Farmville closes

For those of you that think $ZM $TSLA $PTON etc.....are never ever ever going away.
:)

- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/technology/farmville-zynga-facebook.html? 

Polish law preventing social media posts being take down

Love it.

Basically Poland is now "preventing" Social Media Companies from removing posts now UNLESS they break Polish law :)

So the question now....is which law does Facebook decide they want to comply with?

https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-online-freedom-of-speech-bill

Uber gives up "self driving cars"

Turns out a $15 an hour worker.....IS a good thing after all....

 Uber Is Giving Self-Driving Car Project to a Start-Up
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/technology/uber-self-driving-car-project.html?

Cell based "fake chicken meat"

Cell based meat (eg not pea protein), they harvest a cell and then "feed it nutrients" in a "pot".

 Sorry....but wtf is the target audience for this soylent green crap?

Sadness for an age of non-collectors

I woke up in bed this morning and for whatever reason.....in my head i was humming a Thompson twins song.

Made coffee.....was still humming the same lines (albeit....not remembering all of the words exactly if you know what i mean.....though considering they are from the 80's was remembering more than i would have thought).

Heading downstairs for a shower i brought up their Greatest Hits cd on my media server and played it through the bathroom stereo and was happily jamming away (including turning up the stereo when the "Hold Me Now" track came on while shaving) when something struck me.

"I can listen to this music cd 20+ years since i bought it, because i own the cd/original content..... what happens when Google YouTube or Amazon music decide they no longer want to license this content to people for purchase/streaming".

Sure....most people who would listen to it/remember it will be dead....but basically the Thompson Twins will cease to exist. 

Digital 1's and 0's are so fickle. Here today.....gone tomorrow.

No one will ever "discover an old recording" browsing in a second hand store. No one will "browse through a friends collection at a party and become an instant fan". No one will be able to "on a whim....play a track they havent listened to in years but still own".

It made me sad that young people "dont collect", they will never understand "accumulation" in the way we did (and generations before us did).

I still remember the first cd i bought AC-DC Back in Black.

I still remember playing it loud, i mean really loud on my parents stereo when they weren't home.

I remember packing a stack of cd's in boxes every time i moved (lol......the next move-probably to Australia is going to be interesting.....will be many many boxes).

Dont get me wrong as someone who "taped songs off a radio" then did a tape to tape edit so you could cut the tops and tails off the recording.....being able to type in the name of a song on the internet and pretty much always be able to stream it would have been awesome.

But i worry about gatekeepers.

I worry about "winds of change and the whims of 'someone else' making a decision on my behalf".

It could just be the side effects of seeing so many sweeping governmental/societal changes during corona......but more than ever i feel that unless you own it.....you dont control it. What can i say.....I like having all the toys.

Thread type for XSPC Dual Bay reservoir to connect Laing DDC pump

Im posting this for SEO purposes in case someone is searching google for the same problem i had......

So yesterday when replacing the Laing DDC 1T-Plus pump on my XSPC Dual Bay reservoir with pump .....the screws that came with the pump were not long enough to mate the pump to the reservoir correctly.

Do you think they have this listed in the specifications anywhere......noooooooo.

Ended up going to Home Depot on buying 4 different sets - the answer was M4-0.7mm thread x 25mm long.....ugh. (even though Laing pumps use a coarser thread eg. 0.9mm)

Hopefully google will find this and if someone else searches.....what thread type does XSPC use for their reservoirs to mount the pump.....someone will find M4-0.7mm thread x 25mm and save themselves a ton of time.....

Songs for drella

For the 3 friends that i know will love this video 

- https://www.brooklynvegan.com/lou-reeds-songs-for-drella-with-john-cale-and-berlin-concert-films-streaming-free-via-st-anns-warehouse

One of my favourite "only in New York things" was seeing Lou Reed play live at the Highline Ballroom in 2008......sigh.

Scotty from marketing is so small minded....it drives me crazy

Ridiculous claims in this article....the govt needs to open up places to foreign student as the Australian GDP needs it. As quarantine is user pays ....its ridiculous to claim there can't be more spots made available.

Foreign students will happily pay a premium to study in covid free Australia.. Small minds are what the real problem is in Australia.

Hotel rooms are empty in Australia.....there is no tourism at all in Australia....there is no need for more facilities.....they just need to allow more flights in instead of having restrictions with artificially low numbers.

The Australian economy should be booming....instead we have a recession.

The most frustrating part.....is we have this huge resource of being corona free......and no one seems to want to make money from it. Meanwhile people are unemployed/laid off/rents are down/property prices falling etc etc. It seems we only smart enough for digging rocks out of the ground for income.

Caramel Chocolate Cheescake ice cream

Dear Ben & Jerry,

.....I've "dated" a lot of different ice creams.

I'm not ashamed to say "I've played the field".

 But I'm ready to settle down and marry "Caramel Chocolate Cheescake"
...if i could only eat one more ice cream for the rest of my life until i die.

....This is the one :)

Election day "sausage sizzles"

Stores in Manhattan being boarded up for election day....... the juxtaposition of this with Australian "election day" sausage sizzles hit home hard when i saw this.

Life in 2020.....

The intersections of life meet.....the line on the left is for corona tests at City MD and the line on the right is for the UPS store to mail packages as only 1 person allowed in the store at a time......

Sigh.

Tetrachromatic Vision

Im reading the most ridiculously interesting book at the moment....some turtles are tetrachromatic....eg see in 5 colours compared to our 3. 

Richard Dawkins - The Ancestors Tale 

- https://amzn.to/3jvbYP6 

RIP Eddie Van Halen

 Sigh.....

I thought of this ditty a few days ago while waking up. It seems appropriate here. 

Awake but eyes still closed. I realized my feet were extended, cold and bare, well beyond the realm of the quilt.
I buckled at the knees trying to stretch in vain the quilt back to its full length, to tuck it under my feet to re-warm my bones, to keep out the Autumn chill.
It was as vain as trying to hold back time. The march of time was persistent. Winter comes for all.

Ultra-Violet LiFi

 Ok....this is very very neat. Ultra-violet LiFi that isnt affected by sunlight.

They've had laser/direct p2p for a while, but this is different.

Washington crowd intimidation

 There is seriously something wrong with people in America at the moment.

- https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/1298344285079838720 
and
- https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/1298047704866660353
and
- https://twitter.com/BlessUSA45/status/1298129320259604480

Im glad to see im not the only person that this reminded me of this
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1298360556408233984

I remember as a younger adult reading the Philip Short book on Pol Pot and being amazed at what human sheep can be "instructed" into doing.
https://amzn.to/2YynIbM

Coffee Cup the true OG

Most people reading this wont understand.....but i think this is very very cool.

Was the first app i used FTP on and i  thought it was pure magic......"its over here...no now its over there". 

https://twitter.com/NickLongo/status/1297301371197235203 

So what does it cost

Great read for anyone so inclined.

 https://medium.com/@hansburri/one-year-and-11-046-miles-on-a-catamaran-all-the-costs-d953f7440f48

The 2014 removal of the 50% LTCG discount on Australian property

Im wondering how the Australian government feels about their 2014 decision to abandon aussie expats living and working overseas with the ATO removal of the 50% Long Term Capital Gains discount for non residents.....(yes removed even for Australian citizens that are expats).

Im not sure it made much press onshore at the time as house prices were going up.....but now that they are falling and with a low $A.......Aussie expats have no interest in investing in Syd/Melbourne investment properties.....its just not a viable option.

With the removal of the 50% LTCG discount its means that you pay 38% MINIMUM tax on all capital gains.

So if you get 8% return on stocks here in the USA.....(annual average) then you would need to get 13% each year in Australian property in order to have the same after tax return........

Or put it this way...... lets say you buy $1m in Australian property and $1m in USA stocks in 2020 and then sell in 8-10 years when it doubles.

With Australian property you would get $620,000 in profit after paying $380,000 in tax.

If you invested in USA stocks and paid 20% capital gains you would get $800,000......paying only $200,000 in tax eg paying $180,000 less tax than investing in Australian property.

This is why i tell non resident Australian expats to NOT INVEST IN AUSTRALIAN PROPERTY ever since they change the rules in 2014.

Mark Tritton ceo Bed Bath and Beyond

Always nice working away and then off to the side hearing an aussie accent on @CNBC

 Mark Tritton the new ceo of Bed Bath and Beyond is on talking about retail in the age of corona.....and even though he has been out of Australia for years........the accent is still there :)

Good to see someone from Gosford on the world stage.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-tritton-b75a065

https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenshoulberg/2019/10/09/bed-bath--beyond-names-target-exec-mark-tritton-its-new-ceo-what-happens-next/#238fdd356953

Fed's begin to buy bonds

lol sure.....why not.


FED WILL BEGIN BUYING BROAD PORTFOLIO OF U.S. CORPORATE BONDS https://twitter.com/DeItaOne/status/1272590613247074305

Reddit

Ha ha ha Reddit, always so on point

:)

Dave Chappelle - 8.46

Word
:(

America the dichotomy

Police brutality really seems to be sort of "baked in' to society here.

Sadly I dont know how to fix it or whats going to be required to fix it. Maybe more spending on education and less spending on global military machine? IDK?

 I do want to remind you of this though eg so you arent disillusioned about the future... Yes the USA has problems.....and yes it often disappoints, but its the fact that we still feel this disappointment is whats so great about America...eg we are always expecting more and hope for the very best, even when sometimes it falls short.
:(

The fact that this is happening the same day that a private "AMERICAN" company is flying two people to the ISS is the dichotomy of the USA.

Its not a European company, and not a Chinese company, and certainly not an Australian company.......but an American company that 18 years ago was founded by a dude who sold out and made money from a "payments" company he flipped (....which lets face it was basically an idea available to anyone....he just happened to take the IP and blow it up into a monster deal which he has then blown up into 3 other monster deals one of which failed) and whilst i think Elon is a govt funding sucking whore a lot of the time........he did it in America, and thats pretty awesome.

Secondary infections in the USA?

Meanwhile in Ohio.....people wanting to get laid
- https://twitter.com/Pandora_HasABox/status/1261839917052813312

hmmmm the more i see this the more i think i should short the market as secondary infections going to happen for sure My only question is will the feds actually allow another lockdown to occur or will they "hush" the numbers in some way.

Google Play Music Servers are being killed off

Yet another cloud based music drm service being killed off......ha ha ha

 Buy cd's and rip to a private media server, its simple folks and no one ever will be able to tell you your money is wasted.