invest in evil

It really is too soon for BP jokes; but once you get past the BP-cringing part, this Scott Adams article--arguing that the only wise investment strategy is to invest in companies you think are evil--is pretty funny.

Here's how he describes the alternative:

Invest in Companies You Love

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

Those crazies in the musiz biz. Crazy!!

In the article about Rick Rubin (who's a very pro-artist producer, now employed to help Columbia get on its feet) and apparently he and a lot of other music-ee guys (Jimmy Iovine, David Geffen) think a subscription system is the ONLY way to go. And if the music companies don't do it, then Microsoft will wait until the record companies are crashing and cheap, buy em up, and do it themselves.

Meanwhile Rubin's partner--the more businessee guy--is worried about all the problems with the subscription system (with reason). But his solution is... take a cut from the artists' touring and merchandise sales! What the--!!! So the record industry, who have been fucking over artists for decades, who survived for a decade by riding the CD wave (people buying albums they've bought before, and charging $22 per album when it cost pennies to make), now want to save their asses by taking a cut from the one area where artists make their living?? Oh come ON. Eeeeaaaaaase!

It doesn't even fix the problem, which is -- how can artists afford to record albums if their music is mostly downloaded? You have to fix the problem of how to pay for content creation. Not find a new way to bilk the content creators. Jeeze Louize!

One opinion I'm coming across with increasing frequency is the that digi-downloads is only ONE reason why the music industry has been losing money this past decade, and it's just masking a whole bunch of other reasons that the companies are themselves to blame for. Such as not concentrating enough on finding good content. The companies were the gatekeepers to the few avenues where people discovered new music, so if they had someone mediocre or shitty to sell, they could still sell them--get their videos out, get them airplay, etc. And it was (in part) because kids were looking for actual music they LIKED that the online avenue took off the way it did.

And I read of another set of authors who argue that all the media conglomerating that's been going on hasn't been good for the companies in question: "the authors point out the difference between judging a company by how many times it's CEO is seen in Sun Valley and by whether it generates consistently superior profitability." Sounds a bit like Icahn's comments.

Beer chug! go! go! go!

Now I'm reading a long article about longtime music guru Rick Rubin. At what point does one stop researching and start writing? I used to have this problem when I wrote papers too, because research is so interesting. But at some point I just have to make plot and character decisions and get going. Meow!

Oh, and an interesting Freakonomics quorum on the future of music. I haven't finished reading that.

And I still didn't finish the one I was reading yesterday at this time. Better focus on the reading tomorrow and get these done. Beeeeeeer chuuuuug!

In other news, did I ever play Sia's "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" for you?

Cristal and cupcakes

So apparently Michael Bloomberg, New York mayor and billionaire, is basically Ari Gold. Maybe not amusing in real life, but amusing if he was a tv character!

Music: Knockout

My favourite song at the moment. Nicky Minaj ("Barbie" as she calls herself) and Lil Wayne are pretty funny together, and I love her tricolour wig.

I like the combo of hiphop and rock, but most people got sick of it really fast (or they got sick of Fred Durst, and therefore the genre) so it didn't survive long. I therefore appreciate artists like K'naan and Lil Wayne who have succeeded in rebooting it.

Fave lyrics:
Cause once you go black, you never go back
And once you go Wayne, everybody else is whack!



There's a party going on across the parking lot. Music doesn't sound very good.

Research - digi land

I keep reaching the hard drive storage space limits with my computer--I have over 50 gigs of music, which is half my hard drive. I've got about 5 gigs left and then I either need a new computer, or a new hard drive (I have an external drive for backups, but I don't want to have a permanent external with my laptop--not practical.)

A picture of my hard drive, using Disk Inventory X. (I recently used this program to discover a huge folder full of unneeded installation files, which won me back some disk space.)

navy blue = mp3
red = mp4 (itunes AAC format)
yellow = applications (software)
apple green = documents
turquoise = pdfs (mostly articles from my school days)

It didn't occur to me that I'm not the only one with this problem, and the problem will only grow. People who are now buying all their movies and tv shows by download have an even bigger problem. Even a terrabyte hard drive could potentially fill up!

So there are businesses now that operate by "cloud." Your date is stored on the internets, and with a premium subscription you can make some of it available offline for the times when you're not connected. I don't know if this will become the necessary standard one day--this dude says yes, his commentors say BS. But something will have to change--maybe just better ways to compact videos and such.

I realized that kobo already works in a "cloud" way. The books I buy don't download to my computer permanently, so if I accidentally delete it off my eReader or software, I can download it again. Mind--then your content, which you OWN, is held in third party hands. What if they go under? Or what if it's something like photos, which are more personal?

It's a mad mad mad mad world out there in digi land. Gosh knows what the landscape will look like once the dust settles; and I don't even know if the dust will ever settle, because revolutions and advancements are happening at a neck-breaking speed.

So vair vair interesting.

Bye bye Dennis & Louise

Little Hopper is gone. He was one of my boyfriends. I think the first movie I saw him in (that I really noticed him) was My American Friend. I saw it in Ron Rower's film class, where he always made us watch movies 2-3 times.

Also sculptor Louise Bourgeois died. She made this great statue, Maman--there's a few of them, I first saw it in London, and then the one in Ottawa.