Obsession persists. I’ll never stop being a radio guy, no matter how much listening “what’s on” goes down, and radio itself becomes as anachronistic as steam engines. This is why, five years ago, I wrote on Quora how cars saved radio when TV got huge in the 1950s. And now I have just learned, from one comment under that post, that AM (aka MW) radio is just fine in New Zealand. So i went and found a nice list of stations there (as of 2021), plus the World Atlas of Ground Conductivities, created in the 1990s. The Figure 40 map (left, above) shows that ground conductivity in the country ranges from 1 to 10 mhos/m, which is from awful to not-bad. And ground a 10 seems to be near the main cities (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch). Across the world, ground conductivity ranges from less than 0.1 mhos/m* to more than 30 mhos/m on land, and 4000 to 5000 mhos/m on salt water. Anyway, as we see from this map (right, above) RNZ (Radio New Zealand) has lots of coverage on the AM band (the green footprint). RNZ’s two signals for Wellington, coming from a mast in Titahi Bay, are both 158,000 watts, which is more than 3x the top power allowed for stations in the US.
*mho is a measure of conductivity, a reversal of ohm, which is a measure of resistance, named after this guy. mhos/m is mhos per meter.
Salience is salient. Though the latter may have peaked in 2016. I hear both used all the time on thinky podcasts. It’s a thinky thing.
Dots to connect. First, AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?, by John Battelle. Bill’s invention is prorata.ai. Hard to explain in brief, so read John’s piece. Second, Om Malik‘s Here comes the Internet of “tolls“. Third, Ezra Klein‘s podcast with Chris Hayes, titled Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics. Fourth, Kyla Scanlon‘s Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely. Read and listen to what Ezra, Chris and Kyla say about attention. Kyla especially. Fifth, dig Creative Commons‘ Signals kickoff. As a hint to where I’m going with these, consider the possibility that there are better ways to grow markets, to make and spend money, and to invest our interests and attention, than we will ever get from fixing advertising, charging tolls, or signaling the need to respect our money and our work—though all the ideas above might be good. Stay tuned for more.
One more way to rationalize barely being on Substack: Stephen Levy on Substack and subscription fatigue: Typically, Substack pros solicit a monthly fee of $5-10 or an annual rate of $50-150. Usually there’s a free tier of content, but journalists who hope to make at least part of their livelihood on Substack save the good stuff for paid customers. Compared to subscribing to full-fledged publications, this is a terrible value proposition. After leaving The Atlantic, celebrated writer Derek Thompson started a Substack that cost $80 a year—that’s one penny more than a digital subscription to the magazine he just left! (The Atlantic will probably spend $300,000 to replace him with someone else worth reading.) It doesn’t take too many of those subscriptions to match the cost of The New York Times, which probably has 100 journalists as good as Substack writers, and you get Wordle to boot.
I’ve been to all 50. Nate Silver hasn’t been to Oklahoma and three other states.
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