The Rogers News

Category: Commentary

  • I Finished Harry Potter 7

    By the encouragement of my girlfriend, which came in the form of, “if you’re not going to read them, I’ll read them to you,” I started listening to the first Harry Potter book. Soon, the listening-reading was consuming and conversation in the car took a backseat (pun intended) to what the next page held. Before long – only a few pages after Harry left the Dursley’s house for Hogwarts for the first time – I was thoroughly hooked. I was engrossed by a book series I had written off as childish and not worth my time.

    I’ve always prided myself as being relatively open and creative, but the simple fact that I was able to overlook the magic that millions of others found in the Harry Potter series gives me reason to question both of those assumptions. In Potter-head terms, I’m more of a Hermine than a Luna, and while each has their strengths, I’d rather be considered the later – open and willing to imagine.

    The Harry Potter books became exceptionally better around book four, at which point they went from being an amusing series of books targeted for children to something with a message that carried some weight. The seventh book, which I finished less than two hours ago, brought the series to a resolute finish. It played out without being too tedious or predictable. It made me tear up more than once, and maintained the message found throughout the books – that love is an unbelievable force.

    I’d recommend the books to anyone willing to clean off the cobwebs (if necessary) and indulge their imagination in the world of magic.

  • Michigan #6 in Preseason Ranks

    I wish I had something more to say about the pre-season rankings below other than that I miss going to fall games in the Big House. I used to live a few blocks away from the stadium in Ann Arbor and the few of us who woke up early enough would sell parking spots on our lawn for $20. Most games we could park $400 worth of cars, money we either split and pocketed or put in the house fund to buy stuff (E.g. – a large screen TV.)

    1. USC
    2. Ohio State
    3. Texas
    4. Florida
    5. Oklahoma
    6. Michigan
    7. Florida State
    8. Miami
    9. LSU
    10. Tennessee

  • Article: Living in Shanghai (NYT)

    The NYT has an interesting article about living in Shanghai, and how it compares with living in New York City. I’m traveling there next week, and am excited to see the difference between one of the most modern cities in China and the others that I have visited.

  • Giffen Goods Study in China

    Giffen goods are “goods for which a lower price decreases the quantity demanded. This occurs when a negative income effect (the good is inferior) exceeds the substitution effect.”

    Greg Mankiw, who authored the textbook I used for my introductory microeconomics class while at the University of Michigan, asks the following question:

    Do giffen goods exist?

    He links to a study of two provinces in China.

    We conducted a field experiment in which for five months, randomly selected households were given vouchers that subsidized their purchases of their primary dietary staple. Building on the insights of our earlier analysis, we studied two provinces of China: Hunan in the south, where rice is the staple good, and Gansu in the north, where wheat is the staple. Using consumption surveys gathered before, during and after the subsidy was imposed, we find strong evidence that poor households in Hunan exhibit Giffen behavior with respect to rice. That is, lowering the price of rice via the experimental subsidy caused households to reduce their demand for rice, and removing the subsidy had the opposite effect. This finding is robust to a range of alternative specifications and methods of parsing the data. In Gansu, the evidence is somewhat weaker, and relies to a greater extent on segregating households that are poor from those that are too poor or not poor enough. We attribute the relative weakness of the case for Giffen behavior in Gansu to the partial failure of two of the basic conditions under which Giffen behavior is expected; namely that the staple good have limited substitution possibilities, and that households are not so poor that they consume only staple foods. Focusing our analysis on those whom the theory identifies as most likely to exhibit Giffen behavior, we find stronger evidence of its existence….

    To the best of our knowledge, this is the first rigorous empirical evidence of Giffen behavior. It is ironic that despite a long search, in sometimes unusual settings, we found examples in the most widely consumed foods for the most populous nation in the history of humanity.

  • Future Creep

    There is a NYT blog post titled, “I Love It, It’s Perfect, Now It Changes” that has received over one thousand comments about great products that people love, but have been discontinued due to “feature creep.”

    Feature creep is a “phenomenon generated by market forces, media hype and twitchy retailers [that] creates a cycle in which products are constantly improved even if they don’t need to be.”

    After reading about 100 of the comments, it seems that what people really miss is simplicity, dependability, and familiarity. A lot of the commentators don’t like additional features, whether the feature actually adds value or is purely extraneous.

    I have felt this way at times. For example, camera phones. Until the phones came with a camera that offered one megapixal capabilities, I saw no use for them. The pictures looked grainy, and although they were a novelty that surely sold more phones, they were more of an annoyance than anything.

    This all reminds me of a book I bought, but have yet to read, titled, “The Paradox of Choice.” I saw the author speak and was intrigued by the concept that having more choices often makes out lives more difficult. Instead of choosing between three pairs of jeans, we have hundreds to choose from. One of the pairs will fit perfectly, but at what cost?

  • Michigan Wine

    “Michigan’s Wine Country Grows Where the Cherry Is King” – a NYT article about what great wine Michigan has to offer. The focus is on Grand Traverse and Leelanau counties in the northwestern part of lower Michigan. (By the tip of the pinkie finger is you look at the palm of your right had.)

    I’m not a big fan of the cherry wines, which are very sweet. But both the white and red wines I tried at the Leland Wine Festival in early June were delicious.

    It’s always fun to see your home area highlighted for good products.

  • Anti-DRM T-Shirts

    I would classify myself as an anti-DRM person. I like my MP3s to work when and where I want them to. And I want to play them as many times as I want to on as many machines as I want.

    That’s greedy, but it’s also the mainstream thought process when it comes to digital music, which has proved very difficult to protect (from the label’s perspective). And very easy to obtain from the “listener’s” perspective.

    However, I also fall into a group of people who don’t mind that Apple has a vice grip on my media, players, computer, etc. etc. I’m OK with only being able to play my music on iTunes and my iPod because I really like the iPod. But, as you may have heard (because Steve Jobs made it abundantly clear) that Apple is not the one behind the iTunes DRM, the labels are.

    I get why. They want to protect music. But it doesn’t work. And because it doesn’t work, and there isn’t a clear alternative other than completely abandoning DRM, which is a scary proposition, they’re clinging to it for the moment. People want expect music (and movies to a lesser degree) for free, now. But that’s hardly fair to the people putting in time and effort to make what we love to listen to and watch.

    So, what is the answer? Maybe make some t-shirts like these.