

The severe contest: Try your strength against a bear market!

Econoland will appeal to the kid in everyone, although children themselves will not be admitted. The park will open on April 1st.

More information, including exclusive images of the park, are available at Economist.com by clicking here.

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Loving this:

“According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”

Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.”

I love it and am hopeful that this “movement” can gain steam (more often than not, newspapers invent trends where there are none, but I think this one taps deep into the zeitgeist).

Blog unclutterer pokes fun at a different “unitasker” (device that just does just one thing) every Wednesday. They are poking fun at the objects, but they’re far too kind, writing, “It’s totally fine if you choose to own a Unitasker. There aren’t any Unclutterer Police coming to take it away from you or judge you over it. We’re just talking about stuff, things, objects — not people or their choices.”

I don’t think it’s fine. Sure, every one of us is entitled to live life as wastefully as we like. We can squander our income on ephemera, clutter our home, and make ourselves miserable. But it’s everyone else’s right to point, and if they like, judge.

And so I think it *is* worth making fun of the people who own or buy unitask objects. They’re cluttering by owning these objects, and they’re hurting their financial picture. Their unchecked consumerism is also hurting the environment, and that hurts all of us.

A point I make over and over here is that every single object I own needs to be thought of in terms of “total cost of ownership” or TCO. Putting aside the total cost to the environment to design, manufacture, distribute, and get the object into your home, TCO is the cost to actually own the object. 

1. Cost to acquire the thing in the first place (including the opportunity cost of how that money could have been put to better use — say, by paying down high-interest debt)
2. Cost to maintain (running it through the dishwasher, dusting it, oiling it, repairing it, replacing it, whatever)
3. Cost to store the thing
4. Cost to dispose of it (eventually)

It’s this third item that people rarely think about. Take a pickle picker-upper. How many items like it clutter a drawer? How many drawers do you have in your kitchen now? How many would you need with a decluttered lifestyle? (Yes, storage for tiny objects is a step function, but acquisition of crap like this is a lifestyle choice — you never own just one “unitasker.”) Even the smallest object requires storage space, and every square inch of storage space can be costed out like so:

1. cost for the storage (cabinetry, fancy closet hardware, whatever)
2. cost for the property in which your storage sits

Whether you rent or own, you can determine a cost per square foot. If your monthly housing costs are $3000 for 1000 square feet, then that’s $3 per SF per month for the duration of your stay in that space. Is an object that takes up a square foot really worth $3 x 12 ($48) per year, just to store? If you didn’t own it (and all of the other junk that you’ve accumulated) would you be able to step down to 800 square feet for an annual savings of $7,200?

Do this calculation with every new potential acquisition and with all current objects. Is that CD collection worth not just what you paid for it and the cost to store it? Only 31 standard CDs fit within a square foot. A CD collection of 200 discs costs $232 per year to store at a monthly housing cost of $3,000. Is it worth it?

Pickle picker upper (and the folks who buy them) be damned.

PS: Need to retreive a pickle from a jar? Just use a friggin’ fork.

Apartment Therapy’s full of it. On their “re-nest” blog — which claims to cover “the intersection of the ‘green’ movement and the ‘home decor’ movement”  – author “Stephanie” shills a plug-in air freshener. This is unintentional parody.

How does buying a plug-in, plasticy air freshener device accomplish any green goal? Sure, shit stinks. But buying a product that was manufactured in a developing nation and shipped around the world is the very definition of consumerism run amok. Heaven forfend that Americans have to wait for the air to clear before the next one of us steps up to flush 1.6 to 5 gallons of previously fresh water along with pulped remains of trees that were felled just so that we could wipe our asses in comfort. We’re lucky to have indoor plumbing and fresh water, and some of us are buying $10 gewgaws made of plastic and perfume.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Apartment Therapy reader “SFGail” was more polite in her diss of the post, writing, “Ok, I’m going to go out a little on a limb here. I really wish, that as the environmental part of AT, re-nest would focus more on sustainable building/home design, and less on frou frou products like this that aren’t really part of the solution to the environmental problem we all face.”

Straighten up, AT. Your writers have been turned into marketers of the sort of junk that’s clogging landfills, polluting waters, and making a mess of the world.

Apartment Therapy, an endless source of inspiration for “stupid product” posts, is shilling a decorative magnifier and letter opener set. Awful, worthless product.

1. When was the last time you used a hand-held magnifying glass? Fishermen who tie their own flies and decorative seamstresses aside (they’ll use desk-mounted lenses anyway), most of us will opt for standard eyeglasses when we need assistance seeing things more clearly. The last time I used a magnifying glass was probably 25 years ago. I burned ants with it.
2. Letter openers. Seriously. A specialized knife just to rip paper? Seriously? You’re not ripping an entire phone book in half with your bare hands. You’re opening a friggin’ letter. It’s not that difficult. It’s certainly not worth cluttering your home and destroying the environment.

Try these remedies instead: unsubscribe from mailing lists that send you letters that need to be opened; opt for electronic versions of mail where possible; use a butter knife on the rare envelope that you want to save (decorative invites, for instance) … and last, but certainly not least, open your goddamned letters with your friggin’ fingers, the best, most useful tools you’ll ever own.

Stupid, stupid product. Is it really worth the environmental damage and a portion of your mortgage / rent to own this?

Finally, what kind of “Therapy” is Apartment Therapy proposing here? How does it help any of us declutter and make better use of our space to own a couple of decorative, largely worthless objects?

Apartment Therapy is shilling “candle plates” — little glass plates that sit underneath candles and vases. While they do indeed look good, products like this are pure clutter that add no utility. The manufacturing, packaging, distribution, storage and maintenance of these products is also costly and bad for the environment. It’s a product that creates net negative utility for the world.

But Apartment Therapy’s Matt believes that they do serve a purpose. He writes, “Any water I might have missed while filling the vase gathers where the vase and the coaster meet.”

Buying a new piece of consumer kruft just because you’re too lazy to take a towel to the bottom of a flower vase? That’s why our environment is in trouble.

Annie Leonard caught wind of a horrendously wasteful product: NXT shower gel and does a great job explaining why the packaging for this product is an environemental travesty. In short, every single bottle of the shower gel includes an LED light, 2 to 3 triple-A batteries and “a mini-computer” in the packaging. As Annie notes, “Batteries have such toxic components that many cities ban their disposal in the regular garbage and require them to be dropped at a household hazardous waste facility. We’re supposed to be designing toxics out of our production systems!”

Right on.

But I wish she had questioned the need for shower gel in general. As I wrote in a comment on the Story of Stuff blog: Is shower gel really even necessary? To make it, manufacturers take a compact product like soap, add water, and THEN ship it around the world. It makes no sense to ship water since it’s plentiful in a shower environment. Why is shower gel even a category that deserves consumer support? A good bar of soap does a fine job of lathering a loofah or a sponge. Shower gel itself is a wasteful product category that shouldn’t even exist.