Adventures in junking: Watch the birdie

My new favorite hobby is walking the dog on trash day. I always find something interesting in other people's garbage. Occasionally, it's interesting enough to bring home.

About a month ago someone left an Apple IIcPlus and a Macintosh SE on the sidewalk. I know! I sold them on Craigslist for $10 a piece, and found out later that I way undercharged for the IIcPlus.

A couple days ago, I was almost done with a walk and had found nothing worth bringing home. I was feeling a little sad about it when I wandered by a TV and a blender box. I wish I knew what to do with old TVs, because people junk them regularly in my neighborhood.

While Autumn nosed over that, I looked in the blender box, wondering if there was actually a blender in it. There wasn't.

It was incongruously full of mid-20th century cameras!



Here's a Brownie Hawkeye:



Here's an Argoflex Seventy-Five:


Here's a Kodak Duaflex III. (It has its original flash and instruction manual.):



Here's a bunch of plastic shoe inserts that were also in the box:



According to Internet, there's a community of photographers who use these to do Through the Viewfinder (TtV) photography, hooking up their digital cameras to take pictures through the viewfinders of these old cameras. I've clicked through a few galleries in Flickr, and I love that people are doing this! Hooray for people!

These cameras are not super-duper rare or expensive. But they might bring a few bucks. Plus, they're neat. If you know someone who might like to have one of these for a reasonable price, email me, k?

Messy simplicity in Craigslist

Good (longish) article from Wired on Craigslist: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess.

It's enduringly strange to me that people want to "improve" Craigslist. Here's a news flash to everybody involved in the Web except for Craig Newmark: People basically want something simple that works without having to learn anything new.

We don't necessarily want something beautiful that works. We definitely don't want something complex that only works if you understand the mindset of the programmer who coded it, and if you're willing to put up with a couple of things that don't work very well. Here's the order we want things:

1. Works
2. Simple
3. Other stuff you might think is neat

Craigslist is notably unconcerned with anything past 2 on that list.

A quote from the article:

It is the same reason that craigslist has never done any of the things that would win approval among Web entrepreneurs, the same reason he has never updated its 1999-era Web design. The reason is that craigslist's users are not asking for such changes.

"I hear this all the time," Buckmaster says. "You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don't you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right."

I frequently get crap from people for my pseudo-Luddite ways -- as though I prefer to do things the hard way. That is the entire opposite of what I want. What I want is a thing that works like I expect it to work, and some built-in accountability in case it doesn't. And I want to maintain some control over the process, and be able to extract myself from it when I'm done. The number of "simplifiers" that actually complicate is so much larger than people want to believe.

I hear people bitch about how their iPhone doesn't work like they want it to. I never hear anyone complain about an iPhone they don't even have. That seems deeply simple to me. And maybe to Craig Newmark?

Update: See the related article in the same issue of Wired, The Good Enough Revolution.

Lunchtime

Craigslist does not make as much money as it could. Like, $475M less than it could, sez the Wall Street Journal.

This article is from a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to put together what I had to say.

In Mr. Buckmaster's view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street's demands for continually "goosing profitability" and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster's view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we've retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there's a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: "It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. "Now, there's something wrong in the reasoning there," he admits. "You can't run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company" -- more points for understatement. "But still, it's a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible." As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist -- and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me -- sometimes seem to come close.

The article says Craigslist employs about 21 people, and makes $25M a year. It's safe to assume that money isn't split evenly among all the employees, but I bet nobody's doing badly either.

The idea that you look to be helpful, and make plenty of money (the Buckmasters live in a nice house, after all) but not as much as you could, is very like what I was talking about when I said we make the economy, the economy does not make us.

You don't take money just because you can. You take a generous amount and leave the rest, because there's just no good reason to have more.

Here's the new scheme: Rather than concentrate the money in a vicious oligarchy, a business takes a fair amount and leaves the rest for other businesses who are also taking a fair amount and leaving the rest. This increases the overall pool of viable businesses, which generates more work for more people, and lower costs on the goods and services that already exist (due both to suppliers taking less than they could, and increased demand).

It wouldn't even be communism. Capitalism would thrive because there would be less punishment for failure. You could recover from a business failure in a fraction of the time it takes currently. It seems counter-intuitive to capitalism as we know it that this would work, but it easily could.

The reason it won't is that a significant number of us won't buy into it. We don't even ALL have to buy into it. Some miserable number of us can still be greedy bastards. Maybe even a miserable majority can continue. As long as a significant minority are willing to run this way, we'll see the rewards.

There might not be any free lunches. But expensive lunches are entirely optional.