Now, the concept of on-demand streaming or download is a very interesting topic. I truly believe that our progress down this road is completely inevitable.

But, from a purely selfish standpoint, this is a great stride in the right step towards what I really want to happen. I want to be able to turn on my TV on Tuesday evening and watch all the Bif XII, SEC and a few other football games in condensed form from the Saturday before (ESPN probably wouldn’t allow me to do it before Tuesday in concern of cannibalizing the NFL broadcasts). I would watch college football all week. I would gladly pay a great deal of money for this service, something in the neighborhood of $200 a season.

Major league baseball has this service over the internet for like $30 a month. I understand that things might get a little trickier with college football because of the independent conferences, but surely it would not be too difficult to hammer out a deal.

I want on-demand condensed NCAA football. Please hurry.

OK, let’s set the NCAA rulebook aside and talk basic business ethics for a second.

Inside information about an organization is the property of the organization. If you can sell information to a third party, that information has value. Just because you are privy to that information does not mean that you can sell it. Selling inside information and keeping the money is the same as stealing. If the information was that valuable, the organization could sell it.

This is basic business ethics. Fran did not own that information. It was available to the entire coaching staff, most of the training department, most of the players, heck, even the equipment manager probably knew most of that stuff. If any of those people had sold information to third parties, a good coach would have canned them on the spot. You just can’t steal inside information from your employer.

The only reason Fran still has a job is because it is not fair to the team or the program to kick him out mid season. I can not see any other resolution to this mess than a pink slip at the end of the year.

1) Budweiser is kicking the crap out of everyone else in the beer business. Maybe its taste, maybe it marketing, maybe its cost control. I don’t know, but they are ruling the market.
2) Craft beer is becoming more mainstream, and impacting the market. The real issue is that, while the differences between Miller Light, Coors Light and Bud Light are definitely perceivable, the difference is shrinking due to the prevalence of Fat Tire, Shiner Bock and other non-American Pilsners catching on.
3) In the market for consumer-taste/fashion products, America is continuing to move away from the big brands. Coca-Cola, Jack Daniels and Levi’s just aren’t what they used to be. It’s also possible that localism is starting to become a bigger deal, with people preferring to consume products local to their State or city.

Now, I like beer, but I’m not an exclusive beer drinker. I would really place myself more as a whiskey/wine guy. However, making wine requires really good grapes, and making whiskey (legally) requires some insane licensing efforts with the government.

Making beer is all about the process. You start with ingredients that are very similar in quality to anyone who makes good beer. Making good beer simply requires good temperature control, timing and patience. It is definitely an art, but I am amazed at the amount of chemistry that is involved in the process. For every off flavor or problem that can besiege your beer, there is a chemical explanation of why it happened. Examples:

skunky flavor: light exposure turned some of your hops flavor into sulfer
Cardboard flavor: oxidation: the alcohol in your beer was breaking down due to exposure to oxygen, don’t swish it around so much next time.
Sulfur: could be that you left your beer in the fermenter too long, the yeast was eating itself

I am definitely learning a lot, which keeps me entertained.

But what is so interesting about the link was the polls that are displayed below the video. Here are the polls and the results:

Poll: Assuming prices remained the same, would you rather…
[1] Make $50,000 in a world where everyone makes $25,000; or
[2] Make $100,000 in a world where everyone makes $200,000.

62.14% chose option 1. Maybe people don’t get the “assuming prices remained the same” thing, but they are choosing to be worse off overall just to be better off in relation to their peers.

The second poll asks: Would you give up the last 5 years of life for $5,000,000 now?

62.15% said no.

Again, this is curious to me. I personally believe that the point of living is not just to be alive, but to gather experiences and spread goodness and love (OK, I’m part hippe, I admit). $5MM right now will definitely open up more opportunities for experiences than the last 5 years of life wearing diapers and watching TV. I’m not even going to go into the whole time value of money thing.

Of course, the survey is extremely unscientific, probably skewed (based on the theme of the website’s book), and possibly fraudulent (I am only suspicious because the breakdown of the two questions are the same. Hrmmm.).

However, assuming that this is representative of at least some segment of the general population, the insight is fascinating. In general, middle class America is much better off than we were 10 years ago, but our lifestyle gains have not kept pace with our upper-middle class peers. The rich are getting richer. The not-rich are getting richer, but not near as fast as the rich. That provides a lot of angst in a world where people’s values are as reflected in this casual poll.

Similarly, the polls are somewhat related. Many studies out there report that wages, when inflation is considered, have fallen flat. One criticism of many of these studies is that they do not take into account the significant increases in healthcare benefits provided by employers. This increase in compensation is largely taken for granted in our society. While I do not doubt that the rich are getting richer faster than the not-rich, the idea that middle class is stuck in the mud is often repeated, but not really that convincing to me.

I’m just not on board with the majority in these polls.

I am totally enthused.

For those of you not familiar with the test, I would conservatively estimate I spent 350 hours studying for this thing (if you include the time I spent studying for the June 2006 exam, which I failed).

One more test next June, and hopefully I am done.

The bad news for me is that I have a penchant for changing hobbies annually. I like to try new things, but I don’t like owning things I don’t use anymore. I love ebay.

The advantages of using MR to promote Tyler’s book are obvious. His blog readers are the most likely demographic to purchase the book. MR has a lot of eyeballs, and promoting printed media is a reasonable strategy for monetizing those eyeballs. Also, the blog offers two avenues for compensation: if a blog reader follows a link on MR to Amazon to buy the book, Tyler receives both publisher royalties and Amazon commissions, maximizing his per-book profits. Finally, with Tyler being a University employed economist, and since blog-media is relatively new in form, I can’t shake the feeling that Tyler is hoping these promotions could potentially lead to some gooey economic data goodness waiting for analytical consumption and potential publication.