Bootleg

Back in the olden days, when Napster was still a thing, record industry execs spent a whole lot of time and money trying to prosecute people for digitally downloading music. They contended that people were stealing music because they didn’t want to pay for it. But, in retrospect, it’s clear that people were stealing music because that was the only way to get it online. As digital album sales data demonstrate, once they were able to buy music digitally, people flocked to that option in droves.1

During the pre-iTunes Store period, I remember talking with Sean Parker, who compared the online theft of music at the time to bathtub gin. During Prohibition, people couldn’t buy liquor, so they started making it at home. Once Prohibition ended, they could have continued to home-brew inexpensively. Instead, nearly everyone was more than willing to pay for the quality, convenience, and consistency of store-bought brand liquor.

I thought of that again recently, when I came across a table calculating overall internet usage data for last year. Back in 2011, BitTorrent – the primary method for illegally downloading movies – accounted for 23 percent of daily internet traffic in North America, and the movie industry was tearing its hair out with distress about piracy. By last year, BitTorrent traffic was under 5 percent, while (legal, paid) Netflix and Amazon Video have now grown to account for more than 40% of daily traffic.2

In other words: the bathtub gin effect strikes again.

  1. While digital sales never rose to match album levels, that’s primarily a result of unbundling albums into individual songs – people often only want one or two songs from a given album – and moving heavily to a streaming model – which tends to increase consumption without increasing revenue as incremental consumption is free. While both are great for consumers, and less great for record company profits, they’re business model choices made by the industry itself.) ↩︎
  2. I expect things will push even further in that direction once studios give up the practice of ‘windowing’ – delaying the digital release of films until after their full theatrical run. I’ve long contended that a lot of people would be willing to pay fairly high prices (as two movie tickets now closes in on $40, even before marked-up popcorn) to watch new movies at home on the same day that they’re theatrically released. ↩︎

Fascinatin’ ‘Rithm

One of the goals for Composite over time is to build automated mass-personalization for our clients, whether in prescribing workout programs, or pacing the acquisition of healthy eating habits.

I’ve started to sketch a few of those algorithms out, and the flow-charts I’ve amassed definitely look more than a bit like a prop from A Beautiful Mind.

So I was happy to see this xkcd comic today, which pretty much nails my present mood:

Lump this, I suppose, under “nobody knew fitness could be so complicated.”

May 2, 2017

Earn It

As I blogged about last week, progressive overload is one of the most fundamental principles in fitness: for your body to adapt positively, you need to gradually increase the stress induced by successive workouts. To get stronger, in other words, you need to lift more weight over time.

That’s where barbells come in: they allow you to add load, with more safety and efficiency, than nearly anything else. But just because barbell-based movements are where you probably want to end up doesn’t mean they’re the best place to start. Indeed, starting barbell movements before you have a requisite base of strength is a quick road to disaster. If you can’t generate the stability needed to do a barbell exercise perfectly, your body will compensate with less ideal movement patterns to accommodate the load, putting your joints and muscles at serious risk.

If you look around a commercial gym, you can see all kinds of terrible movements in action: unsafe joint mechanics, limited range of motion, and general wobbly disaster. In almost all of those cases, the root of the problem is the same: people ran before they could walk, adding load to a dysfunctional movement.

If you can’t squat perfectly without weight, adding weight is only going to make things worse.

That’s why, at Composite, we build all of our clients’ movements from the ground up. You need to show us 25 perfect, unbroken squats before we add any load at all. Then you need to build up to 25 perfect, unbroken goblet squats while holding half your bodyweight (60 pounds, say, for a 120 pound woman) before we graduate to the bar.

Similarly, if you can’t do 10 perfect, unbroken pushups – with core stability, and a range of motion from full plank lockout at the top to chest literally touching the floor at the bottom – you have no business bench pressing. We see big guys all the time who frequently bench press 225 pounds, yet who can’t pass the pushup test. And, funny enough, they’re also the same guys who show up with a history of persistent shoulder injury.

And while a lot of people spend time on accessory movements to hit their beach muscles – bicep curls, crunches until the cows come home – they’re equally ineffective for beginners. If you can’t do eight strict pull-ups, put down the E-Z Curl bar. And if you can’t farmer’s walk for 30 seconds while holding at least 1-2x your body weight, then start practicing that instead, as it’s all the core work you need.

Sure, the basics aren’t sexy. But they’re also the fastest, safest, and most effective route to results – and long-term health.

May 1, 2017

100

I remember a few years ago hearing Barack Obama explain the challenge of being President: because anything that had an easy solution would get solved by his departments and staff, by definition, every one of the problems and decisions that made it to his desk were all very difficult.

I thought of that again, a few days ago, when Trump observed, “this is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier." Nobody knew President-ing could be so complicated!

It’s been particularly interesting to see the swirling of healthcare policy over the past week, as I think it highlights the two major kinds of problems Trump has faced in his first hundred days, and I think is likely to face over the balance of this four years.

First, he’s enormously focused on solving the problem in front of him, with little regard for how that sets up the next steps. He’s all tactics and no strategy.

When the AHCA / Obamacare repeal faltered a month back, it was because the far-right Freedom Caucus took the bill down. Now, state waiver provisions appear to have pulled the Freedom Caucus back in, though with changes that likely alienated even more Republican moderates. But even if it does get through the House, it’s immediately dead in the water in the Senate. And if, by some miracle, it makes it all the way to Trump’s desk, the bill’s hugely unpopular with voters (garnering just 17% approval by recent polls), and likely to become even more so as tens of millions of Trump voters lose healthcare he promised to protect.

So, at a big picture level, the AHCA looks pretty bad. But the first step – getting the Freedom Caucus on board – still looks enough like a win in the short term to Trump that he was willing to put his weight behind it, longer-term consequences be damned.

Second, Trump also appears to falter when understanding the systems nature of government (and the world). When he’s pulled back on campaign promises (like labeling China a currency manipulator), it’s largely been because carrying them out would have second-order consequences (like losing China’s support in dealing with North Korea) that he previously didn’t grasp.

We’ve seen that this week in healthcare, too, with the White House’s unwillingness to commit to a policy on Obamacare cost-sharing reduction (“CSR”) subsidies.

Admittedly, the topic is slightly wonky, but bear with me: while Obamacare requires the government to subsidize health insurance premiums, those in the lowest income brackets still wouldn’t be able to afford the other costs of those plans: co-pays and deductibles when you actually use the insurance. So Obamacare also authorized CSR subsidies, which help cover those co-pays and deductibles. While the government is required to keep paying the health insurance premiums by law, a judge ruled a few years back that they could drop those CSR payments.

If you’re trying to cut government cost, and reduce the amount spent on Obamacare in particular, the $7B yearly cost of CSRs seem like a good place to start.

But, in fact, the downstream effects work completely to the contrary.

Because of the way Obamacare is drafted, if the government doesn’t pay the CSR subsidies, it’s not the low-income insured who get stuck with the bill. Instead, insurance companies are required to pick up the slack. Doing that is expensive. So to stay profitable, insurers would need to jack up premiums substantially overall – nearly 20% on average by estimate of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

With higher premiums, a bunch of middle class buyers (who don’t get subsidies) would conclude they couldn’t afford insurance, and would just drop out of the market.

But because the government is required to keep low-income premiums at a fixed cost, even if it doesn’t pay CSR subsidies, low-income buyers could stay in the market, still pay what they do now as mandated by Obamacare, and the bill for the increase in their premiums would go right back to the government. By Kaiser’s estimates, those increased premiums would cost the government $10B annually – $3B more than they saved by killing the CSRs.

In other words, while killing CSRs looks like a win in isolation (a $7B savings and a blow to Obamacare), it actually increases what the government will have to spend on Obamacare in the end, while also leaving a slew of middle-class people newly uninsured for no reason.

It’s a really dumb idea. But one that’s only clearly a dumb idea if you can understand that, in a complex system, the results of simple actions can be similarly complex.

With three and three-quarters years to go in this term, there’s still plenty of time for Trump to get better, or worse. We don’t know what Democrats will do (actually, we probably do: devolve into infighting and Bernie vs. moderates / economics-first vs. identity-politics-first civil war), what’s going to happen in the rest of the world, whether we’ll face terrorism or economic disaster at home, etc. But, politics aside, these two big troubles with Trump – his inability to think strategically and to understand complex systems – are enough to make me worry it’s not going to be pretty.

April 29, 2017

Wined Up

A lot of tech-world prognosticators have tagged virtual reality as ‘the next big thing.’ But just as many have pointed out that VR (the ability to interact with a virtual world) will pale in comparison to the sister technology of AR – augmented reality, or the ability to overlay virtual information over the real world.

With a pair of AR-enhanced glasses (or, eventually, contacts) on, you might be able to repair an engine with specs and labels for it digitally overlaid on the metal, or walk through a party with people’s LinkedIn profiles and recent social media updates floating above their heads, like a scene straight out of Super Sad True Love Story.

While that level of interaction is (perhaps fortunately) still a ways off, we’re now seeing some impressive early examples of AR on mobile phones. Consider the Google Translate app, which can translate real-world signs and documents on the fly through your phone’s camera:

Or the venerable SkyView app, which overlays constellations and star and planet names on the night sky:

Both are fun and (at least intermittently) useful, though neither hits as close to home as the Vivino app. The app has long allowed you to scan a wine bottle, to see ratings for it, solving the complete information vacuum represented by most wine stores. But the latest update expands that to an even more socially fraught situation: navigating a restaurant wine list.

Sure, you can fall back to wines you know, or make semi-educated guesses based on varietal and region. Or, with Vivino, you can just point your phone at the list, and find out about the specifics of every wine on it, based on the collective wisdom of the apps 20+ million users:

We may still be a ways off from living in an episode of Black Mirror, but I suspect we’ll be seeing a steady increase of these single-purpose, phone-based AR tools along the way. Cheers to that.

April 28, 2017