Thinkcorps

Given this recent Wired News article in which the record industry purports that the mob is taking over CD/DVD piracy, all evidence within leads me to assume that record industry executives (and their spokespeople) are genetically predisposed to be morons.

“The markup for a kilo of heroin is 200 percent,” Hoffman says. “The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800 percent.”

This just struck me odd. I mean, come on. Drugs are not that cheap and pirated CDs sold by street vendors are not that pricey. What’s wrong with this picture? Come on friends, let’s do some math.

Google gives me this page, where I learn about South Asian heroin:

The fee for smuggling heroin from Bangkok to New York can go as high as $5,000 to $10,000 per unit, according to DEA intelligence reports. The risks are high, as are the potential profits. The 6-inch by 4-inch white brick of pure Southeast Asian heroin (described as a unit in the opening paragraphs and priced at $3,000 at the refinery) generally is sold in New York City at a wholesale price of $70,000.

This generally jibes with DOJ info from 2000 on NYC heroin prices.

MATH TIME: Based on our data, we can safely guess that it might cost you $15,000 to get a 700-gram brick (adding some misc. expenses) to NY where you could sell it for $70,000. The markup? 367%

Now, how about pirate DVDs? An 800% markup means that a $10 disc costs $1.11. Hmm, I don’t know. Based on some informal research, I think we can assume that it’s gonna run around $1.50 per DVD-9 disc including packaging for 5,000 units. Now, there’s still middlemen to deal with. Let’s be conservative and say you can get the discs for $1.60 each to sell on the street for $10 or so. That’s a 525% markup.

But wait! We just quoted a street price for DVDs. What about a street price for heroin? Apples to apples and all that.

Well, going back to our SE Asian heroin info, we read near the bottom that a single delivered brick at $15,000 will generate $280,000 in sales on the street. Now our markup looks a little different at 1,767% doesn’t it?

Still, I think the pirated DVD markup is high. That $1.11 figure seems closer to a base production cost than anything. You’re not doing massive volumes of each DVD title, after all. If we assume that, then we should compare the base production cost of heroin, which is only $3,000. Now our heroin markup spikes to 9,233%.

So, recording/motion picture industry, if I were you, I’d focus less on markups and more on quality.

Street heroin is averaging 60% purity these days. Can you honestly say your movies beat that?

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Travelpost is an online community for personalized hotel reviews and recommendations. They needed a blog to help connect with their audience and the online community at large. I put together a Wordpress install and got them rolling.

Davenetics is the home of noted media and politics blogger Dave Pell. He needed a complete rebuild of his site, combining multiple blogs into one and adding a customized news aggregator.

I put together a highly customized install of Wordpress and then had to make sure that all old requests were being forwarded to the new pages. As part of this process, I hacked up a different Blogger to Wordpress import script, which retains the unique permalink structure that Blogger uses. There was lots more plugin-y goodness I created for Dave’s site, and I came to really appreciate the Wordpress architecture, which beyond any flaws it might have, makes an extremely worthwhile trade of efficiency for extensibility. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s very nice.

Also part of this project was a news aggregator. I have built these myself in the past, using a separate Wordpress install as a base. This time, I chose to work off of RadGeek’s codebase, and tweak it in several ways that I like. I then added a few functions to customize the workings of the site, and a script to expire items from the database, since it’s not meant to be an archive of other people’s work anyway.