Tag Archives: London

Looky looky

It is always nice to go to bed, listen to music and dream away. That is until this flipping brain of mine gets a new idea. In this case it is not new IP, but a new setting for a group of people. You see, during lockdown I got hooked on walk video’s. It was a way to see places I had never visited before, it is one way to get around and weirdly enough, these walk videos are cool. You see more than you usually do (especially in London) most of them are actually quite good, a few need tinkering (like music not so loud) but for the most they are a decent experience. Then I thought what if GoPro makes a change, offering a new stage. That got me going, you see, most walks are on a stick, decent but intense for the filming party. So we can set the movie from a shoulder mount, a chest mount, or helmet mount. Yet what is filmed? So what happens if we have something like Google glasses and the left (or right) eye shows what we see in the film. We get all kind of degrees of filming. And if we want to ignore it, we merely close that eye for a moment. I am surprised that GoPro had not considered it, or perhaps they did. Consider that the filmer now has BOTH hands free and can hold something towards the camera, the filming agent can do more and move more freely. Consider that is works with a holder, but there is a need (in many cases) to have both hands available. And perhaps there is a need for both, the need to use one hand for precision and a gooseneck mount to keep both hands free. The interesting part is that there is no setting to get the image on something like Google Glasses and that is a shame, was I the first to think of it? It seems weird with all the city walks out there on YouTube, but there you have it and in that light, I was considering revisiting the IP I had for a next Watchdogs, one with a difference (every Ip creator will tell you that part), but I reckon that is a stage we will visit again soon enough, it involves Google Glasses and another setting that I will revisit. Just like the stage of combining deeper machine learning to a lens (or google glasses), a camera lens that offer direct translations, and the fun part is we can select if that is pushed through to film, or merely seen by us, now consider filming in Japan with machine learning and deeper machine learning auto translating ANY sign it sees. Languages that we do not know will no longer stop us, it will tell the filmmaker where they are and consider linking that to one lens in google glasses that overlays the map? It that out yet? I never saw it and there are all kinds of needs for that part. What you see is what you know, if you know the language. Just a thought at 01:17. I need a hobby, I really do!

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Is there a difference?

That is the question that overcame me. I was considering a new IP on gaming and it is actually going well, but about that soon. Leave it to me to create a Blizzard contender but now as public domain (for Sony and Amazon). And I do need a hobby so it might as well be sawing the chair-legs away from the Microsoft board of directors. Anyway, as I was contemplating a new path in IP, the Guardian gives us (at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/20/tower-twice-grenfell-height-planned-single-staircase-urw) with the title ‘Tower twice Grenfell’s height planned nearby with single staircase’, so the initial example on June 14th 2017 was not enough, construction and architectural companies in the UK as vying for the title of who can kill the surplus population the fastest. A few small details, the Grenfell tower was 67 metres high and became a coffin for 72 people. Now we see that the mistake is overtaken by to buildings, one of 130 metres, one 174 metres and again the singular stairs. I reckon that cladding will not be a problem either, there are always ways to avoid cost overruns. So when we are given “A planning application for a 51-storey residential tower in Docklands with one fire escape has been paused after a safety outcry”, my initial thought was “At what point will Mayor of London Sadiq Khan wake the fuck up?”. Not only was once not enough, we now see two plans, one in Docklands and one close to Grenfell, so the people will not see this nightmare, once, they optionally (if they are lucky) see it twice, what a joy greed makes!

So when the guardian treats us to “Grenfell United, a group representing the survivors and bereaved, said: “After half a decade of campaigning for safer homes, it’s shocking to hear that a new tower block, a stone’s throw from Grenfell, rigged with a fire safety defect before it’s even been built, is being planned.” It considers a single staircase inadequate for use by residents and firefighters if an evacuation is needed, even though it is allowable under building regulations.” I am left with the cornerstones.

  1. Why is this still allowed under building regulations?
  2. Why did the Guardian and Grenfell United need to bring this to the people attention?
  3. What on earth is the Mayor of London doing by allowing this targeted killing of London citizens under his watch?

You think that point 3 is overreaching? Consider the Guardian, yes I have had disagreements with them, yet they are giving us a while places like the BBC people (and others too) seemingly have nothing. So at what point will the BBC wake up, when will the larger news take this up and asks loudly the serious questions that should be asked? 

I know, only 72 died, London has roughly 9,000,000 people, so it is nothing. If this upsets you excellent! You see, we saw all the trial shenanigans. Now consider the video (from a firefighter) that some might have seen (at https://youtu.be/QM4RJE81fh4) and now consider and wonder how these two plans were set in motion, moreover we get to hear “a 51-storey residential tower in Docklands with one fire escape has been paused after a safety outcry” at what point will you consider ‘has been paused after a safety outcry’. This required an outcry? This was not stopped from the moment the plans were submitted? It would have been long before the people and in particular Grenfell United would have been aware. 

So when we see the video with the response from a firefighter ‘How is that even possible?” and now the Guardian informs us that two more apartment buildings, buildings that are even higher are planned, I reckon that a lot of people want to know who is at the helm of these folly pieces and a list of civil servants that are seemingly asleep at the wheel of city governance, because as I personally see it heads will roll on this one. So we might be drawn by “as some safety experts call current staircase rules ‘madness’”, I would be much more interested on the setting that someone signed off on this, because we see “has been paused”, this implies that someone gave the signal to go ahead on this, or not?

So when the Guardian gives us “as part of a complex of 1,760 new homes being planned by the owner of the Westfield shopping centre in west London.” I merely wonder if that Westfield complex has an undertaker on the spot, because for them business will be booming with up to 3,500-4,000 new customers soon enough. You think I am too blunt? Consider that being soft seemingly did nothing and the fact that someone was optionally willing to repeat the 72 deaths with up to 4,000 souls for bartering in a second attempt. I believe we need a sledgehammer, not the subtlety of tweezers. We did that in 2017 and it seemingly led nowhere. So as the Guardian gives us “but it will rely on the same “stay put” strategy that failed on 14 June 2017 contributing to deaths, according to planning documents.” I feel anger, but mostly because there is some logic in the ‘stay put’ setting, yet it cannot be denied that is failed completely in Grenfell, so why were ALL London building plans not stopped to investigate the logical sanity of that procedure? And moreover, why is that setting as well as the conclusions of that not in EVERY newspaper in the Commonwealth? 

I will let you ponder on this whilst I continue on the idea that gives Blizzard a run for their money, mostly it is me having a go at Microsoft for buying an ice-cream cone for $37,000,000,000 whilst the supermarket 253.4 meters away sells them by the bucket for $50,000,000. It is only a mere factor of 740, and if I get a decent result on my first attempt Microsoft stock would go straight to the basement, and that is before they get a clue on the other issues that Activision might give them, which makes my attempt a lot easier. Ah well, I hope to give you the news soon. 

When a hobby give that much satisfaction, it is almost criminal to be on an income (I would still take it), and the better case for laughter is that one in 740 implies that statistics would fall towards me no matter how it goes. Consider a dartboard. How many darts will it take for you to throw 180? Microsoft can only win if I fail 740 times any success hit sooner becomes a massive cost for them. And there is the rub, only if I fail more than 740 times will Microsoft win, now you try on a dartboard and see how many times it took you to get 180. That is the folly Microsoft started and I am about to rain the size of a blizzard on their parade. Life can be fun and rewarding at times, unless you live in an apartment building in London.

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Overlooked IP

Yes, we all look at ideas that make us rich, we all do. I am no exception. I have my IP, a few in 5G, a few in consoles, in movies, in TV series, in NextGen printable hardware and at least one in books. So until they are all sold I am content. This is the stage where I saw another piece of IP waiting to come to fruition. I see it, yet it is not my forte, in this Google has a massive opportunity and so far no one saw the setting on their retina’s, or on their displays. As I see it Google Maps could be extended and it could extent YouTube creators. Yet I see no start of this, as such I decided to make it public domain and let you all fight over it, or fight over it with Google. You see during lockdown I mentioned that there are all these city walks, yet no one considered to link them to Google maps and to combine them, so that someone looking at the map could click on the YouTube video giving us a real view (more than street view). So when we look at the Map of Toronto (Johny Strides), London (Mostly Walking), Monaco (Tourist Channel), yet also in the other direction. There is for example POPTravel giving us Stockholm, Munich, Heraklion and London. All stages many want to see, but no one made the connection to link these sources to Google maps (or any other map for that matter). I wonder why, if information is selectable, sliceable, dice able and optionally can be set into a funnel, why did no one consider that the funnel can be reversed and that sliced and diced information can be aggregated, so I am a little surprised that this service was not added, making more people look at the information that w could see (via
Youtube). I know that some maps show images, but the city walks are a great source of impression. I wonder if no one else made that leap and it could spur YouTube members into optional additional creativity.

Where is the walking route?

Just a thought I had at 10:34 (after a cup of coffee, who is demanding credit for the thought), A stage we all face, we all have and whilst we all make statements like this, until the thought is set to paper and set to the public it basically does not exist. It is one of the oldest rules. If it is not written down it does not exist. I think it comes from the age of Caesar Augustus (63BC-14AD), so it is not a new rule and many should know this part, or they should have been made aware of this.

Good hunting and good fortune to you all (or is that Google hunting for good fortune?) 

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The virtual quarterback

We can consider me being the Monday morning quarterback, it would be fair to call me this. I have been for the longest time a champion of science, I believe that not unlike evidence in law, science is the cornerstone of all daily life decisions. So I tend to take sides with science for nearly all cases. Yet today, in opposition of a piece in the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/britain-got-it-wrong-on-covid-long-lockdown-did-more-harm-than-good-says-scientist) I take another side, the non-scientist setting. I oppose the views of Professor Mark Woolhouse. So feel free to oppose my views, which would be fair enough. But in all matters take a long hard look at some of the things we are handed here today. I believe that not unlike some wannabe journalists who wanted to cash in on Jamal Khashoggi with their fiction view of ‘Blood and Oil’ this professor might be trying to find the same rabbit in a different hat with ‘The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir’.

So where do I oppose?
It starts with “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.” In March 2020 there was a lot we never knew. Do not forget that the disease was out for only 2-3 months, and it had not spread to the degree it has now. China had no answers, and the people who were responsible for calling this a pandemic did not do so. In addition, the media gave us “This might become a pandemic” all whilst the points of calling it a pandemic had already passed. I wrote about it on February 3rd 2020 in ‘Corona?  I Never touch the stuff!’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/02/03/corona-i-never-touch-the-stuff/), a month before we see given here. I already saw the pandemic threshold passed, yet most media were in denial with “This might become a pandemic” as such, it seems to me that Professor Mark Woolhouse will have to explain a few things. Then we get to “We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt” in this is resort to the blunt ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ In the first there was a lot we did not know, and for the longest time there are still questions, so the response I see with “We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence” is something I would like to refer to as bullshit marketing. You see the first peak of daily deaths did not start until April 13th 2020, with 6916 dead people (aka the non-living). 

I found a table from April 2020 from New York. In this table we see 6839 died, but the interesting part is that 5151 cases had an underlying condition and in that case the older you get the higher the chance of an underlying condition, and in that up to 44 years old 312 died. Most with an underlying condition, but there was a lot not known in that setting. More important, there was no vaccine, there was no protection. The Pfizer solution was still in clinical trials in November 2020. And when you start looking at the facts as they were known, I believe that Mark Woolhouse is trimming his own trumpet for the sake of book-sales (a speculative view, but it is my view). 

Were mistakes made?
Yes, of course mistakes were made, they were made all over the world and with the US having an idiot as president in those days did not help much. There was a large void of knowledge and there was a large void of experience, so looking at the facts after the fact does not help much (apparently it might help a certain professor with a book to sell). And in all this the professor does not take into account the anti-lockdown idiots spreading the disease, the ignorant anti-vaxxers adding fuel to the fire and then the people who were ignorant of the way the disease spread going to relative, friends and so forth needing their social moment. 

And in London that is a large powder-keg waiting to explode and now that it is doing just that we see the blame game in effect. So consider the anti-lockdown protest, it only 10 people had it at that point, at least 1000 could have it 3 days later. And everyone remains in denial, oh boo hoo hoo!

So when we get to “the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. “Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,” says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions.” Where is the time line? When did we know what we know now and that is before we add the complications of Alpha, Delta and Omicron. And with the last quote “By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community. We should and could have invested in both suppression and protection. We effectively chose just one.

In the first, the government could not afford both paths (slight speculation), there were too many unknown factors and with Omicron raging now, anti-vaxxer idiots and anti-lockdown dumbo’s, how can you protect a community? You can claim you can but stupid people will do whatever they feel like, the vulnerable be damned. That is how people tend to be. 

So this is my view on the matter and it is a rare event when I oppose a scientist, especially a professor, but here I feel it was needed. And I had a few more views concerning covid over that year and last year too. I kept it low, because I am not a medici (ha ha ha), yet the larger stage is also ignored in the story. The media was fear mongering all over the place and that too resulted in negative actions. There were several factors and I believe that too many factors were unknown, or untested for the longest of times. 

So, if you decide I am the Monday morning quarterback it is fine, I gave my reasoning and my views that go back to February 2020 when it was in the earliest stage. So I am not exactly the Monday morning quarterback, but I am definitely a virtual one. Consider the facts and consider the blah blah from Professor Mark Woolhouse and draw your own conclusions.

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As fiction becomes real

Who remembers George A Romero’s Dawn of the dead (1978)? I remember seeing it in the cinema. And the idea stuck with me. Dreams of having an entire shopping mall to myself. The idea stuck for a long time and even as games entered our lives, the setting was never close enough. The idea that we had an entire City centre to ourselves, preferably without the zombies. Not some game where the enemies spawn again, but a stage where there is a city centre, complete with 35000 zombies, a finite number and as we secure our place, grow our place, we renew the settings of security, safety and goods. And I voiced it before and now we seemingly have the game ‘The day before’ a game that seemingly is close enough to my dreams to make it a reality. The game can be played single player (a must for me). And the idea that the game will grow appeals to me. Consider that the mechanics, once they are ready allows for the game to seek us in other ways too. An alien invasion (Skyline, 2010), a pandemic (Contagion, 2011) and the list goes on. Now, I have no idea on how The Day before is set or how it works, but I saw a small play video and my old thoughts of Day of the Dead returned. The idea that you need to stamp out your safe space. Get goods, get sustenance, get ammo, find weapons and so on is very appealing. You wonder how far you get, how long you will last and none of that respawn shit. One life, and between 35,000 and 350,000 opponents. How will you fare? I wonder how far I will get. And for the makers of that game it offers a new kind of DLC/Expansion. We might have 3-5 locations to start, but the appeal to see how far you get in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Munich, Paris, Moscow and so on, the chance for the makers of The Day before (Fntastic) are close to endless and it does not stop there. The setting of a real final number is appealing on several levels. The idea to redo Day of the dead in Harrods London will be appealing to thousands if not millions of gamers. Setting up the New York City Police Department – 5th Precinct as your own fortress (Assault On Precinct 13 anyone?) is close to intoxicating. And from there the world of us getting close to the movies we watched will be enticing and I reckon for a large audience. In previous years it was merely a ruse, now with the PS5, it becomes an achievable reality. And as I see it 2022-2025 could optionally become great gaming years. 

And when the survival part in us is quenched we can return to our normal daily routine of being a sniper (Ghost warrior), or perhaps a racer (Gran Turismo) some will prefer their daily life as pilots (MS Flight simulator), no matter to what life we return, we do so knowing that more and better games are coming our way, preferably less glitchy then Ubisoft is making out to be. 

P.S. WordPress still has not fixed colours.

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Darkness through inaction

I had the weirdest dream, it was dark. When I woke up, the cat woke me up and I was slightly weirded out. Everything was pitch black. Was I dead? Was I blind? I looked at my watch, and the time was bright green, I was not blind. I looked around, it took a lot longer than usual. It was the darkest black. I slowly walked to the wall, I turned the lights off and on, nothing happened. Then I remembered my emergency flashlight (better safe than sorry) and it gave some light. I looked around, everything was black. I walked to the windows and looked out, outside was black too, yet this was London, close to Hyde Park, no light anywhere. I walked to the kitchen and got the emergency tea lights and the candleholders. Over a dozen were placed all over the apartment, all IKEA and all working. Three in the living room, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen, all whilst checking what had happened to the stove, there was gas so I placed the filled kettle on the stove. I inspected the apartment and I got a decent insight in the damage. There was no heating, there was no light, but there was gas and there were candles. 

This is not imaginary, people in Lebanon know what I am talking about and when we consider the Independent (at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/gas-prices-rise-electricity-bills-b1935122.html) and they give us ‘Gas price spike will add £29bn to UK electricity bills next year, analysis finds’ yet this is only half the story, you see there is a growing shortage of electricity and it is getting worse. I had hoped for 2-3 more years, but that is less and less likely. So even as my version will not apply to many, but some will face it, it is now becoming heating versus light versus food. Yet there is a workaround. I spoke about it in the past. Even as Elon Musk has an advantage with his car battery, he is not alone and for plenty of applications there are alternatives. Consider a battery, rechargeable batteries, the size of 4 D-type batteries in a row. A stage where you can have one, a harness of two of those beauties linked to charge systems. And there are several solutions. In WW2 people used bicycles. So your home trainer becomes a more powerful charger. There are of course the solar panels, but it is not a solution for all, some will put some version of a wind-vane on their roof. All options to charge the batteries. So when we see that, we also need a new light source. Emergency lighting based on LED systems will come more and more into play, some are more festive and there are several solutions there. It is however a solution I saw in Sweden that could be the larger station. 

Swedish plug

This plug is a lot smaller than others and there is the station, an additional power net in every home and the people with decent DIY skills can do it themselves. And in the beginning it will be merely light and chargers, but over time we will see more and more shift to the low power consumption curve. In the Netherlands electricity prices went up by 57%, so how long until that is a setting no one can afford? Some state (using ‘could’) that electricity prices in the UK will rise by 30%, do you think you have a lot of time? And then we need to consider both the US and Canada, they might not be in the same boat, but they will see the prices rise too. As such the ideas I am giving you now are not new and not unique and taking notice of these dangers sooner rather than later is also important. There are solutions now and some are not elegant, not the prettiest, but they work and that will always be better than sitting it out in complete darkness. And in the stage where you can have 10 4 Watt LED’s are the equivalent of 10 30 Watt lightbulbs, it  is not a lot, but it might be enough and as the batteries are stronger you can have 8 hours with 10 8 Watts that compare to 10 60 Watt bulbs. Even though the bedrooms will suffice with 4 Watt solutions. And this situation is not that far away. The price hikes will force people to take that stand soon enough. And the sooner you can start, the better off you are because when 20,000,000 start on the same day the only people who will end up with lights are those willing to pay the 450% markup, commerce taught us that lesson in a pretty harsh way in the past already.

Feel free to take no notice, but when you forgot your Tea lights at IKEA and you wake up in complete darkness, it will be too late, I hope you will never face that. Yes, I admit that this setting in London is remotely small, but at present it is no longer zero, which is a setting you did not face a year ago, neither did you face a 30% price hike and that is now (by some) a speculated setting a mere year away.

Consider what you have, what you face and what could be and arm yourself for that situation, your choice, your consequence. And also consider the optional savings you make especially in a 30% price hike when you have a solution that takes 75% less energy, even if the battery is the last  part you get, you will already be making a saving.

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Utter insanity

To get to this part, I need to grab back to another article which I wrote on May 6th 2020 called ‘New World Order’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/05/06/new-world-order/), yet that one also takes a step back and refers to an initial article I wrote in 2013 called ‘It hurts every time, but we love it’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2013/02/06/it-hurts-every-time-but-we-love-it/) . In 2013 the US debt was $17,000,000,000,000 (17 trillion), and over 8 years 8 trillion was added, a nice $8,000,000,000,000. This implies that the US government overspends a trillion a year with no exit strategy on how to cope with the debt and it is on both Republicans and Democrats. They raised debt ceiling again and again and this president might be the one who gets to live through the fallout of such stupidity. We (me too) might grab at the ludicrous waste of billions upon billions in only two defence contracts (F-35 and USS Zumwalt) but the problem is a lot larger. The decades wasted by not overhauling the tax system (I suggested changes in 1999, might have been 1998), it would not have solved everything but it could have optionally solved a few things. It is the relentless boasting government approach towards “My Credit Card is too big too refuse! Yet that is at this point exactly what is going to happen next week Friday. Unless there is another ceiling raised and it merely pushes the problem forward. The larger problem is not merely the politicians, it is their favourite tool the media as well. 4 days ago the Financial Times gave us ‘The US debt ceiling needs to be raised’, and they do give us “The very regularity of fiscal cliff edges inures people to their seriousness. The markets expect Washington to fear default enough to do what is needed in the end.” However none of the media told in clear harsh language to politicians (and naming them) that they need to act and as it is soon too late, the US population will get one of the loudest and harshest wake up calls since December 7th 1941. It will hit them square in the face and there will be no escape. A setting of pensions gone (the US is bankrupt), for many their homes will be lost (the debt collectors will collect on EVERYTHING), infrastructures will collapse (the money is gone) and systems will stop functioning (the US credit card will be destroyed). A setting that continues on for decades, unless the US has any friends left, the US seizes to exist and on the side lines China and Russia will howl with laughter. 

Yet not all is lost, the US could become part of the Commonwealth again, although the US politicians will mostly be out for a job, Canada could oversee issues for London and the political seat of power will be in Ottawa, did anyone consider that there was more to my ‘We stand on guard for thee’ article? The article (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/10/03/we-stand-on-guard-for-thee/) had a small reference to “CANZUK time, is Canada ready?” When drenched in “Canada has a chance to be a major player in CANZUK to usher in a more politically stable and mutually beneficial version of a modern Commonwealth”, it is the modern Commonwealth part. And in this there is every reason to trim a lot of fat, especially political fat. In 2013 I gave the reader “Those two, when a change is set might mean that the US could be bankrupted overnight” I never saw a pandemic coming, but that pandemic pushed the US straight over the edge into an abyss of debt. It also gave me shivers to sell my IP to an American player, my 5G and I left without anything? Screw that! I would rather take my chances with China. And that is the larger setting, when the brain drain starts and China pays for the IP the avalanche will be complete (not merely me, dozens of others too), the US will have a dwindling IP vault, manufacturing will go to Asia (optionally India too) and the US will be a container of lard, no bones or muscles holding it together. A body of mass with merely the strength of the barrel containing it all. 

So as Reuters gives us a day later ‘U.S. debt ceiling impasse warrants nuclear options’ (at https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/us-debt-ceiling-impasse-warrants-nuclear-options-2021-09-30/) with “That could spare the United States a default, but would force other cuts, possibly in areas like Social Security or military pay.” We see the beginning of a larger stage where the people would soon be left with nothing, it takes a whole new vibe out of “We the people” doesn’t it? And the “Unable to borrow more, the Treasury would have to cut some 40% of federal spending by mid-November”, it is the icing on the cake, a setting of larger dangers to a large chunk of 331,000,000 people in the US. Did you think I was kidding on the US stampede into Canada? The rich will prefer 30% more taxes against nothing and an angry mob at their doorstep. Up to $3.4 trillion in personal wealth will take any option against losing it all in the US. House prices in Monaco will soar (for the really rich) so if Jeff Bezos can offer me €150,000,000 for all my IP (payable in Monaco) I will seriously consider it. Google, Netflix and Amazon will take to the global skies and they will double register their IP to keep it safe and keep it out of governmental hands, because that will be the next stage, the US will need to find money wherever it can be found. A station the US has never faced before. There is one upside, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can get their required hardware for dimes on the dollar and optionally buy out a few factories and all their patents putting them on par for their 2030 promise of taking home based defence build projects to a whole new level. The US laughed and sniggered when Wall Street offered vulture solutions to Argentina in 1998, now the vultures are ready and set to rip the US carcass apart. Is it a fair view? That is not in question, yet the stage is now that it is becoming a likely view the only people treated fair are the hard workers who just tried to get by. 

Should there be an 11th hour solution of debt ceiling raising, the people will need to consider that the end is nigh and the US did this to themselves. Irresponsible spending for well over 2 decades and with no exit strategy the USA will enter a field it so desperately tried to avoid and with innovators moving to other shores their field of choice becomes ever more limited. 

And when you wonder why no one is writing about those dangers, consider that I opted for this day to come for 8 years, I never saw a pandemic, but when you realise that the US was overspending a trillion a year, 83.3 billion a month for 8 years. Did no one catch on that this clambake could come to a sudden stop? Wonder about that part of the equation. I reckon that a lot more people should have seen the dangers after the 2008 events. Now 14 years later the people of the US will face hardships that is 10 times worse than the events of 2008, not merely because of what is now, but it happens when it’s infrastructures, social security and healthcare are totally gutted. 

Mozart wrote Requiem 230 years ago, I doubt he ever envisioned it used on an entire nation, but that is life, or the lack thereof. 

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Wake up or slumber more?

Yes, we all have that at times, the smallest doubt we give ourselves “Shall I slumber just a few minutes more?” We are allowed it, we were so clever, we set the alarm clock to 30 minutes early and we ignore the first alarm because we had 30 minutes left. At times that is the best sleep time of the night, to know there is 30 minutes left. And I feel the same way, yet I feel that this is the time to realise that the alarm went off a week earlier and we kept on slumbering a little more and a little more and now we are out of time. We are awoken by two articles, not related yet linked. The first is the Guardian who gives us ‘anti-vax radio shows reach millions in US while stars die of Covid’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/anti-vax-radio-hosts-dying-covid) we are told that Phil Valentine was anti-vaccine, he even plagiarised the song Taxman and made it his own. We are also introduced to Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel and Jimmy DeYoung. Yet, we need not worry, they are all dead now, they all died of covid and the millions of ‘fans’ they had, a lot of them will be dead soon too. That is the natural selection we are part of. And it is then that the claim “Media watchdogs suggest that some basic level of responsibility to the public should be required to keep a broadcast license” seems to seep in, but it is already too late. Even as some of the exploiters are realising that things are going overboard, they forgot the basic rules of the game, to gain riches you need a population and that population is now becoming redundant. Local radio hosts ignored by the big players, but the people are local people, they are the foundation that the US stands on and it goes way beyond USA, believe it. The stakeholders are the first and the direct franchisers of levels of exploitation and they are now seeing the impact I warned for for well over a decade. You can live on the premise of fooling people, but the strongest reality has now and always been “You can fool some of the people all the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can never fool all of the people all of the time” and that is now pushing towards a reality the exploiters never realised. They realise it first because they need a population and it is dying, with 697,000 dead in the US and an expected 100% rise between now and February 2022 the numbers will take a massive offset. 

So how did I get there?
There are three elements driving it. The first is the Delta variant, the second is the anti-vaccine movements and lets be frank ‘stupid’ people driving anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments and the third one was given to us by Jenet Yellen giving us a mere two days ago that the US is in danger of defaulting on the US loans in October, the first time in history, all whilst investments in retirement funds are stopping. The three together giving us the waves that follow, waves in hospitals losing funds, funds in resources slowing down, so as hospitals are filling up and in June AP News gave us ‘Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated’, so as the hospitals are full, the unvaccinated die and more will die soon enough. The unvaccinated take up 98.9% of ALL the COVID cases, the vaccinated a mere 1.1%, the difference is that staggering and as the people are embracing stupid anti-vaccine hosts, they follow those people to their grave, quite literally and there is an upside, it will end unemployment in the USA, it will lower unemployment in the UK, Europe and Australia. 

So whilst people are ‘listening’ to some media watchdog, I need to warn you that they have been sitting on their hands for way too long. I alerted the people to hold media accountable in 2011, that was 10 years ago. 

So how is this connected to the second story?
The BBC is the one giving us ‘Covid vaccine stockpiles: Are 241m doses at risk of going to waste?’, so if we consider “The UK promised 100m of that pledge, so far it has donated just under nine million”, we can consider that they did nothing wrong, we can consider all kinds of things, and considering is perfectly fine. Yet there is a larger stage where they did nothing wrong and there is the rub, over a year, less than 10% was donated and the media let it slide, until people start realising that the media adheres to share holders, stakeholders, and advertisers. So who stopped it, or perhaps better stated, who silenced it to a mere whisper? 

And no one is looking into these stakeholders. So whilst we look at crowd after crowd we see more and more, but the three stages, the ‘normal’ people, the anti-vaxxers and the people in panic is now a larger unstable mix. The normalised people are a massive minority and the other two shouting are ahead of all, yet they are now dying and as anti-vaccine versus panic people are in a mix, we see that they all become panic people and they seek a solution but the hospitals are full. The nursing staff (doctors too) are tired and sick of them all so all these panic people have no one to turn to, merely their own undoing and that is the good news. 

Why is it good news?
In the first governments will have to act, so whilst the UK is dealing with Insulate Britain activists we see the tart of a new age, an age of draconian laws, a stage that follows when resources are dwindling down, and these two nations are not alone. France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, USA, Australia they all have to take larger steps in changing direction and this is the stage most of us did to ourselves and the media was kind enough to help, all whilst their stakeholders are running for the hills with a bag full of money. They are now trying to find a place where they can be relatively safe, that is, until the limelight hits them and their actions.

And it is escalating, as some are all about hating the rich and taxing the rich they still fail to see the larger problem. Governments are to blame, they REFUSED to properly adjust tax laws and that has been the case for well over 2 decades. Did you think it was different? Amazon was given the headlines “Amazon had sales income of €44bn in Europe in 2020, despite lockdown surge the firm’s Luxembourg unit made a €1.2bn loss”. Amazon is not breaking the laws, black letter law states what they are allowed to do and they did so, they never broke the law, governments let them off the hook again and again for over 2 decades and it is happening globally. As such the phrase “Kill the rich” should to be “Kill the exploiters” and that list is a hell of a lot longer than you think. The stakeholders have now become afraid that in the 11th hour their gig is up and they are hoping to score one more time before the gig is up forever.

And in this COVID is ending their song sooner than they had hoped. Yet it is a dangerous stage. We see that typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations. Yet in this list we see no facilitators or lobbyists, these exploitive players aren’t on any list, they are couriers from corporations, yet never in service of them, they are only in service of themselves and now when we consider the Economist on July 17th (at https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/17/the-republican-anti-vax-delusion) we see “Populist conservatives are to blame”, yet is it that simple? Populistic people are easier to control as they need a place to voice ‘issues’, yet stakeholders see that these are groups of people easier to exploit too and there is the problem, so whilst we see the ‘Trump’ example which could be true, there are more players in that stage and those players all hate the limelight, as the populists love the limelight, they get it all and as such the stakeholder now seen as a lobbyist fades into the shadows. A game played for a long time and now that the fallout of their actions are backfiring their need to vanish becomes increasingly important. And when you think that this is out of thin air? Consider that the United Nations reported this in 2013, which was based on Constantinides et al, 2007. There is now a stage where stakeholders saw a portal to use media to set a much larger stage to fulfil corporate needs. It is given as “The rise of social networks has changed both the way we communicate and the way we consume information. Even within the relatively recent internet era, a major evolution has occurred: In the initial phase known as Web 1.0, users by-and-large consumed online information passively. Now, in the age of social media and Web 2.0, the internet is increasingly used for participation, interaction, conversation and community building”, a stage we have been seeing for over a decade. A stage driven by populists to become internet influencers and the stage of “community building” will be transformed into “sheep herding of the easily adapted” that is the stage we now face, and if you think that they can be changed, you would be wrong because it is already too late, the people saw the Yellen message, they see the overfull hospitals and the anti-Vaccine group is not becoming a panic group and those people listen to no one and it will be fuelled by ‘241m doses at risk of going to waste’ soon enough and the stage does not end there. So when the US (and other places) run out of vaccines the panic driven people will escalate and with statistics that 98.9% of all deaths are unvaccinated ones the state of panic is close to complete and in winter when isolation adds to the issues panic will reign on a global scale. So when you are in bed slumbering to get to the office and you consider taking a sickie, also consider that this is the one sickie you should not have taken. The safe zone is miles behind you and there is no hospital left in front of you and that merely fuels the panic. So when we take notice of “Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals are expecting critical staffing shortages” consider that this is not an American or a Florida issue, it has become a global issue. London gave us all (earlier this year) “London hospitals would be short of nearly 2,000 acute and intensive beds” and when we realise that millions more will die and that this issue has surpassed the 1918 flu pandemic numbers and estimates, consider that it will get worse, a lot worse. The last one is my speculation but the numbers are fuelling my point of view. So will you take a longer slumber? It is your choice, and if you are dedicated anti-vaccine person, the queue of Hades awaits. Feel free to oppose that view, it is your right, yet India a mere hour ago reported ‘India reports 26,964 new Covid cases’, which might be true, but the other numbers cannot be true, there is too much of a sliding scale in play. So how fast will the US emulate India? I honestly cannot tell, but the numbers show a grim reality and in the end the games that some people played will burn the soil in front of them, that is the realisation that history gave us. So do you really want to slumber a bit longer?

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Filed under Finance, Media, Politics, Science

Wake up or slumber more?

Wake up or slumber moreYes, we all have that at times, the smallest doubt we give ourselves “Shall I slumber just a few minutes more?” We are allowed it, we were so clever, we set the alarm clock to 30 minutes early and we ignore the first alarm because we had 30 minutes left. At times that is the best sleep time of the night, to know there is 30 minutes left. And I feel the same way, yet I feel that this is the time to realise that the alarm went off a week earlier and we kept on slumbering a little more and a little more and now we are out of time. We are awoken by two articles, not related yet linked. The first is the Guardian who gives us ‘anti-vax radio shows reach millions in US while stars die of Covid’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/anti-vax-radio-hosts-dying-covid) we are told that Phil Valentine was anti-vaccine, he even plagiarised the song Taxman and made it his own. We are also introduced to Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel and Jimmy DeYoung. Yet, we need not worry, they are all dead now, they all died of covid and the millions of ‘fans’ they had, a lot of them will be dead soon too. That is the natural selection we are part of. And it is then that the claim “Media watchdogs suggest that some basic level of responsibility to the public should be required to keep a broadcast license” seems to seep in, but it is already too late. Even as some of the exploiters are realising that things are going overboard, they forgot the basic rules of the game, to gain riches you need a population and that population is now becoming redundant. Local radio hosts ignored by the big players, but the people are local people, they are the foundation that the US stands on and it goes way beyond USA, believe it. The stakeholders are the first and the direct franchisers of levels of exploitation and they are now seeing the impact I warned for for well over a decade. You can live on the premise of fooling people, but the strongest reality has now and always been “You can fool some of the people all the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can never fool all of the people all of the time” and that is now pushing towards a reality the exploiters never realised. They realise it first because they need a population and it is dying, with 697,000 dead in the US and an expected 100% rise between now and February 2022 the numbers will take a massive offset. 

So how did I get there?
There are three elements driving it. The first is the Delta variant, the second is the anti-vaccine movements and lets be frank ‘stupid’ people driving anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments and the third one was given to us by Jenet Yellen giving us a mere two days ago that the US is in danger of defaulting on the US loans in October, the first time in history, all whilst investments in retirement funds are stopping. The three together giving us the waves that follow, waves in hospitals losing funds, funds in resources slowing down, so as hospitals are filling up and in June AP News gave us ‘Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated’, so as the hospitals are full, the unvaccinated die and more will die soon enough. The unvaccinated take up 98.9% of ALL the COVID cases, the vaccinated a mere 1.1%, the difference is that staggering and as the people are embracing stupid anti-vaccine hosts, they follow those people to their grave, quite literally and there is an upside, it will end unemployment in the USA, it will lower unemployment in the UK, Europe and Australia. 

So whilst people are ‘listening’ to some media watchdog, I need to warn you that they have been sitting on their hands for way too long. I alerted the people to hold media accountable in 2011, that was 10 years ago. 

So how is this connected to the second story?
The BBC is the one giving us ‘Covid vaccine stockpiles: Are 241m doses at risk of going to waste?’, so if we consider “The UK promised 100m of that pledge, so far it has donated just under nine million”, we can consider that they did nothing wrong, we can consider all kinds of things, and considering is perfectly fine. Yet there is a larger stage where they did nothing wrong and there is the rub, over a year, less than 10% was donated and the media let it slide, until people start realising that the media adheres to share holders, stakeholders, and advertisers. So who stopped it, or perhaps better stated, who silenced it to a mere whisper? 

And no one is looking into these stakeholders. So whilst we look at crowd after crowd we see more and more, but the three stages, the ‘normal’ people, the anti-vaxxers and the people in panic is now a larger unstable mix. The normalised people are a massive minority and the other two shouting are ahead of all, yet they are now dying and as anti-vaccine versus panic people are in a mix, we see that they all become panic people and they seek a solution but the hospitals are full. The nursing staff (doctors too) are tired and sick of them all so all these panic people have no one to turn to, merely their own undoing and that is the good news. 

Why is it good news?
In the first governments will have to act, so whilst the UK is dealing with Insulate Britain activists we see the tart of a new age, an age of draconian laws, a stage that follows when resources are dwindling down, and these two nations are not alone. France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, USA, Australia they all have to take larger steps in changing direction and this is the stage most of us did to ourselves and the media was kind enough to help, all whilst their stakeholders are running for the hills with a bag full of money. They are now trying to find a place where they can be relatively safe, that is, until the limelight hits them and their actions.

And it is escalating, as some are all about hating the rich and taxing the rich they still fail to see the larger problem. Governments are to blame, they REFUSED to properly adjust tax laws and that has been the case for well over 2 decades. Did you think it was different? Amazon was given the headlines “Amazon had sales income of €44bn in Europe in 2020, despite lockdown surge the firm’s Luxembourg unit made a €1.2bn loss”. Amazon is not breaking the laws, black letter law states what they are allowed to do and they did so, they never broke the law, governments let them off the hook again and again for over 2 decades and it is happening globally. As such the phrase “Kill the rich” should to be “Kill the exploitersand that list is a hell of a lot longer than you think. The stakeholders have now become afraid that in the 11th hour their gig is up and they are hoping to score one more time before the gig is up forever.

And in this COVID is ending their song sooner than they had hoped. Yet it is a dangerous stage. We see that typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations. Yet in this list we see no facilitators or lobbyists, these exploitive players aren’t on any list, they are couriers from corporations, yet never in service of them, they are only in service of themselves and now when we consider the Economist on July 17th (at https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/17/the-republican-anti-vax-delusion) we see “Populist conservatives are to blame”, yet is it that simple? Populistic people are easier to control as they need a place to voice ‘issues’, yet stakeholders see that these are groups of people easier to exploit too and there is the problem, so whilst we see the ‘Trump’ example which could be true, there are more players in that stage and those players all hate the limelight, as the populists love the limelight, they get it all and as such the stakeholder now seen as a lobbyist fades into the shadows. A game played for a long time and now that the fallout of their actions are backfiring their need to vanish becomes increasingly important. And when you think that this is out of thin air? Consider that the United Nations reported this in 2013, which was based on Constantinides et al, 2007. There is now a stage where stakeholders saw a portal to use media to set a much larger stage to fulfil corporate needs. It is given as “The rise of social networks has changed both the way we communicate and the way we consume information. Even within the relatively recent internet era, a major evolution has occurred: In the initial phase known as Web 1.0, users by-and-large consumed online information passively. Now, in the age of social media and Web 2.0, the internet is increasingly used for participation, interaction, conversation and community building”, a stage we have been seeing for over a decade. A stage driven by populists to become internet influencers and the stage of “community building” will be transformed into “sheep herding of the easily adapted” that is the stage we now face, and if you think that they can be changed, you would be wrong because it is already too late, the people saw the Yellen message, they see the overfull hospitals and the anti-Vaccine group is not becoming a panic group and those people listen to no one and it will be fuelled by ‘241m doses at risk of going to waste’ soon enough and the stage does not end there. So when the US (and other places) run out of vaccines the panic driven people will escalate and with statistics that 98.9% of all deaths are unvaccinated ones the state of panic is close to complete and in winter when isolation adds to the issues panic will reign on a global scale. So when you are in bed slumbering to get to the office and you consider taking a sickie, also consider that this is the one sickie you should not have taken. The safe zone is miles behind you and there is no hospital left in front of you and that merely fuels the panic. So when we take notice of “Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals are expecting critical staffing shortages” consider that this is not an American or a Florida issue, it has become a global issue. London gave us all (earlier this year) “London hospitals would be short of nearly 2,000 acute and intensive beds” and when we realise that millions more will die and that this issue has surpassed the 1918 flu pandemic numbers and estimates, consider that it will get worse, a lot worse. The last one is my speculation but the numbers are fuelling my point of view. So will you take a longer slumber? It is your choice, and if you are dedicated anti-vaccine person, the queue of Hades awaits. Feel free to oppose that view, it is your right, yet India a mere hour ago reported ‘India reports 26,964 new Covid cases’, which might be true, but the other numbers cannot be true, there is too much of a sliding scale in play. So how fast will the US emulate India? I honestly cannot tell, but the numbers show a grim reality and in the end the games that some people played will burn the soil in front of them, that is the realisation that history gave us. So do you really want to slumber a bit longer?

Leave a comment

Filed under Finance, Media, Science

Taking and making what it gives

Yes, we seem to think that this is the stage we need to be in, and at times you are correct, that is what there is. It dawned on me that at times innovation, or innovation alike can drive creativity. In the past there was an option to get into movies required a fortune, so you either tinkered by the side of the road, or you were some rich kid, that was the reality. Now consider that this is no longer the case, the stage is set to two elements (three actually).

1. GoPro Hero 10 ($600)
2. Mac Airbook (up to $4500)
3. Software (up to $500)

So for $6000 (max) you could have all you need to become a cinematographer. The laptop idea is expensive, there are cheaper solutions, to under $6000 there is a stage where you can make all kinds of movies and there is no cost for film or development. As we were in lockdown, the mind wanted to travel, so I started to watch the walking tours, a lot of them in 4K and most of them made with older GoPro devices. You might laugh, but some of these walking tours equal decent TV and in some cases cinema trips. I saw Portofino, Cannes, Monaco, Vancouver, Montreal, Buenos Aires, London (several), Riyadh, Jeddah and a few things stood out. The movies were well above average, the streets in Canada are amazingly clean, Portofino was worth the watch for a few personal reasons and so on. I believe that we are one step away from a ‘small’ company like GoPro to put a massive dent in Hollywood and that is before you realise that we will be drowning in amazing movies, the stage is already there that amateur film makers can make ‘their’ version of the Blair Witch Project. Another version of Cloverfield and we can go on in all kinds of directions. I myself was entertaining an idea in another direction (no matter what), but I am an idea man, not a movie maker (not yet anyway). 

And even as GoPro is making headway into setting the dynamic movies to a new height. I predict that they will corner the market in several ways within the next 2-3 years. I believe that the information given here is incorrect “The number of GoPro devices shipped worldwide has been decreasing since its peak of 6.58 million units in 2015, to around 2.8 million units in 2020”, there is not a decline, mainly because some people STILL use the GoPro 4, a lot are still using the GoPro 8, so there is a market of well over 15,000,000 film makers and I believe that with the additions on the GoPro Hero 10 that group will increase (a lot). And when you consider that this can directly be spread via YouTube channels, for GoPro the sky is the limit. Whether the film maker will decide to rely on GoPro tools, on Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or iMovie, there are several solutions and as people tart to become more and more active there is a new market evolving. A market of services, critical evaluation and creation, all working in some form of symbiosis. And as the makers set out there options of short movies, I wonder when it will be a GoPro Hero user who in the near future will be the first to win a Academy Award for Best Short Film (Live Action) using a GoPro because the hardware is now definitely up for it, we now only need to wait for the creative soul to make that step (it will not be me), and I would not be surprised that thee will be more evolutions in this direction before the end of 2023, a stage that (as I personally see it) evolved and came to a much larger live during lockdowns and curfews. 

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Filed under IT, movies