Tag: Evil Bastards

Vanishing Tech

Bad News, Technology

This barely qualifies as news, I suppose:

The beginning of the end for the DVD player: John Lewis will no longer sell the gadgets as they are replaced by streaming services (joining VHS, cassette tapes and floppy disks in the dustbin of defunct technology)

As the owner of dozens of DVDs, I guess I’ll have to buy a backup (or two) DVD players for the inevitable time when you can’t find the blessed things anymore.  As it happens, I have a multi-format Blu-Ray DVD player at the moment — multi-format because I have both PAL- and NTSC-format DVDs:  a heritage of buying DVDs in Europe and Britishland during my various travels Over There.  Of course, Philips no longer makes the model I own, so I’ll have to pay the “Sony premium” for my backup.

Gah.

Look, I understand the March Of Progress and all that, and I know that technology becomes outdated after a while.  I just wish that the “while” would last a little longer.

And no, I’m not going to “stream” movies — at least, not the movies that I love and want to watch over and over again — because as any fule kno, what the “Cloud” giveth, the Cloud can take away (often without warning) and I refuse to be held hostage by the fucking movie studios (e.g. the horrible Disney Corporation, or Netflix).  The ordinary movies (i.e. most of them) I can watch once and never watch again without regret;  but the gems?  oh no, I wantssss them all, my Precioussss, so that I can enjoy them anytime I want and not when Global Entertainment MegaCorp says I can (or can’t, a pox on them).

Ditto books, by the way.  I’ve talked before about why I can’t use Kindle (see below* for the Cliff Notes version), so forget e-books of any kind whatsoever.  And I have hundreds of audio CDs, ergo I have a couple of backup CD players for the time when the poxy recording industry [50,000-word rant deleted]  decides that CD ownership is a Bad Thing.

Possession isn’t just 9/10 of the law when it comes to my viewing, listening and reading pleasure:  it’s all of the law, and I intend to keep it that way.

*I’ve never bought into e-books.  I tried a Kindle, but it might as well been kindling for all the appeal it has to me.  Here’s the reason why: my eyesight is failing [Old Fart Problem #4], which means I have to increase the font size to see the words properly.  Problem:  I read at about 2,000 words per minute (always have), which means that I get a blister on my thumb from hitting the “Next Page” button on a Kindle, and anyone in the room with me will eventually complain about the noise of the constant rapid-fire clicking.

And that’s the other problem, right there:  I love the feel of a book in my hands.  I love the ability to flip backwards to re-read a passage that turned out to be important later on.  I love the fact that once I own a book, it can’t be taken away from me electronically by some algorithm which decides that I’ve had the content “long enough” (as though there’s an expiration date on ownership).

About Those “Bombs”…

Politics

So a whole bunch of Leftist scumbags (these and these) are getting suspicious packages in the mail — said packages containing pipe bombs that aren’t really bombs, and envelopes containing white powder which turns out to be talc.

I’m going to say it right now:  the packages are not being sent by MAGA types or even nutjobs from the alt-Right;  they’re being sent by some Lefty or  a group of Lefties who are trying a Hail-Mary pass to somehow forestall the spanking that the Left are going to get in the polls next month.

It’s a desperation move by the ultra-Left, nothing more or less.

Not Your Money

Gummint, Politics

Upset that multinational corporations use such things as legal tax havens and the law to minimize their tax burden, the Germans want to impose some sort of “international” tax on technology companies like Google and Amazon.

“We need a minumum tax rate valid globally which no state can get out of (applying),” Scholz, a social democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government, told the “Welt am Sonntag” weekly.
Europe is trying to devise a strategy to tax profits from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and digital platforms such as YouTube and Airbnb which currently manage to keep fiscal exposure to a bare minimum.
Digital platforms “aggravate a problem which we know well from globalisation and which we are trying to counter — the shifting of profits to fiscally beneficial regions,” said Scholz.

Of course they do.  In the minds of statists and the governments they support, the State owns all capital and corporations and individuals have no right to avoid (note: not evade) paying the taxes said governments feel they are owed.

Shareholders of said corporations, however, insist on the companies’ avoidance of paying unnecessary taxes.

Mind you, I’m anything but a fan of Big Tech myself, the poxy monopolists;  but given the option between Big Tech and Big Government… no prizes for guessing my choice here.  To paraphrase Trey Parker (of South Park fame):  I hate Big Tech; but I really hate Big Government, and the foul neo-socialist European governments most of all.

Threats

Advice

Some fuckwit sent me one of these email messages the other day.  I don’t know what he/she expected me to do, but I ignored it.  Then I got a follow-up email, threatening me with still worse consequences if I didn’t pay up, whereupon I replied as follows (using an anonymized go-between server):

I don’t know what you expected to get from me, but instead of money, here’s my response:
Do what you want, then fuck off and die.  Preferably from some painful cancer.  Even better, I hope your entire family dies from the same illness.
P.S. What you referred to as my “password”, isn’t.  You’re not even competent enough to threaten me.

Sheesh.  They must think I’m vulnerable, or something.  I wish I could spend ten minutes with one of these people — just me and a Sawzall.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Glenn Reynolds, a few words of level-headed wisdom:

“When Saudis kill a Saudi in Turkey, it’s not hugely resonant. Sure, top American journalists care — because he was not just a journalist (the Saudis have killed plenty of those, as have the Turks, the Chinese, the Russians . . .) but one they knew personally. But hardly anyone thinks that the Saudis are nice people; they’re allies of convenience, not of sentiment. If they help us beat Iran, fine, but nobody thought they were our friends before.”

Exactly.  Plus, this “journalist” (Jamal Khashoggi) was actually a Muslim Brotherhood activist more than a journo, so fuck him.

And in a related post, talking about media outrage at Khashoggi’s murder, Charles Martin adds:

Let me get this straight. Saudi Arabia sponsored the 9/11 hijackers, stones rape victims to death for being unchaste, hangs people for being gay…and NOW you’re upset with them?

Yeah, because the obsequious diplomacy as practiced by Barack Cocksucker Obama was totes different.

All that said, let’s be honest and admit that in aggregate, both the Saudis and the Turks are foul assholes and should they decide to kill each other for fun, spite or profit, nobody else should care.  Ditto all the other Muslim regimes in the Middle East.

Never Mind The Joke

Bad News, Health

So this asshole got some joke award for his charlatanry:

The man who published a widely-dismissed paper claiming the MMR vaccine could make children autistic has been ridiculed with an award for bad science. Andrew Wakefield, a former gastroenterologist who is now believed to be in a relationship with the model Elle Macpherson, has been awarded the ‘Rusty Razor’ award for pseudoscience by magazine The Skeptic.
Wakefield’s so-called research fueled the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement, by suggesting jabs could make children autistic, but his studies were fabricated.
Experts have called the paper, published in medical journal The Lancet in 1998, but retracted in 2010, ‘the most damaging medical hoax of the past 100 years’.

Never mind the Rusty Razor Award, someone should have used a rusty razor to cut this fucker’s head off.  Countless children have died and others fallen dangerously ill because of his “pseudo-scientific” study, and at least he should be in prison for life instead of dating a dim-bulb ex-supermodel.

I am not a vengeful man by nature, but if one day some bereaved parent were to shoot Wakefield in the face and I were in the jury at the parent’s trial, my vote would be an unshakable “Not Guilty”.