One year ago today: May 7, 2018, a-a-a-a-a-acting.
Five years ago today: May 7, 2014, early quadcopter photo.
Nine years ago today: May 7, 2010, confusingly full.
Random years ago today: May 7, 2008, Hartke piece of junk.
Playing Paul Bunyan put me out for ten hours. Despite all that heavy lifting, or dragging (to be more accurate), no sore muscles. Just exhausted, meaning it is now 4:00AM and I’m already up and about. Let me consult a calendar. Yeppers, on the 23rd, I’ve have been retired [from working for a living] 23 years. Don’t mistake that for not working at all, but it was never my life goal to slave away paying bills, mainly because I’ve always considered “the Joneses” to be total schlupps and the lowest grade of social puppets. It’s a dark night, a new moon, but starry enough to make an impromptu tour of the yard. I need more fence, even at night.
Come to think of it, like Thoreau, many of my posts that talk about actual prices do get clicked a lot. However, where his reports are a study of inflation, mine place more emphasis on the disgusting gap between what is advertised and what you wind up paying. Just you try to get a $2.99 breakfast special, or 32 mpg in the city. Okay, who’s the cat in the photo?
I don’t know. It’s another of the scruffy feral cats in the neighborhood. Most are fixed, so if you think they sat around a lot in the sun before, around here you trip over the. I’m paying attention because I don’t know if cats and turtles get along. Getting to know who’s-who before I find out they don’t. These are citified cats, more afraid of a garden hose than chain saws and lawn mowers.
Here’s your free magazine article.
Today, let’s get to the point. Thomas Edison is hailed as the great American inventor. Was he, now? From one standpoint I’ve brooded over, he was no more than an early Bill Gates. He copied or incorporated the inventions of others. Where Gates got away because existing laws did not apply to software, Edison was a master at patent manipulation. He spotted the vast flaws in the American Patent Office operations and exploited them both for his re-inventions (often combinations of weak or ungranted existing patents) or to outright stifle the competition.
The too-often quoted statistic that he held over a thousand patents may have a sinister facet. Figure it out. You can name the electric light bulb, and the gramophone, but most people can’t list any more. Because he never built most of what he patented. The effectiveness of this tactic has not been lost to the largest American corporations of today. Legal departments all over the nation are scrambling to buy up unused patents after beholding how the Nashville squadrons of non-trial lawyers were able to wrench such a stranglehold on music rights that original artists cannot even perform their own tunes live.
How do these big companies make sure their anti-competitive measures stay relegated to conspiracy theories? Easy. Get Hollywood to make film after film of Dolf and Bruce going after water-powered car formulas, ancient and/or alien power sources, and Roswellian technologies. The American public school generation types X, Y, and Z will suck that up like it was artificially flavored belly-wash.
This is no pie-in-the-sky concept. I’ve long held the opinion that DMCA (Digital Millennial Copyright Act) was never intended to block live performances. The text of the law aims squarely at preventing the copying of copyrighted music for either profit, or in a way that diminishes demand for the original. But is playing the music live the same a copying?
No, because of the contention that one is profiting from the artist’s performance, and not the music itself, and if one is talented enough to play a close version, he is unlikely to buy the original anyway. I’ve written about this in the later 2000’s decade, and while I don’t have the actual dates, the yesteryear links have an uncanny way of finding them shortly after the topic comes up again. What we have is a clear case of using the law to threaten a court case that the average defendant cannot afford.
Who recalls my concept of getting a license to perform country music around 2007 when pubs and bands in south Florida were being threatened with prosecution if their entertainment included copyrighted music? My plan was to buy those rights from Nashville, and be the only one left standing if those threats had any teeth. I called the number listed for the licensing rights. Who remembers this?
What happened was I had a list of the tunes I wanted to purchase performing rights. Instead of the price quote I wanted, I got a lawyer on the far end who tried to cross-examine me to determine my identity and such. You know how far he got on that, but he would not let go. I guess he figured he was smart enough to get me on file. What happened is he was insisting I was obligated to give him my identity by virtue of having made the phone call. His plan was to get my data, perform a background and credit check to determine what I could afford, then call me back with a “payment plan”. Obviously, that yahoo understood how real estate “prequalified” loans worked.
But the final reason I rejected his plan is that they, and not me, would determine which music I was allowed to license. Copyright, my eye.
Floating pedal pub.
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Here’s my stunt double hand-scooping the clayish yellow dirt from the posthole. We have his personal assurance that this is “not anywhere” near as much fun as it looks. Adding, on a personal note that he “doesn’t get paid enough for this s**t.” The thing is, there is now have a deadline. I are going back to Hermitage and it could be anytime. Give it a week and check back. I have pet news. You see, the long-term experience I have with her pets arose without her input. So imagine the state where I adapt to pets who have adapted to her without her being aware of the process.
For break time, I watched another documentary. This on was on helicopter battlefield tactics. Terrorist organizations are very obliging, whether it be swamp, mountain, or jungle, by always building their secret hideouts near the center of small, flat, un-patrolled openings just wider than the chopper blades. Converted civilian helicopters appear to be a convenient, if expensive, way to fight a war, provided the enemy has none of his own. It also helps that so few bad guys figure out how fragile the copters are and avoid shooting them down first.
It was also fun to watch cargo helicopters used as bombers, with some grunts kicking barrels out the door. Still, I can’t help concluding that helicopter warfare is way dependent on not one of the enemy keeping his head long enough to take aim with a handy anti-tank weapon. Wait, there’s another thing. All right, we know the nuclear bomb flattened Hiroshima and they had it coming. But enough already about the damn Enola Gay and the pilot Tibbits. Who gives a damn who he was? We are sick and tired of this sick and tired information being included in every friggin’ production number, okay? Give it a rest. It ranks up there with the black hole “even light” cliché and the Hawkin’s sob story.
While we’re at it, let’s knock it off with these politicians who pretend they understand economics. The Democrats are on about how nobody wins in a trade war. Yeah, well now explain why the US loses when there isn’t one. Today I bought a pump sprayer made in China for less than $7.00. There’s probably nothing that could be made that cheaply in America any more. Too many job benefits and soccer mom’s needing the afternoon off, or else. What I foresee is a robot revolution, but nothing like the Hollywood version. Robots already outperform humans at unskilled tasks, and we talked about the bastardized version of A.I. that is reaching the marketplace. Coupling these will let existing hardware take over semi-skilled jobs as well, and make inroads into many specializations.
What this means is a new “industrial revolution” with some distressing traits that should worry the Chinese. Because most of their workforce, while highly educated by American standards, are still performing unskilled tasks. It will be their turn to howl about unfairness. When will this happen? Within five years, since the market is compelling the shift. I compared it to the Industrial Revolution in the sense that it shifts wealth from old sources to new, but one factor remains unchanged. New machines require money, and it is so much money that predominantly only the already-rich can afford them. In England the source of wealth went from land to factories. In America, it is poised to shift to those who can afford robots.
ADDENDUM
My experience is that the reason you talk more about the past with increasing age it due to a double whammy. There is more past to talk about and since 1991, the world has entered a phase where nothing really interesting has been going on. A few wars so far away nobody notices on a daily basis. Satellite launches take too many years to transmit any results. Sharper Image proved education standards too low to invent anything really new. Music began a retrograde slide toward tribal chanting behind electronic over-instrumentalization. Media became channelized and formulaic, with every new American movie fitting into a defined category. Except “Shazam”, which was okay.
It’s getting rarer to find a book by Louis Grizzard I have not read. Some of his works tend toward sappy but he remains the largest influence on my style. I can’t really write or even relate to much of his reminiscing. I like vegetables, going to bed early, and was never chided about my school marks since I was straight A. I don’t have a lot of fond memories of family life, but sure, I like to visit old places I’ve been. We lived in such backwater settlements that most of them are still there. Meaning I can’t even share Grizzard’s lamenting about Moreland, Georgia.
Now I have a confession to make. When I say I’ve never owned a credit card, I really mean a credit card has never owned me. When I worked for the phone place and traveled up to six times per year, I definitely had a credit card. But mainly for overseas use. I’ve commented on how that’s become a huge downside of international travel. Credit cards cause American prices where they shouldn’t be. The card was from a Canadian company. I point out that I’ve never used cards domestically. I have an ATM debit card, but the first time I ever used it even to buy gasoline was when I had no choice in November last year. Let the record show that, officially I have had a credit card. More than twenty years ago. I refine my statement to say I’ve never had an American credit card.
