Beer prices rise for the Consumer as Costs of Production Fall and Profits Rise

A number of brewers announced recently that the price of beer that the consumer pays will be going up citing rising costs. In the CNN story above the reasons given are less vague. The brewers claim to be raising prices to offset rising commodity prices and fall in volumes. Though, commodity prices have fallen recently and have caused farmers and dairies to worry about staying profitable this year. Also, ten days ago Anheuser-Busch InBev announced that their second quarter profits had grown despite the drop in volume because of cost cutting measures. One has to work through the maze of business doublespeak in these non judgmental articles regarding price increase and increased profitability to understand that cost cutting and "synergies" in these cases refers to job cuts as a result of the InBev takeover of Anheuser-Busch.

If you are the kind of person who likes to buy American and support American jobs, it is getting harder and harder to find an economical beer. Though some of the big brewers still employ Americans.

Pay

As a result of the media focus on the crash of a commuter flight in Buffalo, NY it has been revealed that pilots starting out and breaking into the industry make about as much as the girl at Starbucks that hands you your coffee in the morning. Add on to that, the fact that the pilots work long days at a job that it is critical they maintain focus and composure and you get a mild national shock.

I was surprised also. I really shouldn't have been given the nature of corporate America that pays the people that actually do the work a pittance while the executives who have never worked a day in their lives rake in exorbitant salaries. Still when you think of a pilot, its the one job that you wanted as a child that even from adulthood still looks like it has the least chance of turning out like the soul crushing office work you wound up doing.

Now more than ever we need the minimum wage to be set to the actual living wage. There really shouldn't be a distinction between the two. Congress should act now because the old argument that raising the minimum wage would cost jobs doesn't fly when companies nation wide have already cut their staff down to bare bones, cutting labor down to workers with essential functions and then cutting just a few more. There aren't any more jobs to loose.

You might still be foolish enough to believe in the American Dream, that hard work pays off, or you might be an aspiring corporate raider and make the argument that this still increases overhead of even small businesses. Sure it does, but you are willfully ignoring the big picture. To be trite, the rising tide raises all boats. If everyone is being paid a living wage, suddenly you have a surge of new consumers that have never had disposable income before. They are buying their coffee from Starbucks instead of from Maxwell House, which increases the dollars in circulation and increases profits and liquidity.

Of course this only happens if Starbucks, forced to increase wages, doesn't increase the price of their already overpriced coffee. Theoretically this could cause an increasing spiral where the costs of goods is increases commensurate to the increase in the minimum wage creating an runaway spiral of inflation. But that's where the other market forces come in. First, not every company will simply raise prices to artificially keep wages low. In our global mega corporation economy where even the store brand discount paper towels are made by the massive conglomerate that makes the costly brand name ones it is easier for such companies to spread any cost increase out over a large population and over time. This doesn't even have to turn into a situation where Congress is robbing the rich to pay the poor.

This was what we once got from unions. We have them to thank for the weekend and the forty hour work week. Unfortunately now they have turned into a punchline about organized crime and an albatross around the neck of the poorly run auto companies. If unions want to become relevant again they need to seize on this recession and take big bold action that will carry us out of the recession. I don't see this happening. They protect workers who don't work and see themselves as the enemy of management. Even worse younger workers have to pay dues into the union and get little out of it by being relegated to the worst jobs not by the company but by the union that is supposed to be looking out for them, and they still get crap wages because the union had to sell out the decent wages of new employees to maintain the benefits of the retired.

That being said, I have worked for companies that hate unions, ones that just aren't unionized, and ones that have a large powerful union and ones where the union is a minor impact on a portion of business, and I have seen that the big powerful unions still have a beneficial impact on more than the quantifiable benefits and wages one gets.

Finding a New Dealer

With the announcement that GM and Chrysler will be slashing their dealer networks over the coming weeks it is obvious that thousands of family owned small businesses will be going out of business. This will of course exacerbate the current recession. Clearly this will cause a similar chain of events that the auto giants threatened us with when they blackmailed Congress into bailing them out. The dealers go out of business, sending their employees out into the street and into unemployment and into the worst employment market in decades. Auto repair technicians who were making a middle class living will now be changing your oil at Speedy Lube for minimum wage. This cuts into the spending power of the community at large, and greatly reduces local tax revenues, which are already having the carpet pulled out from under them because of the housing market collapse. I hope you are getting ready for monthly garbage pick up instead of weekly because as the purse strings tighten municipalities all over the country are going to start looking as dilapidated as Detroit and Cleveland.

The closing of auto dealers also helps to worsen the recession by directly adding to the liquidity problem that got us into this recession in the first place. All those acres of cars that the dealer can't sell anyway will not be packed up onto trucks and hauled back to the manufacturer. Oh no. These cars will continue to sit in your dealers lot.

The dealer doesn't own those cars either. The dealer has huge loans to keep those things on property. The longer they sit there the less profit they make. More seriously for the rest of us though, is the probability that these cars will now be sold at fire sale prices by dealers desperate to unload unpopular merchandise and avoid bankruptcy. Which is exactly like those assholes that were flipping houses in Vegas and Atlanta. Except auto dealers know how to unload cars and house flippers couldn't tell their own ass from a hole in the wall.

The real threat is that banks might wind up owning these unwanted cars. That's something no one wants so hopefully they will all see their own best interest is in making credit available to dealers to keep the cars profitable and by making auto loans available to buyers so the dealers can unload these heaps of smoking steel and glass on us. Somehow I don't see that happening, and what we end up with is a sub prime mortgage and credit default swap sundae with bad auto loan sprinkles.

Time Warner Seeks to Destroy the Internet

Like a cartoon villain, Time Warner has enacted a devious plan that promises to destroy something that brings joy to the people like you and I. If you haven't heard about this yet, Time Warner has begun testing a tiered system where they charge you by both the speed and total amount of bites you operate at in a month. If you aren't feeling outrage right now, then you don't understand what I just said.

Time Warner is attempting to take advantage of the average person's ignorance of how computers and the Internet operate by manipulating ambiguities in language to make it seem like there is somehow a finite amount of Internet out there. When operating under that vague understanding of resource use that is so obvious in the physical world, it seems reasonable that they would want to charge us for how much of something we use. The thing is that this is a deception. There is not a finite amount of internets out there that one day we might us up much like we might one day use up all the oil. There are just limits on how much can be delivered to a certain number of users at any given moment. Which is why the erroneous "tubes" analogy is so attractive.

It is helpful to think of this from the end of the ISP. Faced with the need to consistently upgrade their capacity to handle many more and more customers at the faster and faster speeds that are needed to run the more and more intensive operations we perform over the Internet the ISP decides, not that the costs will one day become prohibitive(because as the Wired graph shows, that simply isn't true. And simple logic tells you that if they faced a problem of overhead they could simply raise their rates. They are the cable company after all), but that since this technical reality creates users of different needs, using a different metric vastly changes your rate structure and you can balloon your revenue.

The simple capitalist, free market logic is obvious here. Where you have a monopoly in your individual markets you can charge whatever you want. Since most regions of the country are serviced by a single cable company or ISP they can all do this without fear of being out competed by the numerous other companies out there. The only customers that will be spared are those that live in competitive markets. And sure enough ATT has started testing this idea out themselves. Now Comcast, the big villains of the last bandwidth war are looking competitive because all they have is a cap.

The slightly less obvious reason that is highly compelling for a cable company to do something sinister like this is that they are a cable company. They are primarily in the business of offering TV entertainment and people going over to the Internet to get their shows whenever they want(even their own customers) deprives them of a customer for their other services, and of ad revenue since people are having difficulty finding satisfying advertising solutions on the Internet. Largely because you have accurate measures of how effective your ads are on the Internet where they are cheap, but have to pay top dollar for television ads that are widely believed to be entirely ineffective.

The tiered structure is basically Time Warner punishing online gamers and online movie watchers for getting their entertainment elsewhere.

The tiers are also very low. Or at least in the way we measure Internet use anymore. Time Warner points out that their first tier, 1G, satisfies the needs of a third of their customers. These are basically the people that don't use the Internet. I admit that these people will probably pay less for the same amount of Internet. Anything above your grandmas Internet use enters an onerous tiered system where you pay for each gigabyte you use. In a month.

Apart from the possibility of viruses and malware using Internet without your consent and beyond your control, this is an attack on the basic philosophy that has led to the Internet and computer use as we know it. We all converted over to cable Internet because it was fast and primarily because we didn't have to pay for every minute of Internet use through a dedicated phone line. It freed up so much of the initial cost barrier of the Internet and increased the speed to the point where it became the multi-media communications tool it had always promised to be. This type of Internet service created the concept of the computer as the always-on, always-connected Internet terminal. This philosophy of the personal computer is central to the way we think of computer use and central to how software operates. Going back to a tiered structure where one pays based on an almost arbitrary metric is an attack, an attack based in greed, but an attack on the philosophy that was foundational to Web 2.0. We will never be able to proceed to Web 3.0 with this albatross around our necks.

That is where monopolies hurt business. Even regional ones. This was a lesson we learned around the last great depression and hopefully with a Democratic congress it is not a lesson we will have to re-learn the hard way. There is at least one Congressman trying to fight back. He has proposed the interesting philosophical change of calling the Internet a utility. I like that. If phone service was essential to daily life enough to be called a utility then the Internet is as well.

You should write to your representatives at the state and federal level. Raising Cain on the Internet will only go so far to produce resistance to this move by Time Warner and Ma Bell. You have to get the honest perspective of the people to the government before the industry twists the story.

It's easy to question the validity of an economic argument that relies on the business generation of the Internet. If you are a moron, or have been living in a cave since 1990. It is easy to point out that many small businesses and individuals have been able to expand their sales and start new businesses because of the low overhead cost of the Internet and its ability to reach an international consumer base. But there are specific businesses that will be impacted by this kind of tiered Internet usage structure. Online gaming is the first that comes to mind. This is now the primary business model for game manufacturers. Every gaming platform is connected to the Internet. The single player content is often secondary in importance to the users of the games. And every gaming device now can download new titles entirely from the Internet. This new business model for the gaming industry that drastically reduces overhead and cuts out the middle man would be jeopardized by requiring gamers to engage in a cost benefit analysis of whether the game would be worth the additional tiered charges.


I currently use Time Warner service to access the Internet. But that will change as soon as I can find an alternate service provider. The only thing a corporation can understand is their own greedy, short term, self interest. So the only way to communicate with them is with money. So I will be taking mine away from the finks at Time Warner for even thinking about using the byte as a metric for billing.

Anticipating The Worst: Update

Ohio state legislators are beginning the process of seeking permission from the federal government to allow local law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. This is not intrinsically racist, unless you believe that having an immigration policy is racist. However, if you listen to the segment in this link, toward the end there is the comment made that this is being justified in relation to job competition.

I haven't heard of any race riots yet (though there has been an obscene level of unexplained gun violence) but comments like this one cause me to be concerned. When made by politicians, particularly those that have been in office through the beginning of this crisis, or those who may have voted for legislation that could be seen as having contributed to this recession, comments like this seem to be a crass attempt to redirect public outrage away from our elected representatives and the corporate crooks responsible toward a marginalized and politically defenseless group. I think I am looking for a more serious word than "crass" but I don't want to pull a Godwin's Law at this stage. Though when it comes to vilifying an ethnic minority in a time of great economic crisis it is hard to come up with alternative adjectives.

Again, what worries me is the speed with which this is progressing. This was already an issue politicians and talking heads used to distract people when times were good. Now that jobs are scarce, the economic fear mongering that has been invalid for so long is starting to get traction at the fringes of the sane media. Note that the link above is to an NPR station.

Anticipating the Worst

John Kerry hosted a discussion last week where he had a round table of experts engage in hysterics regarding the recession and asked them to criticize his party's stimulus, the one he cosponsored. One of their doomsday warnings was that major wars, such as World War II, are preceded by long periods of economic recession. They predicted such an outcome if the current recession lasts, oh say more than two years.

This, in relation to certain things I have been hearing people say, leads me to be concerned. My specific concern is a sensitive one to discuss, however I feel that it is necessary to discuss in the interests of preparedness and prevention. The subject of race riots. If we recall, WWII and most regional conflicts in recent history were preceded by racial unrest or have a racial element to the conflict. Iraq, Darfour, Bosnia, Rwanda.

The things that I have been hearing that worry me are a linking of the effects of the recession on individuals to illegal immigration of Hispanics. I have heard people remark, "why should I be worried about the civil rights of illegal immigrants I can't even find a job myself." To be sure, I have only heard this sentiment coming from racist people who already bemoan bilingual signage. Still, the linking of the bad effects of the recession on individuals, by the individuals themselves, through the issue of illegal immigration, to a specific racial category of people, is what worries me. The immigration debate already inflames gun toting extremists to the point of mobilization. And the Minutemen were in existence when we were still relatively prosperous. I fear the recruitment power the recession will have for violent racist radicals.

This will be the kind of thing that plays out like prior race riots. On the streets in the poor parts of the country people will feel the pressure building every day. That sense of racial tension will never see the light of day in the MSM until the flood waters suddenly burst forth in a regional paroxysm of violence. Local riots will break out and only local outlets will cover them until they become either large, or last multiple days, or become shocking in some other way. Then the national MSM will start saying what had been obvious to 1/4 of the country for months. This will all be a complete shock to white middle class midwesterners who will wake up one morning as the MSM brings their attention to race riots already in progress.



Honestly, I hope it doesn't happen that way. Maybe it will just be local like the riots over the killing of Oscar Grant III. Or maybe the racial tension will never reach critical mass, or maybe the catalyst will never appear. I am just worried at the pace with which racist sentiment against Latinos has changed under the influence of the recession. For practical purposes, we should be concerned with good relations with Mexico because a good portion of their GDP is remittances from the US, and they recently discovered epic shit tons of oil. We should stay friendly with our neighbors.

Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility

For Christmas my wife and I decided to spend our Best Buy gift cards on the Harvest Moon game. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the game revolves around your character as you farm your ranch, raise livestock, get married, and have children. Its basically simulated farm life with some corny environmentalism thrown in as plot. As if working your farm by yourself isn't enough work.

This version has all the familiar elements from the previous games in the series. Cows and chickens, corn and tomatoes, picking stuff of the mountain to give as gifts to woo your intended. In this version there is a greater variety of crops and livestock to choose from. There are winter grains like buckwheat and you can raise an ostrich to ride around town.

However, the downsides to this version are much more profound. The first thing you notice is that the voice sound effects sound like adults in Charlie Brown cartoons and are just as intelligible. "Waa waa waa waa." You notice this because every time you start the game the muffeled trumpet sound attempts to say the games name and every time your character pets an animal it says, "there there." Which I guess is an artifact of poor translation from the Japanese version.

The most aggrivating part of the game is the first hour. Because it takes an hour to get through the introduction. The game forces you to wander around town and have an extended conversation involving gift giving with every citizen of the game before even beginning the toutorial. Like most games, the toutorial is entirely unnessary. Of course while trapped in the insultingly unnessary toutorial, the game's writers decided it was also necessary to force you to interact with the games most unplesant character who spends the toutorial insulting you even as you easily accomplish the tedious tasks he sets before you.

Once you get through the god awful plot and asanine toutorial the game is actually quite fun. Like all the games in the Harvest Moon series, its enjoyable to pretend to be farming your own ranch and the motion controls on the Wii enhance the feel of the game. Its got flow.

Depression Era Tactics

We have really hit the shit now people. Labor is dusting off tactics that they haven't used since the bad old days of company towns and anarchists. Laid off workers have occupied a factory in Chicago. They were given short notice of the closing of the plant and are attempting to get the severance and vacation pay due to them. This is actually connected to the $700,000,000,000.00 bailout because one of the banks that got assistance from the Treasury is the bank that finances this company that employees these workers and said bank refuses to loan the company the money it needs to keep up with its payroll, forcing it to close its factory doors. Which is exactly why there needed to be better controls put on this massive act of corporate welfare so that Paulson wasn't left with the sole option of begging the banks to not horde the cash but deploy it. Because if they won't spend the money then the bailout can't serve the purpose it was authorized for.

The Friday Bacon: Bacon Rage

I have a friend that has Bacon Rage.
All night diners like Denny's, Perkins, and Bob Evans are the kind of place that suburban teenagers begin to flex their growing independence by staying out late and paying for their own food and hanging out with their friends. (they serve breakfast all day long!) During this adolescent period my friend, with some others, went to one of these restaurants and ordered some breakfast combo. It did not come with bacon. Like most sane people my friend wanted some bacon so he ordered a side of bacon.

The bacon came on a separate plate. There were two pieces. Two overcooked pieces. Two small overcooked pieces of bacon on a separate plate. Sitting there, alone. Stark in their presentation and insignificance. This alone is an insult to the god of bacon if there was such a thing. Surely anyone craving bacon would only have their appetite increased rather than satisfied by this paltry offering. He ate the bacon and by all accounts it was a pleasant meal.

Then the bill came.

$6.00. The cost of the paltry serving of bacon was six fucking dollars. And this was in 1995, before people would mortgage their house to buy a TV. Some words were exchanged and things escalated. By the end of the night half of the town was engulfed in flames. If you think that is a bit extreme, you must not like bacon. Or justice. What's wrong with you?

The Department of Defense: We Deliver Weapons to the World

[Note: This posting was authored by TheRedKap, who is currently behind the Great Fire Wall, and is unable to post directly.]

For those of you at home who are worried that the American economy is crumbling beyond repair, take heart in the fact that the United States is still the arms supplier to the world. All of the usual types of equipment are involved, namely the M-16 assault rifle, the F-16 in various configurations, and the C-17 military transport plane. However, there are a few new surprises. For instance, the United Arab Emirates is reportedly considering purchasing Black Hawk helicopters and Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

Details of the record $32 billion year enjoyed by the Pentagon include a package of various weapons systems to countries in the Persian Gulf region. But, don't worry, all of these weapons are going to our friends, such as an advanced missile defense system for the aforementioned U.A.E., helicopters and tanks for Saudi Arabia and Egypt, , and most interestingly technology to help Jordan secure its border with Iraq. Iraq, soon to be flush with billions of dollars in oil revenue is in the market for modern military equipment, including F-16s, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, and mortar systems. An upgrade to the PAC-3 and munitions for Israel is also in the works, along with at least 25 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, with options for up to 50 more, with an eye to getting the planes to the IDF "as quickly as we possibly can."

Meanwhile, Russia's 21% of global arms sales, which partly go to Iran and Syria, were recently characterized by the Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Sallai Meridor as "dangerous and destabilizing to Israel and for peace in the region." Sure, the US and Israel were cooperating with the Georgian military prior to the recent 5 Day War, to the tune of $300 million dollars last year alone, but clearly the Russians were unjustified in their reaction to the Georgian offensive into South Ossetia and Abkahzia. The ambassador, for his part, couldn't understand why anyone would see these arms supplies as threatening or destabilizing. Looking through the old crystalline prism of spheres of influence, the Russians are very concerned about the threat upon its borders.

Do not be confused into thinking that these arms sales are entirely funded by the recipients of these weapons systems. The U.S. government, according to numbers from the BEA, spent approximately $3.8 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2008 financing foreign military sales. While this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the monthly deficit our government is currently running, such as the $111.91 billion dollar deficit for the month of August, arms sales are the classic example of foreign diplomacy that has the biggest potential for unintended catastrophic results.

The Walk of Shame: Corruption and Government, Don't Look So Suprised

Apparently the tax law is so complex that even the guy in change of writing it doesn't understand his own obligations under that law. Or maybe he just forgot to report tens of thousands of dollars in income over two decades. Somehow, I think that if I made a similar mistake there would be gruff men in dark suits knocking on my door.

Speaking of money owed to the government. Days after the Interior Department received an award for high standards of integrity the Inspector General of the Interior Department issued a detailed report describing inappropriate conduct among the minerals management services who collect royalties from oil companies. The sordid dealings include contract fixing, inappropriate sexual relationships between regulators and oil company execs, and regulators being on the payroll of oil companies as consultants. The missing money comes in where the MMS has failed to pursue thousands of dollars in royalties owed to the government by the oil companies while they have been racking in record profits and growing fat off of huge tax subsidies. Subsidies which also don't seem to be doing anything to keep gas prices low. At least the "MMS Chicks" had a good time.

Pelosi seems to think this will effect the nature of the debates regarding increased offshore oil drilling. By which she doesn't mean that this information revealing that the Bush administration could have done something about the rising cost of oil will be used to take increased drilling off the table. (Drilling that wont do anything to reduce the cost of oil since it will take decades for there to be any production and that production will be so small as to not make any impact at the pump.) No, this will just result in some language being added to the bill regarding integrity. This new information won't change anything because it has already been decided to go ahead with drilling. In fact congress has decided to go ahead with a worse plan than that suggested by Paris Hilton.

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City, or the Worst American City?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Cleveland is the second poorest city after only Detroit Michigan. The downfall of both cities is linked and ongoing but at least Cleveland doesn't have a mayor under indictment for perjury. Local news outlets are trying to cut the sting of the numbers by pointing out that the same report states the average household income in Cleveland grew over the same period. What they either don't realize or are deliberately not saying is that this means the gap between the rich and the poor is widening at the expense of middle income families.

This is the kind of thing one would expect to see in a major urban center that is still experiencing flight of the middle class out of the city into the suburbs. It is also an increased threat to the American Dream. In a city where poverty is increasing and which has been hard hit by the collapse of the housing market it seems increasingly unlikely that this is a place where a working family can get a leg up and advance their financial standing. Which would explain why people are leaving the area.

All of these things combined cut down the tax base while increasing the demand on government services. This isn't just more people becoming a drain on the welfare state. It's vacant buildings becoming bastions of criminal behavior causing a drain on the under staffed police force. Those same vacant buildings are also a drain on the fire department due to arson, which increases response to emergencies and costs of investigation. Lastly, the city has to buy those buildings and demolish them creating costly legal work on top of paying out settlements to the banks that have foreclosed on these houses. The roads are in bad need of repair, and communities region wide have to replace their sewage systems because they violate clean water standards, spewing human waste into lake Erie. The steel industry is dead, but its rotting corpse is lying unburied across the rust belt of America.

The Walk of Shame; Only 115 Shopping Days Left

Today is Labor Day, the Sunday night of all summer. Its still warm out but kids are back in school and the leaves will soon start to turn. That doesn't stop main street from thinking about the big sales figures it draws in for the Christmas season. Especially given the struggling U.S. economy. All summer long they groan in board rooms about slagging sales and strain their little MBA minds to come up with something original and every year the answer is to try to make the holiday season as long as possible.



This is all shit you have heard before. I am just here to vent my rage at seeing Halloween advertisements and sales on fucking Labor Day. All year long I wonder to my self why I have an irrational hatred for corporations despite being "libertarian" and then this shit happens and my rage boils up and I don't have a memory problem any more.

Look at that shit! Discount Halloween candy? That shit won't make it till the end of the month even if you don't eat it. But who fucking cares about that, you are giving it to other peoples kids. Why should you bother to have candy that isn't filled with moth larva after sitting in your kitchen for two months?

Cleveland Ohio: Terrible American City or the Worst American City

It seems like Forbes has its finger on the pulse of reality through just a few simple statistics. They looked at population change and some simple economics and come to the simple realization that there are city's that people are moving away from for good reasons. The mayor of Canton got all upset by his city being identified as one of those facing a rapid death. Its an attitude that I have encountered in Cleveland frequently. The residents of this terrible city have constructed their lives to avoid the worst parts of town and allow themselves to believe that it isn't that bad and act upset or surprised when they are told how awful the city is. As long as people are not only willing to accept how bad things are and get so upset when they are told how bad it really is, nothing will improve. Its like trying to convince an alcoholic friend they have a problem.

Everyone is Shitting Themselves Over E3

The Electronics Entertainment Expo ceased to be relevant when it became a venue for gaming companies PR departments to masturbate in front of the media rather than a showcase of the latest in electronics for the consumer base. This parallels the fall of the movie and music industries except the video game industry is still going strong. Movie and music companies have been seeing falling revenues and blame piracy and a shift toward video games. Except in a previous posting we have discussed studies that have shown some piracy actually helps music sales. These companies refuse to acknowledge that the mediocre and pedestrian fare they produce might be the reason they can't attract customers. Also, I personally believe that an artist has the right to own and benefit from his creation. However the corporate model of entertainment production where producers dictate creative content and the label owns the final product create an environment that stifles creativity. It doesn't help that independent music and movie producers are being bought up by large media companies because they are profitable and then shut down to trim costs once they are inside the fold of the media giant. The big studios fail to see that it was the niche markets and inherent freedom to create that was the strength of the independent shops. Instead they blame the Internet and pirates and make overzealous moves to defend the copyright (that they swindled away from the artist in the first place) and they wonder why they are perceived as attacking their customer base.

Its like the don't respect the awesome and terrible power of the Internet.

A Tale of 2 Film Buffs

I love movies and watch them often. I have a friend, we'll call her Pear, who also loves movies. We sometimes watch the movies we get with each other, sometimes not. Neither of us has an extensive DVD or, god forbid, VHS collection. We watch so many, that it would be ridiculous to purchase every movie we want to see. Rent? Oh no, no. Pear, as far as I know, has not rented a movie in what may be years. I will occasionally rent one, but it is usually if options are limited. No, Pear and I watch all of our movies for free, essentially.

The fact that my font name is Bloated Nemesis and this is a blog, you could probably make an assumption that I download movies from the log cabin. Well, you would be partially correct, son. That used to be the way to watch movies in the Bauman Manor living room. Downloading has a couple of significant draw backs. The most relevant to this post is the concept that the downloader now has a copy of it. They can spread this copy around as if it is their own. The downloader can become a distributor. Though, I really have no problem with that, I hear there are some rich, fat, selfish dudes in Hollywood who seem pissed about that possibility.

No, the preferred way to view flicks in the Bauman Manor is streaming. It is easy. It is quick. It isn't always reliable. However, it is beautiful. After I watched Bad Lieutenent last week, I could not distribute it to others. I can point someone towards to the site I watched it with, but that is about it. Essentially, it is being broadcast using the log cabin. Now granted, if we applied FCC laws to the peeps who are broadcasting it, they would be shut down.

Pretend it is 1945, and we all love radio. I'm scrolling through the stations and I stumble upon a station I have never heard before. It turns out some rogue electronics nerds with resources set up a tower and started broadcasting with no FCC authorization. Well, those rogue nerds would get in trouble when they were caught. However, those of us who listened to the station would not have legal problems.

So, one of our two film buffs uses log cabin streaming. Well, what does our friend Pear do? She goes to the library. You know, the public library, or that big ass building downtown that has all of the books and homeless people. Ring a bell? Pear watches a lot of movies, all for free. (Well, I suppose technically tax dollars factor in it, but we are working on the individual consumer level right now.) That is completely legal. Shit, you are considered a "good citizen" if you use libraries. Well, it is a slight surprise to some people that libraries often have movies. Lots of them. Good ones, too. Often, many of the same ones you can get from the log cabin. When Pear gets movies from the library, she does not get to keep them. There is a limited time period in which that movie is "hers."

So, in recap. Pear and I both watch a lot of movies. We watch them for free. We have a huge selection to choose from. We have a limited time period in which the movie is "ours." Shit, libraries and streaming both have an unreliability to them. (Even if Pear knows the library has a movie, they may not have it available at that time. When I stream, I often run into server problems or bad copies.) Seems like borrowing media from a library and streaming off of the log cabin are pretty comparable to me.

So, I was just wondering, if the log cabin is the future of information dissemination, and libraries are the past, why is there not a similar legal option on the log cabin to libraries?

Oh yeah, I remember. The log cabin is a new frontier, much like America was up until 100 years ago. The corporations are trying to make the log cabin completely profit driven, and they want to squash anything that is more utopian than them.

Compassionate Conservatism Gets Compassionate All Over the Environment

So apparently the big news today is that Cheney is an asshole and has been "secretly" trying to suppress testimony regarding global warming. The LA Times has decided to be clever and link this to when Cheney crafted U.S. energy policy in secret, working directly with energy industry lobbyists. They may be reacting to the fact that that story got no mileage seven years ago. It appears that the only reason anyone is paying attention to this latest move by the friendly and lovable members of the Bush administration who only want the best for the American people, is because someone in the Democratic party finally grew some stones and is standing up to this shit.

People on the right fringe give Al Gore tons of crap about "An Inconvenient Truth" but he never even brings up this shit. Its understandable why a respectable person would refrain from pointing the finger at the people who are trying to suppress the truth in order to gain a financial benefit. Usually when one decrys the influence of the big bad oil companies they immediately get labeled as a kook or a conspiracy nut. In some cases this kind of arm waving behavior may be paranoia but when the manipulation of public sentiment is actually happening why can't it be pointed out in a legitimate discussion? Why is the standard response to pointing out information manipulation the logical fallacy resort to ridicule? And why is that the end of the public discussion of the manipulation?

The Nacirema

So aparently American Indians are buying up the land that once was theirs. This has become possible recently through the generous donations made by the white man at the native's traditional style gaming longhouses. They are also taking the ironic move of uitilizing a treaty that could only have been a cruel legal kick in the face when it was enacted. After using violence to drive the natives off their lands the U.S. then made it possible for the natives to buy the land back. How generous! Well now the American Indian tribes are using that treaty to take the land they buy out of the tax base of the local municipality it used to belong to and into their own sovjerenty. And OH! to hear the white man cry when you disrupt his tax base!

The thing that pisses me off the most about local governments is that they act as if the land within their boarders and the tax money they expect to bring in is theirs instead of the property of the people they are supposed to serve. Exibit A Now that someone is using the machenery of capitalism and the law to their own advantage and exercising their rights, these local governments cry foul, gnash their teeth, and beat their chests untill the blood comes out. These local government "leaders" need to have a lesson in real American freedom but sadly this is the kind of corruption that infects local government like a festering boil.

In the meantime some crazy fuckers have gone and disturbed a previously uncontacted tribe in the Amazon just to prove they exist. Now droves of anthropologists will stream down there looking for them to figure crap out. Nowhere is Heizenburgs uncertainty principle more appropriately glossed over into a philosophical statement than with regard to anthropology. The presence of the anthropologist that examines the culture alters what he is examining tremendously. All this, and social anthropology can barely call itself a science.

The World Food Crisis

The world food crisis entered the perception of the average American this week when Costco and Walmart started rationing rice. I came upon rice at half the market rate today in the grocery store and bought up the thirty pounds you see to the left. I also snapped up a gallon of vegtable oil since land used for rice has been converted to the palm oil cash crop and will rise in parity with rice.

The prices of all foods, and all comodities, are linked in this global economy. The staples Wheat, Rice, and Corn have all drasticly gone up in price over the last year. The rise is due to a number of factors that feed back on one another because of the global economy.

In the United States the farm lobby has pushed congress to invest in corn based ethanol. This created an incentive outside of the market for U.S. farmers to dedicate feilds that had been used for producing rice and wheat for food in the past, to corn, that is being burned for fuel. The President spoke of using switchgrass but the money has gone to corn. So this decreases supply of staple foods that the U.S. would otherwise export to the world. With the falling dollar our exports would be very attractive except the cost of rice is fixed to the dollar so it faces the pressures of inflation. The cost of fuel feeds back into the cost of food because of the energy used in transport and processing.

High Gas prices wouldn't effect the hungry as devistatingly if their own countries produced enough food to feed them. Then they wouldn't have to import the food they need from the U.S. Around the world farmer's decisions about what to plant have been influenced by the U.S. economy over the last few years. The black hole of ever increasing imports to America due to ample credit have encouraged foreign farmers to switch to cash crops. Farming has always been a poverty industry since the beginning of time and how can you begrudge an Egyptian farmer who chooses sugar over wheat when its ten times the price?

This global trend to switch to sugar and oil instead of rice and wheat, or poppys in Afghanistan, has driven world food supply even lower. But it has done so in a highly localized way. Major rice exporting countries have cut shipments to ensure they can feed their own people and the major rice importing countries now face a crisis where the whole supply thretans to go into the black market. When the bottom dropped out of the U.S. economy and the falling value of the dollar started an upward trend toward inflation the whole world suddenly realised they had been catering to U.S. luxury demands instead of feeding themselves.

A Crisis Meeting

G7 finance ministers and Central Bankers are scheduled to meet in Washington, D.C. through this weekend to hammer out solutions to the numerous crises facing the world economy. Here's a handy list of items that might be on their agenda.

• General Electric reported losses across almost every sector of operations for the first quarter of the year, and revised revenue for the year downward. The normally stalwart stock is perhaps the strongest indicator yet that the global recession is reaching into every part of the economy.
  
• Bear Sterns has delayed releasing its first quarter results due to the disruptions caused by the merger with JP Morgan. As they are expecting negative results, one can understand their disinterest in transparent financial accounting, but its losses will probably be indicative of the weakest parts of the financial markets.
  
• Head of Germany's Bundesbank, Axel Weber, is concerned about inflation in the Eurozone, and doesn't see any room for interest rate hikes. One can imagine the back and forth between European and American banking officials over the difference in interest rates and other monetary policies.
• According to the IMF, inflation is also expected to tap down growth in emerging nations in Asia. With consumer confidence in the United States slumping, to put it mildly, in the facing of rising import costs, growth in Asia will come to be the growth engine for the world economy.
• The food crisis throughout the developing world, while the most important of the various crises to be discussed, is unlikely going to be at the top of the agenda as finance ministers through the developed world are beginning to see the limitations of their capital.
  
• As mentioned before, the position of Ben Bernanke is likely to come under heavy scrutiny among his colleagues, as the Fed Chairman continues to stand by the notion that banks and other perhaps insolvent financial institutions should be allowed to continue operating, and although the 'originate-to-distribute' system of loans failed at almost every level and started the current credit crisis, the system could be fixed and return to being useful in the future.
• Oil prices, while retreating from their record high of $112 a barrel set earlier this week, are continue to weigh on the economy. However, the larger economic impact is felt by record high gas prices in the United States, edging closer and closer to $4 as the Summer driving season approaches.