DV Tape vs. Flash Memory

I spent much of the weekend recording a new song and a music video to go with it. You can’t really record a song or make a video in one weekend; this was a quick rendition of a new song (“This Is the Moment”) for the purposes of a contest.

As I recorded the video, it struck me how archaic video tape is. I was working mainly with a DV camcorder that I bought new around 1999. The DV format uses about 26 megabits per second, so a one-hour DV (or “mini DV”) tape holds about 12 gigabytes of data, and for my quick music video, I recorded only about 5 gigabytes of video. Meanwhile, this year, a DV tape does not cost much less than a standard 32-gigabyte flash drive.

In consumer electronics stores DV was replaced by flash memory five years ago. You can still buy a DV camcorder, but it is hard to understand why anyone would. Consumers mostly do not need the mass storage capacity of a DV tape. They can record 10 or 20 minutes of video and transfer it to another device. And by now, even if you are recording hour after hour of video on location, you would feel more comfortable holding it in your hand on flash drives than in a few boxes of tapes.

DV is essentially the last video tape format. Sharper than VHS and smaller than virtually any earlier video format, it made sense as a medium for remote video capture. Pro video tape formats were already disappearing around the time DV was introduced, as hard-disk video proved to be so much easier to edit and archive.

Resolution is ultimately the problem with DV. Its 640-by-480 resolution quickly became a standard. A decade ago it was a little better than most of the video you would see on television. The resolution was adopted by the iPod and YouTube for a few years, and for the most part, when people refer to “standard definition” video they are talking about 640 by 480 and not the lower standards of older broadcast television. But the standards of television production and cable systems have moved upward in the last ten years, and even YouTube now encourages sharper video formats. My music video shot in DV is detectably grainy by today’s standards. (The false color and simulated overexposure in my video are production effects added in editing that aren’t related to the data limitations of DV, but the graininess of the picture is essentially the same as originally recorded by the camera.)

Not that anyone is complaining. I may as well continue to work in DV tape until I really need the advantages of high-definition video. The purpose of a music video is to hold people’s attention while they listen to the song. It is still possible to do that with a standard definition video.

This Week in Bank Failures

Politicians and pundits in London are seriously considering the question of whether the banking crisis was caused by the banks or by consumer borrowers. According to the logic of those who point the finger at consumers, if consumers had paid back all their loans, the banks would not have had the financial distress that led to the current crisis.

This assumption, I would hasten to point out, is not actually true. As one cabinet minister pointed out, the banks have to lend to somebody. If borrowers paid back all their loans, the banks would suddenly have virtually no interest income, and that would represent a far worse crisis than the banks are in now. Banks, as they normally operate, need borrowers to pay back loans, but not too quickly. It is an awkward position to be in even in the best of times.

And it points to a deeper question behind the current debate, and that is the issue of whether the current banking system is sustainable. If it is true that banks have to make loans at all times, whether creditworthy borrowers are willing to borrow or not, then large-scale loan losses and a subsequent banking crisis would seem to be inevitable whenever the economy’s collective creditworthiness falls below a certain threshold. The collective creditworthiness of the economy will inevitably go up and down, so banking crises can be expected to recur with some regularity. The obvious next question should be, how can the banking system be restructured so that it can fare better when aggregate creditworthiness declines? Part of the answer, I am sure, is that the banking system as a whole must be smaller and must not occupy such a central position in the global economy.

One bank failure was reported tonight. Security Bank, based in North Lauderdale, Florida, had $99 million in deposits and three branch locations. The OCC had issued a prompt corrective action order in March. Banesco USA is taking over over the deposits and purchasing the assets. It says it plans to keep the three branches open.

A Bumpy Ride in the Job Market

When I last looked at the job market, I noted a tightening in tech jobs, and indeed, there has been a flurry of hiring activity in the past six weeks and especially in the last three days. But this does not mean that everyone who has advanced technical skills is employed now. Far from it. The job market (the tech side of it, anyway) is tighter only because employers are still reflexively refusing to consider long-term unemployed candidates and the overlooked technical graduates of the last 14 years, those who, because of the state of the economy, have not been able to find work in the fields they were trained to enter. At the same time, millions of skilled technical workers are discouraged by the job market and are no longer checking the job openings on a weekly basis.

A tighter job market is just a first step toward a market in balance, and not a very big step at that. There are long-term problems in the job market that will not be worked out easily.

Among them: the hiring freezes of the last seven years have scared students away from many specialized and technical fields, and rightly so. It is absolute folly to borrow money to train for work in a field where virtually every employer requires job applicants to have two years of experience, and the majority are considering only workers who are currently employed. Meanwhile, the drumbeat of “STEM” public service messages encouraging teenagers to go into careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is not helping matters. Imagine the reaction of the student who responds to these messages about the “need” for workers with technical know-how and diligently studies for ten years, finally earning a degree only to look at the job market and find himself unemployable. It does not take many of these stories for the word to get around that “STEM” is a scam.

On the other side are the employers who now expect to interview 20 or more qualified candidates for every job opening. That, of course, is not the way a healthy job market functions. In happier times, by the time you were done interviewing the fifth candidate, you would worry that at least one of the first three had already taken another job. But consider the point of view of hiring officials who over the last decade have come to expect an endless pool of candidates. The hiring officials may have never seen any other kind of job market. It is no surprise if they are already having trouble adjusting. And if they are having trouble now, imagine how they will fare in a supposedly normal job market with unemployment one third of its current levels. If the current generation of managers were to be judged on their ability to hire and retain workers in an actually competitive job market, most would have to be replaced. And if not, then their companies may face an uncomfortably short future, as other companies hire away all of the most skilled workers.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that the long-term unemployed have not been sitting idle. Some of the business initiatives they have hatched in the last five years will, when they can finally get them funded over the coming decade, turn more than a few industries on their heads. Others have had a chance to study and gain a level of skill in a field that the long-term employed couldn’t possibly keep up with. Put this all together, and the job market is certain to be a bumpy ride for the next decade and longer.

The Slow-Moving Target

In April I read The Dilbert Principle, a 1996 book by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams that takes a critical look at corporate management practices. The really scary thing about reading this book is not how thoroughly a humorist can skewer the pretensions of the business world, but rather how accurate the critique remains nearly two decades later. The world may have turned upside down, but in the corporate world, not much has changed. Some of the office technology has evolved — for example, three-ring binders are not quite as common now, while cubicles have become ever smaller — but the changes haven’t been enough to change the way corporations function.

If twenty years have gone by and the changes are almost too small to see, that makes the corporate world a very slow-moving target for a potential competitor to hone in on. It can surely be out-maneuvered by anyone or anything. The fact that the corporate world’s share of the total economy has eroded by only a few percent in two decades should not be much consolation to those of us whose interests lie, in part, amid the sea of cubicles. It isn’t natural for anything of importance in the modern world to move this slow. When new faster-moving competition pops up — and it eventually will — the big, old, lumbering corporation won’t stand a chance.

Temporary, But Maybe Not

The temporary job market, or at least the part of it that I can easily observe, seems to be tightening up again. One measure of this is that “contract-to-hire” jobs are languishing. “Contract-to-hire” is a low-paying temporary job with the vague promise of a possibility of a permanent job offer after a year or so. It makes sense from the job-seeker’s point of view that these would be the first positions to go vacant. These “temporary, but maybe not” openings appealed to job-seekers who really wanted a permanent job, only because there were no permanent jobs to apply to. With an increase in permanent job postings, workers who want the stability and benefits that go with a permanent job will apply directly for the available permanent jobs.

“Temporary, but maybe not” is also not the right formula for workers who really want a temporary job, and the low pay offered with these jobs makes them unsuitable for those who just want the highest pay they can find.

It also makes sense when you take a broader view of the market that the most non-committal employers, those who can’t make up their minds, would have the toughest time in a tightening market, even as employers who are willing to commit to a business plan still find it easy to hire at will.

It sounds like a problem when businesses create job positions that they don’t fill, and in a way it is, but it is also a favorable sign for the economy. It creates the possibility of a more rapid expansion in employment down the road.

Update, a day later: See a more thorough discussion of the sudden imbalances in hiring from a human resources point of view in the article “Recession Fallout in HR: Why Aren’t Hiring Managers Getting the Message?” by Tim Sackett.