Monthly Archives: August 2023

August 22, 2023 · 20:51

Turning the pages

This is Aterm we use, sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect and sometimes literal. We all do it and I am no exception. Yesterday I had a detour and the detour kept on going in more and more directions, seeing more and more new ideas based on the old premise and that is not where it ended. In all honesty, part of the ideas flowed from the ideas of John Spilsbury (always look back to old masters when you get stuck) and he was no exception. There were more parts connected to this, but that is for another day. Whilst doing this my mind wandered towards the CBC article ‘Every developer has opted to pay Montreal instead of building affordable housing, under new bylaw’ (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/developers-pay-out-montreal-bylaw-diverse-metropolis-1.6941008), yes avoiding doing the right thing by paying the fine is the way the greed driven work. In the end it is always about the bottom dollar. I think the best quote comes from Mel Brooks in History of the world part 1 with “Leader of Senate – The Roman Empire: All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote? – Entire Senate: Fuck the poor!” This pretty sums up the bulk of all real estate developers. And the picture isn’t pretty. Especially as the (a speculated view) the fines are so low that these developers will continue to ‘Fuck the poor!’. The article gives us “Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one. The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet” and when you consider the added “Those fees (read: fines) have so far amounted to a total of $24.5 million — not enough to develop a single social housing project, according to housing experts”, as such I see the math as “there have been 150 new projects by private developers, creating a total of 7,100 housing units” giving us a fine of $3380 fine per housing unit and the housing units go well over a million each, sometimes well over 3 million, as such the fine is a joke and it is that yoke that hits Valérie Plante in the face. Now, normally I will not care. I do not live in Montreal, I am not Canadian, but this setting will be copied by developers towards the UK and Australia making their wealth a lot more and gained quicker. As an example I would like to raise the paperback setting of the London Administration with their Powerhouse. So how many became social housing? The answer is laughable and this will run over to Australia as well (perhaps it already has) and these administrations are seemingly a joke. I have been waiting for 10 years for a decent affordable apartment and the waiting list is nowhere in sight at present. So whilst the CBC presents us with “The city of Montreal had promised in 2021 to release the two-year results of the bylaw by early 2023, but hasn’t done so. Ensemble Montréal says it compiled the data itself, using the city’s open data. It is calling for Plante’s administration to disclose what it plans to do with the five new plots and $24.5 million.” As such I have no real hopes that anything will be achieved and I fear that a similar setting will make matters worse in the United Kingdom and Australia. New Zealand has a tight grip on exploding greed, as such they are in a much better position than any of the three others. Even as Australia might be in the least problem of the other two, it does have issues and the UK is in a really bad shape as it is allowing investment groups to buy out complete suburbs at present. CNBC gave us in February ‘Wall Street has purchased hundreds of thousands of single-family homes since the Great Recession. Here’s what that means for rental prices’ and it is not merely the US, as I wrote about it in the past, the UK (London Specifically) is a great way for these players to store their wealth and watch it safely mature, in the end we all need a roof over our heads and the boasted returns for London are too good to pass up and I personally believe that places like Toronto and Vancouver are about to meet those same returns, especially as we see events unfold now in Montreal. So how much longer until these places as well as Sydney are set in a similar stage? I will let you figure it out, but the numbers aren’t looking good if you are in a shifting position of housing. And matters are getting worse. In the last 10 years in Sydney things went from bad to disastrous and I reckon that more cities are on that list of shifting tides. And this amounts for the Commonwealth and the EU metropolitan pressure points. Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Madrid and Rome being prime examples. Weirdly enough Paris escaped the stage. If Le Monde is to be believed with ‘‘Adapting the existing’: Paris’ plan to reach 40% affordable housing by 2035’ they could be ahead of the curve by a massive amount. I wonder if Australia, Canada and the UK have looked into this as a possible solution. Not sure if it is possible (as I am completely ignorant of building codes in these places) but it is a setting I had not seen before as far as I could tell.

So enjoy the week and consider your rent, and how much it could go up this year when it is owned by a Wall Street player, a fearful page turner is ever there was one.

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August 21, 2023 · 22:11

A mindful detour

I made one hell of a detour today, it was a virtual one. So my shoes were spared the support they would have needed otherwise. It all started thinking back to an event (some time ago) when I was making a muslim friend the compliment that his beard was so pronounced, that it was the envy of every garden gnome in the state. This got me thinking of a new kind of garden gnome, one based on Muslims Clerics. The reason for that was two fold, on the one side there were the ‘empty’ gardens and lawns in Dubai Jumeirah, the other was a video of gardens in Dubai featuring Smurfs. The thought evolved from that and now we get to the good part, a additional (or new) theme part based on the Dutch Efteling. Dubai has a few theme parks, but Riyadh not that much and I believe that the Efteling part would play nice. Not a copy but one based on the stories of 1001 Arabian Nights and other fairy tales. You see I remember being young one (yes I was young once) and I must have been between 5-7 when I went the first time to the Efteling and I saw the story of the Fakir and the gardener and I thought it was magic. 

I could stare at that part for hours, it was so magical. The analytical side of my now can clearly see the elements of the show and it is not magic anymore, but whenever I think of that show I once saw well over half a century ago still fills me with nostalgia. I think that if Riyadh wants to up its tourist setting, the idea that such a themed setting is in a place like a 400-metre-high, cube shaped skyscraper named Mukaab. Not all of it, but over the first 3-5 floors giving the shops the incentive to show more, ‘lure’ in the family is not the worst idea. And the size of that cube implies that there is plenty of space for a lot of things. The lower (up to) 5 floors with souks, shops and food-stands that could compete with the Dubai Global Village. 

The only way is to be unique and there is no real timeline, as such giving a place like the Mukaab that kind of visibility could draw in nearly every YouTube travel influencer on the planet. Of course there are other places where this could be done. And I believe that Saudi Arabia needs to do its share to call in the people they are hoping to call in and why be like every American theme park? 

It might only have 4 water rides and 6 rollercoaster, but it snatched the coveted theme park price away from Disney in 1972, 1992, 1997, 2005, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. It got the best theme-park in the world ribbon (by theme park insiders) in 2017 and 2018, a Pomme d’Or and several other mentions. As such the Dutch Efteling is a great choice. I have visited that place well over half a dozen times over a period of close to 50 years and I have always had a good feeling about that place. As such it should interest people like Ahmed Al Khateeb (Minister of Tourism of Saudi Arabia) As Riyadh grows, so will the need to entertain local and international families and I believe that a place like the Efteling had set out its version of excellence going back to 1952. The fact that it has accumulated that many awards in its lifespan should be a good reminder that Disney is not the only entertainer in town and there is place to grow a unique form of entertainment. There is nothing wrong with the Dubai IMG Worlds of Adventure and it looks awesome and perhaps one day I will see it for myself, but it is not the only way. Even now I still have fond memories (and only fond memories) of the Efteling and as I live on the other side of the planet, I cannot go there at present, but that yearning is still in me. That place was that awesome. Even now, you might think that you are too old for fairy tales, but your mind will react to seeing that setting as long as you live. I have to accept that people like Anton Pieck made it special and I accept that, but when you realise that something like that has please people for well over 50 years, it is not the feeling of a mere fashion setting, it was a form of excellence we seldom see. 

Now consider one of the true treasures of the Efteling. The Anton Pieck Diorama. Not a simple diorama, but one that is 700cm by 400cm by 200 cm in size. It has trains, buildings, people and the moving trains make it amazing. It opened in 1971 and has been working ever since. What is nice to know is that Märklin for many years manufactured the Minex steam trains specially for Efteling. A Minex train on that big a diorama. Now consider that setting of excellence in a Diorama that has a Middle East setting. Not just trains, but moving caravans, cars and all those buildings giving you a view on the past in a fantasy setting. That is what could draw in the crowds towards Riyadh and optionally to a place like the Mukaab. I wonder if anyone has looked into this in Riyadh (or Dubai for that matter). 

Well that was my Monday being active. Time to make some food and snore like a sawmill and in western Canada enjoy Monday, you still have all day to get through.

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August 20, 2023 · 22:20

Look back in anger

We all face moments when we sort of lose it. I had that yesterday when I saw an article by the CBC. I learned a long time ago that I should not write from a setting of anger (it never ends well for the writer), so I parked the article until now and now is the time. I am still angry, but a lot less so, as such I feel certain I can give the little bastard tit-for-tat.

The article (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-war-us-cluster-bombs-1.6940961) gives us ‘U.S. provided Ukraine with cluster bombs to fight Russia. Survivors say they should never be used’ as a sentiment I cannot disagree, yet in this case Nick Logan (the bastard in question) is giving us a very one-sided non-informing setting. One view given to us is “Russian use has been extensive while Ukrainian use has been more limited. Neither Russia nor Ukraine are signatories of the of the 2008 convention limiting the use of cluster munitions”, and that is not all.

Another source gives us “Although the Russian side denies accusations of using cluster munitions in residential areas, international and non-governmental organisations have reported such attacks. By the beginning of April, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies were reporting cluster munition shelling in Kharkiv, Sumy, Kyiv, Donetsk, Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. By July 1, Cluster Munition Coalition reports shelling in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson and Chernihiv regions. Testimony from independent weapons experts confirmed that a number of cluster rounds were dropped on residential buildings and civilian infrastructure.” This comes as an amalgamation of sources which includes the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, the Guardian and the Monitor. As such, why is (what I regard to be a little shit like) Nick Logan diminishing the actions by Russia and mentioning Russia 16 times, but extremely often as a ‘victim’ all whilst Russia demolished most of the Ukraine, including Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson and Chernihiv regions and pretty much all of these regions whilst utilising cluster munition. Why is the article by Nick Logan falling short there? Russia is getting what it has served the citizens of Ukraine and that is the first thing that Nick Logan should have reported on. I get the sentiment that cluster munitions are horrible. War is horrible, yet the Ukraine did not start this and having someone making nice with Russia to THIS degree has no business being a reporter for CBC or a reporter for any Commonwealth nation for that matter. So when I look back in anger, I look towards the facilitation of a terrorist state by too many media sources. For that matter, how many corporations are still doing business with Russia? How many are Canadian (or Commonwealth for that matter) and how much longer will we allow people like Nick Logan making BS reports whilst facilitating for some terrorist state? According to several sources (see above) the Russians started using cluster munition in 2014. It was in July 2023 when we got told “John Kirby confirmed later on Thursday that Ukrainians forces have begun using the munitions.” That is almost 9 years later, but the CBC did not give us that, did they? They merely gave us “Police look at fragments of Russian rockets, including cluster rounds, that hit the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Dec. 3, 2022. In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia had a ‘sufficient stockpile’ of cluster munitions, warning it ‘reserves the right to take reciprocal action’ if Ukraine uses the controversial weapons provided by the U.S.” So, how deceptive was that part? How much reporting do we see that Russia used these cluster munitions from 2014 onwards? 

As such the next part is for Brodie Fenlon (editor of CBC). Brodie you have some fixing to do. This level of reporting is unacceptable. I expected the CBC to be better than this and it is up to you to fix this, no one else. It was allowed on your watch, you get to fix your watch (and your watchdogs). A massive injustice was done to the Ukraine and to your readers by allowing this hatchet job to become mainstream news. 

I think I got the anger out of my system, after I let it wind down a little. I let you decide to see if I was wrong or not. 

Enjoy the last day of the weekend.

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August 19, 2023 · 23:50

It started with television

To get the entire mess I will start with a television episode.

The line was “Not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment behind your nightmare scenario” it was linking a conversation between President Bartlett and Dr. Takahashi. The episode was ‘A good Day’ season 6 episode 17. Yes, this part is fiction and some of the mentioned elements were too, but not all and that is the striking part. This episode aired in March 2005. You think that would be the end of it, but you would be wrong. Lets take a look at reality.

The Financial Times gave us ‘Saudi Arabia cuts holdings of US Treasuries to 6-year low’ on august 17th (at https://www.ft.com/content/2925952d-1e20-4748-8fa4-05b3605fc46a). There we are given “Saudi Arabia sold down its holdings of US Treasuries in June to the lowest in more than six years, as the kingdom directs more funds to foreign equity and domestic investments. The kingdom held $108.1bn of Treasury securities in June, down $3.2bn from May and below the $119.7bn it held at the end of last year, according to data from the US Treasury department.” This is merely part one, the second part is seen with ‘China likely to cut more US debt holdings’ (at https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202308/16/WS64dce79ba31035260b81c880.html) this is not the end, this is merely the beginning of what was described in the West Wing as the nightmare scenario. You would think that the EU and Japan would come to the aid of the US, but you would be wrong. Mario Draghi overspend trillions in the past and now the EU credit card is stretched to the max. Japan had in March 2023, a Japanese public debt is estimated to be approximately 9.2 trillion US Dollars, or 263% of GDP. Japan has no place to go and that is the beginning of systems collapsing. The US is in its endgame towards becoming an economic third world nation. 

Yet there is more tom come. We also get (at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/death-entire-financial-monetary-social-180841464.html) ‘‘It’s The Death Of The Entire Financial, Monetary And Social System’: This Market Expert Warns The U.S. Dollar Is Quickly Losing Its Reserve Status.’ I do not know Jing Pan and I do not know whether she is correct, but she gives us one part that struck a nerve. She gives us “In March, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank grabbed major headlines. After the bank sold its Treasury bond portfolio, it incurred a substantial loss, causing depositors to question its liquidity and leading to a bank run. Amid this market upheaval, Silvergate Bank, First Republic Bank and Signature Bank failed as well. “This banking crisis is not over,” she said. “Maybe they’ve been able to paper over it, and so everybody is calm, and you have consumer confidence going up and all of this other kind of garbage. But it’s built on a house of lies.”” It struck a nerve because I got there through different means. You see when the SVB issues was playing out, we suddenly get a news article with Janet Yellen who is keeping tabs on the situation. Janet Yellen, United States Secretary of the Treasury. Not some governor from California, not someone from the banking industry. No, it was El Jefe from the treasury herself. It was overkill. I had issues and I wrote about them earlier (not sure when). I wondered why the SVB was in that setting and why Yellen personally took notice. I wondered who was holding the US bonds. Because banks had some of the bonds, but no one had a list of how much and no one had a clue (or remained silent) on how much the SVB was holding. 

As such I had an issue, things weren’t adding up. And now the two largest finders of the planet are shedding the US debt. As I see it the US has painted themselves in a corner and things will go ugly soon enough.

This is where the next article comes in. The article (at https://tickernews.co/u-s-credit-card-debt-levels-just-surpassed-1-trillion/), which is not the only source gives us ‘U.S. credit card debt levels just surpassed $1-trillion’, as such 300 million people have a collective debt of over on thousand billion. This amounts to the degree that every American has a debt well over $3,000. So how will this unfold when the dollar drops? Now, I am generalising but the larger stage is now set. Bonds are going nowhere and in 2022 long-dated U.S. notes lost 39.2% in value. So how safe are those bonds now? We know about the inflation and that it is rising, but CNN reports that ‘US banks sitting on unrealised losses of $620 billion’. This came to us in March, as such the SVB issues are rising, are they not? So where are those bonds? Who is reaping the losses on that one and the nightmare scenario that a television series gave to us in 2005 is about to become a very real issue in 2023 and 2024. 

We might have thought 20 years ago that bonds were the safest place to be, but only 20 years later and this is no longer a reality and moreover the allies of the USA are shedding them, or cashing in to reduce the damage from them. This leaves America in a very vulnerable position. As I personally see it, they painted themselves in a corner and the windows on the two adjacent walls are soon out of reach to anyone in that corner. To add to this, the paint is red and massively toxic (as I see it), so no release unless someone can find a little over 20 trillion to help the US, the usual suspects are out of cash and I reckon Russia will not offer help either. Consumers have a total accumulated debt that surpasses a trillion and the bad news keeps on stacking up. All because politicians were playing the ‘screw it’ card. Now that the ledgers are up for grabs the US is sitting in the worst spot it has been in in well over a century and corporate and business America is looking for any way out of the US at present. 

When you see that image and you add the failures of Microsoft a different image comes to mind and it is not a pretty one. So why Microsoft? Because it is part of the Dow Jones Index. It might only be for 4.9% but when that goes south the DJI will see a much larger problem. You see it is not merely Microsoft, it becomes an issue for Goldman Sachs as well and when the dollar collapses. What do you think that places like UnitedHealth Group, Johnson & Johnson, VISA, American Express and Walmart will be left with? When over 150 million will have no money left the consumers pushing the aforementioned companies up will also fade pushing rates and results down. All things that could have been seen will over 2-3 years ago. And there is no blaming the Russian-Ukrainian war, this would have happened no matter what. Optionally it happened sooner, but not much sooner. 

Even if ‘A good day’ was the start, the settings have been in place for years. I believe the media merely looked the other way, because the other view was sexy and optionally offered more digital dollars, another funny money business. 

So am I wrong?
That is the question. I could be and relating articles like I am is to some degree folly, but it was all I had at the time. And if there is an economic person (I am not one) giving us a clear answer why I am wrong, I would accept that, but there are too many issues in the field and there are too many issues out in the open. I wonder if anyone could counter them all. But I will keep my eyes open to see if someone goes that way.

Anyway, have a great day and I am about to start the final day of the weekend.

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August 19, 2023 · 00:41

Our house is burning down. Down!

By now we have all heard of the fires in Canada. There is nothing that I can say, invent or imagine that makes this setting easier. These fires are making the fires of Rome (64AD) and burning of London (1666AD) look like a simple BBQ (or clambake if you are from the US). At this time the fires are well over 13,500,000 Hectare, and it has displaced around 200,000 people. Which is almost 1% of the population. The largest fire in recorded history. I have never ever heard of a fire this big and I have been around for well over half a century. I wonder what the eco-deniers make of this setting, who will they blame? The fact that from all over the world firefighters are coming to Canada to fight a fire too big to comprehend is only one setting. The stage that planes are so loaded that they need to turn away those fleeing the disaster they face. 

People wear protective masks as the Roosevelt Island Tram crosses the East River while haze and smoke from the Canadian wildfires shroud the Manhattan skyline in the Queens Borough New York City, June 7, 2023. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

And that is before you realise that NYC is orange, orange from smoke by Canadian fires. An event that has never happened before. So yes, I looked at plenty of issues before I looked at this. I am on the other side of the planet, but I took notice, I took notice several times and now I decided to write about it. 

The setting hasn’t changed, I did. I am starting to realise that that much forest gone will impact our oxygen supply and it will take lose to a decade for a decent amount to be rebuild. We can argue on the timeline. But the forests in the Amazon are depleted, the ones in Indonesia have seen depletion as well Indonesia lost 29.4 Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 18% decrease in tree cover since 2000. Did you think that was nothing? Now the forests of Siberia are almost all that remain and I reckon that this is not a path we want to walk on. This fire might not be what we wanted, but there is a negative part in me that states that this is the fire we the people (not just Canadians) have been entitled to. A small reminder that exploitation of our world will hurt us all and people more intelligent than me would have been aware of this for several years and the Canadian fires are merely bringing it to the foreground. Some articles are drawing in the people by looking at how it started, some are set on the blame factor, but if you need someone to blame you only need to look into a mirror. Politicians are not held to account, all whilst driving the gravy train. We are being told that places like the UK that woodland creation has increased by 40 percent since last year to 3,128 hectares. It isn’t much, but it is a start, all being it being half a decade late. People like Mark Rober (formerly with NASA) have aided organisations like Team Trees, an organisation that as of 29 June 2023, the project has raised $24,438,806, exceeding the fundraiser’s goal to plant 20 million trees. As anticipated, more than 20 million trees have been planted. So one ex-NASA with an organisation achieved more in 2 years that the UK achieved in a decade and it is people like this that Canada will need, their solutions will be required when the fires are stopped. When? Your guess is as good as mine and it will rely on guessing as we have never faced a fire like this ever before, not in well over 2000 years as far as I can tell. 

So what is the option? I am not sure we have one, our house is burning down and whilst most houses have a garden to evacuate to, the planet has nothing surrounding itself but empty space and that is a place where we cannot survive. I wonder how long it will take some to blame the rich, tax everyone and whatever other solution people give, but the simple equation is that until we change our lives from a consumer based life towards an essential goods stage this will keep on going on. And with a little over 8,000,000,000 consumers in this house, we are destined for a larger failing than we care to admit to. You see it is not merely the fires, it is the simple equation where 34 million acres are not there to give us the oxygen we need to breath. So how short will our oxygen supply be in 2024? You can ignore it all you want but that will be the largest topic we ever faced and it is coming. None of it is the fault of Canada or Canadians. We all did our best to ignore Brazil and Indonesia. The media skated around the issue and now the blame game starts. Well as soon as the fires have been digitally exploited to the maximum. That is how I see it. Do you think I am wrong?

Enjoy the weekend and consider the numbers, the numbers tend to be correct.

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August 18, 2023 · 01:04

Optical versus optional

There is a fine setting between genius and insane and I know it well. I am both one and the other. I have had my settings of genius and I have had my settings of insanity. And I will be honest enough to state that they aren’t in equal measure. So, this all started yesterday as I was writing about the strike and an image passed by.

I was looking at it and I suddenly realised an idea I had a very long time ago. Even as the navies modernised, they upgraded and so forth. Yet the events we recently saw made me realise that the Russians have been cutting corners and I have no doubt the nay faced the same corner cuttings. 

As such there is every chance that the new weapon system I thought through (based on the M142 HIMARS) might become a stealth solution towards letting Russians enjoy the views (like the bottom of a sea). 

I still believe that a prep event is needed and if it works the Ukrainians will have an option to sink the Russian fleet. Of course Lockheed Martin would have to make adjustments to their M31 GMLRS, but that might merely be the smallest part in the equation. Another prep is required and I will not write it here (no reason to tell the Russians where they failed), another part is that the target needs to be within 12 nautical miles, but that is a concern that brighter people than me have to address. All what I know is that if the prep part works the Russian fleet is obsolete and even if the idea is regarded as bad, it might make for a nice storyline in a movie, but that is for after the strikes are settled. As far as I can tell, this makes this Lawlordtobe – DARPA now 3-0. Not a bad way to go into Friday right before the weekend. The question becomes is it about to become an optical field because I was delusional? So is this a concept for Hollywood, Canadian Hollywood, or will it go to DARPA and Lockheed? I honestly do not know, as such it is Tim e for one Stefanie Tompkins (in Ballston, Arlington, Virginia) to wake up and consider what I saw and they might have overlooked.

I will let DARPA decide on that one, no reason to lose sleep over that part of the equation. So time for me to snore like a sawmill. 

Have a nice day, Friday is upon me and almost upon all of you to.

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August 17, 2023 · 17:15

Strike Two

This started earlier. It started weeks ago and I was aware, I took notice. Yet, that was about it. I mean no disrespect. I do not live in the US, I am not California and as such I am merely partially aware. I see what most outside of the US see. We see the strike, but yesterday I saw an opinion piece in the LA Times and that woke me up a little more and would you believe it, this morning I got more awake. There was an advertisement on YouTube, it was the Pilot of Lioness and it was one hell of an ad. It was 50 minutes, it was the pilot. Yup Paramount Plus took their balls and hung them up the wall. OK, this is a first that I watch a 50 minute advertisement. Yet, it was not about the ad, not about Lioness but it gave me focus, so lets begin.

The LA Times Story (at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-15/netflix-antitrust-anticompetitive-labor) gives us ‘Hollywood strikes prove Netflix and other streamers have grown too powerful. Time to break them up’ here we are given “Many have called the stalemate an existential crisis because it concerns new issues such as residuals from streaming services and rules for the use of artificial intelligence. These go beyond the usual labor issues such as wages and benefits and cut to the heart of an industry in which streamers such as Netflix can dominate all aspects of the business.” It is one side that I had not seen before. ‘Entertainment’ has become an end-to-end business over ALL verticals. I had not considered that merely because I am not part of this industry, I never was. Yet here we are given “Antitrust laws need to be invoked — as they were in the 1940s in U.S. vs. Paramount — to break up streaming services that both produce content and distribute it. This vertical integration has deeply changed the longstanding entertainment industry ecosystem, which allowed employees to survive and studios to prosper.” Which gets us to “In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against the studios, requiring them to divest themselves of their movie theatres if they wanted to continue in the production business. Shortly thereafter, theatrical films began to be aired on television with no additional compensation for creative talent. This led to the strike by both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in 1960, the last time the two struck simultaneously.”

With finally “If Netflix and its streaming peers like Apple+, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Max can maintain their vertical control, it will be next to impossible to settle the Hollywood strikes in ways that could preserve the ability of creators and technicians to earn a decent living and protect creative diversity. The old vertical studio system was broken up by the Justice Department. It may be time to do the same with these 21st century behemoths.” And that was the wake up call I needed. The Paramount ‘advertisement’ was apt and consider that Lioness is new stellar series. Kidman, Saldana and several others are making a bundle. They earned it, their work is first rate, as is the director and the director of photography. They all did a stellar job, but it would not have been possible without the writer, without the writer there would be no script, nothing for the director to work from. So how much is he making? 

We see the accusations that the top person, which in the case of Disney is Bob Iger, in 2022 he made well over $14,000,000. This amounts to well over a million a month. Now lets take a look at the image below.

So a series that streamed over 3,000,000,000 minutes, making it one of the most profitable and most successful series even, the writers were collectively paid $3,000. Please explain to me in what universe 3 billion streamed minutes gives us a combined pay check of $3,000? You see those three billion minutes amount to 138,121.5 years. Does it make sense now? The writers are beyond underpaid. They are the legal slaves of America and they deserve their right coin. But American history is seeded with injustice and exploitation and to be honest until the LA Times piece I did not see it, so who else was unaware? We are given snapshots, yet until you see the entire vertical of exploitation it makes little sense and now with that streaming vertical exposed you can see just how unfair it is and one series, the series suits, showed us just how much the writers are fed up with being ignored what should be rightfully theirs.

Enjoy the day.

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August 16, 2023 · 18:03

Evolution is not merely the person

The setting started a few days ago, yet the new stage we are shown is merely hours old. Even as it seemingly started on August 12th with ‘Tapping an economy’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/08/12/tapping-an-economy/) the stage is getting redefined, almost as we speak. This is seen with ‘Saudi Arabia and UAE race to buy Nvidia chips to power AI ambitions’ (at https://www.afr.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-and-uae-race-to-buy-nvidia-chips-to-power-ai-ambitions-20230815-p5dws6). I believe personally it is merely one of two sides. You see, we are given “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.” But it is merely one side and this side is putting pressure on the US, it’s companies are running out of funs and their credit cards are reaching limits. These two players have the cash to run circles around dozens of nations and that is not the only place they are in an advantage. I will not go back to my IP (no mater how valid it is). The larger station is that these two players will need data centres and that is where EVROC (as discussed in the earlier article 4 days ago) has the ability to set up national data centres, a stage that takes American companies out of the loop. I am not anti-American, I am anti-stupid and the catering that data centres have given the US companies all whilst places like Cambridge Analytics opened up to is now starting to show. There is the added setting that nationally speaking these two players prefer to be set in, the stage is not merely based on national needs. I personally believe that they have a ‘non-American’ involvement mindset. And I reckon that evidence will be proven when EVROC is allowed these two new data centres as well. It puts the USA in a massively decreasing setting. Another (non-related) stage is added to this. Only a few hours ago Yahoo Finance (merely one source) is giving us (at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dollar-being-dethroned-india-just-201500390.html) ‘India just bought 1M barrels of oil from the UAE using rupees instead of USD for the first time’, we can chalk this up to a whole set of reasons and if someone states that this will be the pro-forma setting of BRICS, I will not be able to support or oppose it. There is not enough data accessible to me. The larger stage is set that the US is being ignored for too man settings and that is merely in the last week. I do not care how many Pizza al Fungi’s Janet Yellen has consumed, or how magical that dinner was. The stage is that the US has become trivialised and a lot of it is by their own doing. So whilst some are staging to trivialise that India is not using the US dollar. The reality is that only 3 years ago that option would be ludicrous and here we see it play out. So is BRICS becoming more powerful, it the US becoming weaker and just how much gains will Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates make in this year alone? EVROC is still a Swedish conundrum, but there are too many voices out there that are too anti-American voiced (which is not anti-stupid, my personal setting). I know I am seeing my own prophecies come to reality, but not in a way I envisioned. It could be that I never had the proper glasses to see it all, or it is because new elements are coming to bear and that second part is the larger stage I am now worried about. Not because of what the KSA and UAE are doing, but because of the US and its Trump and Karen setting, it is highly likely that it will drag the EU and Japan down with them. These latter two made the wrong calls a few times and now that the endgame (of the US) is starting to show, the back paddle actions of the EU (optionally towards China) might not be enough. I have no idea how this will play out for the Commonwealth. The stage of Canada with wildfires and 90% of the NWT being a goner looks more like a scene from ‘How it ends’ (2018) than reality, no matter how surreal both are. As such this stage will impact the rest of the Commonwealth. The UK is close to broke, and with Canada in the state it is in, the Commonwealth needs to find a safe place and footing and the US is less likely to be that place at present. It needs to find a solitary road to link to nations and that is the hard part. I have no idea what the safe route is, but I do feel certain that the US is no longer that part. I feel that finding a way to connect to the Middle East is presently safer than a link to China, but in reality I am speculating on what the safer route is. 

The setting we see now (the Nvidia AI chip) where we were given (at https://www.crn.com.au/news/ai-chips-could-save-future-data-centres-money-nvidia-599254)“Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has a mantra that he has uttered enough times that it almost became a joke during his SIGGRAPH 2023 keynote last week: “the more you buy, the more you save.”” Yet the setting is not merely ‘the more you save’ it is about to become who owns them and those who cannot afford them and now the KSA and UAE will have additional power positions. So consider “AI chips can save companies significant money on costs compared to traditional CPUs for what he views as the future: data centres, fuelled by demand for generative AI capabilities, relying on large language models (LLMs) to answer user queries and generate content for a wide range of applications” and a place like EVROC could set up two data centres all whilst these two nations provide the AI chips required, now we get an entirely new play and it will give these two nations the power to set a stage that excludes the US or their tech-firms. A stage none of them ever had before, as such do you still think I am boasting or creating non-sense? Too many sources had the elements available and the larger media ignored the puzzle pieces. So, is my puzzle correct? Not necessarily, but the pieces fit the image we have all seen before. This does not make the image correct, but it makes it decently likely and the more BS the American media spouts the less reliable it should be seen. This does not make China or the Middle East more reliable, but in the setting I currently see it makes the Middle East (KSA and UAE) a lot safer than the US has been the last few years and that counts, because that reinforces the image that Nvidia and EVROC are giving us, with optional speculations from yours truly (aka moi).

Your guess is as good as mine as to what comes next, but the larger fighting ring (a square setting) is about to show us who the contenders are and the amount of underdogs they face. Because no matter how much BS an underdogs brings to the table, in the ring it is what you can achieve and as I personally see it, the US, EU and Japan are starting to become the largest underdogs this century, which could be a stage pushed in by evolution.

Have fun today.

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August 15, 2023 · 19:04

When the marketshare is murder

That is the setting and at first I would not really believe it. It sounded correct, but to be honest. I did not think that a place like Microsoft would intentionally target victims, but then there was a second source, the Guardian no less and that’s hen the disgust set in.

You see we know advertisements, we know advertisers, but for a system like Xandr to intentionally target people with gambling problems is a new low, even for Microsoft. This is what the article (at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/15/tab-gamblers-betting-australia-targeted-microsoft-xandr-advertising-database) gives us. The article heads the accusation with ‘‘Heavy TAB gamblers’ among groups targeted by online advertising database’, there we are told “The dataset of 650,000 international “audience segments” was discovered on the website of Microsoft’s advertising technology platform Xandr by Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher at Cracked Labs. It listed dozens of data providers looking to offer advertisers the ability to reach certain types of people online”, so not only does the law seem unable to deal with drug pushers, now they are enabling a place like Microsoft to hit the internet by ‘gamble pushing’ victims of this event. As such we get “Of the more than 40 categories identified as related to Australian gamblers, the majority were split into subsets related to gambling interest, sport interest or a particular venue: “Gambling at Pub / Club”, “Spring Carnival Punters” and “Online Gaming – NRL”, for example”. I think it gives a new meaning to the slogan “Long may we play”, perhaps it should be “long may we exploit the gamer”, even though gamer is a stretch, the fact that I have seen scores of these advertising on on Apple, my thought might not be too far away from the reality that people face. Then we go into the unknown with “Everything from our location to our purchase history are data points that can be packaged and used to serve advertising, often through the creation of profiles based on assumptions about our demographics or potential interests. But we know remarkably little about how the ecosystem works.” So not only were we served all kinds of BS against Facebook and Google Ads. These same BS servers have no idea what Microsoft with its Xandr is up to? How is that for slow minded investigations? 

Even the excuse was ‘outdated’ and moronic. What we get is “Microsoft said in a statement to Guardian Australia that the document was inadvertently published on its website and was outdated. The spokesperson said Xandr’s data privacy practices were regularly evaluated “to ensure compliance with applicable data protection laws”.” The words inadvertently and outdated are stop words into nothing. The fact that this data existed was wrong to begin with, they were going after a marketshare, the desperate (as I see Microsoft) are so hungry for revenue that they are willing to look the other way in too many cases. I believe it was 10 years ago when I wrote an article with data that Microsoft was uploading xbox data in excess of 20GB in a month. So, why was that? It was also on dates when I never touched a multiplayer game, I checked the data and the amounts and they did not add up. Was that to feed Xandr? Was that to feed other needs? So what would have happened when Microsoft got to complete the Activision Blizzard deal? How much data would Microsoft get access to? I wonder how many people took a hard look at that, because in March that was 368 million gamers and all that data would be going somewhere, would it not? It might be nice for Activision, but I have some hardcore reservations when Microsoft gets involved. And now that we see the accusations by the Guardian, the show changes. The fact that Microsoft would allow to hammer the people with a weakness to gambling makes me wonder how they are getting the other $198.3 billion in 2022 with 6.8% more in 2023. So how many victims did Microsoft approach? All questions, but there is a downside there, the questions should not even exist and that it the disgusting part of this setting. Until today I never thought Microsoft could sink that low, but there is space to think they could do worse and that is an unsettling stage. So where are these high and mighty senators now? They were all willing to grill Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Where are they now? Does Satya Nadella have too many friends in the senate? Is that why they think they could avoid this? Inadvertently is not an excuse, outdated is no excuse, that dataset should never have existed in the first place and that is now the larger question. Why was that dataset created in the first place. One source gives us “Xandr is used by 0.8% of all the websites whose advertising network we know”, yet what we need to realise that there are (according to some) 1,986,154,062 websites, even at 0.4% that amounts to 7944616 websites and if even one of them is Yahoo or any media site, the damage gets to be astronomical. But I reckon those senators will gladly pass over those numbers, won’t they?

We get it, advertisements are part of our daily life, but what happens when victims are intentionally targeted on their soft spots? Did you think that through?

Enjoy the week and remember the next gambling advertisement could be a mere click away if you are being targeted by Xandr.

 

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August 14, 2023 · 20:00

What is worse then stupid?

That is how I first reacted. We remember Forest Gump (Stupid is as stupid does), but this is worse. As such the CBC gives us (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-world-economic-forum-rhetoric-1.6935294) the article ‘Poilievre’s Conservative Party embracing language of mainstream conspiracy theories’. It is there that we see “Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been hitting the summer barbecue circuit with ramped-up rhetoric around debunked claims that the World Economic Forum is attempting to impose its agenda on sovereign governments” with the added “Poilievre has promised that none of his ministers will attend the international organisation’s conferences, including the annual meeting typically held in Davos, Switzerland” Now, any person and any government is allowed to do what it legally wants to do, but it is at this point the Canadians need to be thankful that it has Justin Trudeau making sense of a global mess. You see, before you join the stupid group, you have to know and realist WHAT the World Economic Forum is about. The organisation (a https://www.weforum.org/about/world-economic-forum) gives us “The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”, in addition it is important to notice of “Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does”, leave it to a man like Pierre Poilievre to throw morality out of the window. So this is the setting, now consider that this is a place where political and industrial leaders have a sort-of non official place where they could mix mingle and see what is possible. Now, I will be the first to accept that these industrial leaders are in it for the $$$$$, they are there to see what options are there. So at what point in time, in what universe, with what economic scales it makes sense to give the people “The Conservative Party also recently sent out mailers with a poll asking people to tell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who they think the prime minister should stand with: working Canadians or the World Economic Forum”. The clear setting is that people like Justin Trudeau are there to make sure that there is a decent future for Canada and Canadians. Will it all be smooth and will it all be great? I doubt it, give me an industrial leader and I will show you a person who is eager to please his shareholders and himself (and his board of directors), but this is in a stage where people like Trudeau can find options for places like New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as well. If there are 250 industry leaders there, there will be well over 225 who have no clue where these two places are and they have no idea that they represent 1.8 million people, many of them hoping for a long term job. Not everything has to go to British Columbia, Ontario or Quebec. And people like Justin Trudeau (optionally with an assist by Chrystia Freeland) can make these people aware of those options. I reckon that people like Pierre Poilievre will be all about helping ‘THEIR’ friends, so who does that help? There is a larger stage, the fact that this early in any elections that we see that people like Pierre Poilievre is embracing conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists is an alarming one. So Canadians better be aware that when things go wrong, people like Pierre Poilievre are most likely to hide behind spin stories and hide where ever they can until the dust settles and after that they will find the piggy in the middle to blame. Who will that serve? In this day and age, especially whilst the US is about to become a third world nation with its $31,000,000,000,000 plus debt. When that happens Canada will be in direct trouble, 250 million people seeking a ‘new’ home will come knocking on Canada’s door. There’s a conspiracy to see coming right at you at 500Km/H (I respected the metric system here). 

The fact that CBC was told that Poilievre did not agree to an interview on the matter. Is even more concern on the matter. My issue is that there are stupid people everywhere (even in Canada) so I have no idea how they can influence Canadian politics, but there is some chance, or CBC might not have written about it. On the plus side, Canada can take an example from Australia. We took care of the Karen’s in our society. We have games where the losers might not survive. The track event is started and around 10 seconds after that we release 4-6 dingo’s. The losers will be eaten. Result? Dingo’s not hungry and most Karens taken care of. Except the 2019 event. There we had 9 contestant and someone released 8 dingo’s. So I was gobbling up the popcorn thinking ‘This is great TV’. So there was the one winner and he was walking to closely to the water and a salty (salt water crocodile) got his ass. One year with no winners. Sad but still good entertainment. The problem is that conspiracies can be given in entertainment, but when it is seriously based it becomes a problem. Although in even in entertainment, when that sarcasm backfires it becomes irony, so take heed when employing that solution.

As such I wonder what is worse then stupid. Neither I or Forest Gump have any clue where to look. Yet we should all keep out eyes open for that problem and tag it when you see it. 

Enjoy the day.

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