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Of all the things I could be doing, I couldn’t resist commenting on rosebudmag.com’s blog on the declining porn industry. {external} As you might’ve guessed, porn is a discretionary product, or more accurately, paid-porn is. With the rise of online streaming sites like Redtube, Megaporn (you didn’t hear this from me) coupled with growing stinginess among consumers, the porn industry is faltering. USA Today’s John Swartz says the evil is with the general belief that “porn should be free.”

However, that’s not the problem. The root issue here is that the porn industry’s model is antiqued. Most porn actresses are not professionally trained. Moreover, there is no branding or product differentiation between rivals. And thus, enabled by steaming technology, competition is becoming fierce with “home-made videos” entering the industry. Therefore, we need filmakers like Shockporn which are adopting a model of production where they market their porn free, and collect revenue by arranging royalties with streamers and embedded advertisments to brand their product. Fighting the trend towards free porn is futile. However, the demand for porn won’t be going anywhere.

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Patrick Pascal’s article regarding declining console sales does outline the fact that console sales has been dropping. But his argument, namely, to discard the drop as insignificant is a faulted. His statement “Although the sales of more consoles would definitively boost revenue of directs sales of consoles and sales of games.” is not accurate. Consoles like the PS3 which costs $800 to produce only sells at $300. So why would Sony sell a bluray drive, state-of-the-art graphics processors and a 9-core central processor at a deficit? The reason is because without selling extra units of the console, there WILL be no demand for games and bluray discs. Therefore his earlier statement “Although the market for video game consoles is evidently dropping from the previous years, but I do not consider that a detrimental  threat to the gaming market.” is also false as it would refute Sony marketing strategy’s very purpose. One of the reasons why the PS3 is so successful is because its subsidized consoles are drawing demand for the games that play on it. If console demands fall, games will invariably.

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The State Food and Drug Administration of the People’s Republic of China has ordered its branches nationwide to investigate the source of cooking oil. This came after professor He Dong Ping, of Wuhan Polytechnic University found huge widespread use of recycled cooking oil in Wuhan, as much as 1 in every 10 meals!

This is a clear example of over-competition. As many suspects, the abundant presence of restaurants in China are competing not over food quality, but price. As such, restaurants across the country side have set up networks with underground mills using equipment for recycle cooking oil into disel fuel to recycle cooking oil for kitchen use, which can cause cancer.

But the main culprit behind this is not the unscrupulous nature of the restaurant owners but the disenchanted farmers and restaurant workers who have taken the brunt of the food inflation in China. In my opinion, the government has to take steps to increase restaurant trasparency by scrutinizing procedural steps when issuing restaurant licenses, and meanwhile, tackling the main problem of food inflation by subsidizing Chinese farmers, who are amongst the world’s poorest.