08:48 – We decided not to continue our subscription to Acorn TV beyond the 30-day free trial. There’s just not enough content there to make it worth our while. It’s not the price, which is only $3/month or $30/year. It’s the hassle of figuring out what’s on when on Acorn and keeping track of what we’ve watched on Acorn streaming versus what we’ve watched on Netflix streaming. If Acorn had any sense, they’d offer to merge their content with Netflix’s in return for a small monthly license payment, maybe $0.10/month per Netflix subscriber. Acorn would make more money without having to run its own streaming operation, and Netflix’s catalog would improve. My guess is that Acorn hasn’t done that because they have the rights to stream the material themselves but not to sub-license it. None of this would be a problem if the powers that be would just rationalize copyright, reducing it to one year at most and then putting everything into the public domain.
Colin has a new little friend. He now likes to visit Sophie, Kim’s five-month-old Yorkshire Terrier puppy. The two of them go tearing around in circles in Kim’s front yard, with Sophie chasing Colin and Colin trying to herd her. She’s fast for a little girl. The expression on his face the other day was priceless when Sophie ran between his front legs, underneath the length of him, and back out between his back legs. At first, Kim was afraid Sophie would get hurt playing roughly with Colin, but he’s very careful not to step on her. She’s about the size of Colin’s head, maybe four pounds or so, but she’s fearless. Periodically, the action stops when Colin goes into his herding crouch. Sophie walks over to him and they touch snouts. Then she reaches up and licks his nose.
11:30 – I see that the Portuguese government is on the verge of collapsing, which calls into question the Troika’s continuing bailout. If Portugal, like Italy, is unable to form a new government quickly, it’s likely that Draghi’s promised unlimited backstopping of Portugal’s sovereign bond yields will not be honored, thereby putting Portugal quickly into default. Germany is fed up with paying the bills of the southern tier, and at some point will simply refuse to continue doing so. Merkel wants the election this autumn out of the way first, but her voters are growing increasingly restless. At some point, the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down. It’s possible that Portugal will cause that to happen, but I think it’s more likely that Italy will be the straw that breaks the camel in half. An increasing number of economists are betting that Italy will be the first eurozone country to depart the euro, although Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, and Slovenia are also likely candidates. Greece, of course, is hanging onto the euro for dear life. Without the euro, Greece is completely toast. Of course, with the euro, Greece is also completely toast.
“None of this would be a problem if the powers that be would just rationalize copyright, reducing it to one year at most and then putting everything into the public domain.”
I just wish they’d put dead stuff, especially games, out of copyright. Use it or lose it.
Between about 1997-2002 I was involved in the USENET group alt.fan.dune and saw discussion about the fate of the Dune Encyclopedia, published in 1984 with Dr Willis McNelly (1920-2003) as editor. The author of the Dune saga, Frank Herbert, may peace and blessings be upon him, was long gone but Dr McNelly was still alive and participated occasionally. He and Frank had been friends, but while the Dune saga was still in print his encyclopedia was not. People were desperate to get a copy and on and off there was talk that someone would scan their copy and put it up on the Internet. McNelly furiously opposed this, saying that such people were stealing his work and livelihood. (He wanted to get the encyclopedia reprinted but Frank’s heirs wouldn’t allow it.) This is certainly a case where a book should have been placed in the public domain.
Of course, I’ve mentioned my favourite MMORPG: City of Heroes/City of Villains. Ownership changed hands several times and in August 2012 the execrable NCSoft decided to shutter it. Supposedly there were negotiations with various companies, including Disney, to take it over but nothing happened. The plug was pulled on 30th November and that was that. People have talked about reverse engineering the game and re-launching it, and NCSoft have apparently warned that they’ll sue if that happens, even though they themselves are not using it and the way the game was ended destroyed most of its value from a commercial point of view. (It’s said that they didn’t want a rival for other games that they weren’t shuttering.)
FWIW, I’ll buy another NCSoft game about the same time hell freezes over.
Re: Colin and Sophie
Photos, please!
More losses in Afghanistan. Hello, Obama…send in the drones…la la la…send in the drones! Media doesn’t give a shit since it’s Obummer.
http://news.sky.com/story/1074978/afghanistan-taliban-kill-six-americans
A “particular” gun store in CT gets it’s license pulled. The ATF has to announce that, but not why. Of all the gun shops in CT (and the country) why was this one investigated and pulled? Duh.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/05/us-usa-shooting-connecticut-idUSBRE9340WZ20130405
“Media doesn’t give a shit since it’s Obummer.”
And continued utter silence from the libtards and progs who voted him and the Mooch into office. But man did they scream when the two Bush regimes were running this criminal fascist corporate oligarchy! And rest assured that if Mittens had gotten in, they’d be screaming themselves hoarse right now. Hypocrite scum.
“…why was this one investigated and pulled? Duh.”
And how much ya wanna bet the original sale of the weapon to Mrs. Lanza was perfectly legal and above-board? They’re just making an example and being pretty damned blatant about it; the same gang that ran guns to Mexican narco-terrorist gangs in yet another effort to tarnish and stain legit firearms owners in this country. Scum, plain and simple.
Some good news, though, from the great Lone Star State:
“… Coplen also plans to arm an entire neighborhood in Houston that currently has a lot of crime, and use that as a case study to find out what happens to the crime rate after residents have been armed and trained.”
http://lewrockwell.com/rep4/guns-for-the-poor.html
Some of the folks in that picture need to be jogging and hiking and suchlike and laying off the enchilada special plates. But other than that, good deal! Frosting on the cake is that we can later recruit these folks for our mercenary militia that take back the country after the oligarchs have been strung up or guillotined.
“She’s fast for a little girl. The expression on his face the other day was priceless when Sophie ran between his front legs, underneath the length of him, and back out between his back legs.”
Photos, or it didn’t happen… 🙂
One of us is going to be surprised here, because I do not believe any American who has not actually lived in Europe understands how very strongly all those nations,—from least to most productive,—want a union at whatever the financial cost. They paid the price of nearly an eternity of what amounts to civil wars. You all will be surprised if the EU survives; I will be surprised if it falls apart—regardless of the financial cost. The money is less dear than the lives of approaching a thousand years of physical strife.
Moreover, that American spirit of every man for himself, is definitely not the way of life in Europe, and that is why socialism dominates. In the final analysis, the Germans DO care about the Greeks, the Italians care about the Cypriots, and they all care about Spain and Portugal. And regardless of what rhetoric comes out of the UK, I never met a single Brit that did not believe they should be united with Europe—and my total time spent in the UK amounts to years, although I did not live there longer than 3 months consecutively.
This idea that Germany, or any other country, is going to dump their brothers and let them flounder to extinction is an American-inspired fantasy, which who knows how such disregard for other human beings got started. It is not in the European psyche and a lot of time has passed and it has not happened yet.
Chuck, I hope you’re right, but my concern is that the situation in Europe is going to get worse before it gets better. I understand that the European people really want to be part of a unified block. However what little I’ve heard leads me to believe that things in Greece is already very bad.
My question is are Europeans still going to feel this way if the situation gets Wiemar Republic bad in Europe?
There is no economist I read, who has had a successful track record of assessing what is going on, who believes things will get as bad as the Weimar—and again, the Weimar situation, same as the US Great Depression, has a much worse reputation than it actually was. That image of people taking wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread, was just that: an editorial cartoon imagining such a plight—it did not actually happen. Now there are old people who swear it did, but there is nothing in news reports of that day which confirmed that it did. Our landlord, whose grandparents lived through the Weimar times, scoffed at those reports, and pointed me to the news summaries of life in those times—written in those times—and there was nothing of the sort reported. Moreover, withdrawals of funds were limited by the government, so it was impossible to get a wheelbarrow full of money from the bank. It does go to show how a visual image leaves the strongest imprint of any of the senses on our minds.
I am in regular contact with my relatives in Europe. No one has lost their job; they are experiencing a recession, but life is moving on. May not be the same in Greece, where people may be getting lean, but nobody is starving, yet.
One thing is significantly different in this era than in previous times: economies are no longer run by politicians; they are run by central banks. This actually represents a huge difference, because, as we are seeing, there is now the banking wherewithal to actually appropriate depositor’s funds, and politicians are powerless to intervene. IMO, Europe can go a long, long way yet by seizing the funds of depositors.
It is a whole different ballgame compared to financial troubles even as recently as the 1980’s.
Scottish fiction and SF author Iain M. Banks is dying of cancer, probably has less than a year to live:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1200129
http://www.orbitbooks.net/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-iain-banks/
I’m gutted. He’s such a great author, and I like his Culture SF novels about as much as I like Frank Herbert’s Dune.
And regardless of what rhetoric comes out of the UK, I never met a single Brit that did not believe they should be united with Europe
I’m unsure what’ll happen with the EU. I think it could plausibly survive, like Chuck said. However, I dispute this particular claim. I’m British, and I know loads of people who don’t want union with Europe.
The entire history of the UK has been one of standing apart from Europe.
And remember that Chuck was the one who pooh-poohed the idea that Greek sovereign bonds were unsafe or that Greece would default. I encouraged him to invest all his money in Greek sovereign bonds, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t.
IIRC, over the past few *decades,* the prevailing sentiment among ordinary Brits has been ‘the less we have to do with the EU the better!’ More often the sentiment has been a lot stronger and more vociferous than that, hostile, even. So I’m not sure who the Brits are who actually believe their country should be *united!* with the EU; the only ones who could possibly fit that description are the Brit equivalents of our own over-mis-educated libtards, academics, media imbeciles, and of course the minions of Her Majesty’s imperial State.
Bad nooz from Oz (here is an exercpt; I’d give the link but the site is messed up for some reason this AM; our correspondents there probably have the straight bumf:)
“Though Australia’s national balance sheet is comparatively quite strong, the government has been running at a net deficit for years… and they’re under intense pressure to balance the budget.
The good news is that Australia now has a goodly number of investor-friendly immigration programs designed to bring productive foreigners into the country, similar to the trend we’re seeing across Europe.
On the flip side, though, the Australian government has just announced new rules which penalize citizens who have responsibly set aside savings for their own retirement.
Any income over A$100,000 drawn from a superannuation fund (the equivalent of an IRA in the United States) will now be taxed at 15%. Previously, all such income was tax-free.
The really offensive part about this is that the government is going to tax people’s savings ‘on both ends,’ meaning that people are taxed on money they move INTO the retirement fund, and now they can be taxed again when they pull money out. ”
(from Simon Black’s “Sovereign Man” email today)
Let me correct that for a second time: I have never said Greek bonds—or any European bonds—were a good investment. NEVER. So my not investing in them is no surprise. Nevertheless, Europe will survive. They have cost themselves dearly by not guaranteeing the bonds of all member states. That would have been cheap at the outset, and would have prevented the current situation. The alternative they chose has not been cheap, nor will be guaranteeing those bonds now. But it is the least expensive of all alternatives. Stupidly, they refuse to do that, and are insuring a very difficult future.
My family and friends in the UK admittedly have constituted a small cross-section, but one would think that I would have come across at least one person who did not favor full EU membership. Likewise, my son spent a year in Edinburgh and found most people there favorably inclined to joining fully with the EU. My relatives in England were elderly, and passed on while we were in Berlin, so I have not been there since the EU’s woes have surfaced. However, it is not surprising that many folks there are more wary now. Still, the fact remains that Eastern-bloc countries are lined up to join, in spite of the current situation.
I don’t find it surprising that many residents of Scotland and their big city, Edinburgh, might have made noises about joining up with the EU, as the English have traditionally given them short shrift on several levels; perhaps they dream that the Brussels bureaucrats will treat them better. Also no surprise that the former Captive Nations of the Balkans would see brighter skies in Brussels. But your rank-and-file Brit, from all that I have read and heard over the DECADES, and I have friends and relatives there, would gladly take a huge dump on the concept of union with the EU.
Of course course the bonzes of Brussels will make countries keep voting until they get it right.
Polls have shown that, if there were a referendum on (UK) membership, 50% would vote in opposition and 25% in favour. Younger people are more likely to be in favour. These figures agree with my experience: people of my parents’ generation are a lot more cynical (perhaps rightfully so!) than people of my generation.
I admire EU legislation on accountability, openness, software accessibility, human rights, etc. To my knowledge, this legislation has been useful for fighting our governments’ encroachments on all those things. On the other hand, I hate the Common Agricultural Policy and I think it would be foolish to join a single currency. Given recent events, I oppose full UK membership. If the member states were doing better, I’d be ambivalent.
Your opposition as a young person as knowledgeable as yourself, says a lot. We’ve had NAFTA and GATT for this country and both have proved to be disastrous for regular working and middle-class people, as I and others believe was the intent all along, while they kept trying to tell us how great it would be.
I would also support any moves toward openness and accountability but as we have seen here, those are often promised but almost never enacted, as witness our current administration.
Well, neither NAFTA nor GATT have been complied with honestly by the US; as in all its treaties, the US does what it damn well pleases, while telling the others to eff-off. Ask Canada about forests and logging and Mexico about trucking.
As a totally disconnected party, I favor UK being a full member of the EU, because I think the UK would push the EU in proper directions. It is not so much that the UK needs the EU, as the EU needing the UK. I say that in the same way I oppose the Libertarian view that the US should exit the UN. The UN needs the pressures the US brings.
The bottom line here is that—for whatever reason—the world, in every aspect of life, is moving towards massive conglomeration of everything into a few entities. I don’t think it is yet clear whether that is better than what we had, but in the US, it certainly has led to the shedding of jobs that appears to have sped up productivity increases dramatically. IMO, it has also diminished the usefulness of the products and services offered. With the recent passing of Roger Ebert, I was reminded that both he and Gene Siskel maintained that movie content output has been progressively worse than since they began their jobs in the mid-’60’s, because there has been so much fine-tuning applied to the whole process that out-of-the-box creativity has disappeared.
One example is the guy who organized seminars for writers. He analyzed the plots of the most successful movies of all time, and reduced them to about 30. He taught that scripts revolving around those 30 were easier to sell to studios and involved less risk to financial backers. Thus, for the last couple decades, 99% of all movies coming from Hollywood are variations of those 30 plots.
As time goes on, we are moving towards living like chickens in poultry factories, with all things limited and refined to options and pablum that remove everything that makes life rewarding. But staying out of the EU is not going to provide a better future for either the UK or the EU, IMO. It is totally opposed to the direction existence is taking.
Then, why, oh why, should we participate in, and support, the continued global conglomorization if the quality of just about everything in life suffers as a result??? Stay out of the EU, the UN, NAFTA, GATT, MacDonald’s, Walmart, and quit paying for and watching shitty movies and tee-vee shows!
As for the latter, and popular music, I can heartily and vociferously testify that it has all sucked, with very few exceptions, since circa 1975; I am supported, in terms of the music, by such luminaries as Larry Coryell and Merle Haggard, who independently of me, picked that same year, coincidentally the same year I got off active duty with Uncle. I came back to fucking disco and country-western had become pop/rock.
That is like a boycott. My observations have convinced me that boycotts are almost never effective. Only fundies boycotting Disney seems ever to have worked, and I am not sure why, but I do not believe it was because they caused Disney any significant financial harm. My parents always favored boycotts, but the bottom line was that they only inconvenienced themselves.
I would rather use persuasion. I know that I have convinced others to vote Libertarian, so I have made a difference. But I do not believe my boycotts have ever accomplished anything but inconveniencing myself. Perfect example—not shopping on Sunday. I don’t feel strongly about the issue, but all stores were closed on Sunday when I was a kid—even gas stations. Same in Germany; only stores in train stations are allowed to be open. In fact, when we first arrived there, no stores (except restaurants and bars) were open past 6:00pm on any day of the week. It was several years before that changed. So I CAN live without shopping on Sunday or past 6:00pm. Jeri was dead-set against Sunday openings, because she was working retail raising a toddler by herself when blue laws in California were banished. Even though the proponents said nobody would be forced to work on Sunday, she eventually was forced to—after just a few months. She found a state job with daycare in the same building, so it turned out to be a better situation, but she would not have left the retail job had she not been forced to work Sundays.
So for the rest of her life, she refused to shop on Sunday. Didn’t do a damn bit of good for the issue, and inconvenienced me, but I went along with her, because she felt so strongly. Now that she is gone, I shop on Sunday if I need to. My not shopping is not going to close stores on Sundays or reinstitute blue laws. (What baffles me is why car dealerships are still closed on Sundays, after decades of everything else being open.)
I just do not see that anything is improved by opting out of anything to ‘send a message’. The message never gets through.
Agreed that life in general is not as satisfying on any level as in the past, but even I have to agree that alternative political systems would be worse. My not voting is not going to improve my lot or anybody else’s, and voting just might help, so I still do it.
I remember when Sunday was a nice, peaceful, quiet day in semi-rural, small-town Maffachufetts; the only sounds were birds in the morning and afternoon, and the occasional small plane flying overhead. No traffic to speak of, after the morning’s church services. Thank God that’s been done away with now and the day is just like any other damn day of the week and even worse, actually, and the retailers and corporations can rake even *more* shekels. Up here, if one does not travel into the city (ha, ha, 8k population) one can avoid all that crap and still have a fairly nice peaceful Sunday. This really is Tiny Town on the Bay.
I will vote in strictly local elections and go to town meetings; that’s it, period, from now on.
And boycotts at least work two ways: one, you know that at least YOU do not participate in or buy whatever. And two, your example can educate others.
So I also boycott most music made after 1975 if I can manage it and have largely gone back to classical anyway. Most movies suck nowadays and we’ve gone back to older stuff and some foreign flicks if they’re not too blatantly communist, like all the ones they show at the “art” theater in the state capital downtown up here. I think “The General” was the last good movie I saw there.
Watched Kevin Spacey’s “House of Cards” and it was pretty good and entertaining, but man, that boy really chews up the scenery, as they say; we like the Brit version a lot better, however.
Fifties here this week and Mrs. OFD off to Lost Wages for a gig; home alone again, with the wild women Bob has no more use for and/or wore out, drugs, and booze, of course.
Chuck wrote:
“I favor UK being a full member of the EU, because I think the UK would push the EU in proper directions. It is not so much that the UK needs the EU, as the EU needing the UK.”
Oh come on!
Let me rephrase that for you:
“I favor atheists/agnostics/free thinkers/skeptics being a full member of the fundamentalist/creationist Baptist churches, because I think the atheists/agnostics/free thinkers/skeptics would push the fundamentalist/creationist Baptist churches in proper directions. It is not so much that the atheists/agnostics/free thinkers/skeptics needs the fundamentalist/creationist Baptist churches, as the fundamentalist/creationist Baptist churches needing the atheists/agnostics/free thinkers/skeptics.”
The Brits were perfectly right to keep the Pound and avoid the Euro. Without political union I don’t see how a single currency will work. You always get freeloaders and people who think they can rort the system.
You always get freeloaders and people who think they can rort the system.
Amen brother! I want a social safety net. I do not want a social hammock.
According to our current commander-in-chief, a social hammock is just fine and actually preferred by him. And I am sure that he understands the word rort which I do not have clue what it means.
Hm. You seriously don’t know what a rort is? I notice that it’s flagged by my browser (FF) as a spelling error, so perhaps it isn’t an American word…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rort
‘Rort is a term used in Australia and New Zealand to mean a scam or fraud.[1] It is commonly used in relation to politics or a financial impropriety, particularly relating to a government programme. First recorded in 1919 as slang used by the NSW Labor Party,[2] it is a derivative of the older rorty a 19th-century London slang word—meaning “fine; splendid; jolly; or boisterous”.[3] The term is also used as a verb to mean the act of defrauding, as in, “He rorted the system.”‘
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/uk-style-disability-job-rort-crackdown-unlikely-in-australia/story-fn7kifwb-1226615235743