New Income Stream For Teachers

One reason I am so anti-"intellectual" "property" "rights" is it so constricts creativity and distribution.  As copyrights is dying out, artists are learning to market their work themselves.  The guitarist for Dire Straights has a tour coming up.  Now, of course you can buy tickets from his website, nothing new there.  But you can also pre-order a recording of the live concert from his website as well.  

Sadly his website seems not up to the task, as people are complaining an inability to make a purchase.  Sigh.  Yahoo offers bulletproof ecommerce solutions for $30 a month but people still spend megadollars reinventing the ecommerce site wheel.

Now, this marketing in some ways is nothing new, because the Grateful Dead used this method to promote their record sales, that is the bootleg tape.

My guess it is audio only since the media is a USB stick, but one in the shape of the fellows famous guitar.

So, if you are giving a live seminar somewhere, record it, and sell it on your website, or pre-sell it. Make it an event.

Why?

I've been listening to this for over 40 years.  And there is absolutely no improvement, or help from any quarter, or a single plan on offer to make a change.  I guess USA must end, then things might improve. In the meantime, everyone is on their own.

Catalogs Are King

I was on the U Washington campus the other day so I dropped in at the offices of the once glorious ASUW Experimental College.   I mentioned to the nice receptionist I had taught for 25 years with them, but had to decline once they cut catalog distribution.  I mentioned in the heyday they put out 140,000 catalogs and got 7,000 enrollments each quarter, a 5% response rate, which is fantastic.

I asked how they were doing now.  She looked it up.  20,000 catalogs and 1000 enrollments.

Hmmm...  so 20k is 1/7th of 140k, 1k is 1/7th 7k.  Exact!

Still 5% response rate.

The paper catalog is king in noncredit continuing education.

Studying the Classics Today

Ted Turner studied classics at Brown and this aggravated his father...

If you are going to stay on at Brown, and be a professor of Classics, the courses you have adopted will suit you for a lifetime association with Gale Noyes. Perhaps he will even teach you to make jelly. In my opinion, it won't do much to help you learn to get along with people in this world. I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.

What a strange view of education, to help you get along with people.  The word means "to lead out.." (presumably the darkness...) to enlighten.  You learn to get along with people, or not, by age 5 or 6.  The point of an education is to be able to have a wider reference to draw on when navigating these treacherous waters.

I am reading Plutarch right now, The Makers of Rome, and the parallels to events today are remarkable.    I am convinced one reason the classics are now denigrated is that it in fact tips people off as to various power-scams, and the results.  Ignorance is victory for the powers that be.

Another thing I note is how these people would kill themselves rather than suffer ignominy.   Christianity takes bad times as having meaning, and even the idea of "time in the desert" as a purifying thing, a stark contrast in those times.

Ted was going to need that perspective he got from the classics later, when his father shot himself to death.  His old man could have used a classical education.