So I see that the founders of Google are going to sell 5mil shares of google stock each. Now that can mean one of two things. They want to loose control of their company or they think the company is heading for serious troubles. In what I can only see as a possible Enron situation with a company that lets face it. Sells click advertising in a down market no matter how innovative you are companies are not spending money on advertising.

Google Founders Sergey Brin (L) and Larry Page

Google has spent money like it was growing on trees the past few years with one notable purchase of youtube.com for the paltry sum of 1.6 billion dollars. Which coming from the Internet industry I cannot see why that site demanded such a high price, they already had a pretty good thing going with video.google.com.

Regardless of their spending habits it is reminiscent of  the dot bomb days where people were spending investment money like they had earned it drew huge salaries like the gravy train would never end. Now it appears that Google may be heading in the same direction as the other dot bombs.

Google has been quite recession proof at least it appears in their stock prices. But how do you really value a company which has virtually no assets. I mean were talking a little bit of real estate in California and a room full of servers. There really is nothing tangible to justify the billions of dollars worth of investment.  This was very appear ant during the market crash of 2008 as google hit some lows just under 300.00 per share. Since that time it has recovered some but is now on a slippery slope once again.

After the announcement of the stock sale though the SEC last Friday the stock began to tank and at close of today Monday Jan 20, it had lost another 9 percent.

I dont think there will be much to keep this from falling through the floor. Maybe a government bailout after all google is too big to fail. what would we use as a search engine? Only time will tell and I could be wrong but I smell another stinker here.

A simple line which really does not mean a hoot anymore. There once was a time where patriotic or personal pride would steer people to seek out and purchase products which were made in the USA.

Doesnt Mean Anything.

With over 10% unemployment and more and more people on the edge of loosing their jobs everyday. I can only say one thing. You did it to yourself. See, it turns out that it really wasn’t the gluttony and greed of wall street that caused the economy to tank. But slow protracted death from a million pin pricks of individual greed.

It all boils down to not supporting your fellow countrymen. When you decide to purchase an item, it usually is based on cost. The cheapest product gets your dollars. Not considering that it may not support or encourages growth here in the states.  Im sure a lot of you have heard this before, but refuse to listen. Nobody wants to blame themselves for a bad situation and that is your demon to deal with.

Point is since president Bill Clinton allowed the tariffs to come off of imported products the acceleration of the decline has increased where products are made so cheaply by children that work for 50 cents per day. There is no protection left for anyone’s job in this country.  Its unsustainable and its idiotic to think that when you buy a product made in China that it does anything good for America.

It has gotten to the point now where previously “apple pie” American companies are starting to outsource to Asia for their workforce which used to be here in the states. These are VERY BAD companies and your a straight up idiot for doing business with them. Every time you call XYZ company and end up talking to someone who cant speak English you are encouraging the outsourcing practice which is costing American Jobs.

Its not too late, and it will take some sacrifice on the American consumer to buy a bit less, but buy American. We can turn this around. But not if  we keep stabbing  our neighbors and friends in the back by buying items that are not Made In The USA,  At the very least Assembled In The USA, still provides someone here a JOB.

Do the right thing. If you Buy American, You provide Americans JOBS. you buy Made In China, Taiwan, Mexico etc. You Provide Them Jobs.

Its a sign on the times. As a side note of the current economic situation SPAM , Special Processed American Meat is making a new debut on the American table. Not since WWII have so many people been enjoying the familiar yet somewhat unidentifiable jelly covered mass.

Hormel the company that makes SPAM must be doing well as they are currently running advertiesments to show how “hip” and “exciting” SPAM can be.

Not everyone grew up during WWII when many creative ways to actually eat the meat besides fried or chopped up with potatoes. Hormel has a website www.spam.com which provides a few tasty ways to ham it up with SPAM.

Lest we forget that memorable Monty Python SPAM skit which showed some of the popularity it has in the UK as in my own opinion is about the tastiest thing on any traditional English menu.

I recently had a fellow blogger which reminisced a movie he was talking about and mentioned that it was available on Google videos. This got me thinking that there are many more places to get movies and videos out there that many people don’t know about.

Most people know about youtube and if you dont well you live under a rock. Youtube is fine and dandy for little video messages but does not lend itself well to full length feature films because of the 10 minute video clip length. Google no longer allows new uploads to their own video service. What was uploaded to video.google.com is still there and there is quite a few good full length videos there to watch but no new content will be added.

So aside from the clunky 10 minutes per segment video of Youtube there are a few other options. A lot of classical movies like what you would watch on TMC are available at the Internet Archive not only can you look up websites from yesteryear or look up what a website looked like 10 years ago but they have for some time been doing video and audio programs there. There are thousands of videos which are open source and can be watched as well as downloaded so you can then watch them on your computer or burn them to DVD. Also the video quality on most are of a high quality resolution.

You can search up movies by name or by genre or by alphabetical order.  The Internet archive project also has many audio dramas which can be listened to. Growing up I used to listen to the CBS radio mystery theater. A time by gone of when radio was, you can find many of the more popular radio dramas.

But the Internet archive is not the only place to find movies. Some of them not so legit, I say that because I am pretty sure they dont have the licensing to hold or distribute the media which they have. For instance one site I have seen has had some pretty recent video, although low quality handy cam taken in a movie theater someplace in Russia or other country (due to Arabic or Cyrillic subtitles). I can only assume that sites like these must be hosted somewhere beyond the long arm of the US copyright laws because some of these movie sites have been continually running for years now without interruption.  One site in particular is davidmovie.com and this is just one of many that I have seen or heard about  on the internet.

The movie industry certainly has to know about these people who are doing these websites and the people who are uploading the videos but is not doing too much in the way of changing it or enforcement. It could be also related to another blog I posed about the piracy paradox where that may be the case of the piracy creates a market for the material.

In my opinion it would certainly make a case for Hollywood to make better movies. If everyone can view the movie, and then decide if its worth going to the movie house to see, that would create an incentive to make worthwhile movies. It is in much the same regard that video rentals can create a justification on if a video is worth purchasing and adding it to your collection.