The Tourist

Rented The Tourist on DVD from Redbox this evening. We have Angelina Jolie playing a beautiful secret agent (where have we seen that before?) and Johnny Depp playing the hapless tourist from Wisconsin. When I first heard about this movie I thought it was probably based on the book which I read last year. I mean we've got many of same elements, spies, beautiful women, master criminals, and Venice. Well, it might be based on the book, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from watching it. There was nothing else the same. It was enjoyable, not a real thriller, more light-hearted, Plenty of scenes with Angelina being ravenous, er, ravishing. And then there was the screwball twist at the end that just made me shake my head. And why can't Johnny comb his hair?

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Company's Comin'

My wife looks out the window today and notices our old Christmas tree lying at the edge of the dismal swamp. When I dumped it there back in January it was the greenest thing there. Now the swamp is full-tilt green and the ol' Christmas tree, well, it's kinda orange, like a sore thumb. We might be getting company this summer, and sweetie pie decides something needs to be done about this eye-sore. So I take my hand clippers and start cutting it down to size and, lo and behold! What do I find?

Bird's nest with two eggs. Apparently abandoned, no mama bird in evidence, near or far. Surprised the 'coons didn't get them, they were only a foot or two from the ground. The nest was in the middle of the tree, so maybe that made it too much work. I surprised a 'coon in front of the house today. He high tailed it around the corner, quick as his fat little butt could waddle.

Update: I just corrected a bunch of typos. I can't believe how many errors I made in the original.
Seven months later: I just found another typo. Will I ever learn to type?
Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

The Black Bottle

This bottle was on the table at lunch the other day. No markings, no label, no indication of what was inside. It looked like ink. Shoot, it even looked poisonous. As we were at a Chinese restaurant, it was just soy sauce, but I could not bring myself to pick it up until I saw someone else use it. Weird.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

The Hangover Part II

My wife and I went to see The Hangover Part II at the local Regal-plex this afternoon. We saw the original when it came out and it was funny. This one was not as funny. Mostly it was people being stupid and rude, sometimes amazingly rude and getting polite applause anyway. However, when we got to the end, they find a camera with some pictures from their misadventures, and those were funny. Only question I have is whether they would have been as funny without having watched the whole movie before hand.

Tickets for the 5:30 show were $10.50. I guess that makes it an evening show, not afternoon. It's still daylight outside right now, so I'm a little confused. Because my wife is a frequent flyer, she qualified for a free small popcorn. Well, you need a drink to wash down the popcorn, so I popped for a small diet coke. The small coke is 32 ounces. What's a big one? A gallon?

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Commercials

I just ordered a ROKU internet box for my TV. $80 from Amazon. I spent a couple of hours reading about different devices this morning and finally decided cheaper is better. Not cheapest, next to cheapest. We shall see.

We have a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that we rent from Frontier (formerly Verizon) for the ridiculous price of $30 a month, but we use the heck out of it. We can watch whatever dramas we want when we are ready, not just when they come on, and we don't have to sit through the ads, though we still have to futz with the fast forward and reverse buttons to skip over the ads, and that can be tedious.

I find most TV commercials are extremely boring and / or annoying, but there are also some that are very clever that I don't mind seeing. Once. Once is usually enough. More than that and they quickly become annoying. So I was thinking, how about a commercial channel? All commercials all the time! If you ever wanted to see what was going on in commercial land you could switch to that channel and in an hour you could probably watch all the new commercials made in the last week. Get your fix of mass marketing all at once.

Then I got to wondering how much a TV show is worth. It takes a bunch of money to produce a TV drama, just guessing I would say maybe a million dollars an episode. I mean just look at all the people listed in the credits, all the locations, all the props. And you have to produce the episode in a week. I think a million bucks is a fair estimate. But the show gets broadcast to millions of viewers. There are about 15 minutes of commercials in each one hour of broadcast time, so if you are charging a $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) per minute, you could bring in 1.5 million dollars, which would make the whole endeavor worth while. If a million people watch the show, then the advertisers are paying a buck-fifty for every viewer, and since only about half of the ads are watched, and only ten percent of them are actually in the advertisers sights, the advertisers are paying $30 for each viewer, or $1 per viewer per 30 second commercial.

Of course, any one of these numbers could be off by a factor of ten or even a hundred, which would make all my carefully wrought calculations worthless, but I think I am hitting pretty close to the mark. A show needs to pay for itself up front, broadcasters aren't going to waste valuable air time on something that isn't paying for itself. After the initial prime time broadcast things can get a little easier. The show has already paid for itself, so any money that can be made now is gravy. Remember the printing press model of capitalism.

All of which is a long way of saying that one dollar per hour of commercial free video entertainment is a fair price.

Video Sites

I signed up with Netflix back in December when I bought a Logitech Review. It runs $10 a month and provides shows over the internet as well as one DVD at a time through the mail. Sometime later I heard that Amazon Prime was also offering videos over the internet. We had already signed up for the Prime service, so that was like a free bonus. Maybe we don't need Netflix anymore.

The we discovered The Closer, and we have been watching several episodes a week. It has been on the air for several years, so there are a bunch of episodes out there. For a while we were getting enough from Verizon's TV service to keep us entertained, but then basketball season for the Trailblazers ended, and we needed more! It turns out that neither Netflix nor Amazon offer old episodes of The Closer over the net. We could get old episodes on DVD from Netflix, but that would require planning ahead, so I went poking around on the net to see what I could find.

I found something called Sidereel, that apparently keeps track of shows and provides links to where you can find the shows. Old episodes of The Closer are available from iTunes and from Amazon, for a price. Individually they aren't much, a couple of bucks maybe, but if you are consuming 20 or 30 videos a month, that can add up. So let's see what other links there are. Oh, look, there's a whole bunch of free links. Most of them connect to to something called Megavideo. I've tried some of the other free links as well, and they also seem to lead to Megavideo. This is kind of weird. I have heard of iTunes and Amazon, but I have never heard of Megavideo outside of my computer screen. Whatever. In any case, we can watch old episodes of The Closer off of the Megavideo web site. Well, we can watch one episode at a time. Try to watch two in a row and you run into a time limit and the video stops.

So now I'm thinking of signing up with Megavideo. The price is only ten dollars, oh wait, that isn't a dollar sign, what is it? Is that a Euro sign? It is and ten Euros translates to around fifteen dollars. Where is this company based? Hmm, doesn't seem to be based anywhere. It only exists in cyber-space. So why would they choose the Euro over the dollar? Probably because they are infidels. In any case, with the proliferation of server farms, you would not actually need to have your own hardware, no matter how much storage you need. You would need some office space for programmers, accountants and marketeers, and that's about it. You could be located anywhere.

So now all I need is a new box to connect my TV to the internet, and I should be able to get shut of Frontier's overpriced TV package. I could probably cancel Netflix as well, but my kids seem to be using it, so maybe I'll let that one continue.

There is the problem of legality. Since Megavideo is nominally a video sharing site, the holders of The Closer's copyright could ask that the videos be taken down, so I would have signed up for nothing. There is another weird thing, and that is for every episode of The Closer, Sidereel lists a dozen or so different links to different videos on Megavideo. How does Sidereel know where all those videos are? Megavideo doesn't seem to keep track. They have a search function, but it is very rudimentary. Do we have a bunch of pirates out there uploading TV shows and movies to Megavideo, and then posting the links on Sidereel? Seems like a lot of work for not much payback. Could Sidereel have a search engine can automatically determine the name of a video posted on the net? If they had such a capability, I would think the copyright holders (or their agents) would likewise be running such a search. Or are the episodes we are watching so old that the copyright holders don't care? Something is not quite right here, and I don't know what it is.

P.S. While I was poking around I came across a web site that had been seized by Homeland Security. How weird is that?

Update April 2016 replace missing picture. Added link to Amazon.

Microfinance, Part II

When I was looking at microfinance before I noticed that the organization that was promoting it in the USA was soliciting donations, and I thought that was just a little odd. They had gotten a loan from some unspecified source to use for making their loans, but they were also taking donations. In that case, they must not be making a profit, at least not yet. Either their overhead or their default rate is too high. I suspect it's their overhead. All the headache that goes into vetting the applicants and then you're only collecting some miserable percentage on the small amount they borrow. It's not a booming business model.

They I realized that there is a more traditional source of money for small loans, and that is loan sharks. They charge userous rates, but evidently it's enough to make it worthwhile because they still get mentioned seven days a week on cop shows on TV. I have heard all kinds of rates quoted for loans from loan sharks. The latest rate of seven points a week comes from a new episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent I saw last week. Seven percent a week can be done if you are turning over a high volume of merchandise. It adds up to 350% a year which is considerable, but it is paid on a weekly basis, so compounding doesn't enter into it.

An example I heard about was an immigrant who was selling kids toys at a flea market. He borrowed a thousand dollars, spent it on tricycles and kids bikes, and sold them all on Saturday at the local flea market and doubled his money. In this case $70 for the vig sounds like a good deal. He makes enough money in one day to survive until the next weekend.

There is also the illegal / recreational drug business. It can be much, much riskier because you really have to keep to the straight and narrow to avoid falling into any one of the chasms that will surround you. Even with the best people, there is still substantial risk, so there needs to be a big payoff to make it worthwhile. So you probably won't be able to get seven points if you are using the money to buy drugs.

What every good capitalist wants is a machine that prints money. You make a capital investment (the printing press), you hire a guy to run it, and you set up suppliers for your paper and ink and you go to town. The machine prints money and everything is wonderful. Of course, the government frowns on people usurping their role as the providers of all that paper and ink goodness, so a law-abiding capitalist looks for something that won't get him / her crosswise with the coppers.

Cranes working on the expansion of Intel's Ronler Acres Fab

The printing press model has made lots of money for lots of people. First it was the newspapers, now it's microchips. Printing microchips is a lot more complicated, sophisticated and precise than printing newspapers, but it's still the same model. You invest the money to buy the printing press, in this case it's several billion dollars to build a chip fabricating plant, you hire a double handful of people to run the press, and then you start cranking out chips. The chips from one sheet of paper (a silicon wafer) can bring tens of thousands of dollars. It doesn't take long for the money to start pouring in.

It can get galling when people are dealing with smaller sums of money, sums they can comprehend. I mean, who understands what a billion dollars can do? I have a hard time with it, but a thousand dollars I can understand. Say you have a guy who invests three thousand dollars, hires a someone else to do the work, whatever it is, and the business starts making ten thousand dollars a week. The employee was getting $200 a week to start, and now, even though the business is making money hand over fist, he is still barely making enough to survive. That's when you run into problems. A smart capitalist would give the worker bee a raise, it wouldn't cost him a lot, at least not compared to what he is making. A greedy capitalist would not give his employee a raise and would not care whether he was generating any ill will. The trick is not to work for the greedy capitalist, and that can be a very difficult trick to pull off.

On the other hand, paying the employee any more than is absolutely necessary is contrary to good business sense. If the employee can be easily replaced, it doesn't make sense to pay them any more. And this is where we are. We have a surplus of  people who would like to have a job that pays decent money and we do not have enough capitalists setting up printing presses.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.