Saturday, April 30, 2011

Nujabes - Lady Brown (ft. Cise Starr)

Abstract Rude - Yep

Jedi Mind Tricks- Uncommon Valor (A Vietnam Story)

R.A. The Rugged Man - "Uncommon Valor" [Music Video]

Atmosphere-Lovelife

"Freedum" [Atmosphere 'LoveLife' (remix)] - Alyssa Marie

Beijing Fashionista

Shanghai Restoration Project - Jade Buddha Temple w/ Di Johnston

Kanye West - Diamonds Remix (Instrumental by Shanghai Restoration Project)

Monday, April 25, 2011

GIF Like You Never Seen Before




Hieroglyphics "You Never Knew"

Philips Simplicity

IMF bombshell: Age of America nears end

Commentary: China’s economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016
By Brett Arends, MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.


IMF sees China topping U.S. in 2016According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China's economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now. Brett Arends looks at the implications for the U.S. dollar and the Treasury market.
And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

According to the IMF forecast, whomever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.

Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes, and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s.




China’s economy will be the world’s largest within five years or so.

But they’re miscounting. They’re only comparing the gross domestic products of the two countries using current exchange rates.

That’s a largely meaningless comparison in real terms. Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony. China artificially undervalues its currency, the renminbi, through massive intervention in the markets.

The comparison that really matters
The IMF in its analysis looks beyond exchange rates to the true, real terms picture of the economies using “purchasing power parities.” That compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.

Under PPP, the Chinese economy will expand from $11.2 trillion this year to $19 trillion in 2016. Meanwhile the size of the U.S. economy will rise from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion. That would take America’s share of the world output down to 17.7%, the lowest in modern times. China’s would reach 18%, and rising.

Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.

Naturally, all forecasts are fallible. Time and chance happen to them all. The actual date when China surpasses the U.S. might come even earlier than the IMF predicts, or somewhat later. If the great Chinese juggernaut blows a tire, as a growing number fear it might, it could even delay things by several years. But the outcome is scarcely in doubt.

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• Hulbert: Why bulls aren't exit-bound /conga/story/misc/investing.html 142106 This is more than a statistical story. It is the end of the Age of America. As a bond strategist in Europe told me two weeks ago, “We are witnessing the end of America’s economic hegemony.”

We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. for so long that there is no longer anyone alive who remembers anything else. America overtook Great Britain as the world’s leading economic power in the 1890s and never looked back.

And both those countries live under very similar rules of constitutional government, respect for civil liberties and the rights of property. China has none of those. The Age of China will feel very different.

Victor Cha, senior adviser on Asian affairs at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me China’s neighbors in Asia are already waking up to the dangers. “The region is overwhelmingly looking to the U.S. in a way that it hasn’t done in the past,” he said. “They see the U.S. as a counterweight to China. They also see American hegemony over the last half-century as fairly benign. In China they see the rise of an economic power that is not benevolent, that can be predatory. They don’t see it as a benign hegemony.”

The rise of China, and the relative decline of America, is the biggest story of our time. You can see its implications everywhere, from shuttered factories in the Midwest to soaring costs of oil and other commodities. Last fall, when I attended a conference in London about agricultural investment, I was struck by the number of people there who told stories about Chinese interests snapping up farmland and foodstuff supplies — from South America to China and elsewhere.

This is the result of decades during which China has successfully pursued economic policies aimed at national expansion and power, while the U.S. has embraced either free trade or, for want of a better term, economic appeasement.

“There are two systems in collision,” said Ralph Gomory, research professor at NYU’s Stern business school. “They have a state-guided form of capitalism, and we have a much freer former of capitalism.” What we have seen, he said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That’s very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.”

The next chapter of the story is just beginning.

U.S. spending spree won’t work
What the rise of China means for defense, and international affairs, has barely been touched on. The U.S. is now spending gigantic sums — from a beleaguered economy — to try to maintain its place in the sun. See: Pentagon spending is budget blind spot .

It’s a lesson we could learn more cheaply from the sad story of the British, Spanish and other empires. It doesn’t work. You can’t stay on top if your economy doesn’t.

Equally to the point, here is what this means economically, and for investors.

Some years ago I was having lunch with the smartest investor I know, London-based hedge-fund manager Crispin Odey. He made the argument that markets are reasonably efficient, most of the time, at setting prices. Where they are most likely to fail, though, is in correctly anticipating and pricing big, revolutionary, “paradigm” shifts — whether a rise of disruptive technologies or revolutionary changes in geopolitics. We are living through one now.

The U.S. Treasury market continues to operate on the assumption that it will always remain the global benchmark of money. Business schools still teach students, for example, that the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond is the “risk-free rate” on money. And so it has been for more than a century. But that’s all based on the Age of America.

No wonder so many have been buying gold. If the U.S. dollar ceases to be the world’s sole reserve currency, what will be? The euro would be fine if it acts like the old deutschemark. If it’s just the Greek drachma in drag ... not so much.

The last time the world’s dominant hegemon lost its ability to run things singlehandedly was early in the past century. That’s when the U.S. and Germany surpassed Great Britain. It didn’t turn out well.

Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Room Blue - Emi Meyer

Shanghai Restoration Project - Miss Shanghai

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Stay At Home Dad

Macklemore ft Geologic - Church

Macklemore - Fallin

Macklemore - Love Song

Naturally 7 beatboxes a whole band

Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation | Video on TED.com

Save the Rich, Pay Your Taxes

As if anyone needed it, further evidence that the system is rigged heavily in favor of the rich:

Payroll taxes (deductions for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance) are mostly paid by the bottom 90 percent of earners. When they’re factored in on top of income tax, the gap between the tax rates at the very top and everyone else shrinks even more—so much that the effective tax rate for people earning more than $370,000 is nearly the same as for those earning between $43,000 and $69,000 a year.

As Martin A. Sullivan of Tax.com recently calculated, a New York janitor making slightly more than $33,000 a year pays an effective tax rate of nearly 25%. And the effective tax rate for a resident of the Park Avenue building named after Helmsley, earning an average of $1.2 million annually? A cool 14.7%.



Bear this in mind as you witness the purely fabricated debate unfolding in Washington about our spiraling national debt and the necessity to make drastic cuts in domestic spending. All the bogus statistics you hear about the wealthy being charged a higher income tax rate – while true in a very technical sense – are grossly distorted in order to portray an element of fairness which simply doesn’t exist in the U.S. tax system. The bottom line is that working and middle class Americans pay a higher tax rate than the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

This reality needs to be at the forefront of any debate about budget cuts. The MSM, of course, will never reveal this information, preferring instead to focus on the theatrical aspects of the imaginary Republican / Democrat divide. As a result, most Americans will never realize just how corrupt the system truly is, unless we help them learn. It is our responsibility – both to ourselves and to our fellow citizens – to do everything we can to make this knowledge public, and to call the greedy elites to account.

But let’s put this into even broader perspective. Ordinary Americans pay a tax rate which effectively amounts to 20-25% of gross income. The wealthiest Americans pay a tax rate which amounts to anywhere from 0 – 20% — but generally on the lower end of that spectrum, as demonstrated by multiple sources. Corporations, while technically required to pay up to 35% in taxes, pay absolutely nothing in many cases – in some cases even less, as with GE.

So ordinary Americans are saddled with a higher tax rate, but what do we get in return? Almost nothing. Our infrastructure is crumbling, are schools are in shambles. Millions of Americans lack access to adequate health care, millions more are unemployed, while millions remain under-employed. Homelessness and poverty are at unconscionably high levels for a nation as technically wealthy as ours, and hundreds of thousands more continue to lose their homes each year.

Meanwhile, corporations are recording unprecedented profits, the near-trillion dollar military budget remains untouched in order to fund our five ongoing wars, and Wall Street continues to operate with its usual reckless greed, backed with the assurance that, regardless of how irresponsible they might behave, they have been deemed “too big to fail.”

It’s a pretty twisted state of affairs, but the masses still lie in a half-awake, half-asleep dreamlike state, convinced that the MSM practices genuine journalism, that there actually is a meaningful separation between the Republicans and Democrats, and that at least one of those parties actually represents the interests of ordinary Americans. And perhaps the worst part of it all is that, by some unfathomable mutation of logic and understanding, the most ignorant and politically uninformed Americans tend to be the most vocal, the most opinionated, the most unwilling to bend. How can ever hope to make any progress when we’re surrounded by people who actually believe corporations help America, that taxing the rich is a bad thing, that offering universal health care is an unthinkable evil?

The sad truth is that things will have to become far, far worse before we can have any hope of them getting better.

Das EFX - They Want EFX

Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Public Overwhelmingly Wants It: Why Is Taxing the Rich So Hard? | Economy | AlterNet

The Public Overwhelmingly Wants It: Why Is Taxing the Rich So Hard? | Economy | AlterNet


When even the New York Times, the supposed bleeding heart of the liberal media, is asking whether it’s more “perilous politically” to accept tax increases for 3 percent of households or benefit cuts for everyone, you’d assume that even Americans who aren’t rich are are opposed to raising taxes on those who are. But you’d be wrong: nearly three-quarters of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy. So why is raising taxes on the wealthy so hard—or why do we think it is?

The obvious answer is that rich people have political clout—but can it really be so simple? A growing mound of evidence suggests that while wealthy people’s preferences may not be the only factor in political decision-making, it’s a worrisomely important one. In a recent study, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels found that senators outright ignored the views of their least advantaged constituents while catering to the preferences of the wealthy. Princeton’s Martin Gilens has also found that policy changes reflect the preferences of the most affluent, while the preferences of poor and middle-income Americans have almost no bearing.

Politicial scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page have found that the preferences of foreign policymakers correspond more to the preferences of executives of multinational companies than to the general public. Page and Jeffrey Winters estimate that the top 10 percent of income earners hold about 90 percent of materially based political power, and that “each member of the top 1 percent averaged more than 100 times the power of a member of the bottom 90 percent; about 200 times if the index is calculated in terms of the more politically relevant non-home wealth.” These numbers are staggering, and should be seriously troubling to anyone who thinks political equality worth defending. Indeed, by Page and Winter’s definition of oligarchy as “the extreme political inequalities that necessarily accompany extreme material inequalities,” it’s pretty hard to argue that the United States isn’t an oligarchic society.

The simple fact of the matter is that the people who can afford to fund and engage in Beltway politics, from idea-generating to legislation-drafting, are disproportionately wealthy, so it’s difficult to suss out just how much of politicians’ deference to the preferences of the wealthy is responsiveness to the wealthy themselves as opposed to the general alignment of rich people’s interests with those of influential elites, organized special interest groups, business lobbies, and those of policymakers themselves.

Because of course, plenty of politicians are themselves wealthy—the median net worth of members of Congress is just under a million dollars. Being wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a shill for lower taxes—indeed, John Kerry and Jay Rockefeller, two of the richest senators, have advocated more progressive tax rates—but it certainly means that most representatives have a different perspective on economic matters than the average American. Indeed, the 10 richest members of Congress—supporters of progressive taxation or no—all voted to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, it’s no secret that as political campaigns have grown increasingly more expensive, campaign contributions have grown increasingly more important: the 2010 midterms cost $4 billion, and President Obama is already planning to spend a billion dollars on his bid for reelection. Meanwhile, citizens in the top income quarter provide nearly three-quarters of campaign contributions, while those in the lowest quintile account for just 2 percent. But as Bartels notes, campaign contributions don’t explain the whole story.

If anything, we probably understate the political influence of the rich. In part, that’s because we can’t quite comprehend the magnitude of economic inequality and the extent to which political power is correlated with it. The real numbers—like that the wealthiest 300,000 Americans received as much income as the bottom 150 million—sound too crazy to be true. As a result, proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy are so often dismissed as wild-eyed populist rhetoric—“soaking the rich”—rather than legitimate, reasonable policy prescriptions.

Furthermore, while we take for granted that the wealthy have more political power than the average citizen, we figure that the sheer numbers of middle class and low-income voters can outweigh the preferences of the rich in swaying public officials. Robert Reich, for example, has argued that the rich have the political power to block higher tax rates “only if we let them,” saying “here’s the issue around which Progressives, populists on the right and left, unionized workers, and all other working people who are just plain fed up ought to be able to unite.” And indeed, that kind of coalition-building is the basis for much progressive politics. But as the wealth and power of the most privileged Americans increases, it’s becoming harder and harder for the rest of us to keep up even in the aggregate.

So instead we’re getting caught in a negative feedback cycle: as the rich get richer and more powerful, policies are increasingly aligned with their interests, which increases inequality still further. Meanwhile, the middle and working classes are left with shrinking incomes and correspondingly less and less power to demand investment in a more equitable economy—and a broader tax base. Unions used to be able to counter the power of the wealthy, but their decline has left the average worker with little recourse. Instead of presenting an organized alternative to the views endorsed by the rich, average Americans are left to voice their political preferences through the vague format of an opinion poll. It’s no wonder that, as political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write, "America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many."

So while it’s absolutely true that the rich pay far more in income taxes than the rest of us—the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans pay 38 percent of income tax—that tiny fraction of the population also receives about 24 percent of income, accounts for about 34 percent of net worth, and holds 42.7 percent of financial wealth (net worth minus the value of one’s home). And those are statistics from before the crash—though there are only tentative estimates of current wealth distribution, many economists actually think it’s gotten more unequal.

Since average people’s wealth is largely tied up in their homes, the wealth of the median household has dropped an estimated 36 percent since the housing bubble popped, while the wealth of the top 1 percent has fallen a comparatively small 11 percent. As Bartels concludes,“the economic order of the contemporary United States poses a clear and profound obstacle to realizing the democratic value of political equality.” In other words, as long as economic inequality is as extreme as it is now, political equality will remain an ideal rather than a reality. We need to make this case over and over again—right now we’re in danger of drawing exactly the wrong lessons from the economic nightmare of the past few years.





In a Wall Street Journal piece a couple of weeks ago, former California economic forecaster Brad Williams states "We created a revenue cliff…We built a large part of our government on the state's most unstable income group." The people protesting with signs reading “We Love Jobs,” he suggested, were “missing the real point.” But it’s Williams who’s missing the point: what we really did was build a large part of our economy around an unstable income group and industry, and what we need to do is build an economy with a broader base and more evenly distributed resources.

Indeed, many arguments given against raising taxes are in fact reasons for decreasing the financial and political power of the wealthy. Worried that rich people will leave the state, or even the country, to avoid property or income tax? Don’t build an economy that depends on a small number of people who have the resources to leave sticking around. Worried that rich people won’t invest in their businesses or create new jobs if we tax them? Don’t build an economy that depends on a few wealthy people hiring the rest of us. Worried that rich people’s incomes are too volatile? Don’t build an economy so heavily dependent on financial markets. And make no mistake: although the Journal would have you believe the distribution of wealth is a naturally occurring phenomenon, state investment and regulation plays an essential role in the structure of the economy. If we want a more equal playing field, we can have it—but we need to start now.


Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150715/

Rich countries’ central banks are on divergent paths. So are their currencies

The Economist

THE Japanese yen has seen dramatic gyrations in its value since the earthquake and tsunami of March 11th. Immediate bets by speculators—or “sneaky thieves”, in the words of one Japanese official—that companies would have to repatriate funds to cover insurance payouts and reconstruction costs led its value to spike following the disaster. Concerned about the impact of a pricey currency on Japan’s post-disaster recovery, the central banks of the G7 countries flooded the market with more than $25 billion of the Japanese currency, sending the yen tumbling by nearly 3% in a single day. It kept on falling, breaching ¥85 to the dollar on April 6th.

The yen is now being buffeted by opposing forces. When risk perceptions among investors rise—for instance, after the announcement on April 12th that the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan was being upgraded to the same level of seriousness as the Chernobyl disaster—upward pressure is applied to the yen. Analysts reckon that currencies like the yen and the Swiss franc, which are traditionally seen as havens in times of trouble, appreciate whenever investors believe that the environment is riskier. Gold, which hit a record nominal high on April 11th, is another beneficiary of this “flight to safety”.

The yellow metal also benefits from fears that loose monetary policy and rising oil prices will unleash inflation. Such concerns, and the response to them by the world’s central banks, lie behind a second, downward source of pressure on the yen—the “carry trade”, in which investors borrow in low-yielding currencies to finance investments in higher-yielding ones.

.Related topicsEuropean economyEU economyEconomiesWorld marketsPublic finance
Many argue that the European Central Bank’s decision on April 7th to raise the policy rate in the euro area, and the prospect of further rises to come, has reinvigorated the carry trade. An interest-rate gap is opening between currencies like the dollar and the yen on the one hand, where monetary policy is likely to remain ultra-loose, and higher-yielding ones like the euro on the other. This gap may explain the strength of the euro, which has risen against the dollar in recent weeks despite endless euro-zone sovereign-debt worries (see chart).

It also explains the sustained appreciation of the Australian dollar, which has strengthened markedly since the start of the year. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was among the first rich-world central banks to start raising interest rates after virtually all countries had slashed them during the crisis. Australia’s deep economic linkages to booming China via its commodity exports mean that the RBA is unlikely to reverse its policy stance in the near future.

The Federal Reserve, too, is unlikely to change direction soon, which implies continued dollar weakness. The Fed’s daily index of the dollar’s value against major traded currencies fell to 69.92 on April 8th, the lowest level since May 23rd 2008. Its monthly index of the dollar’s value against major currencies fell in March for the fourth month in a row.

For Americans concerned about their country’s export prospects, the depressed value of the greenback ought to be good news. In February, the most recent month for which trade data are available, the dollar was 4.5% cheaper in real terms than a year earlier. But although America’s trade deficit did fall in February, it was only because exports fell less steeply than imports. That month’s deficit was still $6 billion higher than a year earlier, when Barack Obama announced a plan to double exports in five years. Achieving that will take more than a cheap currency.

Binary Star - Reality Check

The Grouch - Breath

Biggie Smalls - I Got A Story To Tell

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

USA and China

Current account balance

1 China $ 272,500,000,000

191 United States $ -561,000,000,000

What are you fighting for - Gemini

Def Poetry - Common - A Letter To The Law

Daniel Beaty - Knock Knock (Def Jam Poetry)



You have to watch the whole thing

Def Poetry: Sarah Kay

Talib Kweli - Def Poetry Jam

Sam Richards: A radical experiment in empathy

Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching

J Dilla - So Far To Go (Feat Common & D'Angelo)

MF Doom - Vomitspit

Nujabes - Counting Stars



Big ups, and R.I.P

Cise Star - Adrift

Grynch - All Right feat. Tunji



Some feel nice shit

Grynch - Jaded

Grynch - If Only Feat. Macklemore

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Good Will Hunting Park Scene (Quote)

Sean: I thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting.
Will: Yeah?
Sean: Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me...I fell into a deep peaceful sleep, and haven't thought about you since. Do you know what occurred to me?
Will: No.
Sean: You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about.
Will: Why thank you.
Sean: It's all right. You've never been out of Boston.
Will: Nope.
Sean: So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable— known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you. That could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it’s like to be her angel. To have that love for her, be there for forever. Through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term 'visiting hours' don't apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you— I don't see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared-shitless kid. But you're a genius Will, no one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me, because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fuckin' life apart. You're an orphan right?"
[Will nods]
Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life's been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.

Good Will Hunting Bar Scene (Quote)

Chuckie: All right, are we gonna have a problem?
Clark: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capitalist and...
Will: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Clark: [taken aback] Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of--
Will: ..."Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers. "Work in Essex County," Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us- you have any thoughts of- of your own on this matter? Or do- is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend- you pawn it off as your own- your own idea just to impress some girls? Embarrass my friend?
Will: See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Will: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.

Why shouldn't you work for the NSA? (Quote)

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.... that's a tough one. But I'll take a shot.
Say I'm working at N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hidin'- fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed.

Now the politicians are sayin', oh, "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot, just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there, takin' shrapnel in the ass; he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.

Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price, and of course the oil companies use the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices- a cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, o' course, maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis an' fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs; it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic.

So now my buddy's outta work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walkin' to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids, and meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.

So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.

Why shouldn't you work for the NSA?

What do you know?

My favorite movie: Good Will Hunting - Bar Scene

LEGO GBC 20 modules. Cool Stuff

Friday, April 15, 2011

Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.
by Sarah Lacy

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.

Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.

Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.

And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right.

So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Not surprisingly, another Internet bubble seemed the farthest thing from his mind. But, he argued, America is under the spell of a bubble of a very different kind. Is it an emerging markets bubble? You could argue that, Thiel says, but he also notes that with half of the world’s population surging to modernity, it’s hard to argue the emerging world is overvalued.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.

Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. Bush decree that student loan debt is the one thing you can’t wriggle away from by declaring personal bankruptcy, says Thiel. “It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage,” he says. “You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.”

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

And that ripples down to other private colleges and universities. At an event two weeks ago, I met Geoffrey Canada, one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” He talked about a college he advises that argued they couldn’t possible cut their fees for the simple reason that people would deem them to be less-prestigious.

Thiel is the first to admit some of this promised security is true. He himself grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class household and went to Stanford and Stanford Law School. He certainly reaped advantages, like friendships with frequent collaborators and co-investors Keith Rabois and Reid Hoffman. Today he ranks on Forbes billionaire list and has a huge house in San Francisco with a butler. How much of that was him and how much of that was Stanford? He doesn’t know. No one does.

But, he argues, that doesn’t mean it’s not an uncomfortable elitist dynamic that we should try to change. He compares it to a world in which everyone was buying guns to stay safe. Maybe they do need them. But maybe they should also examine some of the reasons life is so dangerous and try to solve those too.

Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

Two weeks ago, Thiel quietly invited 45 finalists to San Francisco for interviews. Everyone who was invited attended– no hysterical parents in sight. Thiel and crew have started to winnow the finalists down to the final 20. They’ll be announced in the next few weeks.

While a controversial program for many in the press, plenty of students, their parents and people in tech have been wildly supportive. Thiel received more than 400 applications and most were from very high-end schools, including about seventeen applicants from Stanford. And more than 100 people in his network have signed up to be mentors to them.

Thiel thinks there’s been a sea-change in the last three years, as debt has mounted and the economy has faltered. “This wouldn’t have been feasible in 2007,” he says. “Parents see kids moving back home after college and they’re thinking, ‘Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.’ We got surprisingly little pushback from parents.” Thiel notes a handful of students told him that whether they were selected or not, they were leaving school to start a company. Many more built tight relationships with competing applicants during the brief Silicon Valley retreat– a sort of support group of like-minded restless students.

Of course, if the problem Thiel sees with the higher education bubble is elitism, why were so many of the invitees Ivy League kids? Where were the smart inner-city kids let down by economic blight and a failing education system of a city like Detroit; the kids who need to be lifted up the most? Thiel notes it wasn’t all elites. Many of the applicants came from other countries, some from remote villages in emerging markets.

But the program has a clear bias towards talent, and like it or not, talent tends to be found in private universities. Besides, he’s not advocating that stopping out of school is for everyone any more than he’s arguing everyone should be an entrepreneur. But to start a new aspirational example– an alternative path– it makes sense to start with the people who have all the options. “Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else,” Thiel says. “We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top.”

That hints at another interesting distinction between the housing bubble and the education bubble: Class. The housing bubble was mostly a middle-class phenomenon. Even as much of the nation was wrapped up in it, there was a counter narrative on programs like CNBC and in papers like the Wall Street Journal pooh-poohing the dumb people buying all those condos in Florida. But with education, there’s barely any counter-narrative at all, because it is rooted in the most elite echelons of the upper class.

Thiel assumes this is why his relatively modest plan to get 20 kids to stop out of school for a few years is so threatening to a lot of the people who have the biggest megaphones to scream about it. “The people who are the most critical of this program are the ones who are most complacent with where the country is right now,” he says.


http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

Free Trade Solves Food Problem?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "850 million people worldwide were undernourished in 1999 to 2005" and the number of hungry people has recently been increasing widely.

There is a wide range of opinions as to why this problem is so persistent. Organizations such as Food First raise the issue of food sovereignty and claim that every country on earth (with the possible minor exceptions of some city-states) has sufficient agricultural capacity to feed its own people, but that the "free trade" economic order associated with such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank prevent this from happening. At the other end of the spectrum, the World Bank itself claims to be part of the solution to hunger, claiming that the best way for countries to succeed in breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger is to build export-led economies that will give them the financial means to buy foodstuffs on the world market.

Gabriel Teodros "No Label (Esma Remix)" Music Video

Eyedea - Shadows Have Shadows

Atmosphere-Smart Went Crazy

Atmosphere-Little Man

Atmosphere - Scapegoat

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Look At Me Now - Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes (Cover by Karmin)

Derren Brown NLP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg&feature=related

NLP at its finest. NLP explained.

Derren Brown - Playing With Money

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vz_YTNLn6w

Couldn't put the video on here.
But make sure you check it out.
The power of NLP.

Daily Quotations

I am going to start this "Daily Quotation" section of my blog

“Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil.”
- Unknown

Inside Google's Self-Driving Car



The Future?

Echo in Concert (A Happy Quadrotor New Year!)



Really cool little flying piece of technology

Winter Takes All - Common Market



You can't make shit like this

Deltron 3030 - 3030



The Funky Homosapien

MF DOOM - Madvillain - Accordion



Play yourself like an accordion

GRYNCH - "My Volvo"



Get a volvo just to bump this shit

Shad - Out of Love



I'm outta love

Shad - I Get Down



"I'm the biggest thing out of canada since pamelas double D's"

Grind Time Now Presents: E Ness vs Iron Solomon



One of the examples why Iron Solomon is a fucking beast

Grind Time Now presents: Mac Lethal vs Dirtbag Dan



R.I.P. Dan

Soul Khan Presents "Soulstice"

Soul Khan - Fahrenheit f Akie Bermiss (Official Video)

Atmosphere - The Best Day



To All My Friends

Sage Francis - "The Best Of Times"



Remember the old times?

Buck 65 - Centaur [Acoustic Version]

Buck 65 - Wicked and Weird

Classified - All About You

Classified - Hard To Be Hip Hop



It ain't that easy

Classified - "Oh... Canada"



What up Canada

SHAD - The Old Prince Still Lives At Home

Shad -- What We All Want



What do you want?

Shad - New School Leaders



You know if you are a real MC

Classic example of reverse psychology

Kanye West's Samples



Kanye is a superdoper producer!!

Kanye West - All Falls Down



Earlier Kanye

Common - GO!



Run back to your fantasy

Blackstar - Respiration ft. Common

Mos Def Mathematics



It's all about mathmatics

Pete Rock - A Little Soul



One of Pete's masterpiece

Pete Rock & CL Smooth - I'll Take You There



Soul Brother

Pete Rock & C. L. Smooth "They Reminisce Over You"



Hip Hop classics

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - Appreciate

DJ Jazzy Jeff ft. C.L. Smooth - All I Know

Heiruspecs - "Get Up"

Heiruspecs- "Heartsprings"

Heiruspecs - A Tiger Dancing

Heiruspecs - 5ves

Hieroglyphics - Soweto

Madvillain - All Caps

MF Doom - Rhymes Like Dimes

MF Doom - Doomsday

Monday, April 11, 2011

Valencia - "The Space Between"



Punk Rock when I used to play drum

Brother Ali - Take Me Home

Brother Ali - Uncle Sam Goddamn

MAESTRO FRESH WES - Let Your Backbone Slide

Common Sense - Take it Easy

Common - Resurrection

Common -- The 6th Sense feat. DJ Premier

Common feat. Lauryn Hill - Retrospect for Life

Shyheim - Shoalin Style

Common - I Used To Love H.E.R

Common - Faithful

Tupac feat. Money B and Shock G - I get around (Dirty, Best quality + Ly...

Macklemore - I Said Hey

Macklemore "THE TOWN" Official Music Video



You know how to get down in Seattle

Macklemore - Otherside



Seattle Rep.

Nas - The World Is Yours

Shing02 - Love You Like Water

Shadez Of Brooklyn - Change

Jazz Liberatorz - When The Clock Ticks Feat. J.Sands

Grind Time Now Presents: QP vs Soul Khan



Soul Khan baby

Grind Time Presents: Real Deal & Fresco vs Dirtbag Dan & Soul Khan



Somehow four white guys battling are much more fun.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Nas - Memory Lane

UBC IS FUCKING AWESOME

Blue Scholars "Joe Metro"

Tobacco Road - Common Market

Winter Takes All - Common Market

Muneshine - Gotta Feeling (feat. D-Sisive & Shad)

Shad - Now A Daze

SHAD - Brother (Watching)

Madvillain - All Caps

Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

Large Professor - The Mad Scientist

Shad - Yaa I Get It (Video)

Shad - Yaa I Get It

I get it

(Verse 1)
Maybe I'm not big cuz i don't blog or twitter
Dawg, I'm bitter
I didn't have it on the flop, but i'll win it on the river
Longest winter got me seasoned
Now I'm a non-beginner meanin'
Not yet a veteran but nevertheless
Pick the drug or the rapper man im better than Meth
Dope as either or ether the drug or the jay diss
I would say dope as reefer but that would be too basic
And overplayed, overslaved won't complain though
The games been good to a young'un outta London so i'm grateful
Not just for the fundin' or for the fans
But for the chance to say sumthin, it wasn't in the plans at first
It was sad days, halfway to graduation
Cap and black cape making job applications
I hate the catch phrase "Canadian rap sensation"
Shad K don't have chains, big as the Appalachians
But since the label put me out like ash trays to smoke cats
I have gained some accolades and admiration
It's grown since then
Though that second album man was so old-school
Folks called it old Princeton
Im still penny pinchin it was so fine
My bills gonna hold still as pig skin
When its field goal time, now
That being said it's still 09
And i still got alot of credit I still owe 9
But they charge no interest, So i pay no interest
Meaning I pay no mind, If there ain't no fine, I'm fine
I hope I ain't boring yall rappin bout rap
But the only thing i love more then rappin is nappin
and I know nobody want to hear me rap about that
You want the underdog spazzin on the track

I get it...

(Verse 2)
Well my name ain't Lil' Wayne
Gretzky, But yall know better than to check me
In the game, my whole record's like a technique
Tellin' referees to peek at the press seats a sec please
DROP YOUR GLOVES OJ *haha*
I knock you into next week make you get teeth replaced
Can't use plates what you get to eat
Gives new meaning to tube steak
Like watching you breast feed doomsday
Move on these squares like a chesspiece, I'm deadly
Even if you're Supernatural , I'm Craig G
Jesse James meets Jet Li
Killing these fakes at break neck speed
I make your head steam like a pet peeve
Get your neck squeezed till the breath leaves
Got the finesse and the prestige
And more mac(k) then 10 tech geeks dissing XP
Best in the league of vets like ex-marines highest pedigree
When i get the beat its hereditary
Genetic freak poetically
One-ten degree Memphis heat spittin steadily
Medically decapitate this rapper's face
Still won't get ahead of me
I'm the best I'll ever be (Yeah!)
The cats out the bag, the new Shad's out
Now they spell it S.H.A.D.D. the way i spaz out
I don't bad mouth but i'll quickly put down the cat if he bit me like
Roy's boy Sigfried, Welcome to the big leagues
Where they pitch heat, still on a hit streak
My rappin's like battin' .360
*Hey Griffey slow down do something less cerebral*
I ain't big enough yet
*I gotta keep impressin people*
I get it , guess its a lesser evil
Weapons lethal as a Desert Eagle
Now my lethal weapon won(one)
You don't get a sequel

I Get it...

(verse 3)
No eviction notice still i'm homeless on a poets mission
Not that I'm a fiend stealing bass like Otis Nixon
Livin' on the street now i'm livin' on the road consistent
Making fans multiply like a coefficient
Record sales im making low comission but the visions mine
They don't change my record like pitchin' a no decision
Guitar playing emcee Yea i'm known for spittin'
while i'm tappin on my Fender like cars in a slow collision
The precision of my flows in terms of tone and diction
Is akin to that of the old masters of prose and fiction
So many sold their souls , my sole ambition's
To hold solace so calm and bright as a solar system
I'm from a soul tradition; heads think I'm going to prison
Cause I'm talking bout this rap sheet with the most conviction
The most commitment, no other pro is so proficient
The coldest spittin', Rakim north pole edition
LISTEN !