DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Stephen Glass was a star journalist in the late 1990s, until the news broke that he’d fabricated all or part of about half his high-profile articles.

A movie about writing magazine articles would be pretty drab. Fortunately, Shattered Glass is really about the main character’s obsessive need to be accepted, praised, the center of attention. Playing the lead role, Hayden Christensen demonstrates something not at all apparent from his better-known role — namely, that he can act. His performance is a master class in manipulation.

The best part of the DVD release is the 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephen Glass, filmed about five years after his unceremonious retirement from The National Review. Glass had apparently spent a couple years in therapy, and a couple more in law school, which in some circles could be considered an appropriate punishment for, well, just about anything. Curiously, the state BAR association had held up his law license due to ethics concerns.

What was striking about the interview was how well Christensen had nailed the portrayal. While Glass spoke, expressing remorse for what he had done, I could imagine Christensen delivering the same lines, and I couldn’t help but conclude that Glass was back to his old tricks — after having watched Christensen-as-Glass deliver lie after lie with whole-body sincerity, watching the real Glass say something that is almost certainly true was entirely unbelievable.

In the same interview, an ex-coworker from TNR called Glass a “worm.” That has to hurt.

Then again, Glass reportedly got a six-figure advance for his semi-autobiographical novel about … wait for it … a magazine writer who fakes his stories. Check out the reviews; sadly for Glass’ writing career, it got universally panned at Amazon. (You’d think the one thing he could really do well is write fiction!)

But the movie, and especially Christensen, is great, and at ~$6 the DVD is a steal.

Read more about the movie at IMDB.

I haven’t seen the Enron documentary (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) yet, but I’m eagerly following the early commentary:

• Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing describes the rank-and-yank system that guaranteed that 10% of the workforce would be fired annually (in an effort to continually cull the worst performers)
• A reviewer at Amazon comments on the lessons we could learn from Enron: “Currently our president is telling us that we should gamble our future on the stock market. That’s right, take all of your social security money and give it to guys like Ken Lay.”
• David Weinberger sums it up: “We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.”

The Chron published a nice post-mortem on the electric car industry: Owners charged up over electric cars, but manufacturers have pulled the plug

The story, in brief, is that the Califoria Air Resources Board passed a law in the 1990s that required all manufacturers to produce some small percentage of zero-emissions vehicles every year. Electric was the only way to achieve true ZEV.

The automakers turned out some great solutions, like GM’s EV1 and Toyota’s RAV4 EV. But the laws changed, and one by one the big automakers pulled the plug on their electric-car programs.

GM had not sold any of its über-sexy EV1s; rather, they’d leased them. One by one, as the leases expired, GM collected the vehicles — ignoring hundreds of requests from owners who wanted to extend leases or purchase the ZEVs outright — trailered them to the desert, and crushed them.

Is that the most astoundingly evil and stupid thing you’ve read all day? It gets better. Or worse, depending on how much oil-company stock you own. Here’s the explanation for GM’s abandonment of its EV1 program, as reported by the Chronicle:

GM stopped EV1 production, spokesman Dave Barthmuss said, because “after spending over $1 billion over a four-year time frame, we were only able to lease 800 EV1s. That does not a business make. As great as the vehicle is and as much passion, enthusiasm and loyalty as there is, there simply wasn’t enough at any given time to make a viable long-term business proposition for General Motors.

“If we’re really going to make a difference in environmental auto issues, we have to be able to see vehicles in the hundreds of thousands of units, instead of hundreds,” Barthmuss said.

Asked why GM didn’t just sell the cars to the clamoring motorists, as Ford finally did with the Rangers, Barthmuss said that “parts are no longer available.” Even though buyers might waive the right to sue GM over any design or production defects, he said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

The explanation smacks of greenscamming. Let’s dissect it.

Barthmuss claims GM was only able to lease 800 EV1s. How does he explain the long waiting lists of would-be EV1 owners? GM has been under-reporting the demand for electric cars ever since they cancelled the program.

Barthmuss implies that the few ZEVs they sold were not making a great enough impact on the environment, but he doesn’t explain how selling fewer would be an improvement.

Addressing the question of why GM recalled all 800 EV1s, which were only about 2 years old at the time, and destroyed them, Barthmuss claims, “parts are no longer available.” Even if this were believable, it’s irrelevant; I’m quite sure GM’s high-powered attorneys could craft an end-of-lease transfer agreement that releases GM from the responsibility of supplying parts in the future.

For that matter, what car has ever come with a guarantee that parts will always be available?

Moreover, if GM had done a better job of putting EV1s in the driveways of the folks who were waiting in line for them, there would be enough customers to support an aftermarket parts manufacturer.

Finally, Barthmuss said something that is true — but still fails as an explanation for GM’s awesomely wasteful and short-sighted ZEV-crushing. He said, “in today’s litigious society, there is no such thing as no liability.”

GM sells something like 8 million vehicles every year. The 800 EV1s they managed to lease constitute about one-one-hundredth of a percent of the total. How much liability could there possibly be? Compared to the cost of cancelling leases, collecting and dismantling and crushing the EV1s, and enduring the ongoing public relations challenge of explaining the whole mess, I can’t help but think someone slipped a digit.

Maybe I’m an optimist, to think that GM could spend a billion dollars and come up with something fun and safe and eco-friendly and life-affirming, something to pay back a little of the negative karma they’ve developed by selling the hell out of those road-mashing Escalades.

At least Ford learned from GM’s mistake.

DSW Shoe Warehouse lost control of 1.4 million customer records — credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, checking account numbers. A company spokesman said, “we greatly regret any inconvenience this may cause.”

LexisNexis reported that identity thieves stole or modified data on over 310,000 US citizens — names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers. A company spokeseman said, “we sincerely regret these incidents.”

ChoicePoint, whose sole mission is to collect data about you and your purchases, admitted having sold the personal data of at least 145,000 U.S. citizens to a group of fraudulent businesses that were possibly fronting a ring of identity thieves. The notification postcards sent to victims read, “we deeply regret any inconvenience.”

I have a message to DSW, LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, and any other companies with insufficient security procedures: regret doesn’t butter the biscuit.

If these examples prove anything, it’s that identity theft is a matter of when rather than if. Too many companies aggregate too much data, and have insufficient means of protecting it. It’s enough to make a guy move to the country and write a manifesto, or at least a bunch of privacy rants on a website. Pardon me while I grow a beard.

I’m considering using cash for purchases. I don’t know how e-commerce would work, but I’d be interested in anonymous payment mechanisms or one-time account numbers. I’d gladly trade the inconvenience for security.

In case you’re wondering why we even know about these incidents, you can thank the great state of California, which passed a law requiring companies and government agencies to notify California citizens if their private data has been accessed by unauthorized parties.

Coming out of the Santa Clara Westin, I was approached by an earnest women with a flyer in her hand. I usually avoid such solicitations, because people rarely want to give me anything of value — if they had anything valuable, they’d keep it for themselves, right?

This was a rare exception. The flyer proclaims:

Don’t give this hotel your home phone number, unless you like telemarketers.

Under a loophole in the federal “Do Not Call” legislation, businesses like Starwood are allowed to call people with whom they have an “existing business relationship.”

Every time you stay at a Westin, Sheratin, St. Regis, W or other Starwood hotel you’re giving them permission to call you about timeshares.

Assuming this is true, it illustrates one of the problems with “existing business relationship” clauses on privacy and marketing legislation.