Super Repo men get back your 747, learjet, whatever. They’ll reposess from men with guns, whole helicopter fleets, whatever. They make low to middle 7 figures every year. James Bond, eat your heart out..

Apple has decreed that any user may buy an application and have it refunded within 90 days – but that Apple will keep the protection money – euhm commission. So who pays the commission? The developer!

All those greedy content producers trying to hang on to their old delivery and economic models by their fingernails must be crying about this: Monty Python decided to put all their content onto YouTube for free and in high quality with links to their stuff. This raised their sales by 23000%. So it’s not about criminalising your customer base after all: it’s about making your content accessible, making it easy for your customers to buy the content they want from you, but most of all: making good content for your customers to buy!

The size of the bailout plan is truly staggering. Not just a little bit huge but immensely massive. Did you know it was larger than the following combined:

In the US wind farm power is so subsidised, that in Texas power prices around 33% of the year were negative, ie. the more power a consumer user, the more they got paid to use it!

In a surprise move, e-gold was dumped on by the US justice system because prosecution stated they must have known crooks were using the system to transfer money. Doesn’t this now mean that all banks in the US have to be slapped in the face, because, well, let’s face it – there are a load of crooks and they all need to put their money somewhere. Which means that all banks know their services are being used by crooks.

This is one of the reasons why defence contracting costs can go through the roof. This man wants to donate a high grade piece of marble and the costs of transporting it to the US military graveyard to fix a break on the Tomb of Unkowns. The cost of the marble, selected from the same mine as the original piece, was $31.000,-. The military won’t take it though, as they need to set up a tender, set up a committee to oversee the setting up of the tender, set up a committee to check the tender and the results etc etc etc. which means the cost of the project is a whopping $170.000,- to set up for the bid and $2.2 million (!) for the actual marble and transport thereof.

Where cocaine smugglers used to use cigarette boats, very fast boats and small aircraft to move drugs into the US, now they’re using partial submersibles, which travel just below the surface of the water and are easily scuttled. If the crew is caught by the navy, they sink the ship and the navy is left with a rescue mission, no proof and none of the crewmembers willing to talk, as they’re very aware that there is no evidence left.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to pay up to £100,000 for tip-offs leading to action against price fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour.

The new policy of financial incentives for information will initially run for 18 months and is similar to a scheme in South Korea.

A business found to be part of a cartel can be fined up to 10% of its turnover.

The move follows an OFT campaign offering immunity for UK firms that blow the whistle on cartels.

Official URL

The U.S. economy lost the title of “world’s biggest” to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.

…

Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP — $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone — the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.

The dollar sank to $1.5688 per euro late in European trading hours on Friday, at which rate the euro zone’s 2007 GDP equates to $13,880,568.4 billion.

hehehe

Weak dollar costs U.S. economy its No. 1 spot | Reuters

This is the second time I’ve seen one of these calculations, and they’ve always made sense to me:

So, instead of this anti-smoking witch hunt, we should encourage it!

Hardly surprising, but putting points on a person’s licence isn’t going to stop them speeding. Or at least, not the 3.7 million motorists in this study. It increased the insurance company’s profits by around $36 million, as they charge more insurance fees if you get points.
The way to stop drivers from repeat speeding offences, is to give them a court probation.

This law firm in Amsterdam, Jeroen Zandt, insures you for unlimited judicial help, regardless of the amount of traffic violations you have, for around EUR. 200,- per month.

There’s a test people did a few times where they put different stock names at the end different exits of a maze and let a hamster ‘pick’ his favorite stock. It turns out that the hamster is no worse (and sometimes better) than real life stock brokers, showing how the market is random.

The Sun-Times has a monkey who has been picking stocks from a larger portfolio every year for the past four years and has been doing significantly better than the major indexes:

Welcome to the sad state of the world: here we have a possible inexpensive treatment for a variety of cancers which won’t get funded, because the molecule involved isn’t patented, so probably won’t get funded by pharmacutical companies due to ‘market forces’.

The US was looking into it, but Australia has decided – tax stuff done on-line. If there is a monetary benefit. I guess a whole load of tax boards are going to be looking at Australia to see if it can actually be done.

The Dutch Connexxion and Helinet companies are planning a helicopter public transport service between Amsterdam and Brussels, stopping in The Hague, Rotterdam and Antwerp on the way. They almost have all the necessary licences in, so it’s looking good.

It’s truly incredible how people have literally made millions of dollars using the intranets.

Apparently the nude vacationing industry has tripled in size from 1992 (when it was at $400m) catering mainly to the over 35s and luxury segment.

Not just NEC products are being rebuilt, but the WHOLE of NEC has been cloned in China! Factories, workshops and all!

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

More here

I always knew my driving habits were safe!

according to an analysis of more than 12 million passenger cars insured by Progressive, the third-largest auto insurer in the United States.

It found cars with more than 200 horsepower actually generate 17 per cent fewer claims than those propelled by less than 200 horsepower.

From here

Google isn’t the only player to experiment – Yahoo has its own public research page.

The Tech Buzz Game is a very interesting fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.

In the Web Application Frameworks market, I’m betting on Rails.

I wonder if all the people who voted for Dubya are still going to like him when they’re back to tilling the soil in 2010..

THE NUMBERS are staggering — a US$43-trillion hole in America’s public finances that’s getting worse every day. And the stakes are almost inconceivable for a generation of politicians and voters raised in relative prosperity, who’ve never known severe economic hardship

Full story:
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20050307_101541_101541

See you all in superland…

http://www.whereisthemoney.org/