I am a pretty big fan of reality based TV shows, which is a good thing these days because that is pretty much all of what is getting shoveled at us by the networks. A&E in particular has really gotten on a roll with reality based programming, and one of their huge successes has been Storage Wars.

For those who don’t know, Storage Wars involves what happens to abandoned or unpaided for storage lockers at those U Store Stuff style places. Almost every town in America has one or has one nearby, they are a growing business it seems. When these lockers go unpaid, they get auctioned to the highest bidder, and Storage Wars shows us the interest stuff that they find in these lockers, and reveals how much many of these seemingly innocent items are worth.

As a concept, at least on the surface, it’s really quite cool. You have the fast paced, adversarial action of the auction, and then the digging out of the lockers and the discovery of treasures. This sort of gives me a feeling of sort of an Antiques Roadshow with more dust and less class. It’s been a winning combination, with A&E adding a second Storage Wars Texas series, and Spike TV also doing very well with their Auction Hunters take on the subject.

However, you only have to sit back a very short distance to realize that all of this excitement and discovery is built on a lot of misery. Basically, these lockers have been unpaid for, a sign of the times in America with high unemployment and people losing their homes and so on. According to a USA Today article, “Storage Wars deliberately keeps away from the back stories behind each abandoned storage locker. “All you see is misery there, and I didn’t want to trade on that,” says executive producer Thom Beers”. There in lies the barely hidden misery of this show.

What for me is painful is seeing articles that are clearly worth more than any amount of late storage fees, being pulled out and sold for cash. The original owner apparently couldn’t bring themselves to part with them, or didn’t understand the value, and as a result they lose much more than they bargained for. It seems odd to try to figure out how people got into that position. It’s particularly odd when the material is something that is clearly salable (like coins, comic books, or other obvious collectables), and that people seem to have just given up. That is quite the sad part of all of this, and something that the shows clearly don’t want to touch.

So while they shows are somewhat addictive, the characters amusing, and the shows overall enjoyable, I am always stuck on the sad parts, the sign of the times. Storage Wars is just another way of showing how society is more than willing to eat itself to keep the wheels spinning.

I guess it should come as no surprise to most people in the know, but NASCAR once again has managed to make a laughing stock out of itself. The rescinding of suspensions and points penlties against Chad Knaus and the powerful Hendrick Motorsports comes right after one of the most disappointing race weekends in NASCAR history.

At Daytona this year, the 48 team of Jimmie Johsnon, with crew chief Chad Knaus were caught with a roof c-panel (the area between the roof and the trunk on each side of the rear window) that wasn’t right. Basically, it was twisted or manipulated in a way to give the car more speed, by diverting air to certain areas. This is a pretty clear violation of the rule book, and NASCAR threw said book at the team: 25 points off the driver and team, crew chief and car chief suspended for six races, and a big fine. Well, the appeals process in NASCAR goes to a three member panel, and they upheld that ruling about a week ago. So, Hendrick went to a higher court, and not remarkably, the suspensions have all been rescinded, and so has the point loss.

Why is it not surprising? Well, first off, the Hendrick team is the single most powerful team in NASCAR, with 4 top teams, drivers such as Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt jr all race for the team. The second part is a little more difficult to swallow: The Hendrick team is a Chevrolet team, the Hendrick family are big Chevy car dealership owners, and NASCAR’s chief appellate officer, John Middlebrook is a former CEO of General Motors. You can smell the impropriety from about 1000 feet away on this one.

What this decision does is pretty much make it impossible for the inspectors to do their jobs properly, it makes it difficult for NASCAR to punish rule breakers, and it makes it a very unfriendly atmosphere for any team that isn’t someone connected. Certainly smaller teams in NASCAR must wonder what they are up against. The type of aero advantage like this costs plenty of wind tunnel time and money, which really goes against the spirit of using templates on cars.

Further, as a fan, I would say it pretty much blows the credibility of the sport out the window. Now you have to assume that all of the top teams are cheating, and that any real difference between one team and another has to do with unfair advantages, money, contacts, or some combination of the three. My personal recommendation would be for the cars out of the top 25 or so teams to take a week off, and let NASCAR try to run a show with 25 cars. Remind them that the second half of the field is just as important as the front half, possibly more so.

Now, the other issue for NASCAR has been the push in the last few years to modify tracks to “improve racing”. The idea is to give the drivers multiple grooves to run in, so you get more side by side racing. One of the poster child race tracks for this was Bristol. For years, Bristol had been the hottest ticket in NASCAR, a tough, high banks bull ring of a track with basically one and half grooves, plenty of pushing and shoving, and plenty of action. Yes, that action included accidents, spins, temper tantrums by drives and crews alike, and some pretty high spirits all around. But since there was only 1.5 grooves, passing was hard, and some suggested that the track would be better with multiple grooves. So in 2007, with the track needing a resurfacing anyway, SMI (Speedway Motorsports Inc) also took the time to reconfigure the banking to a variable bank system, which basically gives more banking higher up, which opens up more grooves on the race track.

The result? Tons of a side by side racing, which for racing purists may be the way to go. What was lost was the pushing and banging, the nudging, the bump and runs, and all the tempers and high spirits. Oh, one other thing was lost: the crowd. Bristol was the hardest ticket to get in NASCAR for years, sold out for probably 3 or 4 decades of races. Last week’s race had an announced attendance of 102,000 (for 160,000 seats) but real attendance was probably close to 75,000. The place looked empty. The fans have voted with their pocket books. What was one of the unique challenges of NASCAR has been neutered, and the fans tuned out.

How bad is it? The track’s owner Bruton Smith is actually looking at ripping the track up and putting it back as it was (they kept all the computerized measurements from the old track, just in case I guess). Bristol is such a disappointment, such a let down, that there is little else they can do.

Moreover, it’s a kick at NASCAR and their push for “more side by side racing”. They should learn from Formula One, which continues to struggle for an audience in the US. Quite simply, great elegant racing appeals to certain fans, but seemingly not enough. I would suspect that more people in the US see a demolition derby or a bull ring stock car race in a year than see an F1 race even on TV. The fans are there. Great racing for them doesn’t mean perfect synchronized side by side lap running, otherwise the IRL would have been a raving success. What is exciting to them is that there is actual risk, actual danger, and yes, actual contact because it is difficult to achieve the pass.

NASCAR’s current leaders should be ashamed of what they have done to Big Bill’s show. He knew the deal, knew what people wanted. The current crop of France family members seems to have forgotten that, and the sport as a results suffers. Here’s a clue guys: I can find something else to do on Sunday afternoon. Give me a reason to stay tuned in, or you lose me. Oh wait, never mind… I already planned something else to avoid the snoozathon at California coming up. Good night, NASCAR.

One of the most common refrains is that the internet brings infinite distribution, which can be taken a bunch of different ways. The most common ones are that the internet reaches almost everyone, and as such, allows distribution to any of them for electronic goods. With a large percentage of all of the worlds citizens online, even in places like China, there are certainly implications for the distribution models of almost every company and every sort of product that can be moved this way.

The second way of looking at infinite distribution is used by those who support piracy (or just think it inevitable) as a way of explaining why everything should be free. In business school, one of the first things you learn is the basic law of supply and demand, and how that effects price. If the supply is bigger than the demand, then the price goes down. Their theory is that because an infinite number of copies of things can be made, that we thus have a completely endless supply, and so everything from movies to music should effectively be free. They go on about marginal costs (costs to produce one more unit of a given thing) as now being zero, therefore the market price is the same.

In purely technical terms, those who push the idea are correct. If you run the calculations, the price is zero. However, the real world says that this is not a tenable situation, and therefore either the model is incorrect, or it fails at it’s extreme ends, or there is something else missing.

I think it is that something else is missing. When the costs of distribution come down, when the costs of manufacturing reach effectively zero, those things that make up marginal costs no longer count very much towards figuring out the market price of a product, rending the models useless to explain the current marketplace. When it comes to making movies, almost all of the costs are up front. The actual cost of the seat (at the theater) or the shiny plastic disc (DVD or BluRay) that you buy it on is very low. The marginal cost of another piece of plastic (forget digital distribution for the moment) is so small that it all but unimportant. Move it to digital (hello Itunes) and the cost is only the bandwidth costs to move the product. Very close to nothing. We aren’t even talking pennies.

However, the big up front costs are what drives the new market. A movie that costs 50 million to make has to find a way to make that money back. So no matter what the supply and demand curves say for price, the reality is that a chunk of that original cost has to be written into the price of each unit to make it work out. If they expect to push 5 million units, they have to have at least $1 per DVD or movie ticket just to break even. So no matter what supply and demand says, the minimum selling price is still $1.

Now, piracy comes in and pretty much blows it all up. Pirates don’t pay the dollar, but they do shrink the potential market by offering a free alternative to the real thing. Piracy (especially P2P torrent style) has near perfect infinite distribution, and absolutely no up front costs to create the product. So if you look at THIS market, then yes, the product is free. They don’t have to pay to make it, they aren’t paying for distribution or copying (the users do that, and those costs disappear into their monthly ISP bills), and they certainly don’t have to worry about any regulation. They can give it away for free because it doesn’t cost them anything to be there.

Piracy is pretty widespread right now, and if it ever reaches a certain tipping point level, it will very quickly kill off the movie and music industries as we know them. The funny part is that in doing so, they will also kill off the very supply of the material that everyone wants. There are no first year economics formulas to explain shooting yourselves in the foot!

I find it even more important a lesson when looking at why things succeed or fail. The pattern of a failed movement or organization often comes as a result of certain actions, or certain types of changes that come to something over time. There are magic points along the way where things happen, the people change, and the movement or idea is lost forever.

I think that the most powerful one at the moment is the California medical marijuana situation. There are a reasonable number of researchers, doctors, and patients who will say that weed has certain positive effects when it comes to things like general pains, certain specific issues like eye problems, and can apparently help those with cancer and other ailments to have a better quality of life. I won’t go into all of it here, except to say that while all of that is being bandied about, it’s still clear that nobody is even making a passing attempt to make “pot medicine” in any meaningful way. However, I don’t begrudge the supporter of using wacky tabacky to help with the pain or to handle a terminal illness. Heck, I might want it to.

It’s isn’t the good intention of medical marijuana that are meaningful to me. Rather, it’s the “pile on” effect that has happened. Medical weed as a concept has pretty much been hijacked by the “legalize weed in general” community, who are using the medical weed laws as a way to get around police action and to be able to “buy legally”, by getting sympathetic doctors to “prescribe” weed for these potheads. The good of medical marijuana (if any) has been quickly squeezed out of the debate, as the dispensing locations have turned into a big business, a legalized dime bag business that can still charge “street drug” prices, and apparently avoid legal prosecution. All it takes is a doctor willing to see these “patients” and write them a script. The process has been hijacked, and will likely as a result become very restricted or perhaps even shut down if the current pattern continues.

Anonymous is another example of this sort of thing happened. The 4chan anons were literally in it for the lulz, for the laughs, and the pleasure of tweaking a few noses without being trackable. They have had particular fun over the years dragging Scientology back and forth through the mud like it was college hazing time. Amusing to watch, probably extremely frustrating for Scientologists to have to shadow box against an opponent you can never hit. Anonymous has been perhaps the most original farce ever created.

That has changed in that last couple of years. Even though the anonymous people will tell you they have no leaders, it really isn’t all that true. Anyone can be a leader, and with enough followers, it defines itself. Since the whole Wikileaks situation, Anonymous has become a sort of V for Vendetta type revenge group, organizing DDoS attacks on Paypal, Mastercard, and the like. Recently, the group was pinned for having jacked a large number of credit cards from a certain agency they oppose, and using those cards to drive funds to some organization. There are no more lulz to be had here, just a hardcore group of disruptive people using their power and their control over others to inflict pain on those they do not agree with. The lulz are long gone.

Bit Torrent is a technology that has gotten the same sort of shaft. Good or bad, “torrent” is pretty much synonymous with “pirated” or “illegal”. It didn’t start out that way, but the masses have spoken, turning what may have been a potentially very useful way to distribute information, and instead turned it into the brand name for illegal pirate activity.

Occupy Wall Street is perhaps the best example of what goes wrong with these sorts of things. OWS suffered all of the major illness combined: Lack of focus, lack of leadership, “feature creep”, and so on. Most importantly, in many cities the occupy locations really just turned into a place where the homeless or street kids would set up tents and hang out. They would chant the vapid slogans, but really aren’t in either the 99% or the 1%, they are outside the system entirely. Essentially, the anarchists and the “we oppose everything” people moved in and took over pretty much every city outside of New York.

In the end, many good ideas are eaten up by those who seek personal profit from them. OWS saw it’s message (whatever it might have been) lost to the homeless squatters looking for a place to pitch a tent and anti-government activists looking for a place to throw rocks from. Medical Marijuana loses because those looking for a legal way to support their pot addictions try to subvert the system to legalize their actions. Anonymous fails because whatever the goal, extremist from inside and outside hide under the banner of anon and go past protesting to black hat hacking and full on illegal acts. Bit Torrent is a good technology lost to those who use it to pirate. We all end up losing because, whatever the good idea, whatever the noble goal, it is lost to the extremists who infiltrate every day.

Well, the 2011 racing season is done, and the clock just struck 2012 everywhere. Well, everywhere except NASCAR land, where they continues to work on their 1960s inventions and machines, proudly being as ungreen and unclean as the come.

First 2011: The only hilight of the year is Tony Stewart winning the cup. Let’s just say that “anyone except boring Jimmy Johnson” is a plus, however Stewarts team runs the same cars and engines as Johnson’s Hendrick team, and Hendrick cars made up the vast majority of the players in the chase. No surprises then! 2011 also goes down as a year with continued weak attendance, and the media getting excited when the TV ratings were as good as the previous year – which was way off peak anyway. The first 26 races leading up the chase as safe as houses cruises for the top teams, as they generally just work to “finish well” each time and cruise into the championship round, and the start and park crew out back assures us plenty of open space on pit road by the first caution, as upwards to half a dozen of them retire with various mystery ailments.

Now 2012: Hold onto your hats, NASCAR is jumping forward into the 21st century for technology. No, not really. They are jumping forward to the 70s, dumping the carburators that have fueled the cars for years and replacing them with high tech, high end throttle body fuel injection. Yup, the same concept that was in the 1976 Cadillac Seville is now the leading, bleeding edge of NASCAR. Oh my! Talk about a leap forward. Teams are closing down, with Rousch down a team, Red Bull pulling the plug on both of their cars, and even some of the start and parkers are calling it a day. At this point, even Jayski’s enthusiastic pro-NASCAR chart only shows about 32-34 full time teams, and many of them have big question marks in the sponsorship and driver areas.

One of the announcements for 2012 that caught my eye is that Dover raceway is expanding seat width to make fans more comfortable. Well, at least, that is the story they are working with. Actually, Dover is one of many tracks in the NASCAR family that expanded rapidly as the series grew, and kept adding seats to their venue. But some less than spectacular races, the slowing economy, and the downturn in the fortunes of NASCAR has meant they have been hiding significant numbers of seats under banners to try to make things look fuller, and still they couldn’t sell the place out. The place can seat a mind numbing 140,000, and with announced attendance at about 82,000 for each race this year, the place has looked empty. The “widening of seats” addresses that by dropping the available seat count down to 113,000. Cover a couple of sections over with ad tarps, and they could get back to a “full house” scenerio by only putting a few more people in the place. NASCAR could use to run at some venues that look full, because running in front of half empty grand stands isn’t doing the image any good.

Further, the racing in 2011 for the most part wasn’t that good. The two car tag team drafting at the large tracks is a joke, it is truly sad to think that having the fastest race car still makes you 10 mph slower than a tandem team. The first 26 races featuring some truly uninspired point driving, with teams less worried about the win, and more worried about getting the proper precentage of points out of the weekend of the make the chase. They play it so safe now that you can DVR the race, skip the first 475 miles, and just watch the last few minutes and get the whole story. In the case, things were a little heated up, but only another manipulation of the point system and chase system conspired to make it close. Tony Stewart won half of the chase races, there is no reason it should have been close.

Looking forward to 2012, it looks like more of the same for NASCAR. They will diddle with the rules trying to limit the tandem drafting, they will try fuel injection, and they will attempt to smile and say “43 is only a number” when they get to the 5th or 6th race of the season and have only 39 entries – which will grow to 43 entries when the “big” teams roll out specials to fill the grid for a few laps.

Try to enjoy NASCAR 2012 – I prefer it on a video game myself!

NASCAR The Game 2011

The current and ongoing Occupy Wall Street (twitter tag #Occupywallstreet ) protests have certainly started to gain some traction in the media. Outlets in the US such as CNN have been giving the event some good coverage, as have a number of other news organizations. Of course, twitter, facebook, and other social media sites have become meccas for this movement, but these social sites have also revealed the strangeness and lack of focus of these protests.

In theory, Occupy Wall Street originally was all about bitching that the banks got bailed out of the recession, the bank owners continued to get paid big salaries after screwing up, and now the banks are back making profits and getting rich – while the US (and much of the world) sites in the middle of an economic downturn / recession / depression that has been incredibly hard to shake. On that basis and that basis alone, the protests have some merit, but perhaps are more than a little ineffective.

What has swelled the ranks of the protests however has been the muddled message. Everyone and their dog with an axe to grind (real or imaginary) is part of the protest now, from the standard “protest everything” anarchists to students complaining about their student loans, from the unemployed to the never going to be employed, from grad students to squeegee kids. They are all in there in a mish mash of ideas, causes, and general displeasure.

Sadly, what has ended up happening is that the protests have become more and more directly anti-capitalist. It seems that the same types who show up at G8 or G20 meetings to protest, to break windows, and to cause mayhem are slowing coming to the fore in the OWS “movement” as well, and the message is becoming more and more directly against any capitalist activities at all. It takes away from the true initial idea of OWS, and instead has turned it on it’s head.

The movement of course isn’t helped by people chanting anti-capitalist slogans, while tweeting on their new iphone, wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothes, Oakley sunglasses, and Nike running shoes. It doesn’t play well when the most important thing in the park is power to recharge smart phones, rather than sanitary facilities. People defecating on the street while others use their smart phones to tweet the picture is a symptom of the bigger problem: They think that everyone else except themselves should suffer – and that most of them don’t seem to understand that they are really protesting anymore.

My suggestion for the OWS crowd is to give it up and go home. Go occupy yourself for a while. Go look at your own life and find ways to make it better. Work on the political level in your area with the part of your choice to find candidates that support your stand against wall street. If you want to change the way things work, you have to change the laws for everyone. Lower your own expectations, take the Mc Job and stop waiting for everyone else to fix your life. Don’t blame others for where you are at, move forward and you can get it done.

Occupy Yourself. Change starts with us.

Over the next little while, we will see plenty of stories about Amy Winehouse and how tragic her death is. Truly, any time someone is lost so early in life, it is a tragedy. But just like the train coming into the station, this whole event was predictable, on schedule, and pretty much expected by everyone in the room.

The real tragedy of the situation isn’t the death of Amy Winehouse, which has been pretty much a foregone conclusion for ages now, but rather the tragedy is in the system that lets it happen. As a British citizen, I am entirely shamed by the way the courts and legal system in the UK works these days, especially when it relates to the users of hard drugs and the havoc they reek on themselves and the world around them. For me, there is much to be learn by Amy’s death, and much that could have been done to prevent it.

First and foremost, there are the enablers. Two key players in that game were Amy’s ex-husband Blake Civil-Fielder, by many reports the man who introduced Amy to the terror that is is heroin additiction. For a girl who was admittedly depressive, moody, and even prone to self-harm, it was a powerful choice. It was at this period that Amy went from the curvy, well fed, well rounded and powerful singer, slowly contracting into a drug addicted shell of a woman, losing weight, losing her way, and eventually into endless trouble. She married Civil-Fielder, a marriage she later admitted was pretty much entirely based around drug use. She along the way started dating notorious drug fiend Pete Dorherty, who seemed to fuel her drug habit even stronger, and encouraged her in very destructive ways. Between these two people, you have a significant negative influence, both of which should not have been present if the legal system truly worked out.

That for me is key. Both Doherty (known in the British tabloids as Doperty, his drug fueled stupidity so blatant that nobody tried to hide it) and Civil-Fielder proudly told tabloids that he had introduced Amy to crack and heroin. Both of these fine citizens had been before the courts, and until Civil Fielder was locked up for assault in 2008, had never really had any negative implications for his drug use and the like. Doherty has been in front of the courts any number of times, and always gets off. When the legal system, from Police to the courts and to the prisons are unable to deal with these people in a meaningful way, they will be out there in public, encouraging others to join in their destructive ways.

What happened to Amy Winehouse is a tragedy mostly because it reflects how far an entire generation of the UK has slipped, where drug use, binge drinking, and other reckless behavior is not only tolerated, but seemingly encouraged. The tragedy is that nobody in the system wants to deal with the issues, nobody wants to take responsiblity, and nobody wants to make the changes that says “this just isn’t tolerable”. Until that happens, there will be plenty of unknown Amy type girls dying every year from the same horrible combinations of social pressure, addictions, and a wildly permissive society. That is truly tragic.

It’s been sort of funny watching from afar the media coverage of the Caylee Anthony case, the poor child who died too young with a mother who just didn’t seem to know what happened. Casey Anthony was tried and found innocent, a shocking verdict to most people, and probably most shocking to CNN / HLN anchor Nancy Grace.

I can debate Nancy Grace’s position, I can debate her feelings, I can debate her opinion. But that would be meaningless, it’s been done before. Rather, I would rather look at how this particular case, and the particular media frenzy around it have shown that we have reached a point where the media themselves have become more important than the message.

Nancy Grace is just a different flavor of self-important media star, in the same group as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and the sainted Rush Limbaugh. They all believe that they are bigger than the stories they cover. They seems to think that they, as the stars, are more important than the news they cover, the stories that they examine, and the opinions of others. There is a huge problem here that we no longer get news from people we trust, we get it from stars. Heck, for the most part we don’t even get news, each and every one of the 5 I have listed are editorialists, opinion piece writers, and self-justifying media whores.

Does anyone remember when HLN was Headline News, and you could actually get news on the channel? I don’t even both to tune in anymore, because what news they do bring is always “with so and so”, indicating to me that the person reading the news is somehow way more important than the news itself. It’s like TV news has turned into a 24 hour per day op-ed page, with the rest of the newspaper thrown away. We no longer get unbiased coverage, we get opinion and slant. Fox News is typically cited as the worst, but MSNBC is quickly pulling up into a solid second place with a programming schedule that is almost all about opinion, and not about news.

I found it funny to find out that this week, local CTV reporter Kai Nagata quit his job with the network, for a whole bunch of reasons. You can read his blog here, safe to say that what he sees in media working in it is pretty similar to what I can see from the outside – it’s all about ratings and low hanging fruit, and no longer about actually providing information to the masses.

RIP Headline News, I truly miss a friend that would tell me what was what 24 hours per day.

I can remember when Hotbot and Lycos were considered the big search players, and I can remember when an AOL hosted website was still considered somewhat cool, as was having a geocities page. I remember when ICQ was that new hot idea that nobody had every seen before, and I can remember what Yahoo was a place you absolutely wanted your sites listed. The truth is that change is always in the cards, it never goes away. Rather, change is the constant that makes the internet what it is.

Facebook has certainly been one of the fast rising stars. While My Space may have been there near the start of the social media revolution, it is Facebook that has truly defined it, as hundreds of millions of people have signed up for accounts, spewing their pictures, their mindless comments, they inner thoughts, and sometimes the stupidest stuff you will ever see. It was a place where university students could meet and plan their lives, and it became a place where older people met back up after years apart, tracking down old school friends, girlfriends, and perhaps making amends with the enemies of our distant pasts.

It was great. Keyword is was, at least for me.

I met back up online with all the people I wanted to meet back up with, and found in many cases there were reasons why we were apart. I found an old girlfriend with 4 kids and knocked up with number five from baby daddy number 3. I saw my high school reunion and discovered there was nobody there I wanted to reunite with. I have some good friends online, and I have chatted with them often and even developed some good friendships. But alas, even those have waned as each of us keep at our busy lives, understanding that we are in this position of not being friends before because we just don’t have the time or desire to maintain the relationship.

Once it is all done, and everyone has said hi, and everyone has caught up, there isn’t much left to talk about. There isn’t much going on. So I, like millions of other people, have gone forward to close out and delete my account from Facebook. Simply put, I am all socialed out. My thoughts are that Facebook is already heading for it’s slow downward spiral, with more and more companies going on Facebook and more and more normal people heading for the exits, turning into perhaps another My Space or whatever you may have. It was cool once, but then again, so were mullets. Thankfully, we have all grown past that point, and we no longer have to go back there.

For those friends I leave behind on Facebook, don’t worry, it isn’t because of you. Well, it is – because Facebook is a wonderful tool that has let me relive my schooldays, and I enjoyed doing it. But I can’t ride that ride every day, and it’s time for me to move along. Perhaps in another 20 years we can all jump into our star trek teleporters and enjoy a coffee in Rome and look back and laugh at Facebook. But for now, don’t laugh too loud, because many people haven’t yet gotten the joke.

As I wrote before about Wikileaks, just because you can do something doesn’t make it right. Technical ability to do something doesn’t make it legal, doesn’t make it morally acceptable, and doesn’t mean that you can get away with it. Rep. Weiner has found this out the hard way (pun intended), as the use of social media platforms and digital cameras have left him hanging out to dry.

Yes, digital cameras allow us to take naughty pictures that we don’t have to get someone to develop for us. With cell phones and such having high mega pixel count cameras these days, it is possible to take some pretty darn good pictures of your naked body for your lovers and so on, if that is something you want to do. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow us to communicate rapidly, and sometimes this combination of easy to make naughty pictures and fast internet sharing leads to these images getting sent around. It’s almost faster than you can think, and the deal is done. Once done, you cannot take it back.

Sexting, the sending of text messages on a phone with photo attachments is another avenue for this sort of thing. There have been a number of cases discussing underage nude images being shared this way, as willing girls send naughty pictures of themselves to their boyfriends, who sometimes share them around. One of the problems is that this sort thing is actually child porn, and legally unacceptable.

Sexting is also big in colleges and universitys. The scary part about that is that we have perhaps an entire generation of women who have traded naughty pictures with guys, who perhaps have archived them for later display. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when they are running for political office, an old boyfriend will pull out an image of them naked or engaged in a sex act, and run them out of politics. It has taken much less to cause a fuss in these oddly politically correct times.

My advice? Don’t take pictures of yourself naked, and don’t send them to people. Certainly don’t do it if you are a politician, married, and so on. Duh Weiner, you did it to yourself. I hope your few minutes of sexual pleasure makes up for all that you will lose. Maybe you can get a talk show on CNN.