Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Mapo Tofu
[ed. A favorite of one of my uncles, here are three different takes on a classic: Han Dynasty’s Mapo Tofu. Mission Chinese Food’s Mapo Tofu. Momofuku Ssam Bar’s Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes.]
Defining mapo tofu is like playing a maddening game of twenty questions: Is it plant-based? Yes. Is it vegetarian? Sometimes. Does it have pork? Probably. Is it spicy? Usually. Easy to make? It can be! The mapo tofu galaxy is one of infinite possibilities, spiraling outward from an originally spicy, oily, numbing, meaty sauce/stew of Sichuan origin. (...)
There are a couple versions of the origin story of mapo tofu, but I’m going to tell you the one I like best. Let me take you back to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, in the late 1800s. There’s this old lady, a tofu maker. She makes tofu every morning and also cooks some tofu dishes for local people or other cooks. She has smallpox scars all over her face, so people call her Ma Po—ma means pockmarks, and po means grandmother.
So there’s a gentleman who comes in to get some food. He’s just come from the market, and he has a bag of minced beef with him. He’s sitting there in Ma Po’s restaurant, and he looks out across the street and sees a very nice restaurant with a very pretty girl. Ma Po, as you know, is not the prettiest lady, and the pretty girl calls out to him to come to her restaurant. He leaves Ma Po’s place and heads across the street.
A few minutes later a table of customers comes in, and they say that they want a tofu dish with beef. Ma Po doesn’t have any beef but the gentleman who left forgot his bag of minced beef, so she’s like, I’m gonna use this motherfuckin’ beef. She makes this dish and she brings it out and the group of men love it. They go crazy over it.
A lot of people think the ma in this dish’s name refers to the numbing sensation you get from a Sichuan peppercorn, which is also called ma in Chinese. But to me it’s all about a person who creates a dish that people loved so much they named it after her. It became the most famous tofu dish that ever came out of China. There’s no tofu dish that is as famous as this. When you talk about Sichuan cuisine, you talk about this dish.
Defining mapo tofu is like playing a maddening game of twenty questions: Is it plant-based? Yes. Is it vegetarian? Sometimes. Does it have pork? Probably. Is it spicy? Usually. Easy to make? It can be! The mapo tofu galaxy is one of infinite possibilities, spiraling outward from an originally spicy, oily, numbing, meaty sauce/stew of Sichuan origin. (...)
There are a couple versions of the origin story of mapo tofu, but I’m going to tell you the one I like best. Let me take you back to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, in the late 1800s. There’s this old lady, a tofu maker. She makes tofu every morning and also cooks some tofu dishes for local people or other cooks. She has smallpox scars all over her face, so people call her Ma Po—ma means pockmarks, and po means grandmother.So there’s a gentleman who comes in to get some food. He’s just come from the market, and he has a bag of minced beef with him. He’s sitting there in Ma Po’s restaurant, and he looks out across the street and sees a very nice restaurant with a very pretty girl. Ma Po, as you know, is not the prettiest lady, and the pretty girl calls out to him to come to her restaurant. He leaves Ma Po’s place and heads across the street.
A few minutes later a table of customers comes in, and they say that they want a tofu dish with beef. Ma Po doesn’t have any beef but the gentleman who left forgot his bag of minced beef, so she’s like, I’m gonna use this motherfuckin’ beef. She makes this dish and she brings it out and the group of men love it. They go crazy over it.
A lot of people think the ma in this dish’s name refers to the numbing sensation you get from a Sichuan peppercorn, which is also called ma in Chinese. But to me it’s all about a person who creates a dish that people loved so much they named it after her. It became the most famous tofu dish that ever came out of China. There’s no tofu dish that is as famous as this. When you talk about Sichuan cuisine, you talk about this dish.
by Brette Warshaw, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: Gabriele Stabile
Addiction Treatment Goes Public: AAC's Recovery-Center Empire
Late one afternoon in September 2013, Jeremiah Jackson stopped in at his drug dealer’s house to pick up heroin. While waiting around, he checked his voice mail and found a message from American Addiction Centers, a chain of drug and alcohol treatment clinics. An unfamiliar voice said, “Jeremiah, the game is up. It’s time for you to get help.” Jackson just laughed. “It struck me as humorous at first,” he says.
A 28-year-old college dropout, Jackson had been getting calls from American Addiction Centers for more than a month. His mother had passed his name along to several representatives at the company, and they’d call twice a week offering help. The calls were “a buzz kill,” as he puts it, but he sometimes picked up and listened, because he was lonely, he admits, and knew deep down that he had a problem. He’d moved back in with his parents in Sequim, Wash., after losing his girlfriend and apartment but was doing his best to avoid everyone. “It was a horrible year. It was just me, my dealer, and my bathroom,” he recalls. Still, he would end each conversation with AAC by saying he wasn’t interested.
This time was different. Two days earlier, Jackson had almost overdosed on heroin and methamphetamines in a Walmart parking lot. “I woke up on one of those green electrical boxes, and there were all these ambulances and police cars,” he says. “They’d responded to reports of someone screaming. I guess it was me. I had no idea how I got there. … All I had on were my boxers and my shoes. The rest of my stuff was strewn across the parking lot. I was white as a ghost and freezing.”
With that memory still raw, Jackson drove home from his dealer’s place, shut himself into his room, and listened to the latest voice message several more times. “They let me know they cared,” he says. They also noted that he’d be covered by his insurance. When his mom got home that night, he told her he was ready to do whatever it took to get and stay clean. Days later, Jackson shot up one last time and boarded a plane to Dallas, where he was met at the airport by an AAC representative holding a sign with his name.
American Addiction Centers, founded in 2011 and based in Brentwood, Tenn., is run by Michael Cartwright, a former drug addict and alcoholic who says he’s been sober for 23 years. The company owns eight facilities in six states and treats about 5,000 patients annually. In 2013 its revenue was $116 million, up from $28 million in 2011. Last October, analysts say, it became the first business focused solely on addiction treatment to go public, raising $75 million in an IPO. AAC is currently valued at about $588 million. So far, investing in some of society’s most troubled members seems to be paying off: Since October the company’s stock price has almost doubled, from $15 to $28.
“There’s a lot of opportunity in substance abuse,” says Paula Torch, senior research analyst for Avondale Partners, a Nashville-based firm that underwrote the IPO. There are more addicts than beds in treatment centers, she explains, and the industry is highly fragmented, made up largely of outpatient services and mom and pop operations. The market, meanwhile, is estimated to be worth $35 billion, and while almost 23 million Americans suffer from addiction, only about 4.1 million receive treatment each year, according to 2013 data from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (The agency says more than 98 percent of those who don’t get treatment think they don’t need it.) In going public, AAC says it hopes to tap that market, fund a nationwide expansion, introduce a consistent standard of care, and create “a national brand” serving all segments of the population. (...)
Treating substance abuse isn’t like other businesses. The clients, by nature, are at a high risk of injury and death, which might expose the business to lawsuits and bad press; addiction treatment is not well understood; and insurance coverage is subject to regulatory changes. Plus, every successful outcome means losing a customer.
American Addiction Centers’ facilities are upscale, though hardly over-the-top luxurious. They cater to people with solid out-of-network insurance coverage. Each client pays about $800 per day, or $24,000 per month, roughly 90 percent of which is covered by insurance providers, according to Cartwright. The company’s profit margin, he says, is about 15 percent. Each facility has doctors and psychologists with expertise in substance abuse, and most have an on-site pharmacy. The company also has its own laboratory in Nashville. The centers, which have a staff-to-patient ratio slightly bigger than 1 to 1, also treat concurrent psychological issues, because as many as 90 percent of AAC’s patients have mental-health disorders, Cartwright says.
A comfortable environment is important for recovery, he adds, scoffing at what he calls widespread critiques that treatment centers, both luxury and lower-end, charge too much and spend too much on looks. “No one would question that, if my grandmother had cancer, that we would treat her in a beautiful facility with good-quality linens and good-quality food,” he says. “Yet a drug-and-alcohol person you put on a cot in the local mission, and that’s quality care? I do still think that there’s a prejudice around this being a moral issue vs. a disease.”
Cartwright guarantees that a patient who checks in for 90 days can come back for free if he relapses. “We were involved in 15 different federally funded research studies, and the common theme that we kept coming back to, over and over and over, is that the best predictor of outcome is length of stay,” Cartwright says. Six months or longer is even better, according to officials with Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. If insurance won’t cover 90 days, Cartwright suggests a patient check into a cheaper facility. “Look, I personally think it’s more important that you get longer-term treatment than it is you come to me.” He argues that insurance companies may actually save money in the long run by covering one 90-day stay with a good outcome, rather than repeated 30-day stays for a patient who’s likely to relapse again and again.
by Caroline Winter, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Daniel Shea for Bloomberg Businessweek
A 28-year-old college dropout, Jackson had been getting calls from American Addiction Centers for more than a month. His mother had passed his name along to several representatives at the company, and they’d call twice a week offering help. The calls were “a buzz kill,” as he puts it, but he sometimes picked up and listened, because he was lonely, he admits, and knew deep down that he had a problem. He’d moved back in with his parents in Sequim, Wash., after losing his girlfriend and apartment but was doing his best to avoid everyone. “It was a horrible year. It was just me, my dealer, and my bathroom,” he recalls. Still, he would end each conversation with AAC by saying he wasn’t interested.
This time was different. Two days earlier, Jackson had almost overdosed on heroin and methamphetamines in a Walmart parking lot. “I woke up on one of those green electrical boxes, and there were all these ambulances and police cars,” he says. “They’d responded to reports of someone screaming. I guess it was me. I had no idea how I got there. … All I had on were my boxers and my shoes. The rest of my stuff was strewn across the parking lot. I was white as a ghost and freezing.”With that memory still raw, Jackson drove home from his dealer’s place, shut himself into his room, and listened to the latest voice message several more times. “They let me know they cared,” he says. They also noted that he’d be covered by his insurance. When his mom got home that night, he told her he was ready to do whatever it took to get and stay clean. Days later, Jackson shot up one last time and boarded a plane to Dallas, where he was met at the airport by an AAC representative holding a sign with his name.
American Addiction Centers, founded in 2011 and based in Brentwood, Tenn., is run by Michael Cartwright, a former drug addict and alcoholic who says he’s been sober for 23 years. The company owns eight facilities in six states and treats about 5,000 patients annually. In 2013 its revenue was $116 million, up from $28 million in 2011. Last October, analysts say, it became the first business focused solely on addiction treatment to go public, raising $75 million in an IPO. AAC is currently valued at about $588 million. So far, investing in some of society’s most troubled members seems to be paying off: Since October the company’s stock price has almost doubled, from $15 to $28.
“There’s a lot of opportunity in substance abuse,” says Paula Torch, senior research analyst for Avondale Partners, a Nashville-based firm that underwrote the IPO. There are more addicts than beds in treatment centers, she explains, and the industry is highly fragmented, made up largely of outpatient services and mom and pop operations. The market, meanwhile, is estimated to be worth $35 billion, and while almost 23 million Americans suffer from addiction, only about 4.1 million receive treatment each year, according to 2013 data from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (The agency says more than 98 percent of those who don’t get treatment think they don’t need it.) In going public, AAC says it hopes to tap that market, fund a nationwide expansion, introduce a consistent standard of care, and create “a national brand” serving all segments of the population. (...)
Treating substance abuse isn’t like other businesses. The clients, by nature, are at a high risk of injury and death, which might expose the business to lawsuits and bad press; addiction treatment is not well understood; and insurance coverage is subject to regulatory changes. Plus, every successful outcome means losing a customer.
American Addiction Centers’ facilities are upscale, though hardly over-the-top luxurious. They cater to people with solid out-of-network insurance coverage. Each client pays about $800 per day, or $24,000 per month, roughly 90 percent of which is covered by insurance providers, according to Cartwright. The company’s profit margin, he says, is about 15 percent. Each facility has doctors and psychologists with expertise in substance abuse, and most have an on-site pharmacy. The company also has its own laboratory in Nashville. The centers, which have a staff-to-patient ratio slightly bigger than 1 to 1, also treat concurrent psychological issues, because as many as 90 percent of AAC’s patients have mental-health disorders, Cartwright says.
A comfortable environment is important for recovery, he adds, scoffing at what he calls widespread critiques that treatment centers, both luxury and lower-end, charge too much and spend too much on looks. “No one would question that, if my grandmother had cancer, that we would treat her in a beautiful facility with good-quality linens and good-quality food,” he says. “Yet a drug-and-alcohol person you put on a cot in the local mission, and that’s quality care? I do still think that there’s a prejudice around this being a moral issue vs. a disease.”
Cartwright guarantees that a patient who checks in for 90 days can come back for free if he relapses. “We were involved in 15 different federally funded research studies, and the common theme that we kept coming back to, over and over and over, is that the best predictor of outcome is length of stay,” Cartwright says. Six months or longer is even better, according to officials with Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. If insurance won’t cover 90 days, Cartwright suggests a patient check into a cheaper facility. “Look, I personally think it’s more important that you get longer-term treatment than it is you come to me.” He argues that insurance companies may actually save money in the long run by covering one 90-day stay with a good outcome, rather than repeated 30-day stays for a patient who’s likely to relapse again and again.
by Caroline Winter, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Daniel Shea for Bloomberg Businessweek
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Facebook Quizzes Are (Still) a Privacy Threat
[ed. Yet another reason to avoid Facebook like the plague (as if we needed more).]
An online quiz that illustrates the words you use the most on Facebook as a "word cloud" has gone viral -- and it's a great reminder of why you should be wary of connecting ostensibly fun games with your account. UK-based VPN comparison website Comparitech has delved into how it collects not just your name, but also your birthdate, hometown, education details, all your Likes, photos, browser, language, your IP address and even your friends list if you link it with Facebook. Too many details for a simple game, right? If you agree, you may want to think hard before linking any other FB quiz in the future, because most of them require you to give up a similar list of information.
You'll typically see what details an FB quiz app requires on the page asking you to authorize its connection with the social network. Some apps allow you to choose which info you're willing to share: If you're lucky, you'll be able to give up as little as possible and still be able to play the game. In this case, the application didn't work properly when I didn't allow it to access most of my details. That said, it's pretty easy to click through and overlook the part where you can choose the info an app can access. And if you've been using Facebook extensively, chances are you've done it at least once or twice in the past.
Now the real problem is, like any other entity that collects data, these apps collect it for a reason. Vonvon.me, the mysterious company that created the Your Most Used Words on Facebook quiz, notes in its Privacy Policy that if you log in with FB, you're giving it express permission to continue using your info even after you terminate your account. You're also permitting it to store your details in any of its servers around the world, even in places where your privacy isn't protected by the law. Vonvon does note that it wouldn't share your personal info with third parties unless it has notified you first, but in the same sentence, it admitted that the Privacy Policy itself is already one way of notifying you. Tough luck if you haven't read it before clicking OK, because agreeing to the policy is equivalent to allowing the company to sell or share your details.
by Mariella Moon, Engadget | Read more:
An online quiz that illustrates the words you use the most on Facebook as a "word cloud" has gone viral -- and it's a great reminder of why you should be wary of connecting ostensibly fun games with your account. UK-based VPN comparison website Comparitech has delved into how it collects not just your name, but also your birthdate, hometown, education details, all your Likes, photos, browser, language, your IP address and even your friends list if you link it with Facebook. Too many details for a simple game, right? If you agree, you may want to think hard before linking any other FB quiz in the future, because most of them require you to give up a similar list of information.You'll typically see what details an FB quiz app requires on the page asking you to authorize its connection with the social network. Some apps allow you to choose which info you're willing to share: If you're lucky, you'll be able to give up as little as possible and still be able to play the game. In this case, the application didn't work properly when I didn't allow it to access most of my details. That said, it's pretty easy to click through and overlook the part where you can choose the info an app can access. And if you've been using Facebook extensively, chances are you've done it at least once or twice in the past.
Now the real problem is, like any other entity that collects data, these apps collect it for a reason. Vonvon.me, the mysterious company that created the Your Most Used Words on Facebook quiz, notes in its Privacy Policy that if you log in with FB, you're giving it express permission to continue using your info even after you terminate your account. You're also permitting it to store your details in any of its servers around the world, even in places where your privacy isn't protected by the law. Vonvon does note that it wouldn't share your personal info with third parties unless it has notified you first, but in the same sentence, it admitted that the Privacy Policy itself is already one way of notifying you. Tough luck if you haven't read it before clicking OK, because agreeing to the policy is equivalent to allowing the company to sell or share your details.
by Mariella Moon, Engadget | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Why Pfizer’s Deal May Change the System of Taxing Multinationals
[ed. See also: Pfizer takeover: what is a tax inversion deal and why are they so controversial?]
Pfizer’s proposed merger with Allergan is a blockbuster deal in the pharmaceutical industry. History may remember the deal instead for finally killing off the United States’ outdated approach to taxing multinational corporations.
Pfizer will shed its identity as a United States corporation in the deal, notwithstanding the fact that it, not Allergan, is the larger merger partner. Allergan itself is an expatriate; it is nominally based in Ireland, but the bulk of its operations are still in Parsippany, N.J.
Our tax system is premised on taxing United States-based multinational corporations on 35 percent of worldwide income, with a credit for foreign taxes paid. This “worldwide” approach is often identified as anachronistic; most of our global trading partners have adopted some form of a “territorial” approach.
In theory, there’s not anything wrong with taxing American corporations on their worldwide income. The most vexing problem of international tax — trying to figure out the source of income within a multinational operation — would only be exacerbated by a territorial approach.
In practice, our approach has been a failure. One problem is that we allow the deferral of foreign-source income: the profits of foreign subsidiaries are not generally subject to United States tax until “repatriated” in the form of a dividend. Thus, to minimize taxes, multinationals use transfer pricing, cost sharing and other tax planning techniques to shift as much income as possible overseas.
Pfizer mastered this game early on, and its expertise in tax-shifting continues today. For example, Pfizer takes in about 40 percent of its revenue from sales in the United States and 60 percent from foreign sales. Yet, according to its 2014 annual report, Pfizer had about $17 billion in pretax income from overseas, and almost a $5 billion pretax loss here in the United States. By shifting profits overseas, Pfizer pays relatively low cash taxes compared with the nominal United States tax rate of 35 percent. Instead, much of its American tax liability is illusory, taking the form of an obligation to pay taxes in the future if it repatriates cash to the United States.
As of the end of 2014, Pfizer had $74 billion of foreign earnings “indefinitely reinvested” overseas, and another $63 billion in foreign earnings that have not been indefinitely reinvested. Repatriating $137 billion in earnings would generate a United States tax liability of about $48 billion.
Pfizer’s deal means that the United States will never see that $48 billion in tax revenue.
This isn’t Pfizer’s first visit to the circus. In 2004, Pfizer successfully lobbied Congress for a tax holiday. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 temporarily allowed companies to bring back foreign earnings at a tax rate of only about 5 percent instead of the usual 35 percent. Pfizer brought back $37 billion, paying less than $2 billion in taxes.
Just 11 years after cleaning out its overseas coffers, Pfizer now finds itself with $137 billion of new earnings “trapped” overseas.
Pfizer’s proposed merger with Allergan is a blockbuster deal in the pharmaceutical industry. History may remember the deal instead for finally killing off the United States’ outdated approach to taxing multinational corporations.
Pfizer will shed its identity as a United States corporation in the deal, notwithstanding the fact that it, not Allergan, is the larger merger partner. Allergan itself is an expatriate; it is nominally based in Ireland, but the bulk of its operations are still in Parsippany, N.J.Our tax system is premised on taxing United States-based multinational corporations on 35 percent of worldwide income, with a credit for foreign taxes paid. This “worldwide” approach is often identified as anachronistic; most of our global trading partners have adopted some form of a “territorial” approach.
In theory, there’s not anything wrong with taxing American corporations on their worldwide income. The most vexing problem of international tax — trying to figure out the source of income within a multinational operation — would only be exacerbated by a territorial approach.
In practice, our approach has been a failure. One problem is that we allow the deferral of foreign-source income: the profits of foreign subsidiaries are not generally subject to United States tax until “repatriated” in the form of a dividend. Thus, to minimize taxes, multinationals use transfer pricing, cost sharing and other tax planning techniques to shift as much income as possible overseas.
Pfizer mastered this game early on, and its expertise in tax-shifting continues today. For example, Pfizer takes in about 40 percent of its revenue from sales in the United States and 60 percent from foreign sales. Yet, according to its 2014 annual report, Pfizer had about $17 billion in pretax income from overseas, and almost a $5 billion pretax loss here in the United States. By shifting profits overseas, Pfizer pays relatively low cash taxes compared with the nominal United States tax rate of 35 percent. Instead, much of its American tax liability is illusory, taking the form of an obligation to pay taxes in the future if it repatriates cash to the United States.
As of the end of 2014, Pfizer had $74 billion of foreign earnings “indefinitely reinvested” overseas, and another $63 billion in foreign earnings that have not been indefinitely reinvested. Repatriating $137 billion in earnings would generate a United States tax liability of about $48 billion.
Pfizer’s deal means that the United States will never see that $48 billion in tax revenue.
This isn’t Pfizer’s first visit to the circus. In 2004, Pfizer successfully lobbied Congress for a tax holiday. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 temporarily allowed companies to bring back foreign earnings at a tax rate of only about 5 percent instead of the usual 35 percent. Pfizer brought back $37 billion, paying less than $2 billion in taxes.
Just 11 years after cleaning out its overseas coffers, Pfizer now finds itself with $137 billion of new earnings “trapped” overseas.
by Victor Fleischer, NY Times/Dealbook | Read more:
Image: Mark Lennihan, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Monday, November 23, 2015
The Subscription Wars Are Here
The second wave of the web is here.
Soon you will be asking friends if they are part of the Google plan or perhaps the Amazon plan. In fact, in the very near future, we might all be part of the Google, Amazon, or possibly Netflix and Facebook plan. In fact, it is very possible that our choice of plan will be part of how the coming generation defines itself.
What is the second wave? The second wave is the idea that the internet goliaths of the world are now playing for the $150 or so we spend with the cable companies each month. In an effort to justify and grow the monthly price of their particular content bundle, these Goliaths will acquire, roll up, and merge anything and everything into the offering.
This is an all-out war, and it’s all about who you pay each month for all of your entertainment.
So, what does this mean for us consumers, how did we arrive here and where do we all go?
Let’s start by understanding what the first wave of the web meant to us as consumers. From a content perspective, the first wave of the web was all about content creators being displaced by social content aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others created and now own the distribution paths that content must travel to reach us, the consumer. These companies can create better ad supported monetization at scale, and provide a better user experience than any single content creator can provide on their own. Over the last decade, we have seen media company after media company succumb distribution to aggregators like Google, and more recently to Facebook and others.
While it has been exciting and easy for consumers to receive an infinite amount of free content in the palm of their hand, we all have been playing hot potato on who exactly foots the content bill. For the last decade, we’ve all danced around the fact that it’s impossible to make an ad-supported web economically sustainable for individual content creators and media companies.
With an infinite amount of content online, content creators will never be able to create and sustain enough attention to obtain the advertising rates of yesterday. Today, no professional content company can survive and thrive on ad supported revenue alone. Look at the recent death of Grantland as case in point. While Grantland is owned by ESPN, Grantland was run independently, and only generated revenue through selling ads next to their content. We have seen so many content companies hop on the ad supported hamster wheel, trying to somehow make it work. Companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have even made the hamster wheel sexy and trendy for periods of time, but in the end, it’s all the same. Nobody can do it forever.
Our culture has also suffered. Content in an ad supported world is mostly miserable. We live in an ugly clickbait world. Advertising models for content have created all of the wrong incentives. We’re subjected to an endless stream of terrible content begging us to click, and then click once more. Ryan Holiday wrote the seminal work on the misaligned incentives that arise for content companies in his 2012 book,“Trust me I’m Lying”.
But now, in 2015, something new is happening. We all finally had the sober realization there must be a better way to monetize content beyond advertising.
That’s right. The second wave.
The next wave of the web, the second wave, is essentially the post advertising web. Look at media business headlines in 2015, and they are all about subscription business models. Sure, they get called different names in different formats. In video, we call subscription offerings ‘over the top’ or for short, “OTT”. In print we call it the familiar– a membership or a subscription.
It’s worth noting that all subscription offerings offer freebie content to get you in the door. There is a reason why Netflix and HBO do not hunt you down when you share your login details with all of your closest friends. In business speak, we call this “content marketing”. Content marketing is the idea that companies will make money in the end by some other means after they give you some awesome free shows and articles. This is a huge trend across the web. For the small creators, authors, and one person shops, they give away a staggering amount of daily free content, but are now monetizing through a crowdfunding and tip-jar revolution.
For larger content creators and aggregators, they need a reliable, steady business model after showing you so much great free content everyday. Some large aggregators have started with distributing free content, while others got started by offering premium original content from the start.
For example:
So in a post-advertising web, the big question to answer is who exactly gets your hard earned money each month? That is: Who are you subscribing to for content? We know it used to be all of those damn cable companies. And now it’s Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and HBO.
Consumers won’t shell out $9.99 a month or more for an ever increasing number of standalone ala carte subscriptions. And the fight for truly exclusive content that can distinguish a service will only make premium content more valuable. There is a reason why NBA salaries and franchises have basically doubled over the last few years. Nothing it seems is more valuable than live premium sports content.
In order to win and gain market share, the internet Goliaths will be forced to continually acquire, roll up, and consolidate everything into the content bundle.
This is the war. This is the new battle.
Soon you will be asking friends if they are part of the Google plan or perhaps the Amazon plan. In fact, in the very near future, we might all be part of the Google, Amazon, or possibly Netflix and Facebook plan. In fact, it is very possible that our choice of plan will be part of how the coming generation defines itself.
What is the second wave? The second wave is the idea that the internet goliaths of the world are now playing for the $150 or so we spend with the cable companies each month. In an effort to justify and grow the monthly price of their particular content bundle, these Goliaths will acquire, roll up, and merge anything and everything into the offering.
This is an all-out war, and it’s all about who you pay each month for all of your entertainment.So, what does this mean for us consumers, how did we arrive here and where do we all go?
Let’s start by understanding what the first wave of the web meant to us as consumers. From a content perspective, the first wave of the web was all about content creators being displaced by social content aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others created and now own the distribution paths that content must travel to reach us, the consumer. These companies can create better ad supported monetization at scale, and provide a better user experience than any single content creator can provide on their own. Over the last decade, we have seen media company after media company succumb distribution to aggregators like Google, and more recently to Facebook and others.
While it has been exciting and easy for consumers to receive an infinite amount of free content in the palm of their hand, we all have been playing hot potato on who exactly foots the content bill. For the last decade, we’ve all danced around the fact that it’s impossible to make an ad-supported web economically sustainable for individual content creators and media companies.
With an infinite amount of content online, content creators will never be able to create and sustain enough attention to obtain the advertising rates of yesterday. Today, no professional content company can survive and thrive on ad supported revenue alone. Look at the recent death of Grantland as case in point. While Grantland is owned by ESPN, Grantland was run independently, and only generated revenue through selling ads next to their content. We have seen so many content companies hop on the ad supported hamster wheel, trying to somehow make it work. Companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have even made the hamster wheel sexy and trendy for periods of time, but in the end, it’s all the same. Nobody can do it forever.
Our culture has also suffered. Content in an ad supported world is mostly miserable. We live in an ugly clickbait world. Advertising models for content have created all of the wrong incentives. We’re subjected to an endless stream of terrible content begging us to click, and then click once more. Ryan Holiday wrote the seminal work on the misaligned incentives that arise for content companies in his 2012 book,“Trust me I’m Lying”.
But now, in 2015, something new is happening. We all finally had the sober realization there must be a better way to monetize content beyond advertising.
That’s right. The second wave.
The next wave of the web, the second wave, is essentially the post advertising web. Look at media business headlines in 2015, and they are all about subscription business models. Sure, they get called different names in different formats. In video, we call subscription offerings ‘over the top’ or for short, “OTT”. In print we call it the familiar– a membership or a subscription.
It’s worth noting that all subscription offerings offer freebie content to get you in the door. There is a reason why Netflix and HBO do not hunt you down when you share your login details with all of your closest friends. In business speak, we call this “content marketing”. Content marketing is the idea that companies will make money in the end by some other means after they give you some awesome free shows and articles. This is a huge trend across the web. For the small creators, authors, and one person shops, they give away a staggering amount of daily free content, but are now monetizing through a crowdfunding and tip-jar revolution.
For larger content creators and aggregators, they need a reliable, steady business model after showing you so much great free content everyday. Some large aggregators have started with distributing free content, while others got started by offering premium original content from the start.
For example:
- Netflix and HBO in premium original video content.
- Amazon in premium video content, video game content, book publishing (and even hosting web services)
- Spotify in music
- YouTube in UGC video
- Facebook in print publisher content
So in a post-advertising web, the big question to answer is who exactly gets your hard earned money each month? That is: Who are you subscribing to for content? We know it used to be all of those damn cable companies. And now it’s Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and HBO.
Consumers won’t shell out $9.99 a month or more for an ever increasing number of standalone ala carte subscriptions. And the fight for truly exclusive content that can distinguish a service will only make premium content more valuable. There is a reason why NBA salaries and franchises have basically doubled over the last few years. Nothing it seems is more valuable than live premium sports content.
In order to win and gain market share, the internet Goliaths will be forced to continually acquire, roll up, and consolidate everything into the content bundle.
This is the war. This is the new battle.
by Benjamin Smith, Observer | Read more:
Image: Pixabay
[ed. Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. ~ Langston Hughes, Theme for English B.]
via:
De-Stigmatizing Hawaii’s Pidgin English
“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a language. “Oh really?!” the colleague responded, surprised at my excitement.
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.
I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
Wen da keiki wen come olda da language wen come into da creole dat linguist kine people call Hawai‘i Creole. Us local people we jus’ call um “Pidgin.” Nowadays kine Pidgin get all da stuff from da pas’ inside. Plenny of da vocabulary for Pidgin come from English but plenny stuff in da gramma come from Hawaiian. Cantonese an’ Portuguese wen also help make da gramma, an’ English, Hawaiian, Portuguese, an’ Japanese wen help da vocabulary da mos’.It may read like a phonetic interpretation of a really broken version of standard American English, but linguists insist it isn’t. It has its own grammatical system and lexicon; it doesn’t use “are” or “is” in sentences, for example, and incorporates words from an array of languages like “keiki,” which means children in Hawaiian. (...)
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
by Alia Wong, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Sinco Kelleher / AP
The End of the Internet Dream
In 20 years, the Web might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor.
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
To Reach Seniors, Tech Start-Ups Must First Relate to Them
Daily, breathless announcements arrive in my inbox, heralding technology products for older adults.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.
About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
Which scenario represents the likelier future for senior-oriented technology? It depends on whom you ask.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
by Paula Span, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Luc Melanson
Sunday, November 22, 2015
The Woobie
A "woobie" is a name for any type of character who makes you feel extremely sorry for them. Basically, the first thing you think to say when you see the woobie is: "Aw, poor baby!" Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, sometimes divorced from the character's canonical morality.
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.
An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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