Farmer Diaries

Headline:  Netflix to spend US$ 15 billion in content...an answer to the new competition (according to the headline), except for one big thing.  Dear readers guess how much Netflix spent on content in 2019 -- if you guessed $ 12 billion you would be right, and how much dod the revenue grow for the year -- 31%.  So obviously spending more on programming is the way to go! There are two competitors to Netflix:  Amazon and Apple, the rest you can forget. Facebook will concentrate on teen romance/horror etc and Disney will recycle its film itself -- attractive to parents of young children everywhere (and no one else).  What is amazing is how much of Amazon's offering is charitably "B-reel" stuff.  Now, I'm not saying that Netflix doesn't have its fair dose of shlock but compared to Amazon, its a much smaller fraction. Also, Netflix has a secret weapon -- its international content!  Which is largely not shown in the US, but which is often amazing -- saw ...

Take your pick you got prices from $1.2 trillion all the way to $2,7 trillion (as market value).  With this valuation comes a lot of question: 1) What is the scale of Saudi Arabia's reserves 2)  What price will SA sell its sweet crude (its a technical term...) 3)  What are the chance of a revolution -- or government seizure? 4)  The middle east is a tinder box right now All good questions that the analysts used in evaluating the value of Aramco...hence the massive valuation delta.

So yesterday I was playing with the grandson of a friend, the child and the dad were playing with some simple blocks making very interesting buildings and figures...all very simple and you had to use your imagination a lot! I remember the same pleasure, as a child, with lego, but now all I see are these "pre-designed kits" where imagination is gone out of the window.  In my days you wanted a spaceship and you built it with the block at hand (even better if you had a piece of clear lego for the cockpit -- but not essential).  I and my friends would compare how great your spacecraft were.  Not once did we consider following instructions of any sort -- we just picked legos off the floor (they were in large boxes) and from there we would build our universe. Now I get that lego makes a lot more money from these 200 pieces kits it sells for $39.99 than they would from just selling half a kilo of assorted blocks of various shapes and sizes, but to me, they killed what made l...

In the 1950s the Catholic Church in Quebec went all-in supporting a conservative party, even using the Sunday sermon to strongly urged their flock to support this Conservative party. "heaven is blue and hell is red" was a favorite to justify supporting this conservative party. This worked for years until it didn’t. Abuse of power and less the Christian behavior by those leaders but also a changing of the system -- the education system that had, until then, been the purview of the Catholic church was suddenly "yanked out" into the public sector.  the loss of influence was massive, and "the people" realized that they didn't need the church's opinion.  In the space of 3 years (36 months) the churches of Quebec emptied themselves, to this day they've not recovered -- also if you consider the numerous sexual crimes of the clergy... Faith lost "bigly" as Trump would say.  What had been a powerful political force in the province was kill...