Hard News: Debacles and Disgraces
89 Responses
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One advantage of using a lossless system such as FLAC when encoding CDs, even if you have the originals, is that you are spending quite a lot of time doing the actual ripping (unless you own an automated CD library or something). Going to an archival format means you'll never have to revisit this (and can shrinkwrap the CDs and store them away forever).
Another positive for lossless is that converting between two lossy formats (MP3 => AAC or whatever) introduces lots of distortion. If your original is FLAC, you can convert your music en masse to an alternate lossy format without additional degradation.
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If we followed the Koran charging and therefore profiting or losing from interest would not happen. I think so anyway?
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Kyle, that's not true at all. You can make money renting out yachts. Just as Hertz makes plenty of money buying brand new sedan cars as investments.
Technically the same, but from what I understand the super yacht business doesn't stack up the way.
The vast majority of them are privately owned and then rented out to try and recoup some cost - they are certainly not a profit-making business...And the article specifically suggests that they used it to entertain guests - I think it's fair to say this wasn't the standard asset investment debenture holders understood would be happening with their funds huh...
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If we followed the Koran charging and therefore profiting or losing from interest would not happen. I think so anyway?
Not really, while the degree of leverage may be lower, the principles of having to pay more for something over a long period of time mean that other methods are employed to avoid the direct use of interest, but indirectly it is still there,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking#Modern_Islamic_banking
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3410,
James,
Flac is the way to go. Your terrabyte drive will take roughly 2000 hours of it (depending on some variables). By the time it's full, another drive shouldn't cost very much. (In fact, you should probably get another one now and mirror them; all drives will eventually fail.)
Beneficiaries got a sweet deal under Labour?
Bull__shit__, they did. Don't believe the hype, Rik.
Hanover?
Talk about adding insult to injury. Are these investors against independent oversight or something?Out of interest, what percentage are institutional investors? [My blood pressure precludes me reading much more about this.]
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In fact, you should probably get another one now and mirror them
The first goal is to make sure that I put the keyboard in a drawer and run the computer by remote/the buttons on the front. Backing up certainly has a lot to be said for it. Considering buying an NAS device and will probably end up with a couple of TB storage there. Time is an issue. It seems it would be nice to scan in the cover-art as well. Will probably be able to get a 10 or 100 TB drive by the time I actually do this. Was briefly considering how many floppies worth of information the one drive would hold.
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Isn't that what all those people with "investment properties" are trying to do?
Yachts down inflate in value like a house does. They require tremendous maintenance to increase their value because everything on a yacht costs 2 - 10 times as much as it would on land.
Which would be fine, if you were renting it out at great cost to rich people. These guys aren't, they're having expensive parties on it most of the time.
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Yachts DON'T inflate...
Unless they're of a very different model than the one pictured.
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Yachts DON'T inflate...
Unless they're of a very different model than the one pictured.
Yet this is clearly what the impressionable are being taught by the latest Pump Water "Pump Up Your Pay" TV spots (click here for Interwebby version).
Hell, they blame television's influence for everything else from ADHD to teen sex, why not corporate fiscal irresponsibility? With a suitably persuasive email campaign I'm sure I could at least get Garth George on board for this one.
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it's a small part of a large portfolio, then only hindsight says it's a bad investment.
It wasn't an investment. It didn't cost them anything. They used their company's money (at least what was left over of the company's money after the shonky property investments had been capitalised) to buy the yacht. Remember, these are two men who sucked vast amounts of capital out of their failing company in the form of "dividends." They had no interest in investment; they wanted cash and playthings.
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Meanwhile the NZHerald is to excited about the start of parliament that they are jumping in all directions at once:
Maori to oppose Govt's controversial employment law
6:07PM Wednesday Dec 10, 2008
The Maori Party will support the Government's controversial employment law which makes it easier for workers to be sacked in their first 90 days of work. -
LOL. Looks like they've now fixed it up.
The Maori Party says it cannot support the Government's controversial employment bill as it will hurt workers ... The Maori Party's employment spokesman, Hone Harawira, said the bill was essentially the same as the bill put up by National MP Wayne Mapp in the last Parliament.
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Sorry to think your Mum got sucked in by these swine Russell, the ads were very persuasive
Tim Selwyn has the best line though when it came to the meetings"When you witness the herd of suicidal wilderbeast following the instructions of the crocodiles in how to cross the river how can you not despair"
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it's interesting that more people haven't responded to Rich of Observationz comments re the finance companies. i really recommend following the link he posted and reading his short-but-prescient blog post from 2005 on the subject.
the magic of compound interest is like the magic of perpetually rising property prices or the magic of ever expanding rates of extraction of natural resources. it may be the orthodoxy but that doesn't make it true, and even a small amount of research and thought will reveal that the emperor has no clothes.
BTW, it looks like we have moved beyond Act I of the End of the Age of Financialisation, and into the start of Act II.
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I'm still kind of stuck on RoOz's ruse that any kind of digital audio could be lossless.
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I say fire up the turntable again russell, that's what neil originally intended, 1,000,000 tiny photographs verses one long great slather of wisdom.
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3410,
I'm still kind of stuck on RoOz's ruse that any kind of digital audio could be lossless.
In this sense "lossless" means no loss in relation to CD audio.
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Is there a Wellingtonista for "Rant of The Year"? If so I nominate Bruce Sheppard on the Hanover Finance investors.
"I really despair at the base level of intellect of these old dumb wits.
"My new rule is, I'm not going to spend any time with anyone aged over 60 because, frankly, their residual economic value to the rest of the country is so low they should be put through euthanasia programmes right now."
BTW I've never been called short-but-prescient before :-)
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I'm still kind of stuck on RoOz's ruse that any kind of digital audio could be lossless
Or even any kind of analog audio.
I reckon it depends on how the content was created. If I make an original track in Ableton, then the WAV/Flac export is the definitive version. If I give you the WAV and you Flacify (flay?) it, then you still have my original bits. If you put it on MP3 or a conventional CD, you've lost information/quality.
A lot of my dance music collection nowadays is on lossless files straight from the artist (via Cytopia, for instance).
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Kyle, I can't see any problem at all calling Hertz cars investments. So long as they are taking more money out of the fleet than they are putting in (or at least have a plan to do so) then it's an investment of capital. You'd say the same about any machine that did work in a factory - it's exactly the same thing really. Of course the capital cost of the plant will never be recovered by selling the plant for parts - that is not the idea. The idea is to use the plant to make a return on your investment. Almost every share you buy in the stockmarket is driven by this kind of economics and you call them investments, right? If you buy shares in Hertz, you are buying into a fleet of cars, and the rest of the infrastructure to deliver them to paying customers.
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Well they'd make money if you hire them out or onsell them at a profit.
I just suspect that wasn't the plan here, it was only sold once things started to fall over for them and it became obvious what they were doing.
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I should point out that the likes of Hannover are now subject to statutory oversight. Too late for the current round of failures, but hopefully it'll do a bit to prevent something of the like happening in future. The law is Labour's work, so they weren't totally impotent.
One thing I found more than a little disturbing was learning this year that it took until 2002 before the Takeovers Panel was created, despite it being founded in the Takeovers Act 1993. National just didn't want to do anything to interfere with their mates getting to fuck shareholders for every last cent, even though they passed the Takeovers Act to give us the framework for it. Funnily enough, the Minister behind (not) driving such measures was Doug Graham. Thankfully he's not back this time around, but we do have a Rodney and a Roger instead so we may yet be gouged again.
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In this sense "lossless" means no loss in relation to CD audio.
in this sense waterboarding≠torture
u helped to redefine 'less loss' as 'lossless.'
disband the ministry of truth."If I make an original track in Ableton, then the WAV/Flac export is the definitive version"
Unfortunately there's next to no original music recorded on digital,
in this sense original 'new; fresh; inventive; novel'
Or even any kind of analog audio.
medals, sincerely.
it's a temporally linear artform, in which tens of albums have been recorded in a temporally linear format.
now reproduced in a temporally sequestered format.
speaks for itself -
strangely 'lossless' sounds very similar to the adj my trust manager used before he lost all my money
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Kyle, what was actually planned for this ridiculous yacht is an entirely different matter. My only point is that you can feasibly invest in luxury boats as a money making venture. Personally, I wouldn't. It is conceivable that billionaires would find more convenience or cost effectiveness in hiring such a boat for whatever it is billionaires do in their boats. Saves the hassle and wasted time in getting their own luxury liner down here. Pretty risky venture, IMHO, one shareholders definitely should know about.
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