monkeymike blog

About the free market.

The thing about a free market is that the purchaser/buyer/consumer/whatever has to have perfect knowledge about the product.

How often do you see that happening? When did you last see even the slightest mention on a car add about the TCO? about the mean time to failure on a major component?

It is disturbing to me that VW think that some horrific asymmetric little knitted troll, with an obsession with the shapely female form, are used to sell the cars.

What is far more unpleasant is the idea that they are right.

Are we so bereft of reason, so buried in ignorance and slave mentality, that no physical attribute is worth discussing when selling cars?

What about it's market value in 5 years time? MPG? Top Speed? accelaration? no.
Shout it out: "Come on" Don't look at the trivial stuff just buy it without question. After all VW know best which car you should buy!!

The modern retail 'industry' is about the abolition of the free market. The suppression of quality and the creation of a slave race designed soley to consume until we die.

The only silver lining is that within a generation we could be in the situation were we won't have a consumer society, because non of our younger generation will have any money.
If the country relies on retail and financial sectors then we are soon to be poor as church mice. Knowledge and laws are very easy to export permanently (in a way which mineral resources aren't) and once your financial institutions are gone everything else will follow.

I suppose that We could turn the entire country into a retail outlet, but I have my doubts about the viability of that. It's a long way to come to the shops from Europe. The locals would have to spend every other day working in shops and the alternate day out shopping just to keep the money flowing.

So what is left to do?

Well what about human hunting? Turn the entire of England into a nature reserve where rich Chinese, Russian, Indian (and so on) business people can come and hunt humans for their trophy rooms.
Fifty foot fences would surround England and the rich could pop away from within the reserve.

Perhaps in 10 or 15 years time it will come to pass.

Now my spleen is vented, I lie quiescent.

You know I love this heart warming story of 2 lads making good.

They struggled as teenage actors and children's TV presenters. They didn't get the break they needed to make it into the serious TV presenting (like everyone else being killed in a plane crash) but at least they were bezzy mates with some other no-account and for that they DESERVE to win. After all life's not about what you know, what you can do, your skills or anything else. It's about being mates with boy band people.

Bless.

More coverage at ITV.com

I mean, how cool is that? "Institutionalised failure within ITV" you can't pay for publicity like that.

against all odds I have a job in a hospital.

I can't wait to get my hands into an open incision.

"what's that, well let's cut it out and see what happens." That'll be my motto.

only kidding I'll be in the furnace room burning the scraps.

I've got 'man flu'. at least that's what all the women say. Personally I think I've got a cold.

Unfortunately all my colds seem to have the same pattern. Most start with sneezing, although this one started with a saw throat and the sneezing followed soon after. The end of this day sees the most mucous production.
Then comes the day of shivers (poor thermal control in general) dreamy staring and occasionally wandering off course with some coughing and sneezing. This is the weird day.
Next day the soul comes back to normal, but there is more coughing. Then comes the worst day of all. That's today in this cold. It's the coughing day. Dry 'unproductive' coughs that don't stop. I've still got a bit of a saw throat so the coughing is acutely painful rather than just sapping. Changing air temperature or moisture content sends me off in a debilitating fit of coughing. Not good. poor me. poorly.

Cornwall.
If 'they' can put a fence around something and charge you a fiver to gawp at it then they have. I feel like I have been robbed left right and center. The best bits were Lizard point and Land's End, mainly because of the sea and the cliff'age. I also saw a lizard on Land's End.

Then on the way home the Ford Focus suffered it's first big failure. It lost power. I got it to the side and it stalled. The car has been cutting out due to the engine overheating. The AA were called around to see it. Tragically rather than a nice leak in a pipe the water pump had died and was spewing out coolant all over the M5. So we left it in Tiverton and caught the train (£180) home carrying an excessive (and impractical) amount of bags of stuff. So on the friday before bank holiday we were standing on a train for 2 hours just to get stuck in Birmingham New Street. British Rail Eh? SHOCKING! stay in your cars people the Railways are shockingly bad. To hell with global warming. Rather drown falmouth than give any money to those thieving buggers on the railways. It took us 9 hours to get home.

No doubt there are some people who have travel horror stories far worse than mine, but they didn't happen to me. So I don't care.

Everyone knows that Music people and Movie stars are high on drugs an awful lot of the time. From this we can infer that they must be fuelling the illegal drugs trade in various countries.

The best way to stamp out this kind of organised crime is to stop giving these druggy idiots money.
So...if you stop buying CDs and DVDs from reputable retailers you will
NO LONGER BE FEEDING ORGANISED CRIME.

If you absolutely have to watch something (i.e. you've swallowed the hype-cf. Shrek 3) then find a friend who has already bought it (and therefore doesn't mind funding organized crime) and borrow it. Other alternatives exist such as taking copies of media or find lower bandwidth copies freely available on the internet. If you like what you see and would like then to give some money to hopeless drug addicts then wait until the film/CD is of a suitably cheap level in your local music/DVD/Super-Hyper-Mega Mart shop and buy it then. At a REASONABLE price. This minimises the harm you are causing.

Introducing an act of patience into the purchasing experience confers some advantages:
1) As the hype has died down (and you've probably forgotten it) you no longer feel disappointed or betrayed when the film/CD turns out to be dire.
2) You aren't one of the crowd, herd, plebeian masses. This act of consumer defiance can mean you've taken a small step to freedom.
3) Buying at a more appropriate price means that the poor unfortunates in Hollywood (etc.) can only afford a 500g bag of cocaine, for that beach front orgy, and not the 5 Kilos they wanted. You might even be saving their lives.

A recent attempt by the organised criminal supporters to prevent ordinary people from watching a film whatever, whenever and however they want to, has been foiled by a heroic effort of programmers using the universal and free set of infinite numbers. Just one member of the set turned out to be useful for removing the criminal underworld locks on HD-DVD disks.

The number is 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 or as it's more frequently written in Hexadecimal as: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Don't let these sick freaks win. Make a stand. Stamp out drugs by not giving money to the music and film industries. Lives are more important than entertainment.

Hail Discordia.

Well, bloody hell.

I've built a new mid/low range PC. It's quiet as a noisy mouse and It's also a bit schizoid as it's got WinXP on one drive and Fedora Cors 6 (FC6) on the other side.

The first thing I did once I'd built it and install Windows was install C&C 3. I've also dug up loads of old games (and a couple of new ones) to play on it.

I've just spent most of my free time, over the last week, playing a real time strategy game called Supreme Commander.
Bits of it make the computer run like a slug, and my save games where called things like: "Boring1" etc. but I had to carry on regardless. The games isn't even that pretty or satisfying but I HAD TO FINISH IT.

It's some freaky compulsion. What's weird is that computer games are just the about the only things I do finish!
I've even stopped finishing books.

Radio 4 has done it again. It has shocked me to the marrow of my bones.

Peter Davison (of Dr Who, All Creatures Great and Small, A Very Peculiar Practice etc. fame)

Also wrote the theme tune for BUTTON MOON.

YES BUTTON MOON!!!

Thanks again to whatever goddamn programme it was that made me spill my morning tea.

This makes him fantastically useful in Actor-Network Theory

It's been ~ a month since I went in to see how many PS3s Arogs had in stock a couple of days after launch, A couple of days ago I went to look again.

They had 44.

So either they have sold loads of them and always like to keep a stock level of or around the 90/2 mark OR they have sold 1 PS3 in a month.

gotta get them HOT CAKES!!!!!

thinking that ubuntu was a bit of a lame script kiddies OS, I thought I'd go for something a little more hardcore. Redhat was always a beast to use and FC6 as us h@x0rs call it has got that edge over ubuntu (theres a pun in there) because several things just don't quite work with Fedora,

So if you want the genuine Linux experience you should look to a genuine distro like suse or fedora rather than something that works straight away and nice and smooth like Ubuntu.

Of course if you want Ubuntu as well you can always install another partition and away you go.

Scarily enough Fedora recognized my USB bluetooth dongle STRAIGHT AWAY. it took a whole day for Windows to do the same. And also no problem using my digi camera and other USB devices.

Not sure what that is about; Linux being better than windows for hardware compatibility.

Another thing it's pretty good at is being pretty. The desktop enhancements are brill, wobbly windows, various fade up or down effects and you can even get this ripple thingy that propagates away from a window when you release it. Funky (but pointless). Oh and the Cubic Desktop animation as you switch from one desktop to another. all good wholesome funky stuff.