If you haven’t had your head in a box without internet for the last year and a half or so, you know about Hulu.  For those of you who haven’t ever been to Hulu.com (or seen the commercials on TV), Hulu is a lot like YouTube, but instead having lower-quality videos users upload themselves, Hulu hosts mainstream TV programs.  If you miss your favorite TV show, it usually is up on Hulu in a matter of hours (with a few exceptions) and available for a period of time (usually determined by Hulu’s contract with the network the program airs on).  Unlike regular TV, most programs can be seen with limited commercials.

Pretty much everyone can see how great this service is; after all even with DVRs and TiVos becoming more and more common, it is virtually impossible not to occasionally miss your favorite program.  And if you’re like me, sometimes it is just impossible not to miss a show you want to watch because another show is on at the same time.  But even with the large user base Hulu has started to amass, they purportedly are struggling to make a profit leading the companies that jointly run Hulu, NBCU, News Corp, and Disney, to announce the service is going to transition to a paid model sometime in 2010.  It is currently unclear whether this would be a pay-for-use model like iTunes or if it would be a subscription model, but either way it is my belief that charging for content will backfire and cause Hulu to do even worse in the long run.

ABC, NBC, and Fox (I don’t know about CBS, because I don’t watch anything on CBS) have provided their shows on their websites for maybe two years under the same sort of system as Hulu, but with the introduction of a centralized, single site where users can go to get all their favorite shows, Hulu has become the standard for online TV.  People have come to expect a free site where they can go to watch their TV shows, and with the largest user demographic for Hulu being people under the age of 30, a paid model just won’t work.  People will turn to other sites, or torrents to get their shows for free.  In other words, everybody loses.  Networks lose money because they don’t get any profit from the people who turn illegal ways of getting their content.  Hulu loses its share of the market.  And the consumer loses because they have to risk viruses and will have to settle for lower quality picture and sound.

On the other hand, it is obvious Hulu can’t continue to operate without generating a profit.  How can both the users and the businesses win?  The answer is simple.  Implement regular commercials into Hulu’s system.  Make them watch the same number of commercials they would have to if they tuned into the program on regular TV.  Television stations have already proven this works for decades.  Why wouldn’t it work on the Internet?

And because the Internet is interactive, there is a possibility for even more profit from advertising.  The reason why Google can provide so many services for free is because they use the information they have on their users to give them ads users are most likely to find compelling, thus increasing the usefulness of the ad.  Instead of charging money to use Hulu, they could just require everybody gets an account and fill out a survey on their likes and dislikes.  They could also target ads based on what types of shows a user watched.  Furthermore, they could charge more money for ads that cut across demographic audiences.

And sure, most users like the fact they don’t currently have to watch as many commercials when they watch on Hulu, very few watch online just because they don’t want to watch commercials.  To deal with this group of users, Hulu could offer a pay-for-premium access that allows them to skip the commercials.

There is still hope Hulu’s parent companies will choose to go this route to continue to provide free shows to users – it isn’t over until you are required to enter a credit card number to see your favorite show.  But mark my words, if Hulu switches to paid content, there will be a vacuum for free TV… and something will fill that vacuum, legal or not.

The Iowa Supreme Court brought the issue of gay marriage back to the forefront of issues (at least in Iowa) when it unanimously ruled that the gay marriage ban in the state of Iowa was unconstitutional.  Without missing a step, Conservative groups, both in Iowa and all over the country, declared their renewed support to halting gay marriage.  Proposals for a (state) Constitutional amendment akin to Proposition 8 in California sprung up overnight.  Despite the renewed efforts in halting gay marriage, the Iowa Amendment process makes it unlikely the issue will be brought to voters within the next four years because of the fact Amendments need to be approved by two legislative sessions before going to a vote to be approved.  Since the current session has a Democratic majority, it is unlikely any sort of Amendment could enter it’s first phase this session.

So Iowa will have gay marriage for at least four more years.  Conservatives may feel defeated, but I think it would do the entire movement good to take a good hard look at whether or not fighting gay marriage really makes sense anymore (and perhaps whether fighting it made sense to begin with).  Most of the opposition to gay marriage is based in the traditional religious view of marriage, and I can understand the reluctance to support something that goes against many’s religious views of the world.  But for the sake of self preservation, I can hardly believe that the Conservative movement can’t see the writing on the wall.

Regardless of the status of marriage in Iowa, or any other state in the union, Barack Obama has stated that overturning the Defense of Marriage Act is a goal of his administration.  If he plans to tackle this goal with Congress, it is more likely than not that he is going to attempt to do it sooner rather than later so that he has a Democratic majority to work with.  If doesn’t plan to do it himself, his inevitable Supreme Court appointments will do it for him.  Through the President’s eyes, allowing the court system to strike down the DOMA is more beneficial.  Declaring the law unconstitutional would make the only way to reinstate a federal ban on gay marriage a Constitutional amendment… which is highly unlikely.  And once the Act gets overturned, every state would have to recognize homosexual marriage the same way they recognize heterosexual marriages – regardless of whether gay marriage was legalized in that state, basically makes defiance of gay marriage a complete farce.

Furthermore, the mantra of the Republicans and Conservatives has long been smaller, less restrictive government.  In the economic sphere, Republicans have long argued for less government influence.  Why is this any different?  Have your own personal beliefs on the issue, educate your kids in whatever those are, and let others make up their own minds.  The idea of less government influence is the very nexus of the movement.  Why abandon it?

And coming out in support of gay marriage opens up the party to support from that demographic.  The gay community doesn’t have to be tied to the left – if we were more willing to follow our own mantra, we could have thousands more party voters and perhaps a few million more swing voters.

Or the party can continue along this path and have the new generation of voters eventually turn to a different Conservative party.

Upon reflecting upon the comparison between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression, I came across the realization that during both events, a surge of populism radically changed/is changing the way the country is run/being run.  Many feel the populism  is the best way to run a government; the truest representation of the will of the people and I can’t deny that populist approaches to government do have their appeal.  We all want to live in a country where we all have an equal say and our country and perhaps the easiest way we see that becoming 100% true is through populism.

But the populist approach to governance is more analogous and more conducive to the crazed and violent mob at a Wal-Mart store offering discounts for Black Friday than the best scenario for our government, or any government.  Populism amounts to mob rule and mobs are stupid.  The mob at that Wal-Mart last Black Friday actually trampled a guy to death.  That’s right, people were so intent on trying to be among the first ones in they allowed somebody to die because he (a Wal-Mart worker) was in their way.  Of course it isn’t any one individual from that crowd’s fault, because, as pretty much anyone who has ever been with a large group of people can attest to, the crowd takes on a life of its own.

Depressions, or in this case recessions, seem to bring out the worst of the mobs and the loudest cries for populism.  People in America and abroad (especially this week at the G20 summit) are so mad and blinded by the current economic situation they are willing to do basically anything to let their wrath be known.  CEOs of big companies get death threats daily, even CEOs who didn’t receive bailouts from the federal government.  Bankers and businessmen in London have gotten so many threats ahead of the G20 event there that London Police are actually advising them to go incognito.

And mob rule doesn’t isn’t even consistant.  Mobs, unlike the people who constitute them, can’t think, can’t rationalize, can’t even remember.  All they can do is react.

For President Barack Obama, nearly every move since the moment he became the first black American to be elected President of the United States, has been tracked and incessantly labeled as ‘First Breath’, ‘First Day’, ‘First Week’, ‘First time hitting head while entering Marine One’.  While to some extent, these ‘firsts’ are tracked at the beginning of every President’s first term, and with the public attention given to Barack Obama, it is hardly unexpected that President Obama has received so much attention.  But with his first month only four days away, how is Obama doing as President?

For a Conservative, his time in office thus far has been a major disappointment.  In his first two weeks, Obama did take a few good steps in attempting to work with Republicans; but when he began to realize Republicans weren’t just going to lay down and accept every disagreeable Democrat demand, he decided to drop his facade and stopped trying to appease Republicans.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka the Spending package cooked up by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, is almost entirely a Democratic grab bag.  The Dems only included requests from three Republicans in the Senate (all House Republicans voted against), putting them just over the required super majority, and making them filibuster proof.  Convenient, eh?

Saturday Night Live may like to make fun of Republicans betting on regaining the majority through public outrage over this spending package, but Obama is making a very poor strategic choice here.  By starting his Presidency off on the wrong foot, he is virtually guaranteeing his time in office will be much tougher than Bush’s was.  For a man who will in all likelihood remain the best campaigner America has seen at least in the last century, he has shown extremely poor foresight for his prospects of reelection in four years and (more importantly) the chapter that will surely be written about him as the first black American as President.

2010 and 2012 should be far off however; for those of us involved in the 2008 election, it quickly became obvious that the electorate became extremely fatigued of the elongated election cycle.  For now, Republicans should stick to their principles on government and with any luck, the excessive [governmental] expansionist policies will be abandoned or at least slowed. 

I still wish the best for our President, but perhaps more so I wish that he would correct his course after taking us on a rocky first month.  After all, we all have to pay for it (literally).

Today, Barack Obama and the American people proved that in America anything really is possible and that any child, regardless of race, can realistically dream of becoming President.

I wish President Obama the best of luck as President of the United States.  The people in our country will always disagree about the decisions and policies of the President and Congress, but I hope we can live up to the true message of the 2008 campaign; we can disagree without being disagreeable.