I have proof that you are correct. I watched the first few minutes of American Idol earlier this week just to see what the fuss was all about. I was amazed to see so much poor talent (very superior to my own, but still poor) on display. Yet this show is one of the highest rated in U. S. television.
If this is where the future recording artists are going to cum from I am happy I grew up in the sixties and seventies when we had real music.
P. S.
Please ask, no beg, them to stop re-making the music of my youth! It HURTS everytime I have to hear that shit! Maybe it sounds good coming through those tiny iPod ear-buds, but I am used to hearing real music from real speakers. Speakers that cost more than the iPod these kids are listening to.
When did we move from High-Fidelity (HiFi) to iPod?
This brings to mind something Hermann Goering said during his trial at Nuremburg. He said something along the lines of identify someone different and tell the people that that guy is the enemy and he wants to hurt you. The people will then allow you to do anything as long as you keep them safe.
Didn't Santayana say something about those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it?
People around the world eat some strange shit. Snails, dog, pork guts (chitterlings), carob-coated insects, fish eggs, and probably some nasty shit I've never heard of. Some of this stuff might be considered a delicacy tody, but I am sure it all started due to hunger.
Have you ever looked at a cow? What made some poor bastard decide to milk that huge, stinking thing? Yep. Hunger!
I watched a documentary a few years back that showed a guy driving a stick into the side of a cow. A stream of blood mixed with something else poured out of the animal and was collected and...gagh... drunk.
Or did he just fill out the warranty card and mail it back?
That seems a much simpler solution than getting his address from his debit card. You can read the data on a debit card. There was an article in the first issue of Make Magazine with instructions for building the device and a link to an internet site that hosted some software for it.
The only real point I wanted to make was that government does not have a monopoly on bad decisions.
People, whether they own small businesses or not, make them all the time. Those people and small businesses go bankrupt all the time and nobody notices.
Large businesses make bad decisions too, but they seem to be too large to be allowed to suffer the consequences. Anybody seen the U. S. equivalent of the Prius?
No?
Damned shame since a law was passed back in the 1970s requiring the Big Three automakers to produce fuel-effecient vehicles by 1996. Then the Big Three automakers cried to Congress and got the law changed so that they only had to produce a fuel-efficiency as applied over their entire product line instead of to each vehicle. Now the bastards are getting MONEY.
However, after the last eight years I think the economy/psyche needs stimulus to get out of this HUGE pit we find ourselves in.
Whether large or small, some kind of stimulus is needed to get people to STOP talking about the economic mess. Once we get over the psychological hump I think it will get better
A huge worry for me right now is that this mess officially started in December 2007 and it shows no sign of stopping. Depression is on the tip of my tongue and has started to show up frequently in mainstream media. My parents grew up during the Great Depression. I vividly remember watching a debate in Congress back in the 70s and somebody said something along the lines of: a loaf of bread only cost a quarter back in the 30s. The answer he got was "Yeah, but who had a quarter."
I will immediately take this money and pay down my existing debt and go buy some stuff I have been wanting. This will have an immediate effect on the economy as I know my neighbors and many others will do the same thing.
Hey, too bad about those people wearing U. S. military uniforms in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too bad about my nephew who works for Homeland Security. Guess he will have to move back in with my brother. Too bad about all those air traffic controllers. Fuck 'em anyway. Reagan fired a bunch of those jerks and we got along just fine.
Too bad about those banks that get robbed in the next year. Too bad about those states that will have to deal with criminals running rampant across state lines. The F. B. I. will be out of business for the next year.
Too bad about your grandmother when she catches that strange disease that would have been caught by the Center for Disease Control.
Damn! Too bad about a lot of folks, now that I stop and think about it.
Awww, what the Hell! Government (or is that gubamint?) never producing anything of value!
If a small business owner fails he loses everything he fronted to create his business. There is very powerful incentive to succeed.
Absolutely! But, back in the 1990s there was a statistic that was floating about that indicated that 90% of all small businesses fail in the first five years. That's why bank, at that time, were loath to loan to a small business that had not been around for at least five years.
When those small businesses fail, they usually fail owing somebody money. Real money. I think that's the part that gets forgotten a lot.
If government fails they just pass on the blame to everything they possibly can and move on. The tax payers are out money that would have been used much more responsibly in the open market.
I'm not so sure that's true.
Hell, even Alaska's famous "Bridge to Nowhere" created some jobs during construction. It actually created ONE real job that persists. I saw the lady who had the job of watching the road that was built leading up to the bridge. I'm willing to bet she buys pizza and tampons from time-to-time with her earnings, thus putting real money back into the system.
Now, I do agree that she is non-productive. The money could, and should have been spent elsewhere with much superior results. But in terms of getting money into the system, the "Bridge to Nowhere" seems to have worked.
The only point I want to make is that government spending can get money moving which is what the economists seem to agree that we need to do.
Your statement is very interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with it.
MP3 players had existed for years. They were standard. They just didn't look pretty? Is that what it was?
Itunes was nothing new either. There were plenty of download sites available. So many that I don't remember the names of them all. What I do remember is that the quality of the various downloads varied greatly.
Recording industry buy-in seems to be the only thing new.
Then someone needed to fire the Human Resources VP. It is the job of HR to make sure people are released properly.
If HR was not consulted, then the company needs to educate management or dump the incompetant bastards who did not consult HR in such a critical action.
Ummmm. I don't like watching movies or television shows on a computer. That's why I buy (yes, I actually pay) for DVDs.
Or, at least, I used to. A few years ago I got sick and tired of being FORCED to watch advertisements for movies I will NEVER watch, and FBI warnings that mean nothing to me. So, I stopped buying DVDs.
Now I just watch them at the theatre if I think they will be good or just wait for them to appear on U-Verse.
***offtopic***Will someone tell those ass-wipes in Hollyweird that they are losing valuable customers with this practice of putting in useless ads and trying to force people to watch them. I have DVDs that are getting long in the tooth and it's kind of sickening to see ads for movies that have come and gone. Why can't things be like my DVD of The Matrix? When I put The Matrix into my DVD Player, the thing starts at the movie! What a unique concept! DUMBASSES!
Don't even get me started on Blu-Ray. I'm supposed to buy my movie collection again just to get innundated with the same crap?***offtopic***
A great comic. A stank-ass movie. About the only thing it's good for is as an example of a horrrrrrrrrrribbbbblllllleeee (geez, I still get the shivers) movie.
"The Long Tail" did not suggest that Harry Potter would sell less. It suggested that a less well-known, or liked, book could make as much money as a Harry Potter or more because the internet would allow those who liked such things to find them more easily.
For instance, we all know about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because of all the advertisement money spent on it and the use the Oprah Winfrey's show as an additional ad vehicle along with "E" and other such crap that fills the airwaves.
If "The Long Tail" is accurate, then there could be a much smaller independant movie that will could be released at the same time as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and that will make as much money as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but in a longer time frame. This is because you and I think this independant movie stinks when we hear about it, but your neighbor and mine thinks it's the Bee's Knees and search out art-house showings and buy the DVD and watch it whenever it shows on the Idependant Film Channel and Sundance and spread the word so that the thing takes on it's own life in a manner similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Of course, if "The Long Tail" is wrong, then this independant film will more likely resemble "Howard The Duck".
Editors deterimine whether there is or is not a market for the book. They function as pre-screeners. They are what is missing on the web.
If a book makes it to print (dead tree edition) then someone, usually the editor, has determined that a minimum number of people would like to not only read the book but purchase it as well. This is a difficult task as evidenced by the many books you can find in the clearance section of Half Price Books and other stores that buy the many remainder books publishers were unable to sell at the asking price. In other words, editors have the ability to risk the publisher's money and the health of the publishing company! They are not proof-readers as many people expect.
While I used to beat my dad at chess starting from my high school years (15 to 18 years for those not from the U. S.) he kicked my ass at checkers up until the weeks before he died.
Ditto for my Uncle Obie.
I'll bet there's a bunch of old coots sitting around just waiting to teach you a thing or two about checkers.
Oh, and for what it's worth, Go is really simple too.
We don't know yet, and we may not know for some time.
It's good to know that there are separate regions and their approximate locations. This will help some future student understand some strange phenomena he/she has noticed. This will lead to a better model of just what the magneto-shere is and does.
This may help people locate and identify planets with the potential for life by identifying their magneto-spheres. This may also help us understand just what we need to survive here, as in Global Warming.
Yeah, I know some of you may be rolling your eyes, but if we did not understand the Ozone layer we might not have understood how dangerous our current activities are until it was much too late.
Bottom line: science and understanding how the Earth works in ALWAYS in our best interests!
I know your suggestion feels good in your gut, but it won't work very well.
Tax refunds do not stimulate the economy. People either save the tax dollars or they pay of debts.
Infrastructure spending, as suggested by the Obama team, stimulates the economy by paying people who are unemployed at this time to repair roads and schools and lay new broadband fiber-optic cable. Those people take those new paychecks to the grocery store, Wally-World, and even local establshments such as ice-cream parlors and pizza restaurants to give their kids a treat. This money in the local economy encourages those stores to stock their shelves with more items. If this happens across the country, manufacturers, both local and international, start to ramp up production. Hell, they might even invest in new technology to reduce their production costs or to beat a competitor to market. That is what is meant by economic stimulation. That is what Obama wants.
I've been eating that stuff up ever since 1972 when Five Fingers of Death was shown at the California theatre in Berkeley, California. The next year Enter The Dragon was released and the entire country was eating that stuff up.
Yes, I like "violence as a form of art"; however, I insist that it be done well. Gratuitous violence is just...gratuitious violence. The art of creating art implies that the reader/viewer is connected emotionally with at least one of the characters. Without reader/viewer participation it's just porn.
By "porn", I mean the U. S. Supreme Courts definition, not some moron railing against Playboy or any depiction of nudity.
I think it was Chekov (not the Star Trek guy!) who said something akin to "if you call attention to a pistol hanging on the wall in Act I, then you had better fire it before the end of Act III".
I think the only people who actully like Frank Miller's writing are people who read comic books more than any other kind of book.
I am not trying to start a flame war. I have been an avid reader/collector of comics for decades. I used to have a complete set of Spider-man, Daredevil, the Journey Into Mystery issues that featured Thor, and a nearly complete set of Fantastic Four and a bunch of titles I barely remember.
Are you confusing 300 with The Illiad? Those are two different stories. One is fictional (well, maybe based on an actual event), the other is based on an acknowledged historical event.
If you want to see a close approximation of what happened during the battle of Thermolply(spelling is wrong) pick up a copy of Larry Gonick's "History of the Universe". That is MUCH better than anything in 300.
300 is pure crap as far as historical accuracy.
Much of that is probably due to my love for history. I found it terrible that they left out the influence of the Thespians and Thebans and possibly others who were present and all of whom outnumbered the Spartans.
In much the same way I am not as excited as I should be about the upcoming Valkyrie. Count von Stauffenberg was missing an arm as well as an eye. I can see Tom Cruise running and leaping about Deutschland like some modern day espionage agent instead of the heroic Count von Stauffenberg who knew the incredible risk he was taking.
Oh, well, it should be an exciting movie. I suppose.
Oh, yeah. One last point for those who feel the need to point out that Tom Cruise is not missing an arm. Lots of actors who have all limbs have played characters missing one or more.
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If this is where the future recording artists are going to cum from I am happy I grew up in the sixties and seventies when we had real music.
P. S. Please ask, no beg, them to stop re-making the music of my youth! It HURTS everytime I have to hear that shit! Maybe it sounds good coming through those tiny iPod ear-buds, but I am used to hearing real music from real speakers. Speakers that cost more than the iPod these kids are listening to.
When did we move from High-Fidelity (HiFi) to iPod?
Thank you to all who posted the quote. It is really relevant to current affairs, in my book.
Didn't Santayana say something about those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it?
People around the world eat some strange shit. Snails, dog, pork guts (chitterlings), carob-coated insects, fish eggs, and probably some nasty shit I've never heard of. Some of this stuff might be considered a delicacy tody, but I am sure it all started due to hunger.
Have you ever looked at a cow? What made some poor bastard decide to milk that huge, stinking thing? Yep. Hunger!
I watched a documentary a few years back that showed a guy driving a stick into the side of a cow. A stream of blood mixed with something else poured out of the animal and was collected and ...gagh... drunk.
That seems a much simpler solution than getting his address from his debit card. You can read the data on a debit card. There was an article in the first issue of Make Magazine with instructions for building the device and a link to an internet site that hosted some software for it.
People, whether they own small businesses or not, make them all the time. Those people and small businesses go bankrupt all the time and nobody notices.
Large businesses make bad decisions too, but they seem to be too large to be allowed to suffer the consequences. Anybody seen the U. S. equivalent of the Prius?
No?
Damned shame since a law was passed back in the 1970s requiring the Big Three automakers to produce fuel-effecient vehicles by 1996. Then the Big Three automakers cried to Congress and got the law changed so that they only had to produce a fuel-efficiency as applied over their entire product line instead of to each vehicle. Now the bastards are getting MONEY.
WTF?
However, after the last eight years I think the economy/psyche needs stimulus to get out of this HUGE pit we find ourselves in.
Whether large or small, some kind of stimulus is needed to get people to STOP talking about the economic mess. Once we get over the psychological hump I think it will get better
A huge worry for me right now is that this mess officially started in December 2007 and it shows no sign of stopping. Depression is on the tip of my tongue and has started to show up frequently in mainstream media. My parents grew up during the Great Depression. I vividly remember watching a debate in Congress back in the 70s and somebody said something along the lines of: a loaf of bread only cost a quarter back in the 30s. The answer he got was "Yeah, but who had a quarter."
I will immediately take this money and pay down my existing debt and go buy some stuff I have been wanting. This will have an immediate effect on the economy as I know my neighbors and many others will do the same thing.
Hey, too bad about those people wearing U. S. military uniforms in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too bad about my nephew who works for Homeland Security. Guess he will have to move back in with my brother. Too bad about all those air traffic controllers. Fuck 'em anyway. Reagan fired a bunch of those jerks and we got along just fine.
Too bad about those banks that get robbed in the next year. Too bad about those states that will have to deal with criminals running rampant across state lines. The F. B. I. will be out of business for the next year.
Too bad about your grandmother when she catches that strange disease that would have been caught by the Center for Disease Control.
Damn! Too bad about a lot of folks, now that I stop and think about it.
Awww, what the Hell! Government (or is that gubamint?) never producing anything of value!
Absolutely! But, back in the 1990s there was a statistic that was floating about that indicated that 90% of all small businesses fail in the first five years. That's why bank, at that time, were loath to loan to a small business that had not been around for at least five years.
When those small businesses fail, they usually fail owing somebody money. Real money. I think that's the part that gets forgotten a lot.
I'm not so sure that's true.
Hell, even Alaska's famous "Bridge to Nowhere" created some jobs during construction. It actually created ONE real job that persists. I saw the lady who had the job of watching the road that was built leading up to the bridge. I'm willing to bet she buys pizza and tampons from time-to-time with her earnings, thus putting real money back into the system.
Now, I do agree that she is non-productive. The money could, and should have been spent elsewhere with much superior results. But in terms of getting money into the system, the "Bridge to Nowhere" seems to have worked.
The only point I want to make is that government spending can get money moving which is what the economists seem to agree that we need to do.
MP3 players had existed for years. They were standard. They just didn't look pretty? Is that what it was?
Itunes was nothing new either. There were plenty of download sites available. So many that I don't remember the names of them all. What I do remember is that the quality of the various downloads varied greatly.
Recording industry buy-in seems to be the only thing new.
If HR was not consulted, then the company needs to educate management or dump the incompetant bastards who did not consult HR in such a critical action.
Hmmmm. I will have to see if they screwed the pooch and made a mistake that has been so common lately with .PDF redactions.
Or, at least, I used to. A few years ago I got sick and tired of being FORCED to watch advertisements for movies I will NEVER watch, and FBI warnings that mean nothing to me. So, I stopped buying DVDs.
Now I just watch them at the theatre if I think they will be good or just wait for them to appear on U-Verse.
***offtopic***Will someone tell those ass-wipes in Hollyweird that they are losing valuable customers with this practice of putting in useless ads and trying to force people to watch them. I have DVDs that are getting long in the tooth and it's kind of sickening to see ads for movies that have come and gone. Why can't things be like my DVD of The Matrix? When I put The Matrix into my DVD Player, the thing starts at the movie! What a unique concept! DUMBASSES!
Don't even get me started on Blu-Ray. I'm supposed to buy my movie collection again just to get innundated with the same crap?***offtopic***
A great comic. A stank-ass movie. About the only thing it's good for is as an example of a horrrrrrrrrrribbbbblllllleeee (geez, I still get the shivers) movie.
For instance, we all know about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because of all the advertisement money spent on it and the use the Oprah Winfrey's show as an additional ad vehicle along with "E" and other such crap that fills the airwaves.
If "The Long Tail" is accurate, then there could be a much smaller independant movie that will could be released at the same time as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and that will make as much money as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but in a longer time frame. This is because you and I think this independant movie stinks when we hear about it, but your neighbor and mine thinks it's the Bee's Knees and search out art-house showings and buy the DVD and watch it whenever it shows on the Idependant Film Channel and Sundance and spread the word so that the thing takes on it's own life in a manner similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Of course, if "The Long Tail" is wrong, then this independant film will more likely resemble "Howard The Duck".
If a book makes it to print (dead tree edition) then someone, usually the editor, has determined that a minimum number of people would like to not only read the book but purchase it as well. This is a difficult task as evidenced by the many books you can find in the clearance section of Half Price Books and other stores that buy the many remainder books publishers were unable to sell at the asking price. In other words, editors have the ability to risk the publisher's money and the health of the publishing company! They are not proof-readers as many people expect.
While I used to beat my dad at chess starting from my high school years (15 to 18 years for those not from the U. S.) he kicked my ass at checkers up until the weeks before he died.
Ditto for my Uncle Obie.
I'll bet there's a bunch of old coots sitting around just waiting to teach you a thing or two about checkers.
Oh, and for what it's worth, Go is really simple too.
It's good to know that there are separate regions and their approximate locations. This will help some future student understand some strange phenomena he/she has noticed. This will lead to a better model of just what the magneto-shere is and does.
This may help people locate and identify planets with the potential for life by identifying their magneto-spheres. This may also help us understand just what we need to survive here, as in Global Warming.
Yeah, I know some of you may be rolling your eyes, but if we did not understand the Ozone layer we might not have understood how dangerous our current activities are until it was much too late.
Bottom line: science and understanding how the Earth works in ALWAYS in our best interests!
Look at the thing on a map. There it is tucked into the side of Spain.
Have you ever listed to Portuguese? It sounds so much like Spanish that it may as well be Spanish.
Therefore, Portugal is "part" of Spain! :)
Tax refunds do not stimulate the economy. People either save the tax dollars or they pay of debts.
Infrastructure spending, as suggested by the Obama team, stimulates the economy by paying people who are unemployed at this time to repair roads and schools and lay new broadband fiber-optic cable. Those people take those new paychecks to the grocery store, Wally-World, and even local establshments such as ice-cream parlors and pizza restaurants to give their kids a treat. This money in the local economy encourages those stores to stock their shelves with more items. If this happens across the country, manufacturers, both local and international, start to ramp up production. Hell, they might even invest in new technology to reduce their production costs or to beat a competitor to market. That is what is meant by economic stimulation. That is what Obama wants.
I've been eating that stuff up ever since 1972 when Five Fingers of Death was shown at the California theatre in Berkeley, California. The next year Enter The Dragon was released and the entire country was eating that stuff up.
Yes, I like "violence as a form of art"; however, I insist that it be done well. Gratuitous violence is just...gratuitious violence. The art of creating art implies that the reader/viewer is connected emotionally with at least one of the characters. Without reader/viewer participation it's just porn.
By "porn", I mean the U. S. Supreme Courts definition, not some moron railing against Playboy or any depiction of nudity.
I think the only people who actully like Frank Miller's writing are people who read comic books more than any other kind of book.
I am not trying to start a flame war. I have been an avid reader/collector of comics for decades. I used to have a complete set of Spider-man, Daredevil, the Journey Into Mystery issues that featured Thor, and a nearly complete set of Fantastic Four and a bunch of titles I barely remember.
I dunno'. He didn't seem all that happy when P'Gell was working him over with a brick.
But then Denny did keep coming back for more, so who knows, maybe he was happy. :)
Are you confusing 300 with The Illiad? Those are two different stories. One is fictional (well, maybe based on an actual event), the other is based on an acknowledged historical event. If you want to see a close approximation of what happened during the battle of Thermolply(spelling is wrong) pick up a copy of Larry Gonick's "History of the Universe". That is MUCH better than anything in 300. 300 is pure crap as far as historical accuracy.
I too found 300 to be boring.
Much of that is probably due to my love for history. I found it terrible that they left out the influence of the Thespians and Thebans and possibly others who were present and all of whom outnumbered the Spartans.
In much the same way I am not as excited as I should be about the upcoming Valkyrie. Count von Stauffenberg was missing an arm as well as an eye. I can see Tom Cruise running and leaping about Deutschland like some modern day espionage agent instead of the heroic Count von Stauffenberg who knew the incredible risk he was taking.
Oh, well, it should be an exciting movie. I suppose.
Oh, yeah. One last point for those who feel the need to point out that Tom Cruise is not missing an arm. Lots of actors who have all limbs have played characters missing one or more.