Category Archives: Finance

March 29, 2023 · 00:44

The snooze that does not wake

It started some time ago, but the recollection that The Conversation gave me was enough. I saw the message around 05:00, as such I needed some time to recollect the information. But we get to that in a moment. The Conversation (at https://theconversation.com/as-longterm-partnership-with-us-fades-saudi-arabia-seeks-to-diversify-its-diplomacy-and-recent-deals-with-china-iran-and-russia-fit-this-strategy-202211) gives us ‘Saudi Arabia seeks to diversify its diplomacy – and recent deals with China, Iran and Russia fit this strategy’ It sounds simple enough, but it is not. You see, the story gives more than one quote that is important. I prefer to focus on “Riyadh and other Gulf capitals as leaders began to question U.S. credibility as a reliable regional partner” that was the gemstone not the only one, but this one matters. You see, you cannot deny allies the needs they have and then make demands from them as an ally. Like cheap oil. Saudi Arabia wanted to grow its national defence systems and America said, well,  one part said yes and then congress said no, America said no. So now we take a small trip. A trip to ‘The Persian Gulf match’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/06/06/the-persian-gulf-match/) which I wrote on the 6th of June 2019, almost 4 years ago. There I wrote “The actions of the American US Congress have shown that what they regard as being an ally is not what an ally is; it is not even what a wannabe ally would consider to be. As such apart from your advancement in technology and infrastructure a much larger foundation for your national defence is seemingly essential in the immediate future. The shown delays that the European Union have shown to be regarding Iran, Turkey and terrorist organisations like Hezbollah give rise to the essential need of China to become part of that solution.” It was part of a concept letter addressed to the Saudi Royal family. I wrote this almost 4 years ago and now we see this coming to fruition. Saudi Arabia is on the verge of buying a renewal of military goods from China, not the EU and not the US, setting their coffers back close to 20 billion. And now the stakes are increasing.

This is seen when Reuters informs us that Saudi Arabia is agreeing to build a new petrochemical refinery in China. The stage is that the two refineries will be able to process over 500,000 barrels a day. The fine print is not known, but I am willing to make a serious bet that China will soon get its hands on 500,000 barrels a day extra and I feel certain that this will come off the allotted amount for the EU and the US. I warned several times of this danger between 2019 and 2023, look it up, it is done in clear print (at www.lawlordtobe.com). I did not see the refineries in that mix, but for some strange reason Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud will not tell me what goes on in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, what a surprise. But the larger stage is now taking shape. First the defence industry, then other enhancements and now the reduction of oil towards the west. That was the danger stage we all faced since 2019, and US congress and other Americans wanted to play egomaniac, they were the strength of the world. Guess what, you need money to pull that off and America only has debts, which now is about $30,000,000,000,000 and there is no way back. That stopped a year ago when America forfeited billions in revenue and that list is merely increasing. Now that China has a firm grip on opportunities all over the Middle East their goal is merely increasing. And I tried to warn people of this, I tried to warn the UK to step in or lose it all and as the Typhoon didn’t make the Saudi choice, I reckon they are missing out too.

The setting is “U.S. credibility as a reliable regional partner” that is what President Biden needs to resolve and he needs to resolve it now, any opposition from Congress and the problem merely grows and accelerates. That was what I saw in 2019, that is what is happening now. A stage clearly foreseen and ignored by the US windbags. To be honest I had hoped to serve Saudi Arabia in some capacity and optionally score 3.75% commission, which does not seem much, but over a billion it is still $37 million and if the work is for more than a billion, that bonus merely increases and assures me of a nice retirement parachute. 

So how long until that refinery is build? How long until we get hit by the small print that well over 500,000 barrels of oil a day will go to China? I honestly do not know, but I reckon that this news gets heralded when the refinery is around 95% complete. The timeline? I cannot tell, can you?

1 Comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Politics

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

March 28, 2023 · 01:55

Ways to skin a cat

Yes, it is an old expression, yet anytime I use it, the Cheshire Cat gets a little upset with me. Well thats all fine I say, he disagrees. To start this off, I need to take you back to the 21st of March when I wrote ‘The unplanned story’. The story (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/03/21/the-unplanned-story/) gives rise to new IP I had, but it is not about the IP. It is about the quote “The image is based on identity and interaction. You see, that need is not effort, it is engagement. Market Research (at least a few of them) have seen that engagement is the metric that really matters and Augmented reality is the core of that and that is what is missing in malls.” Yes, I saw that it was about Augmented Reality, or so I personally belief. Yet CBC (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-mall-cashes-in-on-alternative-tenants-to-fight-canada-wide-slump-1.6787534) gives us ‘Edmonton mall cashes in on alternative tenants to fight Canada-wide slump’ and that is what I love. Someone found another way and that is great. With their “The Bonnie Doon Shopping Centre is reinventing itself with unconventional vendors and local clubs” I love it, they are creating a new way of engagement. It does not matter, I am firm in my believe that my IP will be a solution. What I love is that someone found another way it is great (and it gives rise to my train of thought). Local communities are often forgotten and now we get “Radio Control Racers Edmonton took over a storefront in the building last month. President Randy Van said the first few weeks have been a massive success for both the club and the mall” this opens up so many options, it does not hurt my IP (which is a little bit on my mind), it merely gives the rise to engagement (not the ring). Engaging with your audience is the solution, it always way. As I have no idea how Eaton Mall will use the 220,000 square foot to create engagement, but it shows what was missing. Even now whilst Eaton Mall is getting back on its feet, it is still well over 20% short of what was (a seeming impression made by the videos I watched). 

In the end there are many ways to skin a cat (sorry Cheshire Cat). It merely requires us to look at that equation differently and the Bonnie Doon Shopping centre in Edmonton (where the oilers are from) has done a decently remarkable thing and that also requires recognition. They took the equation in a different direction and yay to them, they pulled it off. 

This is he kind of ingenuity I applaud, because we see too little of it anywhere. So enjoy the day and consider what the mall in your area is missing. Perhaps they need to change the greed driven formula of dollars per square foot into the future of calling in people per square foot, because people per mall is what decides the success of such one place, not the amount of empty walking space (sorry Nordstrom).

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

March 27, 2023 · 02:58

Speedy escalation dot who?

It started with something I wrote on February 3rd 2023 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/02/03/as-the-tide-turns/) when I wrote ‘As the tide turns’. There was some grumbling when I presented “some governments will start to draw out papers where Russians without permanent residency or citizenship will not be allowed to own anything” it was a natural progression, as such I felt decently certain that this would happen. Plenty did not agree and that is fair, but with Oligarchs all over the field, trying to secure what they can in places like Dubai, the future was decently fluidic. 

Now less than a day ago, I see a Tweet from Lithuania that Russians cannot get a VISA, they cannot get citizenship and they cannot own property and I think Lithuania is only the start. This will go further and now we get to see another side. This could be a larger tooth in a set of juridical teeth that is about to do something about Russian organised crime in many nations and they all it all to Vladimir Putin. Not only did his actions undid a century of goodwill for Russia, it in the same trend it undid the degrees of freedom of Russian oligarchs and now Russian organised crime will get a massive slap to whatever they owned and Lithuania seemingly started that stage. A stage that I saw coming because it is what I regarded as logical continuation. As such London who reacted the slowest of all now needs to give full steam or they need to answer questions like ‘Why did you do so little?’

Did I see the future?
Well, that is up for grabs, I presumed that certain steps are a natural continuation and this was one, to be honest, I had no timeline in sight, one usually does not have that with near natural time lines. But I expected it to be in the works and for a country like Lithuania to take that step has also larger implications. Russians have an interest in Lithuania, it is their smuggle route Vilnius – Kaunas – Klapeida that is now also under fire and that closes the routes to places all over Europe, they will now need to rely on other routes and there is not that much options via Poland, they already despised Russians long before the Ukrainian issues started, as such there will have to design new routes but where? I have no idea, that is not my forte or my data driven direction. 

No matter how I see it, larger changes are coming all over Europe and when the US does the same jump pro Russian political forces in the US will run for cover and they will be running everywhere that is petty much a given. 

So speculate or presume all you care and all you desire, but you got the news here first and yes, I do accept that Twitter is no verifiable source, but similar news is coming from the Baltic News Network and it seems that 16 hours ago Estonia started a similar direction, as such Russian routes and Russian opportunities are drying up and when you consider the US, these two nations have done a lot more in a month than the US has done in over a year. That part becomes visible when you investigate what corporations are still active in Russia, the answer should scare you.

Have a nice Sunday

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Politics

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

March 26, 2023 · 05:54

What business plan?

The very first thought when I saw a Nordstrom video less than an hour ago. In light of the closure of Nordstrom someone made a 4K walkthrough of the Nordstrom shop in the Eaton Mall in Toronto, which is their flagship. The shop is about 220,000 square foot and the first thought out of my mind was ‘Are you flipping kidding me?’ And I suddenly understood why Nordstrom never made a profit. I cannot understand why the people there did not see this right off the bat. In the first the shop looks pretty amazing, but overly spacious and not in a good way. The shop has about 70,000 square foot of unused space, that is a third and mall space is expensive. So to be wasting space to the likes of 70,000 square foot. I found one source with a price (not verified) of $1,450 per square foot, implying that Nordstrom was wasting $101,500,000 EVERY YEAR on empty space. So what kind of business plan is that? And the video (at https://youtu.be/6IQMgV_7uqE) clearly shows the waste of space. You could setup the entire shop in half the space and when you reduce the cost of one shop by $51,000,000 it amounts to a large sum of money. I do not care what the vision of these people were, when you optionally have 13 stores in the same setup, you are wasting hundreds of millions a year. Now, we know that the others are smaller, but it still implies that the stores were wasting close to half a billion every year. So what gives?

When I wrote ‘The unplanned story’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/03/21/the-unplanned-story/) on the 21st of March, I did make mention of “there is a weakness in your business model, but I do not think it was enough”, in this malls tend to be the same and I did not give it the consideration I optionally could have. I never expected that Nordstrom wasted space to the degree they did. There is more, it seems to be some elite store and Canadians aren’t too elite based (well over 40% of the male population loves their hockey jersey). A shop like this fits Los Angeles, optionally Rodeo Drive, but even then this flagship there would become a money pit soon thereafter, especially when you waste 70,000 square foot of space. 

I keep on coming back to the thought, who were these people wasting money to this degree? You see, covid or not, I expect that covid had a massive impact, but the clear waste of space is boggling my mind. Malls are expensive and that keeps on badgering my mind. It also reminded me of a place called Meddens in Rotterdam. A fashion store with exactly the same setup in a place called ‘Lijnbaan’, there is however a difference. The people behind it were brilliant and they bought the entire block. They became an eccentric and exquisite shop, but as they owned the block, their $100K gamble became a multi million euro win and it funded expansion after expansion and after 180 years (in 2010) the 6 shops stopped. I reckon 180 years is a good run. A shop like Nordstrom that stated to CBC last month “Despite our best efforts, we do not see a realistic path to profitability for the Canadian business.” Well, when you waste that kind of space I am not entirely surprised. And it will not take long for places like Holt Renfrew, Hudson’s Bay, and Simons to gobble up the clients. Personally I hope that the staff members will find space in these places as well. They tend to be victims of a business plan, not the instigators of it. It took the parent company less than 10 years to see wisdom and with an earlier quote (I think it was CBC) that they never had a profitable year I actually wonder why it took this long. 

The more I saw of this video the more questions came to me and I have no idea what these board people were thinking (if they were thinking). I might seem happy, but I am not. I do not relish anyone’s downfall (Microsoft being the exception) and this shop was managed floor by floor by people who loved their job and their space. You can see that with EVERY display in that shop and there are many of them and we would want to give them a pass for covid, but the shop was not doing well years before that point and that partially angers me, waste tends to do that. A weird start to Sunday for me, but when I see the evidence I am not really overly surprised on the outcome, merely on some people not seeing this clearly years before me.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance

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

March 25, 2023 · 21:50

Another promise in the works

It was a mere 15 hours ago when we were given ‘UK regulator no longer thinks Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard to make Call of Duty exclusive’, which might be true, but Microsoft created waves when we were told that Redfall was made an exclusive the moment Microsoft bought Bethesda. Now this does not mean that Call of Duty is becoming an exclusive, but there are other things that Microsoft could do and over time we have seen them do similar actions and they have made a $68 billion wager on ‘their’ success. As such I feel that I need to counter the setting by creating a new IP, never seen before and it will be an Exclusive for Sony and Amazon (well optionally whomever buys it will have it all to themselves. Yet the idea of slamming Microsoft in a few ways is oddly satisfying. The IP is at present set to counter whatever Bethesda and Blizzard have in the works. Of course there will be a time of growth and there is a timeline. Only stupid people think that they have a solution ready of the bat. I already created IP to counter Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls with IP that was actually meant for Bethesda, but when they became part of Microsoft, that went into the drawer. Now it serves my need to drown Microsoft in their own arrogance. So in the net IP instance, I focussed on an First Person game, the reason that CoD is First person, but there is a rather large need to go in another direction and I think I achieved that. I looked at combat, I looked at healing parameters and I looked at some of the weapon settings. Two elements I solved and even as you can collect some things, the aim of collection is set to a more redundant stage. A world with 800K opponents does not need to rely on weapons, it needs to rely on favours and I think I set that in a new limelight. The idea of blending favours and favoured weapons is something not done before (as far as I could tell) and in this world we all adhere to one master, well two if you are a proclaimed master of self. Then I considered the world of income and I discarded it in this case to a much larger extent. There will be options for barter, but bartering will be set to other needs (not missions). Then in light of my everlasting need for replayability I set mana to a different score, to the enhancement of passive abilities. There will be melee, ranged and weapons of reach. And your first choice matters, there will be no real switching in the initial game if you want to stay alive. You see in the old days people could hardly afford one weapon, let alone several. So I decided to set the combat to knife, dagger, gladius, sword, axe, club, mace, pitchfork, spear, bident, trident and a few more. But the game needs to be a challenge and there we have the larger stage (which will be revealed to some extent at a later date). As my mind sifts through challenges and opportunities it is important to keep this an open sandbox game, to give the people choice to go in any direction and to consider the realm they are in. I wanted more than a simple game with trigger points and that is where I found myself. There will always be people that prefer CoD, but when you consider what they achieved in NEW innovations, I feel I have a chance to make Microsoft regret their choices. If this game gets its own following and merely persuade 10% of the gamers to try something else than CoD, my job is done and when Microsoft has to do a Ubisoft and sell the game at 50% less (or more), that additional $68B anchor (in addition to Bethesda) it becomes a $100B chokehold and as I wrote 2 days ago in ‘One thought counters another’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/03/23/one-thought-counters-another/) the simplified quote “To merely break even Microsoft will have to exceed 72.8 million of PROFIT every day between now and 31/12/2026 and that is merely to cover the last three spendings, not all their waste.” As such I ignored a few items, but the short and sweet became that they need $72.8M a day to break even, so when my IP allows Amazon Luna and Sony to diminish that to a mere $32M a day with the added thought that in gaming they have no chance of getting anywhere near that $72.8M a day, especially with GamePass in play, they stand to lose more and more money. The added benefit of IP that is there not for Microsoft products, Amazon will grow (still hoping they buy the other IP which would land them well over 50,000,000 subscriptions)and Sony will grow a little more too Sony might not grow too much due to me, merely because they have an amazing lineup of games already. But I am adding them to make sure Microsoft gamers will see that there is more out there and the CoD fans will stick with Microsoft, I get that and they are ‘devoted’ fans, but when they merely get more of the same and they seek out other shores, Microsoft will truly be done for and at that point the Exclusive needs of Microsoft are merely nails in their expensive coffin. 

This is seemingly becoming such a nice weekend. I will have a cheese sandwich and consider to meditate on an old expression of adding the angel’s share to the game. I could not find anyone who did the same ever.  A game with over a dozen unique parts never seen in FPS games before. It sucks to be Microsoft soon enough, for now lets see how arrogant they remain.

Enjoy the weekend!

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Gaming, IT, Media

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

March 24, 2023 · 22:49

A nice surprise

It started early this morning, the BBC (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65057809) gives me ‘Jack Dorsey business target of Hindenburg report’, so someone is finally asking questions of this person? With the byline “Tech billionaire Jack Dorsey is facing scrutiny, after a report accuses the payments company he leads of inflating user numbers and catering to criminals” one part some people noticed that about Twitter, which is why Elon Musk paid well over twice the price and no one in the media was willing to ask questions. I know nothing about the payment company, as such I have no view. The catering to criminals is new, not sure where I stand on it. As such when I see “Block, which former Twitter boss Mr Dorsey co-founded in 2009 and leads as chief executive, said it was exploring legal action against Hindenburg for the “factually inaccurate and misleading report”.” I stopped my response as I did not want to give more ammunition to Jack Dorsey, but the statement ‘factually inaccurate’ requires investigation and data. So as we are given “Now worth more than $30bn (£24.4bn), it was renamed Block in 2021, to reflect another, fast growing side of its business: Cash App, a payments app that was the focus of Hindenburg’s report.” No one seemingly reacts and that is fine, these places happen. Yet the setting is that it grew by well close to 1,000% over the period of less than 8 years. That implies a 125% year on year growth, that is a bit much and the accusation seemingly makes sense. And the criminals (or organised crime) would see the benefit of a cash app. There would be all kinds of benefits for them. This does not make Jack Dorsey guilty, but after the Twitter debacle it makes sense that a deeper look is given to this event. I reckon that I would be able to find a few more items if I had access to all that data, but that is the second stage. Not merely the data, the income streams would be invaluable for a player like China (or Russia for that matter). So as the BBC gives us “While conducting its research, Hindenburg claimed it had easily created obviously fake Cash App accounts in the names of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and made public records requests, which allegedly showed that Cash App was used to facilitate millions in fraudulent pandemic relief payments from the government.” Which leads to “that reflected “key lapses” in compliance processes” and there is one of the elements I warned for for well over two years. The BBC calls (or quotes) key lapses, but I see another fintech app lacking checks, balances and the ability to vet the correctness of information. And the added ““Former employees described how Cash App suppressed internal concerns and ignored user pleas for help as criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform,” Hindenburg said. “This appeared to be an effort to grow Cash App’s user base by strategically disregarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) rules”” merely gives rise to my thoughts. And the world seems to be stagnant to act to any FinTech when needed. Yes, we see it at the BBC now, but how many more will look into this? How many media will give Jack Dorsey another free pass? I cannot tell at present, but over the last 11 hours the media did not go nuts over this, yet jokes like the ICIJ with their Pandora papers, their Pickwick papers and their cups of tea are seemingly in the dark on too much of this. So whilst some will wonder why Charles Dickens comes into play. Consider “A great hokey-cokey of eccentrics, conmen, phony politicians, amorous widows and wily, witty servants, somehow catching an essence of what it is to be English, celebrating companionship, generosity, good nature, in the figure of Samuel Pickwick, Esq, one of the great embodiments in literature of benevolence.” Now consider that view whilst I edit that part into “A view of FinTech solutions, conmen, phony media, and, silly exploiters, somehow catching an essence of what it is to be a wannabe, celebrating greed, need, and exploiters, in the figure of an unknown person at present, one of the worst instigations of hardship creators” it took less than a minute to get to that part of the equation and the crumbles of the media pie were all over the table for well over a year. So it is good to see the BBC make mention of this, but I wonder who will follow and will there be a real investigation? And I have to make one alteration, the Australian Financial Review got there about an hour ago, so they were on the ball. Yet who else was? Not that many for sure. 

This situation is still fluidic and I will take more looks, because I think I owe people like Elon Musk to take a larger look into this person, merely for the reason that the media refused to do so and that ain’t right. So will Jack Dorsey join the flock containing people like Elisabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried? I do not know, that is for a court to decide, at present it is an accusation. But in this the BBC has for the most been a righteous party, so for now they are getting the benefit of the doubt and the fact that the AFR is supporting that view is not a bad thing either. Perhaps the twist and dance of Jack Dorsey is in its last stage Time will tell. 

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Law, Media

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

March 23, 2023 · 09:14

One thought counters another

This is a case we sometimes face. My thought counters theirs and their thought counters mine. There is nothing unnatural about it. In a setting where we applaud, respect or even merely accept the scales of balance, we see that one side counters another. Balance is natural and that is important here. You see, players like Microsoft have been fighting balance for their own selfish little needs for the longest of times. Now, this does not mean that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are not like that, but they tend to go with the flow for most of the time (Facebook perhaps a little less than the other three). Apple might be the most in tune with the scales of balance, but that is from where I sit and might be incorrect. And this all started with ‘Microsoft says ten years is “sufficient” for Sony to create Call of Duty rival’, yes, I can do you one better. They can do it in half that time. More important it will not be some Call of Duty rival, it will be better. As Microsoft is becoming more and more of a hollow egg, the $69 billion more in the near future is also the face of a failing company. You see, You can buy all you like, but when the creative people walk away because they see the failing of a company who fails against Apple with their Surface, who fails with their Azure against AWS, who fails with their Bing against Google search is a company that is doomed and as I personally see it, it is in its last 1,375 days before it crumbles into a joke, that firm will lost a lot more soon enough. And it is not that hard an equation. To merely break even Microsoft will have to exceed 72.8 million of PROFIT every day between now and 31/12/2026 and that is merely to cover the last three spendings, not all their waste. That is why I know that Microsoft will fail. So I created in the past blogs the foundations of more RPG that I made freely available to people designing for the Amazon Luna. It is the final blow of failures for Microsoft. I don’t need to do anything for Sony. They have their horses in a row and they are ready to race. Nintendo has its own niche and they are doing fine. All settings that two gaming giants had racked up correctly. Microsoft betrayed their own gamers, blew its audience who is now taking a distance from Microsoft, and as such their population is dwindling down. Still think I was delusional?

It goes from bad to worse after that. Their own cornerstone is having more and more issues and people are willing to push away from that too. Microsoft office is too bulky and there is a lot of power in Open office and Google’s solution which apart from their spreadsheet is doing above OK, not to mention the fact that it is a free product. And in the graphic settings Adobe surpassed them in several ways all at once and in the age of Meta and their metaverse Microsoft will merely lose more and the need for the daily profit of 72.8 million that marker will merely bite more and more. With the Luna set to overtake (with a little help) the Microsoft streaming service they will get another opponent. It is Chinese Tencent who is already taking serious time to create Unreal Engine 5 applications. Another soft spot Microsoft was ignoring. Yes we are given all the spin in the media, but too many is created by ‘Microsoft Friends’ and we see AI claims all over and when we think things trough, we will realise that ‘their’ AI is data driven and they lack data. There is no way that some AI claim can create scripts. You see (deeper) machine learning can only react to data, react to events they HAVE and that means that they can copy and edit, but they cannot create. That is the first larger flaw. And now as I had another idea for Streaming gaming, there will be a much larger case for people to connect to systems that will deliver, not are bought and then altered to fit another need. That is a sure way to fail. One source (a few, but seemingly all from the same source) gave us “Redfall PS5 version was in development, but cancelled after the Xbox buyout”, so how does that align with a Microsoft statement that they would be everywhere? Now, lets be clear Microsoft is allowed to do what they do, they bought Bethesda, they are trying to own Blizzard. But what happens when we design new versions, new IP exclusive for Amazon Luna and Sony? What is their win when they spend $100,000,000,000 for a console that as some sources gives us 

As of June 2022, lifetime unit sales of Xbox One consoles in North America reached 31.58 million, while in Europe, lifetime unit sales surpassed 12.8 million with some partial addition of what was estimated that Microsoft had shipped at least 18.5 million units of the two consoles (series S and X) worldwide by December 2022. Now look at the Sony equation. PS5 sales have now climbed to 32 million, with 7.1 million consoles sold in the last three months alone, a dramatic increase over the 3.9 million sold in the same quarter last year. This means that the PS5 is almost equal on the Microsoft last 3 consoles, all whilst the PS4 has surpassed 117,000,000 consoles. Now they want to go to the cloud whilst their consoles are already doomed. So I am willing to set aside some creative time to make sure that they fail there too. 6 directions (tablet, SAAS, office, search, gaming and GAAS) where Microsoft fell short and keeps on failing, no purchase will counter that and the message merely gets to be worse soon thereafter. Now, do not discount some options. Microsoft will get some parts right, Starfield looks for all accounts amazing, but when there is an alternative people will go for the one solution that does not betray them. And should Amazon (or Apple) select my IP, they stand to get more than 50,000,000 more accounts making the failure of Microsoft even more dismal, especially as I predicted this setting for the better part of 2 years. No spin will work when there is a published article countering that. They are all about making a spin towards the future, but what happens when the ‘future spin’ becomes past and does not hold up to the numbers? That is the part Microsoft seemingly forgets about (again and again) and that wheel is merely spinning faster and not for Microsoft. They will merely lose more and more control. At some point they will need more money to repair the potholes of their shoddy road. Consider the Solarwinds issue and the fact that Microsoft was going to buy a cyber powerhouse (which became part of Google) and after that the media went dark, the spin failed, so darkness is all they had and the media complied. There were no questions on how Microsoft was going to deal with it after that. Weird he?

The list merely grows and at some point the media needs to do a 180 or accept that they are a Microsoft tool. So how many failures until the media actually turns on Microsoft? Perhaps the larger advertisement deals come through, but not for all and that is the counter that vanishes, especially when you consider that the world has 18,000 registered with the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). Some will lose and that is the beginning of a lot more pain for Microsoft. 

So whilst all of that is in play. I considered a new RPG, free for Amazon Luna and Sony developers. Consider the absolute hit the first 4 God of War games were. Now consider an RPG where Tartarus is actually mapped out. As such it is no God of War and you have no special powers, but a battlefield the actual size of America named Tartarus, the underworld where you need to keep standing, where you need to survive and each death restores you, but with the millions of opponents you cannot run into battle all the time. You need to find the relic weapons that have additional powers and perhaps you will at some point find an Olympian piece of armour or. weapon that gives you an edge. And it will be first person. So 9.9999 years before Microsoft imagined I gave Amazon and Sony a rival. That is the power of creativity, something Microsoft lacks, they surely lack it, because if blizzard is bought, many creative souls will retire with their part of billions and Microsoft end up with another near empty shell, product but without driving creativity. So how long until the makers at Bethesda will have had enough? How long until they think that Ubisoft is a better deal than Bethesda under new management? That is how I know that Microsoft is ticking away towards implosion and when that happens (within the next 1380 days) I will merely sit, sip a little Ice water and tell you ‘I told you so!’ Because I get to do that at that moment. Yay me!

1 Comment

Filed under Finance, Gaming, IT, Media, Science

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

March 22, 2023 · 22:39

What was this about?

That was the second thought I had, not the first. To be honest, I was swept up by emotional phrasing that was done rather well, but the whole mess changed when I had some time to think it through. It started about 2 days ago when I saw ‘My bank did not stop £6,500 payment to holiday scammers despite my pleas’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/20/bank-did-not-stop-payment-holiday-scammers). The initial thought was what screwed up thing did the banks do this time, it was accelerated by the small issue of £6,500, which for a lot of people is regarded as loads of cash, especially when you arrange your budget in pints, which in some places outside of London will bank you 1,625 pints. For some people that is a drinking option dragging you on for well over a year, 18 months and that is a lot. So why the beer reference?

Money is a direct number, but how to compare it? There is a discussion whether an annual event can be compared to  normal monthly budget. Personally I do not believe it is valid or even acceptable. If we did that we might never have a vacation ever again at present. But back to the article. We are given “Graham says that for more than six hours after she had authorised a €7,155 (£6,500) payment to a Bank of America account in the US, the money continued to sit in her First Direct bank account. When she received an email an hour after making the payment warning her that the villa’s listing on Vrbo had been removed for security reasons, she immediately phoned First Direct back to halt the transfer”, now there are issues here, but that gets to legal to consider, but VRBO removed the villa AFTER payment was processed, there will be legal issues for VRBO. The second part is that this is a US setting, with seemingly no representation in the UK, that is the actual issue for me. Then we get “At this stage, she says, the people purporting to own the villa said they might be able to do Graham a deal if she was prepared to move outside Vrbo’s email system, and to email directly.” Taking VRBO out of the loop sets VRBO free, why do you want to be out of ANY loop? And that is where the victim gives us “They have been about as useless as they could be”. The woman who is referred to as Sarah Graham is wrong. 

In the first the bank correctly performed a payment setting. At the time of the payment it was ‘agreed’ on by both parties. In the second, the move outside of the VRBO loop got VRBO off the hook because they were unaware of what was going on. 

Now a small education for the stupid people out there. Scammers are pretty much everywhere, where ever there is a quick deal, a cheap deal (£800 cheaper) there is an exponential growth of a scam in place. There is a travel agency in almost every corner of any street in the UK and EU. There is a reason for that. Looking at a hotel in Crete I see one for 113€ a night, that is including the flight a lot less than £6,500 for a month.

There is a growing issue with people thinking that they can get the cheap deal and when you do not know the party on the other side, there is an increasing chance of losing your money. With local travel agencies (in the UK) they tend to have ATOL protection. 

This means that the scheme provides protection for travellers who book a holiday, which includes a flight. If an ATOL licensed travel company collapses, it ensures that your money is protected and you can get home. And now we get to the real part, the article does not once mention travel agency or ATOL. As such the question towards writer Miles Brignall becomes. Did you do anything more than exploit the victim? If you wanted to alert the people you would have mentioned travel agencies, ATOL licences and the issue with foreign organisations, even though I will admit that all facts taken aside, VRBO is in the clear, the scammers made sure that they were out of the loop so that they could collect, and in this the banks have no blame either. A service was performed and the bank performed it. 

This was about a person trying to get the golden deal for a lot less whilst she knew none of the parties. How does that usually go over on the internet?

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

March 21, 2023 · 23:45

The unplanned story

That happens to us all and there are any number of reasons. I thought I was done with the subject for now, that is until CB gave me ‘Nordstrom Canada will launch sales at its closing stores starting Tuesday’ (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nordstrom-canada-liquidating-stores-1.6784540) about 11 hours ago. There was no surprise. I covered this in part in ‘It as one keyword’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/03/04/it-was-one-keyword/) and that story links to a few others. I casually captured the folly of Nordstrom but I left a few things out. You see, we can all agree if you have been working from a place of loss from day one, there is a weakness in your business model, but I do not think it was enough. Covid was too unexpected and the world reeled on it, but it was already to late as I saw it and even if my IP was accepted by the right people, for Nordstrom it was already too late, it would have merely given them a little more time, time they could not hand them a better result. Their business model and their prediction model was off by too much.

You see, to see this we need to look at a picture. The picture is below. 

As you see here, we see a mall and this time around it is not the Toronto Eaton Centre, this is the Hyat Mall in Riyadh and it show the same weakness, which is the problem for malls. Yet as I see it, the problem is a lot bigger for western malls (USA, UK, EU) they have the same touch, the tough of non identity. You can scream the name all you like, but these malls are all the same. Go to a mall anywhere in the US and you could not tell where you were from walking there. It was a formula that malls were based on and between 1990-2015 that made sense, but after Covid the world changed and that is where the problems starts for these malls, all 116,000 of them. Yet there is a solution and both Gucci and Tiffany is already tapping into that, but I reckon they are missing part of it and that is where Google, Samsung and Apple come in. I wonder if these two players figure out what I saw over 6 months ago and it is a juicy one. Optionally Elon Musk could use it to give more needs to his Pi Phone but in itself it is still an android solution. The image is based on identity and interaction. You see, that need is not effort, it is engagement. Market Research (at least a few of them) have seen that engagement is the metric that really matters and Augmented reality is the core of that and that is what is missing in malls. Lets be clear, for Nordstrom it is too late, the question becomes will malls change into retail graveyard places over the next 5-10 years or are they given a new lease on life and that matters. How much real estate is in 116,000 malls? When they die the local places will light up and I personally am a firm believer in ‘Support your local hooker’ which was an expression we used in the 70’s. 

So am I right because Gucci and Tiffany are tapping into that idea? No, I believe I am right because the nature of the beast (the consumer) has changed and is still changing. They are catching on that a new prerogative is required and AR gets them there. So when they are done with ageism and other forms of consumer categorisation, they will figure out that their predictive model is wrong on a few levels and that is where we see the larger stage change. I merely wonder if some of them will wake up in time. If not, I watch it all go to hell and when it does I can point to my previous articles and tell them “Told you so” and whatever excuse they have will not hold up, because I wrote it months ago and I wrote it in several stories over a span of about a year (perhaps a little longer). So when they wake up, I wonder if it is to the board directors who are fed up with the colour rd in their books, or the conveyancer trying to measure up the place for new usage. I can’t be to the smell of coffee, because it is too late for that and it will not be to me as Amazon, Apple and Google all decided they never needed me. Fine, whatever.

So when we complete the consideration of “In approving Dacks’ liquidation request, Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz agreed, saying Nordstrom is facing a “difficult time, but this process is unfolding in a very co-operative manner.””

At least I kept it out of the hands of Microsoft, not a bad stage to consider. Yet consider two final things. The first is Nordstroms liquidation actual liquidation or euthanasia? The second is, is Nordstrom alone? How many other places are on the brink of really bad times in the next 5 years? 

Have a great day.

3 Comments

Filed under Finance, Media, Science

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

March 19, 2023 · 01:32

The quick fortune

Yes, that is how it starts, and there is one little snag. There is no such thing as a quick fortune, not for anyone. On the other hand, it gave me the idea for a new movie called ‘The cure is so much worse’ a nightmare of the most horrific kind, but more about that later. 

The BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939146) gives us ‘Thousands may have lost out to crypto trading app’, and I wonder just how stupid people are. You see, when I am given “Trading in cryptocurrencies has become popular, with people often promised large rewards over short periods” I see a red flag, a really big ref flag. If I have something that makes me so called rich overnight. I do not share it, well perhaps I share it with the two best friends I have and only after I have gotten a nice payout, so that I know that I am not setting them up. It is that simple. Its like these house scammers In Sydney almost a decade ago. Housing was so short that people started advertising apartments for sake via Facebook and a few other sources. If I know of an apartment for sale, I send a quick message to my dearest friends and no one else. Because an opportunity like this, I either use myself, or hand it to a best friend who will owe me a solid. With digital currency it is different, I trust none of them and even if The Saudi government or a place like Kingdom Holdings pays me an initial ₿2000 (for my IP) the first thing I do is to go to a bank and transfer it to a dollar number in my bank account. Bitcoin might have some reputation, but I do not trust it, I trust no form of digital currency. Then we are given “She says she lost hundreds of euros when she invested in iEarn Bot. She asked not to have her identity revealed as she fears her professional reputation might be damaged. Customers buying the bots – like Roxana – were told their investment would be handled by the company’s artificial intelligence programme, guaranteeing high returns”, so we aren’t even buying an app, we are buying a bot, more red flags, the there is the AI reference, an issue that does not exist and that list goes on. Then we are given “In Romania, dozens of high-profile figures, including government officials and academics, were persuaded to invest via the app because it was sponsored by Gabriel Garais, a leading IT expert in the country.” This person Gabriel Garais was apparently duped as well, some IT person. 

And then the curtain falls with “iEarn Bot presents itself as a US-based company with excellent credentials, but when the BBC fact-checked some information on its website, it raised some red flags. The man whom the site names as the company’s founder told us he had never heard of them. He said he has made a complaint to the police. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alongside companies such as Huawei and Qualcomm, are all named as “strategic partners” of iEarn Bot, but they too said they have no knowledge of the company and they are not working with it.” This also holds the third red flag. You see iEarn implies an Apple product, so why was Apple not all over this from days one? There might be a solid reason, but this gets me back to Gabriel Garais, as an IT person he should have known. 

This reeks like a Ponzi scheme menu and the setting and the spread implies organised crime of a new kind. Whether it is Russian, Korean, Chinese, or even American does not matter. When you can spread to this degree things get noticed and when people are getting scammed the lights go on nearly everywhere, as such the mention of 800,000 people in Indonesia and no one raises a brow? It does not add up. But the BBC went further. This is seen when we see “On the website, the company does not provide any contact information. When the BBC checked the history of its Facebook page, we learned that until the end of 2021, the account was advertising weight-loss products. It is managed from Vietnam and Cambodia”, OK, that might be true, but these pages can change hands like a snap from a finger and no contact information is the largest red flag. 

I get it, there are vulnerable people and they are seeing that pensions are coming up short, they see the promise of quick cash and I get it, some are falling for the trap, but the stage of Common Cyber Sense should have been on the forefront of their minds. And finally we get to “With the help of an analyst, the BBC managed to identify one main crypto wallet that received payments from about 13,000 potential victims, for a profit of almost $1.3m (£1m) in less than one year”, so 13,000 people gave someone over a million dollars in one year. When we consider what Indonesia is setup for, this seems like a low estimate and the news goes from bad to worse. You see this is now, when the national 5G networks go live, this amount gos up buy a lot and it will be achieved in under a week. I said in 2020 that the law was not ready and it is still not ready, moreover national police forces do not have the resources or the manpower to stop this and this is what organised crime is waiting for, it would help if the law was ready, but it is not and this is going to get worse. 

Getting back to the idea, it is still evolving, I need. Prologue to make the start, but the setting is nearly done, and to get this in the open I would need an actor, nothing like Ryan Reynolds (or Hugh Jackman). This is deep dark, people will step into a dark room to see a light (compared to my setting) as such I need a proper dark actor. Perhaps even a woman like Eihi Shiina. She scared the hell out of me in Audition (1999), I was even surprised myself that I could have such dark thoughts. A movie that literally scares members of organised crime into their own basements and commit suicide? Yup, that might be a new Netflix (or Apple) hit.

Have fun and please do not fall for these kinds of scams.

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Science

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