Saturday, December 2, 2017

short term retard


SHORT TERM RETARD
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We briefly touched in the comments section on the idiotic movie that was supposed to be a spoof on the making of Apocalypse Now.  A spoof of a documentary of a movie.  Okay.  Hollywood has been out of ideas before ( or at least the slime creatures that okay the funding for movies ).  They still are.  I knew not to waste my money on it as, number one, it is a film from Hollywood ( better ones are coming from Canada for Christ sake ) and much more importantly, it had Ben Stiller in it.  There is no better indicator that the movie will blow nearly completely undigested bloody chunks.

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Ah, newsflash Tech Porn idiots, the “new business model” of Kindle Unlimited and Netflix isn’t working because it is the next new bright and shiny digital masterpiece ( Amazon and Netflix are all about stock inflation and buy-outs from the founders, not operating at a profit, which they don’t.  If you can’t say “this time it’s different at Pets.com”, you are a moron.  These are bubbles, people ).  They are working because the quality of books and movies are such complete feted fowl feces that only by paying pennies per viewing are you getting any eyeballs on the product.  It is quantity due to lack of quality.  I’m getting more enjoyment out of Family Feud 1980 on Amazon Prime than most of their new shows ( one exception would be the well done “Tin Star” ).

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I think the reason all this super hero crap is doing so well is that the Chinese audiences of the demographic that loves comics, age 16-25 or whatever it is ( probably the same age group that can’t afford a bride due to the old One Child Policy and has plenty of disposable income as a result ), is probably bigger than the entire US domestic audience.  That is the only reason Hollywood is still in business ( are the sexual assault “revelations” the final act of an imploding business?  The Enron equivalent of some suits going to jail? ).

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I’m actually happy that the spoof ( “Tropic Thunder”? ) was such a piece of crap.  Serves them right for trying to gay up one of the best cinematic masterpieces of all time ( the era might have brought us “Heaven’s Gate” which I loved but which showcased the financial aspect of creator control getting out of control, mores the pity, but it also gave us Godfather 1 &2 and Apocalypse Now, amongst others ).  So, what did they accomplish spending $80 million?  They encouraged more of this slop ( I do believe it still made a profit ), and it gave us the phrase “full retard”.  That is about its sole pop culture contribution. 

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Granted, that was private money ( unless the DOD threw in a bunch of free toys for filming ).  But it highlights the Way Beyond Point Of Diminishing Returns in our economy.  Millions and billions get thrown around, for almost no effect.  I know, Hollywood is a rather poor example.  Their business model has been poor for a very long time.  There was always a turncoat screwing everybody else for an immediate profit, completely endangering the current model, going back to the Great Depression and television.  You could call it creative  destruction.  I call it cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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You could say the same about the airline industry.  It starts with taking away one olive from the salad on the in flight meal to save a couple of million a year.  It ends up with cuts in the maintenance schedule.  Or baggage and other fees closing in on doubling the ticket price.  Or forcibly removing passengers due to overbooking.  Or how about that retail industry?  Start by screwing over the local town by moving in with bank credit for undercutting small businesses profits.  End up by screwing your customers with empty shelves, shoddy products and minimum wage workers who have zero product knowledge ( Radio Shack ). 

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Everybody is cutting off their nose to spite their face.  Short term profiteering.  Going Full Retard.  The bankers might not have known that Peak Oil would kill the economy rather than just give us a recession, but then they only learned to embrace Too Big To Fail afterwards.  Right back to short term thinking.  The educational industry is great for short term thinking.  Teach to the test.  No long term learning, retention or problem solving.  Which was the whole point of public education to begin with.  More knowledgeable citizens make better workers and the whole of society advances ( it makes sense this started with the Prussian state, lacking in resources other than human capital.  Or why Japan emulated their behavior, also surrounded by enemies and without resources ).

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What is the educational system churning out?  Total retards.  Of COURSE political correctness appeals to these idiots.  They have zero capacity for critical thinking.  But the point is, only profit short term is a criteria.  Look at the energy industry.  They sought out business users to sell excess capacity, lowering industrial rates.  Which still makes sense because you need to generate extra electric around the clock.  But that lowers profit, so you defer maintenance.  Which lowers profits when you replace rather than repair.  Or, you lower your generation numbers and cause blackouts and brownouts.  Next thing you know, you are subsidizing energy efficient appliances so your residential homes use less electric.  But they pay the higher rates!

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This all might seem insane.  Full Retard!  Yet, what do you do personally?  If you don’t have money since taxes are up, mandatory medical is up and hours are down, what do you do?  You defer maintenance on your car, wait for something to break, then put the repair on a credit card.  Then, to make that payment, you begin deferring home maintenance.  Something breaks and you watch a YouTube video on how to fix it yourself, which you do using very low quality materials which postpone another costly repair for a short while.  Are you any different that American Airlines or the electric company?

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The only difference is that their decisions immediately impact future income, whereas you have a waiting period before the next yearly medical insurance costs increases or the next cut in your hours.  They get income reduction in months whereas you can wait up to a whole year.  And the only way you can avoid this entirely is to sacrifice to the point you insulate yourself from their short term profit model.  Downsize your home to the point it doesn’t need to be financed.  Get out of the medical insurance game by earning under ten grand a year.  Which means you ride a bicycle or moped to enable you to drop vehicle insurance.  You’ll be exercising more being off grid, much more manual tasks such as hauling water, to help offset the lack of medical insurance. 

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With lower income you don’t eat out, fixing all your own food from scratch.  Saving money and getting healthier.  Home school rather than having a vehicle to take the spawn to the county bus stop.  No one wants to hear about doing all that, not even preppers or survivalists ( which, hello!, is pretty embarrassing ).  Yet otherwise you are on the same treadmill as all of the rest of the short term profiteers.  There is no more growth.  Ask Paladin Press or half the freeze dried food sellers.  Growth, which almost every business model needs, is gone.  Adopt to the contraction.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2k7TR8T )
 
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23 comments:

  1. Two quick observations

    * I bought more Christmas lights to expand my meager set. Same system as previous years only this year they changed it & of course it's not backwards compatible. This means I have to buy new controllers. Worse is that there are far less fairy lights but at the same price (I could count them but each water fall strand is down 4 lights). Shrinkflation

    * Clothing. Why can I see everyones fricken underwear now? If pants are not riding low exposing but crack the material is so light that you see straight through it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When slender French chicks show their underwear, it is sexy. Are you Body Weight Plus Phobic? It's just Lovin' It McDonalds style, the end product of their diet. Or if you prefer, your PA mobile food storage. :)

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    2. I'll tell you why you can probably see mine. Because ALL of the manufacturers, for at least the past 20 years, have been making men's britches, shorts and longs, that simply do not fit. During that period I've bought at least 50 pairs and every one of them has been too short from crotch to waist and therefore ride way too low for my comfort. If I wear a belt too it is almost impossible to get my junk out to urinate without undoing the belt, opening the button/rivet, and get the zipper all the way down. Right, a major pain. I wear shorts 90% of the time and I've been tempted to tear a pair of them apart, reverse engineer them, and then create a proper prototype to take to a seamstress to fabricate about 20 pairs for me. Everything is going to hell and at a faster speed tomorrow than yesterday. There appears to be no bottom in this hell on earth.

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    3. Look at the bright side. It is a FRESH Hell On Earth every day :) The good side of working from home is I wear sweat pants every day, even walking the dog in winter. I'd say Gore Warming, but just a renter from middle Nevada comment how cold it was here. Mid 30's as a high today. I was calling it a VERY mild winter. We usually have teens starting in October. So far this year to date, two days max in the upper teens as a low. I'm calling a mild winter. Anyway, I only wear real pants biking or shopping, same with real shoes. Makes life much easier not buying clothes for work, even as cheap as I was. I wear Dickies. The crotch hangs down embarrassingly long, but I'd rather that than your issue of not enough junk space.

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    4. Mild winter now here too. We had a harsh October, but November came in and it might as well have been summer - temps hitting 60! here it is December and we are without snow, and hitting near 50... Great for us building on our land but the farmers and ranchers are starting to worry a little - not enough snow in the winter means a drought starting next spring...

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    5. @Ghostsniper - you're reading my mind. I'm seriously thinking of getting pants made specifically for me. Probably through this guy http://www.blackfoot.com.au/www.blackfoot.com.au/Clothing.html


      My current pants for work (5.11 - don't hate me, I had a pair and they were perfect.) I bought two more pairs and they don't fit properly. the crotch is WAY to low so I have to wear them steve erkle style. I hate them so much but they cost me a fortune. I have a whole stack of clothes I hate. LOL

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    6. JJ-we don't get increased temps in the day-we just don't get as cold as normal.
      Dingo-you have a whole stack of new clothes for the apocalypse! Mine are mostly all thrift store stuff gathering dust for ten years or longer. Most pants are too tight in the waist, but I imagine six months in on a wheat diet they will fit :)

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    7. 70° nights and low eighties in the day, occasionally showers...
      Swim trunks and cargo shorts here.
      Maybe long pants for a couple weeks worth of days for the whole winter.

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    8. My luck, while in FL I had a Canadian front come down and it got in the 30's. You can't bundle up enough in cotton layers for that crap ( not when you are acclimated to the subtropics ). I'm surprised the mobile home heater worked.

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  2. Perhaps I misspoke earlier, see this:
    https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/662008/China-War-US-Nuclear-Missile-Hypersonic-Dongfeng-41-Xi-Jinping-Donald-Trump-Test-Nuke-Mach

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry, I tried to read it. But when a three minute article takes ten because of the asinine loads of pop ups and videos and ads and graphic BS, I give up on it. People come back for that crap?

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    2. Try adding this little gem to your browser: https://www.ublock.org/

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    3. Sorry. I'm using Chrome with all the regular blockers so I was unaware of any pop-ups, videos and ads. Supposedly china has a new super duper rocket that flies at mach 25 and can deliver something like 10 warheads to 10 different sites simultaneously. I saw it mentioned over at Vault-Co, who says that's the end of the game and shut his blog down after 19 years.

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    4. The pop-ups are minor. All the embedded graphic crap on the site slows it to a crawl. I can't visit the local paper, or any newspaper American or international because of the same lag. It is so bad, Zero Hedge is now a quick loader in comparison. And I can visit The Burning Platform now. So that is a plus ( although it seems ZH kind of blows now for content-although that could be subjective ). Amazon has slowed down pretty bad, though. I might not be buying much from them, except the Kindle Unlimited is frustrating for searching-the content is tons better luckily. So...mixed bag I guess.

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    5. It's these goddam popups wanting your email address for their newsletter that annoys the shit out of me. Seems there's no way to stop em. In the beginning I used to write in stuff like blow-me@fuck-you.com or something but I've gotten so disgusted with everything web I just shut the tab and move on.

      I use chrome with all the bells and whistles for normal browsing as it blocks 99% of the junk, and I use firefox, stripped to the bones, if I want to see specific videos I find by way of chrome. It's a pain switching browsers all the time but such is the way online now. Just think, next year there'll be even more goodies in store for us. Neither of my XP machines even work online any more, not even email. sigh

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    6. I get to surf from work. Zero Hedge is unreadable because of all the crud they have polluting the site.

      I have a fantasy. It's TEOTWAWKI. My family provides shelter in our Bunker to some yuppies who have just escaped a cannibal horde (ala "the Road"). Breathlessly they thank us. As the horde bang on the Bunker on the door one of the yuppies tells us he was woefully unprepared "I'm a programmer. I made a fortune creating pop up video's that auto played for websites but that didn't prepare me for this chaos". My heart hardens and we push them at bayonet point towards the door. "open it, we can't let the evil powers you possess exist in this world".

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    7. What is the ublock?
      A browser, and add-on to chrome and firefox?

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    8. GS-I tell myself, trying sooth my rage, that as more poor bastards become unemployed they are forced to eek out a living online and the commercialization is explained out of desperation. It still sucks, and I only tell myself that when I'm feeling kindly and not screaming at the computer ( with NOL poking fun and the dog wondering whether she should hide ).
      Dingo-you should fantasize more. You are a funny MoFo when you do!

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  3. friend's son is airplane mechanic.
    was working years ago for major airline in san fran area.
    to cut costs supervisor told him tho sign as inspected planes he had not touched.
    refused, quit and got another job in chicago.
    i wonder about the married mechanics with family and medical responsibilities-- did they sign illegally in order to keep their jobs?

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    1. You know the ones with bills sign the form. And who doesn't have bills. I would imagine when he got to Chicago they were more subtle. All you do is keep cutting the time allowed for inspection and the workers start doing the short cuts themselves. Then you can't point to corporate cause.

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    2. You call the FAA. I know how to "work" an inspection system, even with QA breathing down your neck. If they fire you for not hot-stamping flight gear, you own them. Your Mom might be on that flight.

      pdxr13

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    3. I understand my examples might not be subtle enough. But I know corporations and how sneaky, underhanded, greedy and deadly they are. I also know the govt. and corps are hand in hand gay loverboys. I trust neither. Wasn't there something about sending the planes to a foreign company for inspections? I'll use this example. I don't know HOW Wal-Mart is going to try to poison my next saving money on their food, but I know they WILL. So I don't eat their crap. Same with airlines. I don't need to know HOW to figure the odds are good someone figures out a system.

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    4. Oh, yeh, I forgot. The plane that crashed in our town a year ago? We got lucky ( on the ground-not so much the crew ) and it hit an unoccupied parking lot. No explanation why it suddenly failed. My explanation was it was a medical flight. Medical industry-screw you for money? Ring a bell? Cheap part? Hinky with maintainence? I just think complete fear and hatred is called for here. Stay away from crowds, stay away from airplanes.

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