08:35 – Our stock of chemistry kits is getting perilously low, so I’ll take some time today to build more.
I knew this month was going to be difficult for Barbara. It’s her first birthday and her first Christmas without her dad, and she worries about her mom. Things are also hectic at work for her at the moment, so she’s under a lot of stress on all fronts. I wish I could think of something to do to ease things for her.
Geez, take her out to a nice dinner or a weekend away somewhere. Or both. That *is* a lotta stress at a stressful time of year.
“Analyst: Don’t expect a la carte cable TV anytime soon”
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/12/analyst-dont-expect-a-la-carte-cable-tv-anytime-soon/
“The reason your cable bill keeps going up is because it subsidizes a lot of channels you’ll never watch. So-called unbundling would let customers build the TV services they really want, but would also mean a lot less money for content providers and the middlemen that provide access to them.”
“But according to a new report by an analyst with Needham & Co., this is a dream that likely will never become reality. According to a story in the Los Angeles Time, unbundling of cable channels would result in an economic implosion in which many current cable channels would vanish.”
Sounds like how the government would run cable television. Five good channels and 500 others (100 of those would be civil obedience shows like cooking shows).
Another BC puppy or rescue dog for Barbara for Christmas?
Cable TV is a who-cares now and becoming more so every month. In addition to all its other problems, demographics is the final nail. Young people don’t care about cable TV at all. They get all their video off the Internet. It reminds me of 10 or 15 years ago, when Cadillac discovered that the age of their average buyer was increasing at a rate of more than one year per year.
As we discussed not long ago, the only thing that’s keeping cable TV from imploding is live sports. If the NFL, NBA, MLB, and other sports corporations get their acts together and start going direct to customers, cable TV dies quickly.
Another BC puppy? Surely you jest? I can barely keep up with Colin.
I’d love to get Barbara out of town for a long weekend, but she’d just worry about her mother the whole time. Maybe after the first of the year I can convince her to take a few days and go up to the mountains to scout out the Boone area.
Derek Lowe has mentioned your books again.
“If the NFL, NBA, MLB, and other sports corporations get their acts together and start going direct to customers, cable TV dies quickly.”
If only. The NFL is showing signs of getting ready to do something; I’m not happy with what they’ve got so fah. They’ll have to do MUCH better. If not, c’est la vie; I don’t care all that much. MLB might be OK, but again, I don’t care a lot; we have minor-league baseball up here that is much more fun. Also minor-league football and hockey and basketball. I need to get off my ass and outdoors anyway.
That long weekend idea in the mountains sounds great, but it also sounds like you oughta do something now, before Christmas hits. Any decent restaurants around there? Can you cook? I mean, besides chem lab experiments? Cook up a nice dinner at home for her?
Yeah, I wish Derek’d get his own books out, which I’d recommend sight-unseen.
As Derek, says, don’t trust an organic chemist who can’t cook.
Did you notice the Derek is working on a book? It’s supposed to be 250 articles of key events in the history of chemistry.
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/11/21/the_chemistry_book.php
So are you confessing to be an organic chemist who refuses to cook or an untrustworthy one?
Don’t trust what the so-called ‘industry analysts’ say about cable; they have not been right since the very beginning when they helped cable peddle that tiresome lie that there would be no commercials on cable, because you paid a subscription fee.
All of broadcasting and the media is in financial turmoil. It is because successful properties are supporting losing ones, instead of letting the losers die. That means the cost of the successful enterprises is higher than it should be, because they are forcing you to pay for the losers.
It is really hard to predict what the sports originators will do, because they are skating on thin ice. Here is what is happening. Team owners are paying increasingly exorbitant fees to players and managers which they can only afford with revenue from TV. TV and cable are being forced to pay increasing fees that are the only reason teams can pay those staggering salaries. BUT, the audiences are going down, putting a real squeeze on those broadcasters carrying the games. At some point, the ice breaks, and the originator/carrier cannot afford to lose more money than they already are. Moreover, if the teams and leagues set up shop to broadcast themselves, they are automatically unbundled. They can no longer extort excessive profit-deficit fees from the broadcasters/cable companies, who are only able to afford paying because they sock you with fees for channels you do not care about, do not want, and do not watch. Thus the thin ice the sports teams and leagues are on. They are damned by broadcasters who will eventually stop carrying them because there is no money to be made carrying them because of the excessive contract fees; and they are damned if they go it all alone, because they are automatically unbundled and will only be able to extract fees from people who actually want to watch.
This scenario is true all over the world—for soccer in Europe and cricket in India. Teams are spending big only because they are currently able to force the broadcasters to lose money on their programming. Eventually that house of cards collapses. That is probably the point when teams and leagues will have no choice but to go it alone, and the point where player and manager salaries start going down.
The cable industry is flagging far more seriously than you hear. My friends working in production are seeing cuts happening everywhere, and the companies they work for are losing production contracts left and right as projects are cancelled. Newspapers are failing worse than the public knows, too. Both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times are bleeding to death. Tribune has just announced it is going to cut loose its newspaper division (which includes the LA Times) and remain only in broadcasting. Who is going to step in and subsidize those papers to keep them going? Not Tribune’s TV profits anymore.
Cable delivery as a business is failing. Your big Internet bill is paying to defray some of their losses.
Sounds like how the government would run cable television. Five good channels and 500 others (100 of those would be civil obedience shows like cooking shows).
Now why would that be? Let’s say government owned the cables/fiber. Cable channels pay them a wholesale cost to be included on their lines. You pay the cable channel for the key to unlock their channel—if, and only if, you want it. That is the very definition of unbundled. You sure ain’t getting unbundled from private enterprise delivery, are you?
The point of that article was that you are not going to get a la carte cable or satellite anytime soon. BTW, DirecTV is still increasing subscribers but Dish is not (DTV has way more HD channels). Cable and Satellite are going to keep their channel packages until the cows come home. Things won’t change until the majority of people get their channels over the intertubes. I think that DTV has 20 million subscribers, Dish has 14 million, cable has 40 million and at&t/verizon have ??? million. Those numbers have got to significantly drop before the systems change.
It was 80 F here in the Land of Sugar this morning (and felt like 80% humidity) but we are at 50 F now and dropping rapidly. The front blew in at 930 am and dropped the temperature by 10 F in less than a minute. Nice! We are not going to be back in the 60s until late next week.
50 and dropping, Lynn??!! We’re at 56 right now here, with big wind gusts off the lake. Scattered rain sprinkles. Not to worry; we’ll be back into the 30s and 20s tomorrow; this is an anomaly for early December in northern Vermont.
But mos def NOT Indian Summuh; we need a solid week of hard frost first, then a few days to a week of much higher than normal temps and sunshine. Doesn’t happen most years here.
Mrs. OFD’s plane is now two hours late, again, and now she won’t get in until 8:30 (original ETA was for 5 PM, then 6 PM, and now it’s this. And it was snowing in New Mexico when she left earlier today. (Albuquerque) Dinner tonight at MIL’s is now a rain check, and just as well as daughter is cramming hard for McGill exams. MIL is astonished that it’s taking six months for Fed background check crap for a lousy IT drone job here.
Back to the housework and project grind this next week while she’s in Morristown, NJ, where my first wife and I both worked twenty years ago. Tempus fugit.
30°F and sleet right now. It is the same weather system you are getting Lynn.
http://image.weather.com/images/maps/current/curwx_720x486.jpg
Yeah, if Direct subscriber numbers are going up, then it is at somebody else’s loss, because total numbers are decreasing and have been since about 2009. I do have several friends who have tried several different methods of getting TV delivery, and they now swear by satellite. They say it never goes down, like cable does during the key parts of some program or sports game, and the quality is noticeably better on big screen TV’s than is cable.
Although I hate to say it, because Michael Bloomberg is one of my least favorite people on the planet, Bloomberg biz news is about the most accurate, along with the Financial Times. I get TV industry new from them and RSS feeds for “Cable Television News” and “Broadcasting and Cable”. Every single issue of the latter two has had grim news for cable for quite some time.
Comcast is now trying to buy out Time-Warner. The only reason to do this is so the current top level management can escape with golden parachutes, and the next generation of execs is left with the reality of how poorly both of them are actually doing.
I have a big job in Indy tomorrow, and am trying to decide whether to make the 60 minute drive tomorrow morning, or tonight and stay somewhere near the job. We are right on the tail edge of the storm, as you can see from the above (dead center of Indiana). Chicago is getting nothing, according to my daughter.
We’re long done with cable and regular broadcast tee-vee here, eight years and counting; I have an active indoor antenna that can pull in three PBS stations from across the lake in the Vampire State, and I just hooked up a Roku 3, which brings in some more channels, but I have not been impressed so fah. We don’t love tee-vee enuff to spring for satellite.
Looks like more streaming here, and more with radio and books.
I live across town from RBT. It’s been warmish and humid all day, gray and overcast with an off-and-on heavy mist. It reminded me of Houston in January.
The news tonight said 7/8 of the country was affected by the cold weather system. They made a big deal of Dallas dropping 50 degrees in 24 hours. Our current Weather Underground forecast says “Tomorrow is forecast to be Much Warmer than today,” showing a high tomorrow of 74/low of 54. Then Sunday’s is 35/34 with ice pellets. That DOES make me feel like I’m living in Dallas again.
Jerry Pournelle posted this…
”
Lamarck and Lysenko
experience modifies genes
hi Jerry,
This article about passing an aversion to smell onto offspring shows some of the first evidence that evolution is not completely random.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25156510
Jeff Marshall
This may be the most important genetic data since the discovery of DNA. It is nothing less than evidence for some of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The last important advocate of that was Lysenko. If acquired characteristics can be inherited, then the mechanism of evolution changes dramatically.
… …
We have certainly not heard the last of this discovery.”
————————————————————————————–
I noted that it’s more likely that the DNA of the parent was altered by the
“fragrance” solvent (a ketone) than by the learning experience.
Not much snow, but enough to make work getting out this morning. Worst thing about this storm is that it is supposed to stall today, just after it past, and start moving north again over the area. We dropped from about 60°F Thu morning to 24 by last night.
Off to a full day of recording legal wranglings.
OFD wrote:
“That long weekend idea in the mountains sounds great, but it also sounds like you oughta do something now, before Christmas hits. Any decent restaurants around there?”
Ask and ye shall receive:
http://www.danlbooneinn.com/
Chuck wrote:
“This scenario is true all over the world—for soccer in Europe…”
I’ve been following English soccer fairly closely since 1977 and have noticed the insane growth in players “wages”. It used to be that when a popular player retired he was given a “benefit match”. Another team of similar stature would play a “friendly” game against the retiree’s team, with most or all of the profits going to the retiree for his years of devoted service. You don’t hear much about that nowadays, they don’t generally need the dough. In the Seventies you didn’t see advertising on the players “strips” or uniforms, at least on the televised games. Now advertising is everywhere. When my team, Arsenal, moved their home ground from Highbury to “Emirates” it was part of an advertising deal. The clubs need every penny to keep their greedy players satisfied.
Lynn wrote:
“Another BC puppy or rescue dog for Barbara for Christmas?”
I tried contacting Mr Barkley telepathically to see if he’d like to move to NC, but he was fast asleep and I couldn’t get through:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f12mysqw83ggn0n/1472786_10151787666507826_558275370_n.jpg
Mr Barkley sure does like sleeping:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qpdscmj30999kts/1471939_10151783170967826_1976982380_n.jpg
Tell them to enjoy it while they can. Soon that puppy will be wanting to work all day every day. If they don’t provide enough work to keep him busy and wear him out, he’ll figure out something on his own, and believe me they don’t want him doing that.
I’ve warned them.
Apparently their niece (7 yo) and nephew (10 yo) came over one day and gave Barkley enough exercise to make him want a nice long sleep. I’ll be living nearby soon and I might get roped into keeping Barkley worn out too.
Seriously, make sure they understand that they need to puppy-proof their home or they will regret it.
Barbara called Duncan the bookworm. When he was about Barkley’s age we left him unsupervised in Barbara’s office for a short time. Big mistake. He started on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf we used to hold paperbacks (fortunately). In the space of just a few minutes, he worked his way the full length of the shelf, removing each paperback, tearing off the cover, and shredding the pages. When we found him, he was just getting ready to start on the second shelf.
We thought about renting him out as a document shredder.