Creeping Digital Revolution

Used to be telephones used wires, wires that were dedicated to telephones. They were completely independent of all other systems. Even if the power went out, the telephone would still work. That was then. Now everyone has a cell phone and nobody has any wires. Except me, till now. It started a few years ago when Verizon brought a fiber optic line to our neighborhood. When we signed over our souls to the devil in return for broadband access to the internet, he also took away our telephone wires. Instead he gave us a little box that hangs on the wall in the garage and converts our nice analog telephone signals into digital bits that get dumped in the fiber optic pipe along with everything else. It has worked fine for several years.

Along with the broadband internet access, we also got some TV, and the TV has been a hundred-dollar-a-month thorn-in-my-side ever since. Now Verizon has sold the fiber business to Frontier, and Frontier has just raised their rates by $30 a month, so now I really want to get shut of them, well, as much as possible. Let's cut it down to the bare minimum: internet access only. But that means doing something about the telephone. I could get a cell phone, but I don't have a pocket to put it in. Besides cell phones are expensive. I could get an internet phone service, but that means some kind of funny hardware to connect my existing phones. You can buy it, but it's not cheap. The boxes are like $200.

Then Verizon comes out with a deal. They will give you a box that will connect your old, land line phones to the cell phone network for $20 a month, and they supply the magic box for free. Being as Vonage, the big name in internet phone service wants $25 a month, and they don't supply any hardware, Verizon's offer sounds like a pretty good deal, so I signed up. The box showed up on my doorstep yesterday and today I plugged it in. It may be a week or so before the connection with Frontier goes away and this thing totally becomes my phone, but so far so good. Notice how it is not plugged into the telephone jack. Too bad we have to use two wall warts to power this assemblage.

Update: One day later, and the land line is dead. Just verified that we can get incoming calls through the new box.

Update 2: Error: the magic box hanging on the wall in the garage was only in use for a short while. It was replaced by a new, combination box on the outside of the garage that split the fiber optic into wires for the telephone and coax for the internet and TV. In order to connect the rest of the telephone extensions to the new magic box in the kitchen, I disconnected the phone line from the old magic box and then plugged the new magic box into the telephone wall jack. Now all the old land line phones are connected to the new magic box, and they all seem to work.

Chocolate

Chocolate | Official Trailer | 2008 | HD | Action-Drama
GARDEN OF GORE
Gangster's moll in Thailand falls for Japanese dude from competing gang. He goes back to Japan, she stays in Thailand and raises their autistic daughter while boarding in a martial arts school. Zen (the daughter) spends her time imitating the kids practicing their punching and kicking. It turns out she has some uncanny physical abilities. Her cousin Moom exploits these abilities by having her give demonstrations in the street and collecting donations from the crowd. This turns out to be a good thing when mom contracts cancer and they need money for treatments. But the pittance he collects from the crowd is nowhere near enough to pay for all the treatments. Then Moom discovers a little black book with a list of people who owe mom money. So Moom and Zen go out to collect. Moom is a nice kid who simply asks for the money, but that doesn't work so well. Zen gets it through her head that this guy owes her mom money, and when he throws an abacus at her head, well, it's all over but the shouting.

It's a great film. JeeJa Yanin (Zen) might be the next Jackie Chan. It's a good story, and the fight scenes are thoroughly entertaining. There's a new trick in dang near every punch and kick. Our heroine (Zen) is so light, and thin and flexible she can do things no man should ever attempt.

The villain seems to have an endless supply of thugs, and towards the end of the movie when Zen is working on her second hundred knockdowns, it gets a little old. We also have a couple of instances of people who have been seriously wounded doing things they shouldn't be able to, but that is kind of standard in movies like this. Besides, they're gangsters, they are probably coked to the gills and don't even realize they should be dead.

Update July 4, 2025 replaced missing image with video trailer.

P. S. The whole movie is available on YouTube here.

Amateurs

I think I have a handle on the whole economics thing, but people continue to be a mystery. Professional athletes who play for one of the big franchises make buckets of money, but guys who play the same sports for colleges make nothing. There was an article in the paper today about how some dude at the university goes around tracking down the origins of college sports memorabilia, trying to determine whether the athlete the item originated with was ever compensated for it. If he was, that would be a violation NCAA rules and he could be disqualified from further participation.

There is a parallel in the sciences, albeit on a much smaller scale. There are various competitions staged for science and technology buffs, and the rewards are generally in the way of a certificate of recognition and maybe a plaque. Occasionally there will a cash award, but it is generally too small to even interest the IRS.

This kind of thing puzzles me. Not too long ago I heard a story about a guy from India who had done something special in college and once he got a job his attitude became one of entitlement. He no longer had to do anything, he had proven himself and now that he had his position he could do as he pleased. Although this attitude bothers me, I can't say that if I were in his position I would not behave the same way. I would like to think that I would not claim entitlement, but I would probably accept the position.

I can understand working on something because you enjoy it. I also understand getting paid for working on something. One reason for granting tenure to someone at a university is that given free rein they might produce something remarkable, something that otherwise who not have been created. Tenure could be a reward for having done something exceptional. It can also be a bet placed that the professor might yet do something exceptional. I wonder if that bet has ever paid off.
 
Schools with big sports programs should form a new organization that would allow paying their players. These guys are taking big risks and the schools are reaping the benefit. Stiffing the players while reaping the rewards strikes me as being downright un-American.

The science thing isn't quite so clear cut. There isn't the visceral attraction, it's more cerebral. As such, any financial success is only going to be achieved through business or internecine politics.

Two Dude Defense by Walter Walker

Murder mystery set in San Francisco, like so many others before. Complicated blackmail / murder / arson plot. Private eye, religious cult brainwashing kids (where have I seen this before? Chandler, maybe?), The girl with the dragon tattoo makes a brief appearance. I wonder if this is where Stieg got his character? Our detective is not too smart, he gets beat up a lot, I mean every time he turns around, someone is whacking him over the head. There's a little too much smart guy talk. Where Dirty Harry would have just grunted this guy goes on for an entire paragraph. I think the writer was just enamored of writing tough guy talk. Prices are kind of surprisingly low, but then this was written 25 years ago. Not a great book, but if you are a writer I think you might be able to learn some things from it, both good and bad. It's kind of like some movies I've seen: with a little judicious editing, it could have been a really good story.

I got the picture off of Ebay. The cover is kind of like the book, nothing special, but at least the picture on Ebay was big enough to see, unlike Amazon, who only put up a dinky little thumbnail.

Economics

I think I finally figured it out.

• When there are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs to be had, wages go down because more people are willing to work for less money.
• You (as a business person) can make more money by hiring a few bright people to construct a system that makes money than by hiring an army of slaves to do menial labor.
• Our American way of life, by which I mean the enormous variety of goods and services available for relatively low prices,  is dependent on an enormous infrastructure of businesses, their facilities, equipment and trained personnel.
• When you increase spending on consumables and decrease spending on investment (capitalization), economic growth slows.
• If you want your standard of living to go up, your capitalization per person needs to go up. If your population increases faster than your (inflation adjusted) capital investment, your standard of living is going to go down.

We have four main drains on our economy:

1. Our military adventures in the Mid-East
2. Security (our standing army and all our various police forces)
3. Raising and educating our children
4. Old people and their medical problems

Which one do you want to cut back on?

 One thing I have heard recently is that businesses are sitting on large amounts of cash. One thing I have not seen is how much of our capital investment is tied up in big business, and how much is tied up in small businesses. Any successful small business, say one that keeps half a dozen people employed, probably represents a capital investment of at least a couple of million dollars. Land, buildings, vehicles, equipment all cost money. You might be renting the space, and leasing the equipment, but somebody, somewhere had to put up the money to pay for all that in the first place. We hear about billion dollar deals here and there, and it's touted as like it's something important, but if you have a million small businesses, each with an investment of a million dollars, that's a trillion dollars right there, and that only accounts for maybe ten percent of the workforce.

When a chip (integrated electronic circuit) manufacturer spends a billion dollars on fab (wafer fabrication facility) that will employ maybe a thousand people, you are talking more like a million dollar investment per person, not a measly hundred thousand bucks.

Back to cash hoarding. The business world is in constant flux. A successful business may last for five, ten or even a hundred years, but things change, entire businesses may go up for sale, and buying a business requires money. If you want to be prepared to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity, you need to have cash on hand. However, just holding onto cash also entails risk due to inflation. Every day you hold onto that cash, it loses some value. On the other hand, you don't want to just throw it at the next opportunity that shows up. That can as bad as just throwing it away. So these hoarders are gamblers, waiting for the right moment to place their bets. After all there is a certain amount of luck involved in all human endeavors, and who among us is immune to the lure of the big score?

Unknown with Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger & January Jones

January Jones (left), Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger

Redbox has raised their rates 15%. What used to cost a buck now costs a buck fifteen.

I always enjoy watching Liam, and the girls were pretty. Diane plays the blond Bosnian refugee, and being a tough girl she gets in a few kicks. (Are there any blond Bosnians?)

It's a story about assassins running around loose in Berlin, which always makes a good baseline for a story. The plot was a little weak, like a new strain of corn that is gonna save the world. No, I don't think so. And then there is the whole memory loss / faulty remembering thing. Possible, but thin. And then suddenly switching sides in the middle, that was possibly due to encountering hostiles, but what drove him to confront them? The action was great, the characters were good, the plot was a little thin.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Capitalization

What is capital? Capital is a thing (or service) that is produced not for consumption but for further production. The existence of capital industries implies several stages of production, or up to thousands upon thousands of steps in a long structure of production. Capital is the institution that gives rise to business-to-business trading, an extended workforce, firms, factories, ever more specialization, and generally the production of all kinds of things that by themselves cannot be useful in final consumption but rather are useful for the production of other things.

Stolen complete from Ric's Rulez. Ric might be my evil twin, or vice versa, I'm not sure which. Ever wonder why poor places like Haiti stay poor? Follow the links, read it all, it's illuminating.