Category Archives: Finance

August 26, 2023 · 16:11

You were saying?

After yesterday I had all these ‘complaints’ and how wrong I was, that this would never happen and I rejoiced, because the evidence was already there. I was actually dreading todays article (which will now happen tomorrow) and puts Apple and Google in a setting of funny money. But first this part. So, people were sure I was wrong? So let’s take a look at Al Jazeera (at https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/8/25/saudi-arabia-considering-chinese-bid-to-build-nuclear-plant-report-says) gives us ‘Saudi Arabia considering Chinese bid to build nuclear plant, report says’ where we are given “Saudi Arabia is considering a Chinese bid to build a nuclear power plant in the kingdom amid frustration over the United States’ stipulations for supporting Riyadh’s quest for nuclear power, the Wall Street Journal has reported” which with the added “In 2019, a senior Chinese official said Beijing could build as many as 30 overseas nuclear reactors through its “Belt and Road” infrastructure drive over the following decade”. So to give you the bland numbers, a nuclear reactor will cost between 6 and 8 billion. So 30 of them amount to around $200,000,000,000 that is revenue the US is now losing directly, one deal cost that much. I have no doubt that China will get a mere 1-3 reactors to start with, yet this amounts to well over $20,000,000,000 from the start. Revenue the US (optionally partially EU too) will lose. One deal sets that strain on the US revenue needs and partially European too. Now we also get (from an unknown source at http://www.ecns.cn/m/news/culture/2023-08-25/detail-ihcskrzm0994854.shtml) there we are given ‘Saudi Arabia to teach two Chinese classes weekly in secondary schools’, if this is true then the KSA are tightening bonds with China and that spells a bad year for America. I might have foreseen a lot of this, but to see operational steps being done implies that the USA is done in the Middle East. In addition to this I wonder how far the steps are at present with the UAE. You see they are both joining BRICS, as such they both stand to gain by these steps at present. Even as the UAE might not be seeking nuclear power, they (especially Dubai) stands to gain a lot by having at least one. So whatever is under options with Saudi Arabia, I reckon that the UAE is not far behind on this. In a day we see the stage where the US, due to its own stupid actions is about to lose out on well over 200 billion, and it is seemingly all going towards China. So you were saying? And how much more losses will America cop before it starts to realise that the folly approach from 2019 onwards was stupid on a premium level? 

And this is merely the beginning. As NEOM grows, so will the opportunities that China will get, America, the UK and EU pretty much priced themselves out of those markets. And the news goes from bad to worse. None at the moment, but in Q4 2023 there will be a lot more news clippings on options that are now no longer going to the American Coffers, that part is pretty clear at this point. So I was right all along. It doesn’t make me happy or joyous, yet for the Americans who realise that they are out they might want to have a heart to heart with the politicians and analysts who should have seen this long before I did and if they did, why was nothing done?

Enjoy the weekend.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Science

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

August 25, 2023 · 19:06

And then there were 6 more

I have been expecting this, I have been awaiting it. OK, I have a few different reasons, but the added BRICS members (from January 1st 2024) are Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. I don’t think that the people get how much of a issues this is going to be. BRICS members, just like any other membership (like EU, NATO) will give preference to its own members first. On ‘the seventh guest’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/06/21/the-seventh-guest/) I wrote “I am certain that Russia and China will use this opportunity that opened up, I just do not know how at present.” That was June 2019. There was no war looming in the Ukraine (and BRICS was not on anyones radar). This setting would be coming naturally from China and now we are about to see that play. Now consider that Saudi Arabia imports from United States was a simple US$16.22 Billion during 2021, now also consider that U.S. Exports to Saudi Arabia constitute 14.2% of total U.S. exports of those commodities worldwide. Now consider that these two numbers will diminish by at least 50% and those trades all go to China (optionally Russia too). I reckon that January 2024 will be the start where the debt levels the US currently has can no longer be allowed. Doing so will end its existence sooner and sooner. Should the US default, they will drag the EU and Japan down with them. A sentiment that China will not shed a tear about. Egypt is interesting as it propels the Saudi plans for their global G5 plans a lot further and a lot faster and it puts the EU and US out of the game pretty much overnight. As such there are signs that the latter two are racing to get agreements in play now. Something Saudi STC and Chinese Huawei are eager to block. Now consider a second part. The quoted setting was “the relationship is that the United States of America (USA) provides military protection of the Kingdom in exchange for a reliable oil supply from the Saudis, pricing of oil in USA dollars, and Saudi support for American foreign policy operations across the world” under those steps China is the most likely party to enlarge their options and they stand to get a lot more oil, oil that is likely not to go to the US and EU from January 1st 2024 (or at least a decent part of it). The latter one is a speculation, but it fits the long term play China is employing and in this I could be wrong. The KSA has long term agreements with the USA. The larger concern isn’t merely the KSA. In this new agreement Iran and the UAE join and now there is a new balancing point in the Middle East and the Emirates are part of that. So how much import does the UAE get from the USA and EU? So when they too go from “United Arab Emirates Imports from United States was US$16.88 Billion during 2021”as well as “European Union Exports to United Arab Emirates was US$37.38 Billion during 2022” and now consider that these two will go down by at least 50%, if not a whole lot more. That gives us $99,000,000,000 in lost commerce from these two places alone and that is merely the start. So how will their government credit cards go when they do not have these revenue streams continue? After that consider the damage that lost revenue from Egypt could get up to as well as increased revenue to China and this is not new, that danger existed from 2019, but certain American politicians were to ego driven and now it all comes to a speculated halt in 16 weeks. For China it will turn out to be a very merry Christmas this year. For the EU and USA a lot less so. But they were warned (not by me), these so called wannabe’s making the calls had more than information I had and they played the ostrich game. So how is that playing out for them? If you were hoping for some miracle cure from me you would be wrong. As I see it, it is too late for that. The US and UK should have adjusted their courses at least 3 years ago (7 would have been better). In the end for several players their upcoming BRICS membership is merely  business decision and that is what China and India are hoping for, because it opens their options by a fair bit starting in 2024. 

As I personally see it, the endgame will play itself, I see no moves left for the Commonwealth, the EU or the USA. Setting that should and could have been avoided for close to 5 years were never done and now with an enlarged new player on the global stage we can watch and see Wall Street implode on itself. To see the desperate go nuts on greed missed all because of some ego driven politicians will be stellar on a few levels. You see a secular population is a weird thing, the moment things go really south, they will rely on the faith of others to let them continue. Does that make the profoundly lost sentiment a drive of sarcasm or a natural wave of irony? I am not sure what applies more but as an antithesis they might be feeding each other for some time to come (especially when the media wants to get as much digital dollars as it can). 

I honestly wonder which systems will still be in play by April 1st 2024, what a joke that will be. Enjoy the weekend.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 23, 2023 · 20:55

A very different oak

OK, to be honest, this dream hit me some time ago. I had it, but I have no idea why I had the dream and I might never figure it out. The event was at Golden Oak Orlando. I was visiting someone and when we got to his abode (a mansion by any other name) we were overwhelmed. I reckon that this is the feeling that all those who ever visited someone’s place in Golden Oak leaves them. It is a little overwhelming. So we got to his place, we were shown the lower part of the house with an inner courtyard. There was a pool, a jacuzzi and a few other amenities making sure that we all felt a little out of our comfort zone. We went to the corner in the inner courtyard and we had something to drink. There were two pitchers of iced fruit-juice and it was wonderful. I went for the slightly more orange one. It was a mix of peached and tangerines loaded with what seemingly a shrapnel of ice parts. It was icy cold and refreshing. My kind of refreshing. The others were talking and I was listening and looking at the details of the courtyard and the kitchen room through the glass. The stove looked old-fashioned but seemingly bursting with high tech elements. A stove anyone would dream of having in their home. After the drink the second part started. We saw the living room, the kitchen we walked through and we saw a large pantry. The living-room was a little spartan but stylish. We all walked up the stairs and we saw the master bedroom. Not sure what the style was, but it looked neat. The walking bathroom was to die for and had everything on a space that is pretty much my living room. There were the two guest rooms and they both had their own style, nice but very different. And I saw the door, the door that would change it all. The door was out of place. It looked a lot heavier and darker, like dark oak heavy. From a distance it stood out, even as the door was deeper into the wall than any other door in the house. It stood out like a bank vault door would stand out in any apartment, it looked that heavy. The door was dark oak as said, but it was engraved unlike anything I had ever seen. The owner then moved a panel in the door and a small opening revealed itself. 

The opening had a key, a very old fashioned one and if I had to make a guess it was a 17th century key, but it looked off somehow. The panels showed us characters from Peter Pan and Mr. Smee (the first mate from Peter Pan) was the center piece of the door. The door opened smoothly but seemingly heavy and the door didn’t open at the end, the door opened with the axial at one third of the door and the door was a lit thicker than a door should be. What I saw then blew me away. The room was almost entirely made from wood, hardwood floors, and I saw to the right what could have been the navigator desk from a galleon. To the left was an admiral’s table with swanky seat. The navigator had its own swanky seat, both a chesterfield design, both chairs build for comfort and I walked in. I saw the small door to the end and I walked towards it, it opened up to a small balcony with seats. The wooden balcony seemed to have been part of a slightly enlarged balcony like the admirals room on a galleon with a small table and chairs. 

I looked around and I was slapped across the face a second time. The walls I can in from were the  rear of a galleon, complete with stained glass and a view of the ocean. The wall that connects to the house was an ocean and the smell of salt water was invading my nostrils. A freakin ocean? I slowly walked towards the end of the ship realising that it was smoke and mirrors (of sorts) the windows were real enough, the sound of a seagull was there, but as I stared closely I noticed the fine lines. The view on the ocean were TV screens 4 meters wide in total, about a meter high. 4 of them. There was a hidden vapour in there feeding us seawater. The sound came from the screen. It was the sound of the ocean with a bird every no and then and the screens were merely showing us the water waves, almost like it would have been were we on a galleon. The walls had pictures. One in heavy sterling with the image of Bill Thompson (the name was engraved in the centre of the bottom side of the frame. I knew the name as I grew up with Disney movies. He was the voice of Mr. Smee in the Disney version of it. There was an image an autographed one of Bob Hoskins, the man who played Smee in Hook and there were more Smee memorabilia all over the room. The navigator desk was a desk, it was fully functioning with a large map of Never-never land. The map rolled up and stayed rolled up. Beneath it was a screen a 32” touch display that showed the Mac screen and applications. There were all the Adobe ones, all the Apple ones and several I had never seen before. I noticed that below it were extensions that came out, for both the keyboard and to the right of that an A4 digital writing pad. The system was super-fast, faster than the average G5 and it looked super intuitive. I looked around to the admiral’s desk which as a large and very nice desk with all kinds of amenities. The top of the desk was wood and I think a strip of leather, for writing on I reckon. The drawers were all engraved and to the right of the desk was a panel like it was some kind of food elevator. The panel was opened and two plates with canapé’s came out. They were delicious. The door I came in through was no longer visible, well not until you go looking for it. I saw the lines of where the door was and it was almost invisible to the naked eye. 

The chair was bordeaux red, it looked extremely comfy. We ate the food and we all were mesmerised on the room. I was not the only one blown away. This was his office space and it was one hell of an office space. It was a few minutes later when we left the room and as the door opened the screens shut down, the sounds faded and to room lights all dimmed but did not turn off. As I left the room I heard the room lock and I heard more clicks, almost like a set of alarms were set to sharp. We went down again and in the kitchen I now noticed the same panel we hd upstairs. A food elevator and a chef was there with plates of food that staff were bringing around. There was a Japanese plate with marinated eel. Plates with what seemed to be wraps with chicken and I had another fruit juice. I took the yellow now, which was I reckoned pineapple with Limes and I guess pear. It was slightly sweeter, I preferred the orange one. Which was my third drink. We sat down in the living room and I was listening. I also figured out I was the plus one of one of the ladies there. She was way out of my league, so no idea who she was and why she was with me and as I was sipping my fruit juice I faded away and woke up in my own bed. 

The dream stuck with me and at first I thought it was the setting for some kind of game, but there was no relation to any game I thought up. Then it could be for TV or movie, but the office space was too distinct. I would have loved to have a house and with such an office, but too much was not my initial desire in office choice, even as the computer clearly was. Sometimes the brain takes you on a meaningless quest, so I might never know why, but that feeling of looking around and watching the ocean still haunts me and I have no idea why.

Enjoy the day, we are now past the 50% point towards the weekend.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, movies, Stories

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, IT, Law, Media, movies

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Politics, Science

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Gaming, Media, Politics, Science

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 13, 2023 · 20:56

Discrimination Legislation of America

This is not new and I have talked about it before (some time ago). This all started with a Tweet, not the most academic source, but it gave me somewhere to start.

Then I went out and looked for something more reliable and Forbes handed me (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/alangassman/2023/04/07/bidens-war-on-billionaires/) a story from April. 

The setting given is ‘Biden’s War On Billionaires’ (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/alangassman/2023/04/07/bidens-war-on-billionaires/) it is there we see “All American earners are subject to federal income taxes, but not everyone is subject to the same tax rate. While middle-class Americans pay, on average, roughly 14% in federal taxes annually, the wealthiest American families frequently use loopholes to avoid paying these tax rates.” This is one point of you and it is not an invalid one. Yet, in black letter law the US has tax laws. The law is what nations rely on and I agree it is not a fair one, but guess what. This is the fault of the US Congress and the US Senate. I have been talking about fair taxation for over 10 years. But the law is the law and there is an additional setting, the reason why people focus on Jeff Bezos, this is merely a first step. You see, that 20% will do nothing, America is in too deep, it is a sinking ship and the only thing these political people want to do is step out, so they can say not was not on their watch. It is too late for that. You see when that first law is passed, they might get a chunk of Bezos, but they will also get a chunk of Marc Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison and that list goes on. My issue is that this is discrimination, Ageism (age discrimination), economic discrimination is also discrimination. So they are going after the real innovators, real inventors and what America wants is not their money, it is their IP, or at least part of it and co-controlling it. You really want all these systems to be co-owned by the USA? Whatever freedom you thought you had would be gone. The US has been playing stupid since the Clinton Administration, it was the last time that the US had green numbers, since then the allotted a debt surpassing $31,000,000,000,000 dollars. The US is broke and they are now in it to delay for whatever time they can. The USA has become a sinking ship, they are patching holes by cutting pieces out of the same leaking hull, it never ends well. I have pleaded for tax law overhauls for well over a decade. I noticed the slippery slope close to 25 years ago and it impacts the EU and Japan as well. China is growing, China is becoming the next power player in its lonesome position. BRICS is becoming an inner circle with China in the lead position, the moment it sheds Russia, their geese will be count as well. BRICS went from the elite of 5, to a group with 40 nations interested, the lead of the US is gone. No one follows the broke person who can no longer feed itself and with the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates added to the BRICS group the US has very little left, so now they are setting the stage to go after the billionaires and whatever more they can get. Yet in all this the numbers of what Apple (Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft too) paid in taxation. That would have ben the fair setting, but no one is really digging into this, are they? Fair taxation starts with the corporations that was the first step and that has been overdue for decades, the loopholes had to be dealt with and that never was, that is the real story. Jeff Bezos et al used the legal options like tax lawyers to avoid paying more taxation than was required. Tax avoidance means “the use of legal methods to minimise the amount of income tax owed by an individual or a business”, which is perfectly legal, tax evasion is not legally stated and a crime. This is the stage that brings in the players like PwC, they are one of the leading experts in tax avoidance, this is why a tax overhaul had been essential for about 25 years and now it is too late. The us has its opponents knocking on their gates (BRICS and their members). So we get another populist call for taxing the rich, but it is the tax system and IRS who needed to clean their houses, they never did. I am no friend of Jeff Bezos, I do not think I ever was but that man took an online bookshop and turned it into something huge, then he went against the biggest tech company of all and created an equal if not a better version with his Amazon Luna (against the Google Stadia) which made Google leave the field (leaving billions on the floor), it almost destroyed Microsoft with its Azure through Amazon AWS. Two clear wins by (an online) bookshop. That is what Jeff Bezos did. You have to respect that and the others made their own innovative futures. Now the US wants to go after these innovator? So what happens to the US when these places resettle in BRICS territory? Good luck with that idea. So consider the Discrimination Legislation of America, the DLA, which by pure coincidence (LOL) also means Disability Living Allowance. The pay setting that most Americans are about to get towards to. Consider that the DLA ranges from around $1,000 – $5,000 depending on the member’s pay grade and dependency status. You can normally only receive DLA once each fiscal year. So a maximum of $5000 a year to make ends meet. Where in America can you live of that? I am not certain there is any place that will make America liveable and when the larger corporations leave that will be close to all that is left, until the money is gone. That is the future and I tried to warn you all, not to bite the hand that was feeding the US (Saudi Arabia) and when the tech players leave billions on the floor, why is that? I will let you decide.

Weekend is entering the last hours of the day, it is at the end of Sunday in the East (New Zealand) and at its start in Western Canada, enjoy.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,