Thursday, December 30, 2010

Forum Making Money

Washington (CNN) – Four candidates hoping to take over the Republican National Committee from Chairman Michael Steele warned party activists Wednesday that the GOP could risk their ability to capture the White House in 2012 unless a leadership change is made atop the party.

Their jabs at Steele, who has yet to announce if he will seek a second term at the committee, took place at a forum for RNC candidates sponsored by the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks and the Republican National Conservative Caucus (RNCC), a coalition of conservative RNC members.

The RNC will elect a chairman at their mid-January winter meeting in Maryland.

Steele did not attend the forum and has been unusually quiet in recent weeks as he decides his future. More than a dozen current RNC staffers were spotted in the room observing the session, but none could say whether Steele will run again.

The four candidates – two of them official candidates, the other two seriously considering bids – sat together on a dais next to a yellow "Don't Tread on Me!" flag and pledged to work alongside the Tea Party movement and avoid meddling in Republican primaries.

But they agreed that it would take more than just Tea Party-fueled enthusiasm to unseat President Obama in 2012.

"I don't think we can count on 2012 offering the kind of tailwind for Republican candidates as it did in 2010," said Gentry Collins, who steered the RNC's political efforts until last month, when he quit with a blistering resignation letter accusing Steele of mismanagement and incompetence.

The nuts and bolts of the party operation must function at their highest level during a presidential cycle, the candidates argued, each making their case as to how they would do a better job than Steele.

Collins estimated that the RNC needs to raise and distribute between $400 and $425 million in 2012 to have a shot at defeating Obama.

Collins, who has not formally declared his candidacy, appeared alongside Michigan committeeman Saul Anuzis and former Missouri GOP chairwoman Ann Wagner, both of whom have officially entered the race.

They were joined at the last minute, surprising many in the room, by former RNC chairman Mike Duncan, who was one of five candidates who lost to Steele in the 2009 race for the chairmanship.

Duncan has been considering a repeat bid in recent months and told CNN he will decide on a possible bid within the next 10 days.

The four Republicans largely avoided mentioning Steele by name but blamed him for allowing the RNC's traditionally robust fundraising program to wither, leaving state party victory programs without critical funds during the 2010 election cycle and possibly costing the GOP several House seats.

The RNC had $4.5 million in debt as of mid-October and party insiders believe that figure will be substantially higher come the next reporting period.

It's a nightmare scenario that must not be repeated in 2012, each candidate warned, promising to devote most of their efforts to donor outreach and fundraising.

"A fully-funded RNC is the only way that we are going to take back the White House and the United State Senate and increase our gains," Wagner said.

Anuzis said he surveyed big GOP donors before launching his campaign. Eight out of every 10 donors he talked to complained that Steele never reached out to them since taking over the committee in 2009, Anuzis claimed.

He promised to spend two-thirds of his time raising money. "The challenge today is that we have to rebuild the confidence of the donors," he said.

Steele's absence from the event was not surprising, since the RNCC was formed in part to oppose Steele's bid in 2009, when he was the perceived "moderate" in the chairman's race.

Also not in attendance were a handful of other potential candidates, including former Bush administration official Maria Cino, Wisconsin GOP chairman Reince Priebus, Connecticut GOP chairman Chris Healy and former Sen. Norm Coleman, who are still gathering support for their campaigns or are waiting for Steele's next move before joining the field.

But Priebus, Cino, Healy and Coleman are expected to join the other candidates in attending a series of private interviews with the conservative caucus on Thursday.

Iowa committeeman Steve Scheffler, a fierce Steele opponent, said Wednesday's forum emphasized the unpredictable nature of the RNC election.

"It's a wide-open race, and at some point in time we find that one alternative to Steele," Scheffler told CNN. "But we may not even know who that is until the day of the election."

Over the weekend a number of developers in the Android Market support forums were reporting a highly disproportionate transaction fail rate (some devs claiming 80-100% of purchases failing). The problem continued with no response from Google for days, costing many of the developers real money and more than a few one star market reviews.

The problem appears to be sorted out now, a lot of the developers reporting problems have come back to say transactions are clearing, but the fix alone doesn’t look to be enough to soothe some angry developers. Many seem absolutely shocked that the Market appears to have zero weekend support, some are demanding refunds from Google, and all are really just looking for an honest explanation of what happened.

This tip came through a few days ago (thanks @_zehro!) and I probably should have posted it then, but I figured better late than never. A few of the devs in the thread had asked for media support to shed some light on the situation and this is my attempt to do that. If this is water under the bridge by now, just ignore this post (or let me hear it in the comments).

The problem: a recap

I’m going to do my best to summarize the problem and resulting uproar, but if you really want the full picture you can read the original thread over in the forums. The problem first showed up on December 4 (a Saturday) when judez posted:

What’s going on in Android Market? Every sell I have is declined. The system’s been failing for the last 6 hours.judezAndroid Market forum

It seemed that Google Checkout was randomly (and frequently) declining orders for a large number of developers (the majority of which appear to be outside of the US). Over the next few days/hours, more and more posts poured in showing the increasing frustration with the situation:

This is an utter disgrace now … I have lost an unbelievable amount of revenue because of this. I am fuming! There must be action we can take. I am getting too many support requests to even comtemplate dealing with, my reputation is being ruined because the users don’t know what’s happening and are blaming me, and still Google hasn’t said a word!!dooblouAndroid Market forum

Aside from the lost revenue, developers were concerned about the one star ratings that were starting to flow in:

It’s not just the sales, it’s also killing our reputation as developers. The user can’t download our app but they can download all their other paid apps so they assume that we have programmed our application wrongly.zehroAndroid Market forum

Being a developer myself, I can assure you one thing we realllly hate is a problem/shortcoming outside of our control making us look bad. As someone who solves problems for a living, it’s infuriating to have a real problem stare you in the face.

The resolution

On December 6 (a Monday) a Google employee finally showed up in the thread to report the problem had been solved:

As I mentioned on the other thread, we do deeply regret the inconvenience and pain caused to all of you, and take our responsibility to our merchants and developers very seriously. I certainly didn’t mean to be dismissive in my response.

Re: the reasons. We’re still digging into some of the underlying reasons with our integration partners, and will try to share more soon. Please be assured we will take measures to ensure this is repeated.salgarGoogle employee

Like I said at the beginning of the article, the problem was fixed days ago. I’m just writing about it now because most of the developers seemed disappointed that Google wasn’t able to even answer to say they were looking into things. The whole thread is filled with people who seem to feel amazingly disrespected.

The user dooblou did a fierce job of summing things up:

@salgar: The whole episode was an utter disgrace. “Regretting the inconvenience” isn’t really an apology either, is it? There was no communication with the developers, it took over 2 days to even start addressing the problem and it has all left a very bitter taste. I really think you should consider arranging a refund of the 30% we pay to you over the time frame this all occurred … this would go a little way to helping us all feel like we weren’t paying for support that never existed.

And on the note – how difficult is it to employ a member of support staff over the weekend that can monitor the Market? All it takes is 1 person to sit there monitoring activity – can you not even provide that for the 30% fee you take from us?

Finally, the ‘cut and paste’ response you gave everyone to their support requests was perhaps the biggest insult of all. I provide attentive and personal support to all my customers/users and it pays dividends (hey, I even do it at the weekends!) – why can’t you do the same. Out of all the support requests I have made to the Android Market, not a single one of them actually answers any of my questions – it’s like you skim read it, get the gist, and then choose the appropriate standard response to send back. Thanks for that.

So go on, make a gesture to prove that you take us seriously and that you value our contributions towards Android’s success. At the very least, you should email Android Market users that were caught up in this debacle and explain to them the issues and that it was not the developers’ faults. Please do this for us – EDUCATE THE ANDROID USERS – it’s the absolute bare minimum that you owe to us. I’m fed up of providing support for Google/Android as opposed to my own applications.dooblouAndroid Market forum

So what now?

Some of the developers were asking for a refund of the 30% paid to Google during the outage, figuring since no support was provided that no money should be split. Others are trying to figure out what to do with the one star reviews that were incorrectly levied against their apps. Google still hasn’t said much, only that the problem existed and is now gone. Should they be expected to do more than that?

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

personal finance blog

So argues David Harsanyi today in his column (which is also at Reason), and Harsanyi gets a big boost from John Fund at the Wall Street Journal. We’ll start with Fund’s analysis of the impetus for the FCC’s decision yesterday to once again claim jurisdiction over the Internet, despite an earlier court ruling against it and Congressional action to warn Julius Genachowski of attempting it again. The intent of this camel’s-nose regulation is to establish FCC authority over the Internet, Fund argues, but that’s just the appetizer:

There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website Socialist Project in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

Fund does a remarkable job in detailing the financing behind the Net Neutrality movement, which is also tied to campaign finance reform organizations. The FCC used studies funded by activists on Net Neutrality to bolster their claims, especially with Harvard’s Berkman Center, which gets a good chunk of funding from the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, not exactly neutral political players. These two foundations funded the kind of media reform efforts advocated by McChesney through Free Press. Did anyone doubt what those studies would show?

Harsanyi argues that the FCC’s push into private networks in competitive markets shows its obsolescence, and its danger:

It’s not that we don’t need the FCC’s meddling (or worse); it’s that we don’t need the FCC at all. Rather than expanding the powers — which always seem to grow — of this outdated bureaucracy, Congress should be finding ways to eliminate it.

Why would we want a prehistoric bureaucracy overseeing one of the past century’s great improvements? As a bottom-up, unregulated and “under-taxed” market in which technological innovation, free speech and competition thrive — at affordable prices, no less — the Internet poses a crisis of ideology, not commerce, for the FCC.

It’s about control and relevance. What else can explain the proactive rescue of the Web from capitalistic abuses that reside exclusively in the imaginations of a handful of progressive ideologues?

What is the FCC doing? It’s complicated, and in some ways, it’s irrelevant. It claims that regulatory power will ensure that consumers enjoy an “open Internet.” (With more broadband providers than ever, is there anything moreopen than the Internet?) But the FCC can censor speech. And once the FCC can regulate Internet service providers, those providers will be more compliant and more interested in making censors happy.

Why do we need the FCC in the 21st century? Most television channels are narrowcasters, using satellites and cable channels that don’t eat up limited broadcast space in local markets. The phone system in the US is no longer monopolized, and the issues of access and competition in those areas could be handled by state public-utility commissions, as they are now. The licensing of broadcast stations could be handled by the Commerce Department, or by a greatly-reduced FCC with binding limitations on jurisdiction.

We have managed to free ourselves from the encumbrances of monopolization over the last thirty years. This country doesn’t need a bloated bureaucracy getting in the way of innovation and commerce. It needs government to acknowledge that its communications-regulation apparatus is archaic and in need of downsizing, rather than attempting to nationalize the media.

Consumerist Budget Spreadsheet Balances Your Money, Encourages Your Nest Egg

The saving-savvy folks at The Consumerist blog have put together a template Excel spreadsheet for managing personal finances. It's the kind of thing you always say you're going to do, but they went ahead and did it for you, and it's free.

It's not a new thing, but Consumerist's budget spreadsheet, crafted during the days the site was one of our blog network brethren, has come back, after being lost to the vagaries of server maintenance. The site has instructions on setting it up, including tips on thinking through your monthly expenses and advice on how much you should plan on socking away for a rainy day, retirement, and other expenses.

Maybe you use Mint or another automated spending/saving tracker instead—but then again, maybe those tools are so automatic that you don't get a good look at your real money situation.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

The problem: a recap

The resolution

So what now?

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Consumerist Budget Spreadsheet Balances Your Money, Encourages Your Nest Egg

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Bank Of America Lawsuits Highlight Broken, Ineffective Mortgage Modification Programs

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Thursday, December 9, 2010