Bill Would Give President Emergency Control of Internet
August 28th, 2009Via: Cnet:
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”
Research Credit: WS
AUSTRALIA: INSURANCE COMPANIES WON’T COVER DOCTORS WHO GIVE SWINE FLU VACCINE
August 28th, 2009Just stick the Aussie taxpayers with the bill.
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
THE Federal Government’s plan to immunise the population against swine flu is in chaos because insurers may not cover doctors who administer the jab.
Inadequate testing and the possibility of spreading other infections means there is too high a risk patients will sue, the insurers say.
Despite weeks of crisis talks, the Government has refused to underwrite doctors’ liability for the vaccinations and medical groups say the program – due to start as early as mid-September – cannot proceed unless doctors are insured.
The president of the Australian Medical Association, Andrew Pesce, said: ”The indemnity issue needs to be sorted out or else the vaccination program won’t go ahead … In the environment we’re in, someone has to be held accountable for rare vaccine reactions that may occur …
”If the Government decides there is a priority need to roll out the vaccine, then it has a duty to indemnify the doctors who provide it.”
A spokesman for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Ronald McCoy, said the wrangling could undermine community confidence in the vaccine’s safety. ”It’s the public’s health that’s at risk here,” he said.
The Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, announced in May an order with vaccine supplier CSL for 21 million doses – enough to protect at least half the population from the flu strain. Analysts’ estimates suggest that contract may be worth up to $120 million.
But the insurers believe the distribution of the vaccine in multiple-dose vials exposes people to unnecessary risk of blood-borne infection from other recipients. As well, they believe the possibility of rare side-effects has been inadequately explored. These issues, they say, will make it hard for doctors to advise people whether or not to have the injection, exposing them to patient complaints that they were not properly informed.
Phillip Garrido: Man Who Kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991 ‘Heard the Voice of God’
August 28th, 2009Phillip Garrido’s Blog: voicesrevealed.blogspot.com
Via: Times Online:
The man who allegedly abducted Jaycee Lee Dugard, the girl kidnapped nearly two decades ago who was found alive in the US yesterday, is a religious fanatic who claimed that God spoke to him, acquaintances have said.
Phillip Garrido, 58, a convicted rapist and sex offender, is being held on kidnapping and sex charges relating to the disappearance of Ms Dugard, who was 11 when she was snatched from a bus stop in 1991.
His wife, Nancy Garrido, 54, was also arrested, and authorities have alleged that she was with Mr Garrido when Ms Dugard was kidnapped in South Lake Tahoe.
The reappearance of Ms Dugard, now 29, stunned America when the news broke yesterday morning – her kidnapping had caused a national media frenzy – but the elation soon turned to anguish when the horrific details of the abuse she has suffered became clear.
Mr Garrido allegedly raped Ms Dugard and fathered two children with her, the first when Jaycee was about 14. Along with Ms Dugard, the children, both girls who are now aged 11 and 15, were also kept hidden away from the world in the backyard compound of the Garrido house in California.
Fred Kollar, an under-sheriff at the police department in El Dorado County, where Ms Dugard was held captive, said: “None of the children have ever been to school, they’ve never been to a doctor. They were kept in complete isolation in this compound.”
People who know Mr Garrido said that he had become increasingly fanatical about his religious beliefs in recent years, sometimes breaking into song and claiming that God spoke to him through a box.
It was also reported that he held religious services in a tent in his garden and had recently claimed to have invented a device that would allow him to control sound with his mind.
In April 2008, Mr Garrido registered a corporation called God’s Desire at his home address. He also writes a blog called Voices Revealed on which he says that “the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world”.
Ms Dugard reappeared when Mr Garrido, a registered sex offender on lifetime parole, was ordered to visit a police station after a report of suspicious activity involving him and two young children the previous day. He took the two children with him, along with Ms Dugard.
“The diligent questioning and follow-up by the parolee’s agent led to Garrido revealing his kidnapping,” the police department said in a statement last night.
Mr Garrido, who is on lifetime parole, gave a rambling, sometimes incoherent phone interview to KCRA-TV from the El Dorado County jail yesterday in which he said he had not admitted to kidnapping and that he had turned his life around since the birth of his first daughter 15 years ago.
“Wait until you hear the story of what took place at this house,” Mr Garrido said. “You are going to be completely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning. But I turned my life completely around and to be able to understand that, you have to start there.”
Police said that the backyard compound where Mr Garrido allegedly kept Ms Dugard and the two children had electricity from extension cords and a rudimentary outhouse and shower, “as if you were camping”.
Mr Kollar said that a parole officer who had visited Mr Garrido’s house previously had not noticed anything amiss because the compound was well concealed by shrubs, rubbish bins and a tarpaulin.
“You can’t see over the fence with the shrubbery and the trees. You can’t see the structures,” Mr Kollar said.
Mr Garrido’s compound was in Antioch, a city of 100,000 about 170 miles from Ms Dugard’s family home in South Lake Tahoe. Yesterday the house was cordoned off with police tape as it was searched by FBI agents and the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department.
“In the last couple of years he started getting into this strange religious stuff. We kind of felt sorry for him,” said Tim Allen, president of East County Glass and Window in Pittsburgh, who has bought business cards and letterhead from Mr Garrido’s printing business for the past decade.
Three times in recent years, Mr Garrido had arrived at Mr Allen’s showroom with two “cute little blonde girls” in tow, he said.
Mr Garrido would talk about quitting the printing business to preach full time and gave the impression he was setting up a church.
“He rambled. It made no sense,” Mr Allen said, adding that he had no inkling of Mr Garrido’s criminal record.
“We never thought anything bad about the guy,” Mr Allen said. “He was just kind of nutty.”
In his interview with KCRA -TV Mr Garrido also claimed that he had left important documents that would reveal key information about the case with an agent at the FBI office in San Francisco.
“What’s kept me busy the last several years is I’ve completely turned my life around,” Mr Garrido said. “And you’re going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, the victim – you wait. If you take this a step at a time, you’re going to fall over backwards and in the end, you’re going to find the most powerful heart-warming story.”
Ms Dugard’s mother, Terry Probyn, was reunited with her daughter yesterday, but she has not yet made a public statement.
However, her stepfather, Carl Probyn, 60, said of the kidnapping: “It broke my marriage up. I’ve gone through hell. I mean, I’m a suspect up until yesterday.”
Mr Probyn was standing in his family driveway on June 10, 1991, when he saw a grey car pull up beside the bus stop where his stepdaughter was waiting for the school bus. She was snatched and the car sped off.
In spite of a massive search operation, several witnesses, and the fact that Jaycee was wearing a distinctive pink jacket and pink trousers, no arrests were made, and Jaycee was never found. Police never gave up on the case, though, and as recently as 2002 a former priest’s home was raided in connection with the little girl’s disappearance.
Mr Probyn now lives in Orange County, and Mrs Probyn lives in the LA suburb of Riverside. The couple have another daughter, Shayna, who is 19 years old.
Mr Probyn told local reporters yesterday that he had received a phone call from his daughter at about 4pm on Wednesday. “Mom has something to say to you,” she said. “Are you sitting down?” Then his wife came on the line and said, through tears, “They found Jaycee. She’s alive.”
Mr Probyn, a Vietnam veteran, said that his wife had been told the news by an FBI agent who called her at work. At first, she thought it was a prank call. Then the agent put Jaycee on the phone.
“My wife talked with her and is convinced she is Jaycee,” Mr Probyn said. “Jaycee remembers everything.”
Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax
August 27th, 2009There’s no link on this because the author, Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D., emailed it to me.
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Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax
Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.
The alarm has been sounded. Politicians, pharmaceutical executives and media conglomerates would have us believe that a 1918-style pandemic is a real threat. The 1918 pandemic, however, evolved out of conditions unique to World War I, for four specific reasons.
Why 2009 is Not 1918
First, World War I was characterized by millions of troops living in waterlogged trenches along the Western Front. This war zone became fertile ground for an opportunistic virus, as medical literature reveals:
“…a landscape that was contaminated with respiratory irritants such as chlorine and phosgene, and characterized by stress and overcrowding, the partial starvation in civilians, and the opportunity for rapid ‘passage’ of influenza in young soldiers would have provided the opportunity for multiple but small mutational charges throughout the viral genome.” (1)
Second, the war witnessed the growth of industrial-scale military camps and embarkation ports, such as Etaples in France, enabling the flu virus to enter into another phase of accelerated mutation. On any given day, Etaples was a makeshift city of 100,000 troops from around the British Empire and its former dominions. These soldiers concentrated into unsanitary barracks, tents and mess halls.
Today, many cities and nations have dense concentrations of people; none of these, however, are geographically isolated under the conditions of trench warfare and World War I-style deployments. Of course, there are smaller, sub-populations of people in prisons (prone to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis), in military barracks (prone to respiratory pathogens and meningococcal infections) and on cruise ships (prone to the Norovisus) – all proof of the connection between human confinement on the one hand and infectious disease on the other.
Third, after the war, ships such as the USS Alaskan became floating Petri dishes. Thousands of soldiers were packed like sardines for the long voyage home, allowing the virus to reverberate within hermetically-sealed units.
Fourth, returning troops were stuffed into boxcars for the train trip back to military bases, where they infected new recruits. Later, it was documented that Army regiments whose barracks allowed only 45 square feet per soldier had a flu incidence up to ten times that of regiments afforded 78 square feet per man. (2)
The 1918 flu virus became pandemic because, during World War I, the normal host-pathogen relationship was abandoned when millions of young men crowded into geographical confinement. In World War I, a flu virus was presented with a seemingly limitless number of hosts – almost all young, male, and with compromised immune systems. Unconstrained and unchecked by the usual habits of human behavior, the virus went rogue.
Flu viruses are smart, but they are not suicidal: if the host becomes extinct the virus will become extinct too. The evolutionary strategy, from the virus’s perspective, is to stay one step ahead of the immune systems of both humans and animals – but not two steps ahead. The flu virus aims to infect and reproduce without killing a critical mass of the hosts, of the herd, so the virus’s virulence is ameliorated after it becomes fatal for people on the margins of the host population – the weak and the elderly. World War I disrupted this synchronized, co-evolutionary relationship between flu viruses and human populations.
No flu since 1918 has been strong enough to produce, in millions of people, a “cytokine storm,” which is an immunological over-reaction leading to pulmonary edema (the lungs filling with fluid) – the curse of those with the strongest immune systems, normally between 20 and 40 years of age.
In normal flu pandemics, even in severe ones, the flu virus kills a portion of the weak and elderly. This appears to be the case in 1837 for Germany and in 1890 for Russia in 1890, though reliable medical evidence is scarce. It was certainly true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968, neither of which were significantly fatal for young adults. The flu 1976-1977 has been exposed as a boondoggle, a fraud, with far more people dying of the vaccine than from the flu itself.
Indeed, 1918 was an aberration. Since then, no flu has scythed away so many people: some 500,000 Americans and anywhere between 25 – 50 million people worldwide in three waves: first in March, then in August (the deadliest wave), and in then again in November of 1918, lasting into the spring of 1919.
The origins of the 1918 pandemic can be traced back to the trenches of the Western Front in 1915, 1916, and 1917 – to the world’s first large-scale industrial and international war. There was no other cause: If WWI had not been fought, it is inconceivable that the 1918 flu pandemic would have been so severe. Today, in 2009, absent the conditions of WWI, it is preposterous for political and medical authorities to claim that the swine flu is a menace to society.
The Mysterious Origins of the H1N1 “Swine Flu” Virus
If the current H1N1 swine flu virus does become abnormally lethal, there would be three leading explanations: first, that the virus was accidentally released, or escaped, from a laboratory; second, that a disgruntled lab employee unleashed the virus (as happened, according to the official version of events, with the 2001 anthrax attack); or third, that a group, corporation or government agency intentionally released the virus in the interests of profit and power.
Each of the three scenarios represents a plausible explanation should the swine virus become lethal. After all, the 1918 flu virus was dead and buried – until, that is, scientists unearthed a lead coffin to obtain a biopsy of the corpse it contained. Later, researchers similarly disturbed an Inuit woman buried under permafrost. (3)
The US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with a scientist from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, then began to reconstruct the 1918 Spanish flu. Had Iran or North Korea engaged in Frankenstein experiments (complete with ransacking graves) to reverse engineer the 1918 virus the US and the UK would have gone ballistic at the UN Security Council.
Interestingly, numerous doctors and scientists suspect that the swine flu virus was cultured in a laboratory. A mainstream Australian virologist, Adrian Gibbs – who was one of the first to analyze the genetic properties of the 2009 swine flu – believes that scientists accidentally created the H1N1 virus while producing vaccines. And Dr. John Carlo, Dallas Co. Medical Director, “This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified.”(4) Because of this, the 2009 swine flu virus – which has yet to be detected in any animals – has a rather suspicious pedigree.
The Propaganda Campaign
Across the mainstream media, reports announce one swine flu death after another (even though ordinary flu kills about 35,000 Americans each year). Upon closer scrutiny of what passes for journalism, the victims have “underlying health problems,” or “a common underlying health condition,” or “significant medical conditions.”
One news headline even blared: “Swine flu mother dies after giving birth, leaving her premature baby fighting for life,” and only later, buried deep in the story underneath, did it explain that she had “other medical problems” which included being confined to a wheelchair because of a serious car accident.
Citizens the world over are increasingly skeptical of hyped headlines followed by smaller-print caveats. They are uneasy with the effort to create “doublethink” – a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 and a reference to holding two contradictory ideas in one’s mind simultaneously, paralyzing critical thought.
The media has never been in the habit of reporting the cases of people who, for no known reason, die of the flu. Out of the 35,000 Americans who die each year from flu-related illnesses, some are bound to be relatively young and healthy. It happens. This year, however, their stories are front-page news.
More recently, news reports now claim that the H1N1 swine flu can affect people in the lungs and lead to pneumonia. This, however, is what separates the flu from the common cold in the first place; and this is why tens of thousands of elderly people die of flu-related symptoms each year. Fox News even claimed that “this one morphs and mutates and comes back in different ways…,” (like all flu viruses). In short, the media now uses the flu’s own ordinary symptoms to fuel fear.
Fortunately, a growing wave of online media challenges the propaganda. Back in 1976, there were no rival voices, and the Center for Disease Control’s manipulative television commercials dominated the airwaves. Fortunately, as a testament to official shamelessness, these videos are now archived and searchable on the Internet under the title of “1976 Swine Flu Propaganda.”
Now, like then, the US government’s pandemic policy alternates between the ridiculous and the repugnant. The government’s flu website is revealing. First, the historical section on the 1918 virus is intellectually dishonest, making absolutely no link between the unique conditions of World War I and the flu pandemic; instead, the site propagates the erroneous notion that this virus came out of the blue. (5)
Second, the site announces an absurd American Idol-style video contest: “Create a Video About Preventing or Dealing With the Flu & Be Eligible to Win $2500 Cash!” (Congress has earmarked 8 billion dollars for swine flu prevention and can only offer $ 2,500 to the proles – or, rather, to the one prole who, rising above mediocrity, best parrots the Party Line.)
And third, the site encourages the use of Twitter to “stay informed…” There is something mildly disturbing about the US federal government promoting Twitter as a form of resistance to foreign authoritarianism, while, simultaneously, using social networking to further federalize and protect the abuse of power at home.
1976 + 1984 = 2009
In sum, it appears that the 2009 swine flu pandemic will not be 1918. It might be a 1976-style hoax, however, serving profit and power – with a bit of Orwell’s 1984 thrown in for good measure.
Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.
Author of “Biotech Empire” (Amazon)
Notes
1. JS Oxford, A Sefton, R Jackson, W Innes, RS Daniels, and NPAS Johnson, “World War I may have allowed the emergence of ‘Spanish’ influenza,” The Lancet/ Infectious Diseases Vol. 2 February 2002.
2. Byerly CR. 2005. Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I. New York, NY: New York University Press.
3. Ann H. Reid, Thomas G. Fanning, Johan V. Hultin, and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, “Origin and Evolution of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus Hemagglutinin Gene, PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Division of Molecular Pathology, Department of Cellular Pathology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC. Communicated by Edwin D. Kilbourne, New York
4. Paul Joseph Watson, “Medical Director: Swine Flu Was ‘Cultured In A Laboratory,” This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified April 26, 2009.
5. http://www.flu.gov/
Goldman Subpoenaed on Huddles
August 27th, 2009Via: Wall Street Journal:
William Galvin, Massachusetts’s chief financial regulator, has subpoenaed Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc., demanding information on the firm’s weekly trading huddles between its research analysts and traders.
Mr. Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, said he is concerned that the huddles, in which Goldman’s research staff give verbal short-term stock tips to the firm’s traders and then its clients, disadvantage some Goldman customers.
“We have concerns about the research analysts and the efforts under way to use them to secure additional business,” Mr. Galvin said on Wednesday.
The huddles, which were the subject of a page-one article on Monday in The Wall Street Journal, also are being examined by both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — the industry self-regulatory body known as Finra — and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the matter.
Internal documents reviewed by the Journal show that at times, these short-term trading tips differed from Goldman’s long-term research. Critics complain that Goldman’s distribution of the trading ideas to its traders and major clients hurts other Goldman customers who aren’t given the opportunity to trade on the information and may be relying on the firm’s longer-term research to make investment decisions.
Rothschild Connection to Megrahi Release
August 27th, 2009Via: BBC:
In recent years two British prime ministers, a Russian oligarch, the scion of a European banking dynasty, a Prince of the Realm, a leader of Big Oil and our very own “Prince of Darkness” (aka Business Secretary Peter Mandelson) have all had walk-on parts, if not more, in events that preceded the release of the Lockerbie bomber. It’s a cast of characters that would do justice to a Bond film.
At the centre of this possible web of intrigue is Saif, the shaven-headed, London School of Economics-educated son of the Libyan dictator. Turns out he is a good friend of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium baron, and Nat Rothschild, of the eponymous banking dynasty.
Saif invited both to his 37th birthday party in June in Becici in Montenegro, into which Deripaska and Rothschild have poured around $1 billion to create a sort of St Tropez in the Balkans. Saif is also pumping Libyan money into Montenegro from his country’s vast investment fund, reason enough for Rothschild last year to host a party in his honour in New York.
What’s all this got to do with the Lockerbie bomber? Well consider this. Peter Mandelson’s love of holidaying with the rich and famous in exotic places took him to Corfu this month for the second year in a row. Last August he visited Rothschild in his $60m Corfu estate and stayed on Deripaska’s luxury yacht. This August he stayed at the Rothschild villa – and met Saif Gaddafi.
Mandelson claims the meeting was only “fleeting” but officials admit they did discuss the Lockerbie case. A week later it became public that the bomber might be released on “compassionate” grounds though, of course, there may be no connection. It was then revealed that Mandelson had previously met Saif at a reception in London in May.
The Business Secretary maintains that any suggestion that a deal was being cooked up is not just wrong but “offensive”, which we should accept at face value until facts suggest otherwise.
Fed Whining About Having to Release Records of Which Firms Received “Emergency Loans”
August 27th, 2009Via: Bloomberg:
The Federal Reserve argued yesterday that identifying the financial institutions that benefited from its emergency loans would harm the companies and render the central bank’s planned appeal of a court ruling moot.
The Fed’s board of governors asked Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to delay enforcement of her Aug. 24 decision that the identities of borrowers in 11 lending programs must be made public by Aug. 31. The central bank wants Preska to stay her order until the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York can hear the case.
“The immediate release of these documents will destroy the board’s claims of exemption and right of appellate review,” the motion said. “The institutions whose names and information would be disclosed will also suffer irreparable harm.”
The Fed’s “ability to effectively manage the current, and any future, financial crisis” would be impaired, according to the motion. It said “significant harms” could befall the U.S. economy as well.
The central bank didn’t say when it would file its appeal.
Fed lawyer Kit Wheatley told Preska in a conference call today that she did not know how long it would take for the Fed board to search the New York Fed for records.
“We really don’t know what’s in New York,” Wheatley said. “We don’t control the system of record-keeping in New York.”
The Standard
The Fed’s lawyer went on to say that she did not know what records would fall under a “delegated function,” which would be a task assigned to the New York Fed.
Preska interrupted Wheatley, saying that “Ms. Wheatley, I held that’s not the standard. You didn’t search under the regulation. You’re supposed to search under the regulation.”
Preska scheduled another conference call for 2:30 p.m. today to discuss the schedule for a search of the New York Fed.
“Nobody is going to deny you your right to an appeal,” Preska said on the call, “We’re going to do it expeditiously, not in a piecemeal fashion and hand it all off to the Second Circuit.”
The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under the emergency programs, saying disclosure might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders.
Flashback 1998: United States Patent 5733553: Recombinant Birth Control Vaccine
August 27th, 2009With regard to human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) and vaccines, see: Bad Blood? The Possibility of a Tainted Tetanus Toxoid Vaccine in the Philippines.
Via: Free Patents Online:
Population is growing at a rapid pace in many economically developing countries and there is a continuing need of an alternate method for regulation of fertility. We proposed several years back a birth control vaccine which induces the formation of antibodies against the human pregnancy hormone, the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). These inventions are described in patents issued in India, U.S.A. and several other countries. (Ref. EP 204566, JP 62286928, CA 1239346, U.S. Pat. No. 4,780,312, CN 8603854). We describe now another invention which generates antibody response of a long duration against hCG after a single or a limited number of injections.
The Crapification of Everything is Just Beginning
August 27th, 2009Becky did lots of research into finding a handheld blender that wasn’t crap. She eventually found an article in a consumer magazine that said that there are no handheld blenders that aren’t crap and to just buy the cheapest one available, expect it to crap out, and when it does, buy another one or use the warranty.
As absurd as that situation is, that’s the situation.
She bought a NZ$14 (about US$9.50) handheld blender at the Warehouse (the Warehouse is a New Zealand version of WalMart). Warehouse mostly sells garbage from China, and if you want a cheap appliance that you can count on to break down, or not work properly in the first place, Warehouse is the place to go in New Zealand.
She used that handheld blender for nearly a year and then it crapped out, as expected. She went back to Warehouse with the receipt and got another handheld blender (the same as the last one) for free. As crappy as that stuff is, Warehouse backs it for a year.
I wonder how many products have become commodified to the point where a quality version no longer exists at any price?
Changing the subject a bit, here’s an old disposable camera crapification story:
Disposable cameras, as we know them today, were relatively new when I attended Brooks Institute of Photography in the early 1990s.
One of the students there started producing really weird and unique images via some method that the rest of us couldn’t identify.
How was he doing it?
He had modified a disposable camera so that he could shoot with it, remove the film and then reload it. The quality of the lens was so poor that the various aberrations and distortions were producing the “unique” look of his work. I think that he normally shot 35mm with a Lieca M6, so the tack sharpness and beautiful contrast produced by that gear obviously started to bore him a bit.
Via: Wired:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”
And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.
The good news is that this trend is ideally suited to the times. As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it’s the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at. And from impact can come big sales. “When the economy went south before Christmas last year, we worried that sales would be affected,” says Pure Digital’s Fleming-Wood. “But we sold a ton of cameras. In fact, we exceeded the goals we had set before the economy soured.” And this year? Sales, he says, are up 200 percent. (Another payoff: In May, networking giant Cisco acquired Pure Digital for $590 million.)
To some, it looks like the crapification of everything. But it’s really an improvement. And businesses need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun.
Swiss Bank: The U.S. Overestimates its Attraction as a Financial Center; Advising its Clients to Get Out of All U.S. Securities
August 27th, 2009Crackpot, foilhead , lunatic fringe Swiss banks! *snort*
Via: SwissInfo:
Swiss private bank Wegelin announced on Tuesday that it is to stop doing business in the United States.
The St Gallen-based bank, Switzerland’s oldest, said the decision had been taken in response to stricter measures introduced in the US against tax dodgers and planned changes to estate tax, which would make some non-US citizens liable to tax if they inherited US securities.
In a letter to investors it said Swiss banks were likely to find themselves in an untenable position, as they would be expected to know which clients were liable to pay US tax – “an impossible undertaking”, given the lack of clear definitions in the matter.
The danger of inadvertently making false declarations to the US tax authorities will be too great, it explained.
It added that it believes the US overestimates its attraction as a financial centre, and is advising its clients to get out of all US securities.
The decision comes a week after US tax authorities reached a deal with the Swiss government which will see bank UBS hand over details of almost 4,500 suspected tax cheats.
