Now that David Chase has completely ruined his series (ever noticed how all the good mob movies ended with a rather satisfying ending?), its not time to cancel HBO. Since 6 Feet, Deadwood and Sopranos are all gone, why have this piece of crap around?
Why didn't HBO , as OMC said it in "How Bizarre," 'Buy the Rights.' They didn't need Chase anymore. Chase is an idea guy, and not a super great one at that, get this, a miniseries featuring plot-lines ripped from tens of great mob movies. Its fun to watch. Who would have thought?
Anyways, Chase directed only the first and last episodes. It shows. The last episode was inferior.
Also, it tended to be that things that he wrote and co-wrote were below the batting average of the shows.
He left curb stomp Coco out there, the Russian guy in the woods, Silvio in a coma, The FBI guy saying "we'll win this yet" without explanation, Uncle Junior demented, Paulie with unresolved issues with Tony, you name it, this scumbag Chase (David DeCaesare, lets call this prick by his name, David DeCaesare) left everything hanging.
The show ended for my when they killed big pussy anyways.
I wish someone would capture David DeCaesare-Chase, and cut his right leg off above the knee. And while cutting it off laugh and spit in his face. Tell him he didn't need that right leg like everyone didn't need a proper Sopranos ending. Thats what I wish would happen. He may have money and hubris, but he now would have to limp like the bitch gimp he is, and his little piles of money couldn't change that.
Anyhow, I think HBO should hijack the rights and hire even bigger and better writers to finish this off with style. One of the greatest movies of all time, Godfather, ended properly, this is just a piss poor excuse at being artsy, but in reality its a giant F.U. to the fan base.
Everyone, get the stones to get up and cancel HBO. It just went from Home Box Office to seriously Heavy Body Odor.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Janitor's Evil State / Evil Eye music : Koyaanisqatsi
In the scrubs episode "My New God", (98th episode), the music playing during the evil stare is Koyaanisqatsi, by minimalist composer Philip Glass, who was himself lampooned in the south park episode "A South Park Christmas." The Janitor rules.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Core inflation, Inflation, Money Supply, The Fiat Monetary System Nearing Breakdown.
Core inflation, Inflation, Money Supply, The Fiat Monetary System Nearing Breakdown.
The New York federal reserve said that using "core inflation" is not good inflation metric, it is more telling to use a moving average of CPI.
Which means that all those times "healthy" inflation numbers were reported the numbers were seen as good simply because gas and food were not used in the calculation of those inflation numbers.
Reading 'The Economist' paints another ugly picture for inflation: 100 USD in the year 2000 is equivalent to 204 USD today. Did your salary adjust (double) to accommodate this horrific inflation?
In fact, inflation is such a problem and is latent on everyone's mind it was satirized in a cartoon in the Economist:
A bull with horns and a t-shirt that says "Markets" runs full speed towards a soccer ball. He punts the ball at full speed and full strength. The ball flies away. The bull flexes his muscles after his stratospheric punt. A HUGE soccer ball comes back and blows the bull away. Another bull with bandages and bruises comes into the picture with the caption "Inflation!" That "record" down when normalized against commodities, gold, industrials, steel, anything, isn’t so "record" high. It’s a new low being sold as a high - but the invisible hand knows.
With inflation, core or "All Items," factored in, the current "record" markets are just getting back to where they were five years ago, and if those records are adjusted for inflation… - Things aren’t doing to well - certainly not a record.
The Fed has been printing money, expanding the money supply for the last 6 years such that a dollar today is worth half as much as a dollar in 2000. See:
Big Mac Index (The Economist):
Big Mac in April 2000 was $2.15
Big Mac today: $3.22.
Wire: (anecdotal)
A coil of ROMEX wiring for houses used to about $35 bucks in 2000.
ROMEX (100ft 10/2) is $95 + shipping (weighs about 20lbs)
Gas: (energy.ca.gov)
Gas Price, 7/2003: $1.60 (CA)
Gas Price, Today : $3.50(CA)
US Median House Price of Homes Sold (source economagic.com)
Year 2000 - $165,000
Year 2006 - $232,500
US Average Price Of Homes Sold (economagic.com)
Year 2000 Q1: $202,900
Year 2006 Q1: $ 290,100
Has your salary nearly doubled since 2000? Looks like the money supply was expanded (M0 + M1 + M2 + M3 ), prices adjusted exactly to the increased money supply, yet a dollar is just as hard to earn. Jobless claims are underreported, and those who are not educated and in demand or not yet commoditized by inexpensive overseas or immigrant labor aren’t doing too well as far as being able to maintain a standard of living that the US should be capable of supporting.
The Fed stopped publishing the M3. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply . This is most likely a strategy to hide the vast increase in money supply.
The calculations for inflation that are often quoted is the 'core inflation,' which excludes GAS and FOOD. Yet this has been said by the NY Fed: "Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that this measure is no better than a moving average of the Consumer Price Index as a predictor of inflation."
CPI and the "Core Inflation" are more or less the same thing. Inflation is being underreported. The prices for things not made in China / PRC are rising sharply.
This is Stagflation. We better hope for the dollar to come back to being money and hope interest rates go up. For all those with big loans they need to tie, those who foolishly borrowed greedily stole money from the children's future for transient low quality items and a McMansion - a liability for the owner in the form of taxes, insurance and paying interest, and a boon for the banks and local governments.
Low interest rates and "cheap money" help buy things you cant afford and may help stimulate non-US / overseas / emerging market sales, but salaries are still paid in USD, so rooting against the dollar destroys what is saved, destroys the value of profits and the buying power of the dollars for both businesses and employees.
The New York federal reserve said that using "core inflation" is not good inflation metric, it is more telling to use a moving average of CPI.Which means that all those times "healthy" inflation numbers were reported the numbers were seen as good simply because gas and food were not used in the calculation of those inflation numbers.
Reading 'The Economist' paints another ugly picture for inflation: 100 USD in the year 2000 is equivalent to 204 USD today. Did your salary adjust (double) to accommodate this horrific inflation?
In fact, inflation is such a problem and is latent on everyone's mind it was satirized in a cartoon in the Economist:
A bull with horns and a t-shirt that says "Markets" runs full speed towards a soccer ball. He punts the ball at full speed and full strength. The ball flies away. The bull flexes his muscles after his stratospheric punt. A HUGE soccer ball comes back and blows the bull away. Another bull with bandages and bruises comes into the picture with the caption "Inflation!" That "record" down when normalized against commodities, gold, industrials, steel, anything, isn’t so "record" high. It’s a new low being sold as a high - but the invisible hand knows.
With inflation, core or "All Items," factored in, the current "record" markets are just getting back to where they were five years ago, and if those records are adjusted for inflation… - Things aren’t doing to well - certainly not a record.
The Fed has been printing money, expanding the money supply for the last 6 years such that a dollar today is worth half as much as a dollar in 2000. See:
Big Mac Index (The Economist):
Big Mac in April 2000 was $2.15
Big Mac today: $3.22.
Wire: (anecdotal)
A coil of ROMEX wiring for houses used to about $35 bucks in 2000.
ROMEX (100ft 10/2) is $95 + shipping (weighs about 20lbs)
Gas: (energy.ca.gov)
Gas Price, 7/2003: $1.60 (CA)
Gas Price, Today : $3.50(CA)
US Median House Price of Homes Sold (source economagic.com)
Year 2000 - $165,000
Year 2006 - $232,500
US Average Price Of Homes Sold (economagic.com)
Year 2000 Q1: $202,900
Year 2006 Q1: $ 290,100
Has your salary nearly doubled since 2000? Looks like the money supply was expanded (M0 + M1 + M2 + M3 ), prices adjusted exactly to the increased money supply, yet a dollar is just as hard to earn. Jobless claims are underreported, and those who are not educated and in demand or not yet commoditized by inexpensive overseas or immigrant labor aren’t doing too well as far as being able to maintain a standard of living that the US should be capable of supporting.
The Fed stopped publishing the M3. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply . This is most likely a strategy to hide the vast increase in money supply.
The calculations for inflation that are often quoted is the 'core inflation,' which excludes GAS and FOOD. Yet this has been said by the NY Fed: "Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that this measure is no better than a moving average of the Consumer Price Index as a predictor of inflation."
CPI and the "Core Inflation" are more or less the same thing. Inflation is being underreported. The prices for things not made in China / PRC are rising sharply.
This is Stagflation. We better hope for the dollar to come back to being money and hope interest rates go up. For all those with big loans they need to tie, those who foolishly borrowed greedily stole money from the children's future for transient low quality items and a McMansion - a liability for the owner in the form of taxes, insurance and paying interest, and a boon for the banks and local governments.Low interest rates and "cheap money" help buy things you cant afford and may help stimulate non-US / overseas / emerging market sales, but salaries are still paid in USD, so rooting against the dollar destroys what is saved, destroys the value of profits and the buying power of the dollars for both businesses and employees.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Death to Microsoft Exchange OWA - pisses me off.
I have Vista on a machine. Exchange 2003 OWA doesn't work properly with Vista. Microsoft, the pack of assholes, requires a patch to the exchange server OWA to make OWA work on Vista RTM. No one should have to patch the server simply to fix a broken fucked up client like IE7.
Anyways.
Firefox works great. Its not the premium client - but hey, at least I donut have to ask IT to risk breaking a working exchange server simply to make Vista work.
So now the main reason for tolerating exchange, OWA (outlook web access), looks like shit because I have to use Firefox to actually be able to reply to things - and Microsoft premium OWA requires fucktive activex, so that means opera and firefox have to look like shit.
Now here is the kicker.
You know how Firefox is super-awesome and saves half filled out forms and post boxes for you so in case of an accidental forward/backward or crash, its all there for you when you get back? Well IE7 doesn't do that shit, and somehow, OWA fucks Firefox from being able to work its magic in the reply box.
So I lost about 3-4 minutes work on a longer email reply.
All I have to say to Microsoft - give me a break. Microsoft can pull off vista, have a huge OS that works ok, a huge API, you name it. But they cant manage to keep libraries straight (WinSXS anyone? What a fuck-up), the 64 bit emulation sucks (WOW64 is a dirty, lame hack and Windows in 64 bit mode sucks, stuff like palm desktop doesnt even work right over USB), they manage to have an IE 7 that sucks worse than FireFox in every way but startup time (adblockplus - yes , stumbled upon, yes). Not even IE7Pro can help to unfuck how bad IE7 is, the Interix environment (Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications), get this, ar was fucked up because they named is ar64 or something, and the userland on Interix out of the box sucks hard - so hard, its hard to bootstrap the GNU toolchains - and what the fuck is with .NET frameworks. Why not just do the $JAVA_HOME thing and be done with it? Why is this stuff so melted and glued and stapled into the OS? Here is a directory with the VM and some classes and shit. Use if you want to.
This is all to say that the core, the David Cutler / DEC/VMS rip off part works great. The frosting sucks shit. Microsoft needs to pay more attention to not getting fucked by stupid shit. The kernel works great, now stop making shit flavored frosting and everything will be grand.
I wish microsoft had a super thin no login require portal to post stuff like this so they could improve this stuff. If I was gates/ballmer/whoever, I light a big fire under the product managers for transgressions like this - letting open-source stuff drastically out-pace Microsoft on usability.
Anyways.
Firefox works great. Its not the premium client - but hey, at least I donut have to ask IT to risk breaking a working exchange server simply to make Vista work.
So now the main reason for tolerating exchange, OWA (outlook web access), looks like shit because I have to use Firefox to actually be able to reply to things - and Microsoft premium OWA requires fucktive activex, so that means opera and firefox have to look like shit.
Now here is the kicker.
You know how Firefox is super-awesome and saves half filled out forms and post boxes for you so in case of an accidental forward/backward or crash, its all there for you when you get back? Well IE7 doesn't do that shit, and somehow, OWA fucks Firefox from being able to work its magic in the reply box.
So I lost about 3-4 minutes work on a longer email reply.
All I have to say to Microsoft - give me a break. Microsoft can pull off vista, have a huge OS that works ok, a huge API, you name it. But they cant manage to keep libraries straight (WinSXS anyone? What a fuck-up), the 64 bit emulation sucks (WOW64 is a dirty, lame hack and Windows in 64 bit mode sucks, stuff like palm desktop doesnt even work right over USB), they manage to have an IE 7 that sucks worse than FireFox in every way but startup time (adblockplus - yes , stumbled upon, yes). Not even IE7Pro can help to unfuck how bad IE7 is, the Interix environment (Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications), get this, ar was fucked up because they named is ar64 or something, and the userland on Interix out of the box sucks hard - so hard, its hard to bootstrap the GNU toolchains - and what the fuck is with .NET frameworks. Why not just do the $JAVA_HOME thing and be done with it? Why is this stuff so melted and glued and stapled into the OS? Here is a directory with the VM and some classes and shit. Use if you want to.
This is all to say that the core, the David Cutler / DEC/VMS rip off part works great. The frosting sucks shit. Microsoft needs to pay more attention to not getting fucked by stupid shit. The kernel works great, now stop making shit flavored frosting and everything will be grand.
I wish microsoft had a super thin no login require portal to post stuff like this so they could improve this stuff. If I was gates/ballmer/whoever, I light a big fire under the product managers for transgressions like this - letting open-source stuff drastically out-pace Microsoft on usability.
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