AIG is a HUGE company with tendrils extending into many countries, including Canada. It is a cornerstone of the mortgage market because it insures high-ratio mortgages. In other words, if you didn’t put down 20-25% when you bought your house, you probably had to pay some kind of insurance premium to cover the lender in case you default. In Canada, it is primarily CMHC that does this with a little additional coverage from AIG. In the USA, AIG covers a substantial percentage of the market.

If AIG had failed, it could have taken down a substantial portion of the banking system with it. The reason AIG is having so much trouble is because of a very small number of its own employees and a SUBSTANTIAL number of corrupt mortgage brokers who deceived them. When the U.S. housing market began to flail around like a steerage passenger on Titanic, it was not the banks who took the first ballshots – it was the companies that insured the mortgages like AIG. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been working on a totally different entry lately but I have not finished it. I was just sort of overcome with the urge to write a quickie… well, if it turns out to be a quickie.

It’s getting to be season finalé season for the big 3 + the 2 little pretenders. The number of programs I watch on the big networks has dwindled, and with the final episodes of certain shows surely coming within the next season or two, I am likely to be down to little in the way of the “mainstream” programming. One franchise that I will likely be watching for at least a while longer (since there are no signs of all 3 branches ending) are the CSI shows…

I am very curious about CSI (Crappy Scientific Information) right now – with the impending departure of Gary Dourdan (Warrick Brown), and the apparent hiring, then unhiring of Katee Sackhoff, it looks like the show maybe scrambling around to find its direction. I mean, it’s all been done in Las Vegas by now. Still, this is the show that won me over in spite of their completely unrealistic ability to produce lab results in seconds using procedures which take hours, days or sometimes weeks. Dying in LV at 3am means your tox screen, DNA and GCMS analysis will all be finished by 6am, and they’ll have your killer in custody before McDonald’s stops serving breakfast at 10:30am. It is hard to complain about their lab results apparently operating on a Domino’s Pizza guarantee of 30 minutes or free, because if it was real and they had to actually wait for results some drama COULD be lost with the lack of immediacy, but seriously – where do they get the computers that can process petabytes of fingerprint data in 30 seconds? Is that REALLY necessary?

CSI: Worst Cops Ever (which is marketed by CBS as CSI:Miami) is awesome. Read the rest of this entry »

I think first you need to check out this story to put this in perspective.

I don’t know what is happening to the world. It seems that if a small number of people decide they are offended by something, they suddenly become able to run things. No one seems willing to stand up and say “GET OVER IT!” for fear they will get sued, or that someone will report the story to the media who will INSTANTLY broadcast it to the world (via the intarwebs).

A company starts an ad campaign. In their ad, they are selling chicken sandwiches. So the innocently put up a billboard with a sandwich on it, a barn with a rooster weathervane clipart background, and the words “CRISPY FRICKIN’ CHICKEN”.

People take issue with the word frickin’… and at LEAST one billboard is removed, and officials field calls and complaints as though it is some kind of moral crisis. And then the news outlets get a hold of it. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, we have all (or at least those interested) seen the outcry over the government’s attempt to slip a new American-style DMCA-like copyright law into the Canadian law books. I would go into my take and the whole thing but I think I will save it for some time when I finally get my blog page back up and running.

Right now, though, I thought it was amusing to read a quote from a news release from ACTRA (for those of you who don’t know, that is the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists), expressing their “outrage” over the delay of the bill after Minister Jim Prentice found himself deluged with questions and complaints about his new legislation.

The entire article is here. But, the most significant quote which I found amusing was the opening line:

“The government’s about-face decision to abandon the scheduled introduction of new Copyright legislation is a detriment to Canada’s artists, and a hijacking of the policy process by a vocal minority.”

A vocal minority.

That’s what the voters in this country are, according to the “industry”.

The last I checked, ACTRA had 21000 members – and it doesn’t take much searching to find that their membership is far from unanimous in supporting the ACTRA position. Disregarding ANY other people who are concerned about this, we can look at the facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada” and make a comparison. The group has 25588 members as of this writing.

Taking the facebook group and ACTRA’s membership numbers alone, there are more people in favour of avoiding the USA-DMCA-like billl than supporting it.

So – doesn’t that mean that effectively ACTRA is nothing more than a vocal minority smaller than the very same group they claim is not making a valid claim because they are a minority?
Read the rest of this entry »