First Intentionally Listened-to Tracks of 2014

This was a bit intentional.  I knew that too much modern crap would be pimped, so I stuck a headphone in my right ear and thought to myself, "What do I, myself really want to hear first for this year?"  So, I abused my tablet and my network to pull together what I knew I personally wanted to hear first.
I figure only the first 10 tracks count, so that's what I'll limit myself to historically.
(Track names are in bold, to be easier to read)


1.)  Slash - Obsession (from the 1996 weirdo movie "Curdled") (Just the instrumental)
2.)  The Birthday Massacre - Pins and Needles
3.)  The Hush Sound - Wine Red  (the tablet had a lack of content, duh, so I needed time to go searching for other good things.  In spite of this, the track was on the tablet for good reason.)
3.)  Rank 1 - Airwave (Sunset Remix)   (Airwave is such an awesome track, regardless of form.)
4.)  Slash - Obsession (may only be Slash doing some impressive things on a Spanish guitar, but it beats the pants off of Jason Drulo (sp?) and the #RockinEve playlist)
[please don't make me drag out the average replayers to counter the televised crap]  [I have an mp3 player with better content]
Fine, I'll drag out the mp3 player.  Dammit.
5.)  Saliva - Ladies and Gentlemen
6.)  Geto Boys - Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangster  (came up randomly, but it still beat the media-chosen crap)
7.) "Weird Al" Yankovic - Albuquerque (11 minutes, 23 seconds, worth every second) (intentional, not randomly hit)
8.)  Overclocked Remix - Final Fantasy 6 (3 US)  - Dirt Devil  (look it up.  It is spiffy)
9.)  Shark Island - Father Time (from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  Hasn't lost much value since then.)
10.)  [gotta make this good...]  Def Leppard (Hysteria) - Pour Some Sugar On Me (THE first track I ever heard via CD playback)

It may be a bit random (intentionally).  But, when compared against the mass-media produced end-of-the-year, "this is the first thing you're going to hear this year" crap, I'd say my list slamdances on the grave of their playlist.  Mass media needs to quit trying to tailor itself.  When it does, it just looks that much more foolish.

Fergie, Fallout Boy, That chick that used to be Hanna Montana, Jenna [something] (that may have been a porn star at some point), of these I care not at all out of some specific (and probably small) context.  Don't force me to hear that crap just after the new year changeover.  You pull that crap and I'll both tune you out and hate you for it.


Random Rotation Honorable Mentions:  (timestamps = when noticed and/or typed)  ((Some skipping may be occurring))
01:37  Republica  - Ready To Go
01:39  Amy Grant - It Takes a Little Time
01:45  Vengaboys vs ATB - Shalala Lala Ibiza Trance (Alice DeeJay Remix)  [Good luck finding that track, not sure where/when I found it]
01:48  Crash Test Dummies - How Does a Duck Know? [Awesome track]   [also oddly seems to be the one time-unmodified one in the bunch, since I've got a +/- 5% speed and +/- 10% speed version both in the directory]
01:53  AC/DC  - Thunderstruck
01:57 t.A.T.u vs. Rammstein - Ondo I To Zhe (Long Repeat Remix)  [Very good happenstance to get this track and its siblings]
02:08  Chumbawamba - Mary, Mary
02:11  Sophie B. Hawkins - As I Lay Me Down
02:13  Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around  (The man (Cash) wasn't wrong...)
02:17  Pidgeonhed - Battle Flag (Lofidelity Allstars Remix)

Sleep:
I'm on record for what I permitted/required myself to listen to.  If you're not on the list, you don't necessarily suck.  You're just in a really fierce competition.  If you were tapped by the mass-media to play something or sing something for the waving in of 2014, there's some high probability that some people missed your "contribution" entirely.

[edit] Came back and undid the coloring, which really didn't work for this blog's background, and instituted some far more simple formatting.

Uninstall Thursday Week 2

Well, let's get at it.

Monopoly Slots -- It just got boring.  Spend all your money, wait for more free money, spend that, wait for more free money, hope you level up, blah, blah, blah.  Nah.  I have more important things to do, like maybe nurture my Sims and go ghost hunting some more.

Castle Clash -- Just like so many similar games.  Fun for a day or two, then gets boring and neglected.

Game Dev Story -- Many rave about it.  But, I've seen this type of game before.  I lose interest after about an hour.

ttorrent -- What was I thinking?  "I'm going to run torrents from my tablet, over wifi, using up my limited storage and running out my battery faster.  Not to mention that I'm also going to be fighting my NAS for upload bandwidth when I'm at home."  No.  I'm really not.
µTorrent -- Same problem.

MonsterCrafter -- An interesting concept, but I don't quite "get it".  And it isn't as fun as GunCrafter which uses some of the nifty features of a tablet/phone for aiming and stuff.

Zombie Highway -- Another app that's good for about 15 minutes the first play, maybe another 10 minutes of replay a couple of times, and then there's not much reason to come back.  I guess if you're competitive with yourself, then you'll keep striving for that longer distance, more kills, more goals accomplished, better car, blah, blah, blah.  I just don't feel that particular need, I guess.  It does make good use of the gyroscope for steering-wheel-like control.

Riptide GP  Shiny, polished, gyroscopic controls, competitive computer opponents.  It's just not my thing.  Sometimes I like the concept of boat racing games, but my reflexes really aren't what they once were, so I leave the more twitchy stuff for the kids.

Next week, I really need to make an effort to go through some of these free-apps-of-the-day I installed and never opened and see what they're all about.  I've probably got a good bit more dead wood laying about that I can get rid of.

Uninstall Thursday

Most of these were probably picked up from Amazon's appstore as "free app of the day"

Monsters Ate My Condo.  It was fairly well crafted, but too twitchy for me.

Hambo.  Kind of interesting as a puzzle/kill-the-enemy type game, but eventually got too hard, and I lost interest.

Float'n'split tablet keyboard.  The resizability to be able to get more visible screen is nice, but means the keys get smaller (harder to tap).  It just doesn't seem as useful as the Hacker's Keyboard (which is free).

Tiny Death Star.  After a couple weeks, it got REALLY boring, and I only wanted to bother looking at it once or twice a day.  The amount time it took to stock many things in the difference facilities never lined up and many times was just too short.  I don't want a game where I have to babysit it for an hour 2 or 3 times a day to play it.  When one thing takes one minute to stock, but the next store has something that takes 3 minutes to stock, and another has something that takes 5 minutes to stock, do you flip out of the game after each event, or set all 3 to stock, then flip out of the game, wait 5 minutes and come back to stock or do you just stare at the screen mindlessly for all 5 minutes, using the elevator to move VIPs that apparently don't know how to use the elevator themself while waiting for the different things to get stock?

Simpsons Tapped Out.  Similar but different from Sims FreePlay. It suffered some of the same timing issues as Tiny Death Star but on a different scale.  And too much of it just seemed geared towards "Hey, buy donuts so you can do things faster!"  

Obama's Press Conference Stirs the Buzz

According to Yahoo Buzz:

Chip Reid asked a tough question about Obama's controversial budget. Reid asked if the budget, which will increase the debt to "$7 trillion over the next 10 years," is a case of passing problems onto the next generation. Obama responded that investments need to be made to "meet our growth targets that put us on a pathway to growth." He then pointed out that the critics of his budget have yet to bring forth an alternative.

Classic bait and switch. "We have to do what I'm proposing because noone else is coming up with a better solution."
Wrong! The better solution, which you IGNORED was to do your job, which DOES NOT INCLUDE micromanaging or "fixing" the "problems" with the economy.
We're now at least 6 months behind because the failures that should have occurred haven't happened. So the businesses that are competent haven't been able to step up and fill in the gaps where the incompetents already dropped the ball (which they're continuing to do, by the way).
Many people are really beginning to see the fruits of your micromanagement, and they're realizing that your system rewards incompetence. While this makes incompetents quite happy, it makes competent people realize that there is no benefit to sharing that competence with the rest of society.

You can not expect success while you reward failure.
What you feed, grows.

If you want success, then reward it by letting the successful see the failures fail, and quit handicapping the successful with more regulations.
If you want failure, keep rewarding it. The successful will quit, because they realize there is no point.

AIG employees starting to return bonuses, CEO says

According to Yahoo Finance:

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he wants legislation to give the federal government vast new powers over financial institutions like AIG to protect the public.

This is NOT a good thing. Government is not supposed to control private business. This business should have failed. Why did government step in and prevent it? THAT is NOT government's job.

Obama, speaking to reporters at the White House, said the powers would be similar to those now exercised over banks by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It would be part of the administration's broader package of new finance regulatory steps, he said.

Insurance isn't financial. Am I missing a step?

Since AIG is an insurance company and not a bank, it is not subject to the same oversight.

Well, somebody else connected those dots too. Bonus points for them.

"We've got a big mess that we're having to clean up," the president said.

YOU don't have to clean it up. It's NOT YOUR JOB. If you want to run THAT business, then become the president of THAT company and quit trying to be the president of THAT company by using your President of the US hat.

"Nobody here drafted those contracts" that resulted in the bonuses being paid out to AIG employees, he added.

No, you just bailed 'em out.

Obama also defended his administration -- and specifically Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- against questions about its handling of the AIG fiasco.

"Nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG and allowing themselves to put the economy at risk by some of the outrageous behavior that they were engaged in," Obama said.

Now, however, "the buck stops with me," he said. "And my goal is to make sure that we never put ourselves in this kind of position again."

One more time, that's NOT your job.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the Financial Services Committee, demanded that the company submit to Congress a list "of people who received the bonuses, whether they paid them back or not." If the names were not provided "without restriction," Frank warned, he would ask the committee to vote to subpoena them.

Liddy said he would "comply with the law:" but was "concerned about the safety of our people."

He said he would give the names of the bonus recipients only on the basis of confidentiality. He read aloud threats that AIG employees had received, including one that suggested that all bonus recipients should be "executed with piano wire around their necks."

Another one read: "If the government can't do this properly, we the people will take it in our own hands and see that justice is done. I'm looking for all the CEOs' names, kids, where they live, etc."

And now another guy wants to do things that aren't his job. Government's job was to leave things alone. And government failed. Big surprise.

Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, the senior Republican on the subcommittee, complained that the administration still has no strategy for disentangling itself from the insurance giant.

"Part of me wants to say to some of the loudest critics, 'What did you expect and why weren't you asking more questions before?' I would argue that the real outrage now is the $170 billion of taxpayer money that's been pumped into this company and to what effect," he said.

Finally someone on Capitol Hill that actually has some sense.

The retention payments -- ranging from $1,000 to nearly $6.5 million -- were put together in early 2008, long before then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Liddy to take over the company. Liddy, the retired former chief of Allstate Insurance Co., is not getting a bonus and is drawing only $1 a year in salary.

"No one knows better than I that AIG has been the recipient of generous amounts of governmental financial aid. We have been the beneficiary of the American people's forbearance and patience," he said. But he also said that "we have to continue managing our business as a business -- taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees."

The company started doing what companies do when it's time for them to die. Trying to reanimate them, zombie style, by injecting them with misappropriated taxpayer dollars IS NOT A SOLUTION.

The clamor over compensation overshadowed AIG's weekend disclosure that it had paid out more than $90 billion of the federal aid to foreign and domestic banks, including some that had multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts of their own.

Well, one thing this administration has shown in the first 3 months. They're extremely efficient at wasting our taxpayer dollars... and getting NOTHING in value in return for it.

Great job there Mr. President Guy.

In case anyone can't tell, I'm pretty pissed. Though how you could miss that, I'll never know.

Obama berates AIG and vows to try to block bonuses

According to Yahoo News:

Joining a wave of public anger, President Barack Obama blistered insurance giant AIG for "recklessness and greed" Monday and pledged to try to block it from handing its executives $165 million in bonuses after taking billions in federal bailout money.

Well, gee. Why are you so surprised. If they had been operating properly, they wouldn't have needed a bailout in the first place, would they?

"How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?" Obama asked. "This isn't just a matter of dollars and cents. It's about our fundamental values."

And you, by pushing the bailout in the first place are helping to show that the fundamental values of this country are cracked. Quit acting shocked. And quit trying to "help".

The bonuses could contribute to a backlash against Washington that would make it tougher for Obama to ask Congress for more bailout help — and jeopardize other parts of the recovery agenda that is dominating the start of his presidency.

Good. This is a sign that some americans are starting to wake up and see that the bailout wasn't a good idea.

Thus, the president and his top aides were working hard to distance themselves from the insurer's conduct, to contain possible political damage and to try to bolster public confidence in his administration's handling of the broader economic rescue effort.

Too late. You've already paid the piper. Now you have to listen to the tune.

"This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed," Obama declared.

If you didn't know this already, then I feel sorry for us all.

One reason that the AIG bonus giveaway is such a compelling story — and a politically troubling one for Obama if not neutralized — is that it offers a simple story line that appears to sum up ways in which the federal bailouts have gone awry.

"Never should have been", you mean.

Bailout steps for AIG totaling over $170 billion since September have effectively left the federal government with an 80 percent stake in the faltering insurance giant

Congratulations. You bought a load of crap. Learn from your mistake. STOP!

Still, those surveyed generally gave the president favorable marks for doing as much as he can to try to fix the economy, and few blame him for making the economy worse.

Ok, maybe not enough of us are learning yet. Too bad really.

However, Obama officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows to denounce the insurer. And even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke weighed in, saying on CBS' "60 Minutes" that the AIG bailout angered him the most and that he "slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG." Still, he said a collapse of AIG would have wreaked havoc on the global economy.

That's how most governments explain their doing of stupid things. "If we don't do anything things will be far worse." Get over yourself. You don't even know how to run a government, what makes you think you can run an insurance company too?

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called the bonuses "appalling" and said he hoped "the administration gets the message from the taxpayers on this issue."

We can hope. But I'm not holding my breath for any sanity out of this administration.

How to Blow Your Credit Limit -- Without Spending

Well, according to Yahoo Finance:

If you haven't had the credit limit cut on your credit card recently, count yourself lucky. Risk-averse card issuers are getting slash happy. And while many cardholders gripe that such cuts slice razor-close to their balance amounts, for an unfortunate few the cuts go far deeper: below what they currently owe.

Which sounds like a dishonorable tactic to me. But I guess it stands to reason that a dishonorable industry that is intent on tricking people into getting into debt and then making them comfortable with the situation so that they stay there permanently, would resort to undercutting the people's outstanding balance to cause "over limit" fees (when the people have enough trouble making the base payment already).

It's too bad that with all the "learning" going on in america recently, with so many people cutting back on spending across the board, that most still haven't learned that credit is a bad thing, and not a good thing.

And this is why the bailout was such a bad idea to begin with. The solution to the system is not to fix the credit system, inserting more money for people to borrow, so they can spend more.
The solution is for the credit system to become unworkable. For the entire credit house of cards to collapse under it's own weight (as it is doing if the brain-dead government would get out of it's way).

Once upon a time, in this country, there was little to no credit, and the country was prosperous.
People bought what they NEEDED, and they did so with cash. Though even more often, they constructed, grew, or traded for what they needed.
It wasn't until the advent of easy credit that too many people started using illusionary money (credit) to buy crap that they wanted (didn't need, thought they needed, but really didn't) that things really started to go wrong.
Your credit score is NOT an asset. It's a value of how reliable you are at paying back "money" that someone else says you owe.

They (the creditors) knew that they weren't providing you a legitimate service. They knew that they were making a gamble that you would fall for their illusion and provide them a permanent free lunch, or dinner, or car, or house, etc.

I say that the time has come for the free lunches to end. The house of cards needs to collapse.

Citigroup shares tumble below $1

According to Yahoo Finance:

Citigroup, a Dow component, fell more than 13 percent to an intraday low of $0.98, hammered by continued fears over the bank's health and ability to avert nationalization.

Bad choices hurt. Can't say that I'm surprised by this.

If I thought there was any chance of them preventing nationalization, and/or then pulling themselves out of the toilet by themself, I might say that now is a good time to invest. But I know better.

The investors know that an ill wind blows (mostly out of Washington D.C.) and they're doing the smart thing... running away as fast as they can.

Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S.

According to Yahoo News:

The U.S. is no longer the only land of opportunity. If we don't want the immigrants who have fueled our innovation and economic growth, they now have options elsewhere. Immigrants are returning home in greater numbers. And new research shows they are returning to enjoy a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of being close to family and friends.

It's not surprising that immigrants (the legal kind) are deciding to leave. And I can't blame them. Where I would wish almost nothing but failure and deportment on the illegal immigrants, I wish nothing but the best for the legal immigrants that are deciding to return home.

To the legal immigrants, I say, I can't blame you for leaving. America doesn't deserve your skills. If those skills can benefit your home country, then my blessings on you.

And to anyone that would say that blessing them to go home is bad for America, I call hypocrisy. People keep complaining that there aren't enough jobs. What better way to give Americans jobs than to have openings created in skilled positions?

Oh, that's right. You can't teach Americans new skills easily. Something about old dogs and new tricks...

Dow falls to lowest level in 11 years

According to Yahoo News:

Investors' despair about financial companies and the recession have brought the Dow Jones industrial average to another unwanted milestone: its first drop below 7,000 in more than 11 years.

(everyone with me now) Well, DUH!
Of course the investors are looking at what the government is doing and saying to themselves "Screw you guys. I'm taking my toys and going somewhere else."
The investors continue to see nothing new coming out of Washington, so why should they think that anything is going to get any better, causing them to have reason to stay?
Isn't the definition of insanity "doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result" (paraphrased).
If the investors keep seeing the same tax and spend concept coming out of Washington, and the investors, being some of the largest "income earners" in the country, a group continually referred to as "the rich", who "can afford more taxes", continue to be threatened with more taxes, more government spending, what sane reason would any of these investors want to keep their money invested in the corrupt system?
"Tax the rich" really means "tax the investors", which is a great way to convince the investors that your country is a great place to NOT invest.

If you want to destroy the economy further, keep threatening to "raise the taxes only on the rich".
If you want to destroy jobs, instead of create them, keep talking about how the rich aren't paying their share.

If you want to destroy the country, keep punishing the rich with harsher and harsher taxes and more regulations on business. They'll stop investing. They'll close or reduce their businesses because they're tired of your pedantic rules. They'll continue to move their factories to countries that either don't bend them over and rape them so hard, or don't rape them at all (what a concept). They'll continue to shuffle their hard-earned money out of this country, instead of reinvesting in america (lack of caps intentional). The rich know how to "pass the buck". The harder you try to rape them, the worse things get for the working people.,

If you want to help the working man, quit punishing his employers. Quit punishing the people that invest in the company he works for. QUIT PUNISHING THE RICH.

Until america learns this lesson, it's doom is sealed.


On a totally unrelated note, I just noticed that it's called the "Dow Jones industrial average". I didn't know that america still had any industry left.