Neither candidate for president is even remotely suited for the office. And yet, one will occupy it. Neither is temperamentally suited, and, let's face it, neither is a good person. Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply strange man, and Hillary Clinton should be in jail, among other things. I could argue, successfully, that while Trump's transgressions are predominantly things he's said, Hillary's are things she's actually done, and that's far worse, but let's put that debate aside. Let's stipulate that the candidates are equally awful.
What to do? Here's what. Get over the fact that both candidates are each their own brand of reprehensible and come to terms with the fact that one of them will be running the country. Focus on the one thing that no one seems to be talking about: policy. Policy is the tie breaker.
Choose the candidate that best fits your policy preferences. It shouldn't be hard, because they are miles apart.
Do you want an activist Supreme Court or one that upholds the Constitution? The next president will decide that one for at least a generation.
What kind of tax code do you want? Hillary wants higher rates and more complexity, Trump is the opposite. On death taxes alone, Hillary wants to go to a whopping 65%, while Trump wants to eliminate them. That's an incredible difference that no one's focusing on. Do you want open borders or more rationalized, controlled immigration? How about identity politics with transgender bathrooms and balkanized campuses? Want to double down on that or push back? I could go on. There are huge policy differences between Trump and Clinton, bigger than in most presidential elections, and almost no one is even noticing. Everyone's caught up in the circus, including the media, who have been shameful. The debate moderators have been feeding into it as well. But policy-wise, we're talking about two very, very different paths forward. So...
Last week, I went to a large conference in San Diego, where
my company had a booth. What's interesting is that it was for an industry that didn’t
even exit three years ago. I mean nothing, zip, and now it’s huge. If you’re
a regular reader of this blog, odds are you don’t even know it exists.
I’m talking about game streaming.
What, no idea what that is? Allow me to give you the brief history.
What if someone had come to you, say, four year ago, and said they had
an awesome investment opportunity for you: they were starting a website where
you could go and watch other people play video games live.
I’ll tell you what you would have said: move along.Next idea,
please.I would have reacted the same.
Well, we all would have been wrong. Really wrong. A billion dollars wrong.
There is a company called Twitch that did exactly that. A
year and a half ago they sold to Amazon for a cool billion. That turned out to
be cheap, and over the last couple of years, an entire industry has grown up
around the idea. It turns out that people, mostly young and male, love watching video games. Many of the more popular “streamers,” the people who send
live streams of their games to Twitch, are minor celebrities and make six figures. I
saw some of them at the conference, and people were lined up to get selfies
with them.
Nearby, there were endless rows of booths with specialty streamer products
like microphones, chairs, and endless accessories. Shaq and Snoop were there, avec entourage, playing in a “celebrity vs. streamer” match.
The way it works is that “streamers” start playing a game
of, say, Call of Duty, and upload the action in real time to Twitch. Viewers
can watch and type in comments. The streamer can be seen and heard by everyone
in a little box in the corner. It looks like this:
Viewers can also make spontaneous donations to the streamer,
to which you no doubt say, pfft!,who would do that?
A lot of people, as it turns out. The largest donation to
date is $45,000. What do you get? Nothing, really, except maybe a shout-out
from the streamer. Seven seconds of derivative fame.
No one over maybe 35 can possibly get any of this. I don’t, and I’m in the industry.
Here's how much I don't get it. I went to an “unboxing” of a new game, called Breakaway, in a huge theater where I watched as the game was “revealed.” Two thousand people
shrieked and whooped around me with every detail. Two teams were introduced on stage, to much fanfair. They then competed in the first ever match, which
played out on a huge screen.
This was a good test because like me, none of the people in the theater were familiar with Breakaway. We were starting on equal footing, and I made a good faith effort to follow the action. Here’s what I saw: eight characters flitting
around in all directions with light and objects flying everywhere faster than I think anyone
could reasonably process. It was like watching chaos, and I could only follow small portions of the action, missing important developments elsewhere.
Well, apparently my visual processing is wanting, because the shrieking and whooping around me continued. Sometime it would reach audible crests when something happened that I invariably couldn't make out. I'm officially on the wrong side of the digital divide.
If you want to see the whole event, it’s here (the gameplay is towards the end):
You’re probably wondering what the heck I have to do with
any of this, so allow me to explain. If you’re not interested, now would be the time to move on to the Drudge Report.
My new company, LiquidSky (I am co-founder), does cloud
computing. Specifically, we let you rent a high-performance Windows PC in the
cloud which can be accessed from any device. Got a clunky old laptop? No need to replace it, we turn
it into a badass computer with monster bandwidth. Simply use your clunker
to connect to your “SkyComputer,” and we stream the experience to you fast
enough such that you can’t detect any latency. It looks and feels like your own
computer, but it’s not.
We think this will be a big deal, generally, because we’re
breaking the model of buying a new machine every few year as your old one
obsolesces. We let you keep everything up there, in the cloud, including your files and
programs. It’s pretty cool, I gotta say.
But for gamers, it’s particularly cool. Every new game requires
ever more demanding hardware specs, and gamers have trouble keeping up. A good
gaming PC can run $2,000, but then it’s struggling to keep up a year later.
With LiquidSky, gamers and others never need to update their hardware again. Heck, you can
even play Call of Duty on a phone, if you get our app.
At our booth, we had two laptops, loaded with two different
high-end games, which were connected to our nearest servers in San Jose, which
was 500 miles away. The gaming experience was flawless, and most people had
trouble believing it was possible. One even looked under the table, thinking we
were hiding a server there.
Nope.
Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I’d call it a subculture,
but that would be unfair. It’s too big. Gamers spent $91 billion last year. Did
you know that more people watched the League of Legends Championship Match last
year than the World Series?
