Excited Delirium

In reference to the previous post, here’s some research:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/01/30/taser-study.html

This issue will be pretty high on the PR level for some time, probably with many MPs and other public officials chiming in about how much they love their tasers:
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20080130223316196

Here’s a proposal from the Songwriters Association of Canada as it relates to recouping some of the losses they’re experiencing with internet downloads:
http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php

The proposal is this: charge $5 per internet account per month. Based on the level of service across the industry, I’m going to guess that that would work out to the following:
$5 x 12 months = $60 per internet consumer
# of internet consumers in Canada = approx. 17 million
17 million x $60 per year = $1 billion / year

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.

Judging by the links provided on the SAC site, the SAC looks like a bit of a mouth-piece for the music industry, which is in effect, the big 5 media companies that own most of anything related to pop culture produced in the 20th century.

With that kind of backing, consumers in Canada must be aware that this tax (and it is a tax) should not be allowed or acceptable.

If this kind of nonsense becomes law in Canada, it’s a shifty backdoor on a whole pile of ugliness for other industries, including TV, movies, the video my cousin posted on YouTube of him getting bashed in the nuts with a skateboard and countless karoake versions posted by really drunk college kids. They’re all going to have to have a piece of the action if musicians get theirs.

Within a couple of years, Internet subscribers will be subsidizing every failed digital industry, just when it had a chance to break away from TV and other media. A tax like this will stifle the Internet and these people know it.

They’re hoping for it.

This proposal is about as good a “A Modest Proposal” written by Jonathan Swift almost 300 years ago.

It’s exceptionally annoying when people in the old school just don’t get what’s happening in today’s digital marketplace.

Paul McGuiness, long-time manager for a little Irish quartet called U2, wrote on their website about the need for more controls on digital downloads. Unfortunately, like many involved in the industry in its hey-day, he completely misses the point.

http://www.u2.com/news/index.php?mode=full&news_id=2196

For nearly a decade, the recording industry has had an opportunity to do something with themselves beyond fleecing consumers of their cash for singles and one-hit wonders, but they haven’t. I’ve bought every single U2 album, I’ve paid for three outrageously over-priced (but great) concerts and hundreds of dollars more in fan related stuff, but he still wants more.

Sorry. I’m tapped out.
We heard this kind of rhetoric when Lars Whazziz Name from Metallica was in a constant rant about losing out on revenue when Napster and other P2P services went live. We heard about the plight of the distributors as more and more of them shut down (except the cool ones that actually have a little more selection than all x number of Jennifer Lopez CDs).

And yet, nobody stopped to ask me what I’d do if they stopped playing Britney Spears or Clay Aiken when all I really wanted to do was find a couple of funky groups like Caribou, The Acorn or Patrick Watson (all exceptional Canadian bands, I might add).

Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with this statement from Paul McGuiness:

“There is technology now, that the worldwide industry could adopt, which enables content owners to track every legitimate digital download transaction, wholesale and retail.

This system is already in use here in Cannes by the MIDEM organisation and is called SIMRAN. Throughout this conference you will see contact details and information. I recommend you look at it.

I should disclose that I’m one of their investors.”

What’s that you say? You’re not aware of any conflict of interest? Give me a break. I can think of a lot of ways to describe this blatant attempt to shut down a couple of billion downloaders, but the reality is, Paul, you’ve gone and shot yourself in the foot.

Why don’t you do something productive like Peter Gabriel? He’s taken this in stride and has started an exceptionally unique company called WE7. At least it’s an effort to make something happen in a positive way.

I know this sounds so obvious, but the media landscape has been permanently altered. Get used to it.

Just Benzene? Let’s face it folks: the best way to avoid all of this crap is to avoid all the crap. Anything that comes in a package or that has some kind of processing involved needs to be questioned. We didn’t need it 200 years ago and we don’t need it now.

What I’m curious about is when things like ‘pop’, chips and a tonne of other stuff became icons of entitlement. As a parent, I struggle with ways to avoid ‘pizza day’ and ‘movie / popcorn’ night, but how do you do it without being a stick-in-the-mud?

Seriously … if anyone has some tips out there, please let me know.

I’m too much of a chicken-shit to comment on this:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/75244/

Maybe Canada should consider joining this group as part of our action plan against the Harpies?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7212457.stm

I can think of worse alliances to have!

I’ve read about what’s being called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which is ALBA in Spanish. Right now, it’s a small group, but with Venezuela backing it with trillions in oil revenue, look for this to make the news more often as they recruit countries like Chile, Argentina and maybe even Brazil.

Research Credit: WRH.

I love it. An article in the National Post by economist Herbert Grubel (a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and educator at the Chicago School) calls for Canadian politicians to “fix the loonie“.

I wonder: has Mr. Grubel not seen the equivalent of the charts that were posted earlier?

Does he really take Canadians to be that stupid?

Please. Stop already.

Tying our currency to a sinking ship is like … well, tying your currency to a sinking ship. A connection with the US dollar would guarantee that we go down with them and that we forever doom our manufactured goods, commodities and other products to economic oblivion.

The better way: disentangle ourselves from the US and reduce our dependency on them. Trade with more stable countries like Venezuela and Western Samoa.

Many people ‘wow’ themselves with the price of oil, the Canadian exchange rate and the price of other ocmmodities like gas, wheat, soya, gold, etc.

For a long time, I’ve been saying that these changes have a lot less to do with economic miracles embedded within each of these commodities. Sure, there have been disturbances, but nothing on the scale that would support consistent increases in prices that we’ve seen over the course of the last 8 years.

So, to prove this point, I did a little digging related to the US dollar index. This is a basket of currencies weighted to reflect the ‘true value’ of the US dolar vis-a-vis a number of different currencies. The data for this little project is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Here’s the chart from January 1995 to December 2007:

It’s a pretty neat triangle, isn’t it?

I zoomed in from the beginning of the Bush Jr era to the present and I got the following:

As you can see, the US dollar has been in a freefall since Joonior took office. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. General global lack of confidence in unreliable economic theories
2. Outrageous levels of overspending, particularly on defense
3. The desire to have the rest of the world subsidize American consumption

Now, looking at a chart like this, you’ve got to think for yourself: “it has to rebound”.

If the Dems takeover, it might, mainly because they’ll have to reign in spending. The money institutions will start calling in their loans, taxes will have to rise, interest rates will increase, capital flows will stop and people will hate the Dems again, but for all the wrong reasons.

If the Republicans win (my bet is McCain), spending will continue to go through the roof and the US dollar will resemble a third-world currency in free fall, continuing the global subsidy to the American ’standard of living’, assuming of course, that it’s individuals that benefit from falling prices (which they won’t) and not the MegaMarts that sell more crap to them (which they will).

In the coming weeks, I’ll try to put together some “quasi-indexes”, which will be comparisons of the US dollar index to various commodities. From there, I’ll attempt to get a sense of how much this dollar drop has cost the Canadian in terms of lost opportunity.

From Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, we get this interesting review of the current US economic situation:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01272008.html

If the US government cannot balance its budget by cutting its spending or by raising taxes, the day when it can no longer borrow will see the government paying its bills by printing money like a third world banana republic. Inflation and more exchange rate depreciation will be the order of the day.

Now that Bush has done completely the opposite, I’m going to go long on the call that the US dollar will continue to plummet.

What does this mean for Canada? For starters, since we’re the largest supplier of oil to the US, we should price our oil in Canadian dollars. Other commodities should follow the same route. If that’s not satisfactory, we should at least pick a basket of currencies from countries that aren’t lead by people who could care less about the value of their currency.