From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V9 #84 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Saturday, April 1 2000 Volume 09 : Number 084 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: cdnow [Capuchin ] Re: FW: say it ain't so!!!!!!!!!!!! ["Brian Huddell" ] Re: Selling Out [Chris Gillis ] Re: Selling Out [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: robyn news [fartachu ] The Onion takes over Salon (NR) [steve ] Re: Virgin [Capuchin ] Re: FW: say it ain't so!!!!!!!!!!!! [Capuchin ] Re: Coca-Cola (was, like, a: Virgin) [MARKEEFE@aol.com] jeme's gone red! all over the world ["CORNHOLE ARMAGEDDON" Subject: Re: cdnow On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, dmw wrote: > On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Capuchin wrote: > > Well, I only rebutted it because it was dumb. Just as I poorly explained to Eb, Doug. I'm not saying YOU are dumb. It's just a dumb idea that all the market share is being eaten by chain stores' virtual outlets. > well, let me clarify a little bit -- barnes and noble and tower, > specifically, ARE hurting cdnow. they already have all of the pie -- the > net sales are a tiny fraction of their current market share, no threat > whatsoever. their own web storefronts are no threat to their retail > empires. on the other hand, cdnow, and amazon, and all the other poor > little toeholders, are so precarious that they can afford to lose hardly > any market share at all. they are, currently, only surviving because of > massive injections of cash from investors who somehow think this will all > make money someday. And Tower and Virgin and Barnes & Noble entering the fray only lead investors to believe that the market WILL grow. Investors see this and think "Gee! If these bigshots are moving into what has been, until now, a profitless venture, surely the they see that a turning point is coming!" This means money floods into companies like Amazon and CDNow in the hopes that the dividents will be their when the elusive turning point comes. The loss of market share means nothing because the profits didn't exist in the first place. It's speculation on some future time when even a three percent market share of online book sales would be a fortune. > there is an encroaching phenomenon, though, of people who go to a real > store, ask questions, fondle the merchandise, etc. -- then go home and > order it online, because in many cases it *is* cheaper. I'll do this if I can order from the manufacturer online and there is no manufacturer-direct or manufacturer-to-retailer outlet in town. I'm very curious to see how this pans out. It's tough to swallow the idea that all hard goods commerce will become mail order. I mean, it STARTED as mail order and mall convenience killed the price advantage of mail order. I wonder how overnight delivery compares to store distribution in terms of energy consumption per units sold. Any ideas? Is it ecologically unsound to use airshipping over trucks? Which fuel is more efficient? Which more polluting? (these last two could possibly be the same... they are not exclusive) Interesting. > it's *only* cheaper because 'net shopping has so many disadvantages > -- you can't flip through the book, and while you can listen to > audio samples, no one's got a good analogue (or hell, a bad > analogue) for flipping through a rack of records. That's not strictly true, Doug. They're not cheaper BECAUSE of the disadvantages. Some are cheaper because they don't have to turn a profit (their retail mark-up is based on some ridiculous formula that somehow isn't tied to paying their workers or staying open). Some are cheaper simply because of the extra volume afforded to a shop with a global customer base. I sincerely believe that the overhead isn't much different. Especially if you're doing custom programming and not drop-shipping from the manufacturer. In fact, I'd say the overhead is higher. The Tower website would have to be big enough to handle all of the sales of all of the stores (so that any given customer could EITHER go to the local store OR go to their website). But if the site only had the sales of a single store, it'd fold. Yet each individual store is profitable. And yet again, if the site could only handle as many sales as a typical physical location handles in a day (like, say, the size of the computer here at my right knee), they'd be flooded to death and lose all reliability if someone put a link to their page in a public place without warning. Choosing the proper scale is probably key in designing a web commerce implementation. > the 'net shops have three things going for 'em: 1) more stuff listed > than any one store would ever carry 2) open all night/open from your > desk at work 3) price competitive, or cheaper, in most cases, than > shopping locally (which is more-or-less possible because all the > venture capitalists mean there's no need to operate in the black.) > (oh, and 4 - many people don't live somewhere where there is a > convenient physical retail outlet) I'd say two and four are really the same one: They're global. And three is obviously artificial. The large retailers aren't profiting. > my worry is that these price-gouging strategies will drive a lot of > independent retailers outs of business, essentially consolidating into a > set of chain retailers both physical and online, with fewer other options > available to the consumer than currently exist. This is going on right now. This is the number one reason to follow a conscientious, morally sound consumer guideline. Some day you could wake up with no choices. Another thing I'm fond of saying, writing, and typing: The great problem with your traditional 1790 Adam Smith capitalism: eventually one guy ends up with all the money. And there's no reset button. We could let the market sort itself out, but how do you sort it out after you've made the mistake of giving one guy all the money? These days, I'd be terrified to see the ratio of people who'd take up arms for profit at the expense of their freedom and those who'd take up arms to gain freedom at the expense of their standard of living. What I'm really saing is, I'll bet that rich bastard could build quite an army and hold off revolution. > ...i agree with many of your points (repeat after me: no online > retailer has ever yet posted a single profitable quarter) Now, is this strictly true? I mean, what about AccessMicro or MicroStandardUSA? I think all of those guys profit. And these office product companies that are discontinuing their paper catalogs and were catalog-only businesses forever and ever? Certainly some online only retailers are making money. Would computer and office product companies not be considered retail because they sell to businesses? That's not sensible to me. They're still selling at full price... and anyone can buy from most of them. > but i think what will make online retail work in the very long run > is social, not technological or economic change -- going to the mall > is a social activity. clicking a mouse in your living room isn't, > for my generation. but that's changing. when you can "go" to amazon > (or whatever its successor is) with a bunch of buddies, and when > that's the societal norm, i think online shopping will begin to > dominate for things that you don't have to try on and that don't > spoil. OH SHIT! I hear this argument ALL THE TIME, but it's so much bullshit. The dominant social activity of suburbia is SHOPPING. Should our social activities really revolve around spending money? Or, at least, if we're going to spend money when we go out with our friends, shouldn't it be for services like food and dance clubs and bike rentals? If we can take the social aspect out of shopping altogether, we'd have the exact same effect on online retailers without the horrifying prospect of using web browsers with friends and considering that social time. It won't matter that websites aren't social if shopping's not social. I'm repulsed by the idea of shopping as a social event. Shopping is what you do when you NEED stuff. Socializing is what you do when you don't need anything. > for one thing, retail stores have *massively* more overhead --the cost of > bandwidth doesn't begin to compare with physical plant costs, High availability colocate space costs as much as any retail establishment I've ever seen. My company offers these services and they do not come cheap. I mean, unless you're renting three or four floors in a downtown building for your retail showroom. > the personnel structure is much more streamlined, Your employees are higher skilled and make, on average, twice or three times the money. > non-employee shoplifting is a non-issue, and on and on. But employee sabotage becomes a MUCH bigger issue. > and as things go more to bits, the stock/shipping problems are going > to go away. As more things go to bits, more people will be adept at handling bits and once you're adept, you see the folly of selling them and the ease at which they can be freely transfered. As more things go to bits, fewer things will be readily sellable. And that means demand for shipping will go down. And that means the price will go up because volume is the only thing that keeps those daily Fedex and DHL and UPS jets in the air. I wish I could sleep. I'm sure you all do, too. J. - -- ______________________________________________ J A Brelin Capuchin ______________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 00:57:13 -0600 From: "Brian Huddell" Subject: Re: FW: say it ain't so!!!!!!!!!!!! I enjoyed Jeme's discussion of retail on the net (not the first time I've enjoyed one of Jeme's discussions). What seems to be missing from the equation is *inevitability*. I mean, isn't it absolutely unthinkable that we will stop buying our CDs on the web? Seriously, I'm sure as hell not going to start walking into those horrible stores again just because CDNOW or whoever tacks on their higher overhead to my purchase price. Right now it's cool that I don't have to pay more for the comfy-chair factor, the not-coming-face-to-face-with-Brittany-Spears-fans factor, but I will. So will other people who value convenience and misanthropy over saving money. Many of the cornerstones of our economy are preposterous, bloated, doomed to fail, but they manage to succeed by virtue of the greed and/or laziness of consumers. The combustion engine comes to mind. Beef comes to mind. Right now Amazon et al are floating on a bubble that obviously has to burst eventually. But Jeme, do you really think net-based retail will ultimately fail and we will all gradually begin to trickle back into the stores? I suspect you don't, and I'd be interested to know what your predictions might be. I could be wrong but I feel sure that in my lifetime most of my major purchases, beef for my carnivorous wife and kid, combustion engines and guitar picks, will be made from my computer. So assuming the days of the Amazon/CDNOW model are numbered, what exactly will replace it? And how does that affect Robyn Hitchcock? cheers, brian ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 08:53:00 -0800 From: Glen Uber Subject: Re: Selling Out On 01.04.00 20:03, Bret wrote: > I thought it was funny, as I just registered isoldout.com i'm not sure what > I am going to do with it, but i had to have it.... Anyone have any ideas? What about spoofing all the artists we've already mentioned here and then inviting visitors to register some of their own. > NP: Johnny Quest Thinks We're Sellouts - Less Than Jake > (ok, not really, but I thought about digging out the cd) NP: The Who Sell Out ;-) - -- Cheers! - -g- "I value kindness to human beings and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer." --Brendan Behan +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Glen Uber uberg@sonic.net http://www.sonic.net/~uberg ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 08:57:18 -0800 From: Chris Gillis Subject: Re: Selling Out > > I thought it was funny, as I just registered isoldout.com i'm not sure what > > I am going to do with it, but i had to have it.... Anyone have any ideas? > How about selling it?? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 09:20:55 -0800 (PST) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: Selling Out overbury@cn.ca wrote: > Not nearly to the same degree. The question, folks, was: "has > anybody else ever sold out so completely?" and I guess I should > qualify that by saying "anybody with that much early potential". > > Remember Sting burst on the scene as radio-friendly pop, and I can't > think of anything he's done that is as offensive as "Do Ya Think I'm > Sexy?". > > Phil Collins? Pretty close, except that he sold out the band's > potential more than his own. Still, yeah, Phil Collins. Elton John? maybe not as quickly, but that lion king crap is far more thoroughly corrupt than "Do ya think i'm sexy?" at least "DYTIS" is funny when RevCo do it. >> I would say the Stones definitely sold out; but not as hard as >> Sting. > Yes, they've sold out at times (EG: "Miss You"). I still think Rod > wins, because he sold out sooner and harder, and never looked back. and when did the stones being selling out? when they added ex-Rod Stewart guitarist Ron Wood. (about the same time Rod gave in completely, actually). >> David Bowie -- a god of mine, so I tread carefully here -- is >> selling out in a very matter-of-fact above-board sense, which is >> something I really can't get all that angry at him for, as who knows >> with Bowie what, exactly, is what. > A few months back I heard Bowie in an interview that music has > changed: it's consumable, disposable product now more than before. > That was probably just as true before, say, Sgt. Pepper. He still > does pretty much want he wants, doesn't he? Would anybody be > surprised if he gets weird next time around? exactly. he did sell out in the mid-80's, but since then, for better or worse, he's pretty much followed his muse. i think there's be big difference between selling out and cashing in. ===== "Life is just a series of dogs." -- George Carlin __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 13:41:23 -0500 From: fartachu Subject: Re: robyn news fegs, did some follow-up work on the yo la tengo thing. the matador records news page confirms that robyn will be playing with the band on the listed dates. interestingly, some of yo la tengo's other english dates will also be collaborative performances -- the other guests being neil innes and sonic boom. the venues are the gardner arts center (brighton, may 6), royal festival hall (london, may 8) and the mitchell theatre (glasgow, may 13). woj ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 13:19:31 -0600 From: steve Subject: The Onion takes over Salon (NR) http://www.salon.com/special/aprilone/2000/grunts/index.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 12:50:01 -0800 (PST) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: Virgin On Fri, 31 Mar 2000 HSatterfld@aol.com wrote: > On a slightly unrelated topic, where can I buy Virgin Cola? Why? > Never before have I had to sit through so many commercials for a product > that I have never seen in any store. Is it simply not an east coast thing? > Or will I find it only if I hang out at the Virgin Megastore, which I never > do. And commercials really do make you go out and buy things? I thought American society was beyond that. Dear lord. You know what? You don't have to go buy Virgin Cola. I can tell you all about it and I've never even seen a commercial or a can. It tastes like cola. It's not significantly different except that it maybe seems a little sweeter on the first taste and maybe a touch more or less carbonated. It doesn't have any spice or kick. It will not quench your thirst. It's sugar water and selling it is really just selling an image. I was talking to one of my old coworkers at the ad agency. He's now the creative director for the CocaCola account. This is a very big deal in his world. He said he was really excited to be working on that account because they have heaps of budget to throw around (so you can do fun stuff, presumably), it's the most recognizable brand in the world (so you don't have to worry about ruining your image), and the product itself is just sugarwater (so actually discussing the product in the ads is pointless and even discouraged). These are the things an ad writer loves. Turns out, it's hell. He says the marketting people at Coke are terrified to try anything that isn't really boring and safe because [GET THIS!] they don't know why people buy their product nor how long it could possibly last. They know that all they're selling is an idea of refreshment but that the product does nothing at all to deliver. They know they have a certain segment of the population hooked because of the caffeine/sugar one-two punch, but these days caffeine is a common ingredient in anything (caffeinated water, breath mints, and chocolates, not to mention the proliferation of supercoffees) that addiction is no longer a reliable selling point. CocaCola itself is terribly afraid that they could lose everything at any moment. And the idea is to not let anyone know. So Virgin has a cola... not because a cola is something they know how to make better than anyone else... not because they think the world needs another cola. Virgin has a cola because they already have cool and name recognition and sugar water is an easy thing label with your logo. And if you have a big retail chain and a sex word in your name, you can sell any old crap. Ranting more, J. - -- ______________________________________________ J A Brelin Capuchin ______________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 13:32:24 -0800 (PST) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: FW: say it ain't so!!!!!!!!!!!! On Sat, 1 Apr 2000, Brian Huddell wrote: > I enjoyed Jeme's discussion of retail on the net (not the first time > I've enjoyed one of Jeme's discussions). I'm glad soemone other than Viv read it all the way through! Thanks. > What seems to be missing from the equation is *inevitability*. I agree to some extent. I believe that shopping online will always be a possibility. And I buy all of my computer hardware online because it is MUCH cheaper than local independent stores and the distributors are mostly small, single-purpose companies. So, yes, you're right. Inevitably most items will be purchasable remotely without a physical catalog. > I mean, isn't it absolutely unthinkable that we will stop buying our > CDs on the web? Seriously, I'm sure as hell not going to start > walking into those horrible stores again just because CDNOW or > whoever tacks on their higher overhead to my purchase price. Well, this is a flawed position. You will stop buying CDs period, Brian. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that. In twenty years, a CD will have vinyl status... but without the benefit of being a fundamentally different medium (analog v. digital) because the new thing will also be digital. Books and CDs are the things people talk about buying online most often... which is odd to me for two reasons: Both are really just information media and the web is an information medium. In the future, I am absolutely certain that information media will be transmitted as bits (as opposed to transmitted as bits permanently etched in atoms). Books and CDs are for collectors. People who get books and CDs strictly for the information they contain will use something more reusable, versatile and compact. They are two of the items that you would most like to check out in detail before purchasing. They're inspectable for quality. Computer hardware, for example, isn't inspectable. You go to a computer store and you can read the boxes and the specifications, but very few people can look at a circuit board and see if it'll suit their needs. In fact, I can't think of anything outside of electronics and items with which a person is extremely familiar (like a Robyn album for us, or an Evergreen Chino shirt for me) that is suited for purchase on the net. Nearly everything else benefits greatly from individual inspection. Interestingly, the only component of my new workstation that I'm NOT buying from a web retailer is the case. I'm buying that locally because I have to inspect it to make sure it's ergonomically sound and will suit my components. I did not plan this ahead, it's just the way it made sense at the time. (Incidentally, I would never buy a keyboard from a virtual store, either, unless I were intimately familiar with the brand and model. I buy all of my keyboards at the Goodwill.) > Right now it's cool that I don't have to pay more for the > comfy-chair factor, the > not-coming-face-to-face-with-Brittany-Spears-fans factor, but I > will. So will other people who value convenience and misanthropy > over saving money. This is true. But you might go out to a physical store to inspect goods and then order them from home. But this will change in your music buying when it becomes trivial for you to move the music around without the little bits of plastic. > Many of the cornerstones of our economy are preposterous, bloated, > doomed to fail, but they manage to succeed by virtue of the greed > and/or laziness of consumers. This is true. But they are allowed to be bloated because they are profitable. > The combustion engine comes to mind. Beef comes to mind. But really, there, you're talking about things that weren't proposterous before they became cornerstones. They only became preposterous when they hit the big time and stayed there. > Right now Amazon et al are floating on a bubble that obviously has > to burst eventually. But Jeme, do you really think net-based retail > will ultimately fail and we will all gradually begin to trickle back > into the stores? I don't know. But I have some ideas. > I suspect you don't, and I'd be interested to know what your > predictions might be. I could be wrong but I feel sure that in my > lifetime most of my major purchases, beef for my carnivorous wife > and kid, combustion engines and guitar picks, will be made from my > computer. So assuming the days of the Amazon/CDNOW model are > numbered, what exactly will replace it? And how does that affect > Robyn Hitchcock? I know I come off arrogant, but I don't claim to know. And what WILL happen is totally up in the air. I can tell you, however, what should happen and what I'd like to see happen. I think they're reasonable things. The Amazon model cannot fly because you can't be everyone's everything. In fact, you can't be everyone's one thing. The bad thing that really could happen is Amazon drives most every other book retailer out of business. Once we're all stuck buying from Amazon, Amazon might actually become profitable... but only because they have every consumer in free world and the manufacturers will have to kiss their ass. This represents a whole set of other issues that are pointless to enumerate and conjecture. It'd be a guess based on a guess. What I see is that Amazon is trying to be the world's bookstore. They want to sell all books to all people. The problem here is that the scale doesn't work on the web. The overhead of claiming to carry every book ever printed and trying to deal with tens of millions of pages a day is just too much. People who DO make money from their web sales are people with more modest goals. If I, say, set up a commerce server on my box (which I could do in about forty minutes) and built a way to process credit cards and built a little shopping cart and a customer profile database so they could do Amazon's stupidly patented "one click" stuff and I sold widgets at twelve dollars apiece over my cost of goods, I would only have to sell four or five widgets per month to be profitable. My connection costs me forty dollars, the hardware was found in the trash (literally), and I spend about an hour a month keeping the system running (and since I worked out some bugs two months or so ago, I haven't had a second of unscheduled maintenance. My server uptime is 71 days. Thats how long it's been since a reboot). I could sustain that kind of sales. But the important thing is that without changing a thing, I could handle five or six thousand TIMES that many hits. It isn't until you get really ambitious that you start to see the profits drop off. This makes me think (hope, too) that the future of web retailing is small specialty shops that do a damned good job at what they do. Because it's either that or a corporate behemoth running at massive losses until there's just no competition anymore. Incidental thought on the topic #12277: I think providing extraneous content beside your sales actually hurts your cause. It costs you money to gather and present and maintain that information. But the idea is that people will come for your content and stay for your sales. But web retailers already benefit greatly from consumers that are smart enough to do their research and THEN make their purchase. And they have to realize that just because a user is reading one page on their site, they are not necessarily going to purchase an item there... it might not have ever even crossed the reader's mind. What they really need to realize is that all of their competition is exactly one bookmark away. You hunt down the best prices for the items you think you want and then you research your best option and then click back to the store that had the best price on the best item. It's trivial. Just because I read a book review on Amazon or looked up the ISBN number doesn't mean I'm going to buy from Amazon. I'm still going to get it from Powell's. Web retailers are pushing users to be dilligent research in the real world before they buy... that's the only way to get them confident in buying unseen goods. But they're trying to work on the opposite principle when attracting customers. That is all. J. - -- ______________________________________________ J A Brelin Capuchin ______________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 16:46:49 EST From: MARKEEFE@aol.com Subject: Re: Coca-Cola (was, like, a: Virgin) In a message dated 4/1/00 12:52:21 PM Pacific Standard Time, capuchin@speakeasy.org writes: << Turns out, it's hell. He says the marketting people at Coke are terrified to try anything that isn't really boring and safe because [GET THIS!] they don't know why people buy their product nor how long it could possibly last. They know that all they're selling is an idea of refreshment but that the product does nothing at all to deliver. They know they have a certain segment of the population hooked because of the caffeine/sugar one-two punch, but these days caffeine is a common ingredient in anything (caffeinated water, breath mints, and chocolates, not to mention the proliferation of supercoffees) that addiction is no longer a reliable selling point. >> I find Coca-Cola (the image and the taste) very comforting, in that it's been around for a long time and makes me think of getting a can of Coke after a little league game and how the aluminum pull-off tabs (up through the 70's) would litter the parking lot outside the convenience store. And I think Coke goes great with stuff like pizza and popcorn and cheeseburgers (oh, and Cheetos! . . . but I don't eat those anymore). And, although it actually provides quite the opposite of a "refreshing" experience as far as the body as concerned (in that it basically dehydrates you), there's something about drinking Coca-Cola that I find refreshing. Probably the caffeine and sugar. Anyway, if polar bears like the stuff, then it's good enough for me. So, yeah, Jeme, tell your advertisin' buddy to put that in his hat and smoke it. Or maybe suggest a commercial where someone's eating a cheeseburger with a side of cheetos, and some guy could come into the picture from out of nowhere (like they do in commercials, but never in real life when you might actually want someone in a suit to bring you a couple of Nuprins, damnit!) and suggest to the person getting ready to dine on these fine foods that stuff like juice and water would be really boring and uncool accompaniments, but that a nice, tall, cool and "refreshing" Coca-Cola would hit the spot :-) - ------Michael K. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 13:46:32 PST From: "CORNHOLE ARMAGEDDON" Subject: jeme's gone red! all over the world wow! incredible posts, ka-pooch! i especially dug the bit about burning up the patent. i'm almost afraid to add anything, because it (i'm being quite serious) will surely pale in comparison. first, it occurs to me that there was something pretty cool that happened at the oscars, but which has not yet been mentioned. though i haven't watched them since...um, the year Braveheart won, and Babe did not, probably; and i haven't seen it; i was rather tickled that The Matrix took The Phantom Menace out to the fucking woodshed in the technical categories. by the way, what's this about American Beauty's cinematographer saying that the reason he wanted to shoot the movie is because he lusts after 15-year-old girls? anyone got the actual quote handy? and anyone who saw it think he was probably joking? ever the capitalist stooge, eh, terry? talk about selling out young! advertising, while it's not probably as pernicious as military spending, is nothing less than complete waste. it's obnoxious. it's offensive. and it's totally unnecessary (except, of course, in a society in which nothing has any value whatsoever other than how much it can be sold for.) advertising as a model for funding the dissemination of "content" over *public* airwaves makes about as much sense as for-profit health care, for example. which is to say that it makes no sense. please graduate soon, terry. that school is poisoning your very soul! i've heard that jet airplane travel is [some outrageous number which i can't remember -- coupla hundreds, i think] times more polluting per person-mile than automobile travel. driving in a car is not the same as shipping "content" via truck, of course. but there you go. this is not how adam smith envisioned "market forces" playing themselves out. he believed that perfect liberty would lead to perfect equality. but he was writing before the industrial revolution, so you can more less forgive him. and let's remember that industrial capitalism is pretty much the antithesis of "perfect liberty", in oh-so-many ways. let's lynch the landlord. man. well, first, it's already happening to some extent. see shell oil in nigeria, for example. that's kind of what the next chapter of Straight Outta Enola is supposed to be about. but i doubt i'll ever get around to writing it. but, it depends what you mean by revolution. if you mean "armed insurrection", of course you're right. but if you mean "general strike", i don't think so. because shooting down all your would-be employees is not going to get the assembly lines rolling again. the rub, of course, is that we'd need pretty universal (not to mention dedicated!) participation. you didn't really think that, did you? every time you start to think that, just remember Wild Wild West again. besides, if they *didn't*, advertising wouldn't be such a colossal industry, would it? true? i hear that pez, believe it or not, has the highest brand-recognition in the country. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V9 #84 ******************************