Friday links

Jeong has to live with all that hate. Pity.
Hate is always foolish; love is always wise.

Generally, a movie is born from a screenwriter’s pen, but it turns out the recent “Mission: Impossible” movies are done a little differently. McQuarrie said the script is actually the last thing to be developed in the making of the movies. The movie is first fueled by the stunts that Cruise, McQuarrie, and others close to the franchise come up with.
Moviegoer: “Why don’t today’s Hollywood movies tell decent stories?”
Hollywood: “What’s a ‘story’?”

James Bond tactics for figuring out if somebody’s snooping around your room.
Or the maid has done her job.

I wrote a feature about “The Bellman,” who cleans and repairs church handbells. (http://www.thebellman.com/) The history, art and science of casting a set of bells to make pure sounds on particular pitches is fascinating.
Lots of fascinating people live hearabouts, and I get to interview one a week.

The NYT is just continuing a long tradition of it’s biases and how it determines what is newsworthy;

https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825/ref=as_at?creativeASIN=0521607825&linkCode=w50&tag=thedailybeast-autotag-20&imprToken=iN72E1Y9M3GXDTlNmTaXqA&slotNum=0

Thank you for posting the link to the Improvised Munitions book. Nice that the price was right.

About the Guelph cop… Sadly we are seeing more of this behavior. But on the plus side, while it takes time, we are also seeing cops get tried and convicted more too.

Nice to see the 3D gun links keep popping up. You really can’t stop the signal these days.

The James Bond tricks are very interesting in an old school sort of way. While I am a big fan of the James Bond novels, (much better than the movies BTW) one thing I do know is that they are fiction. Doing things like this in the real world of today, JB would not last a day before his cover was blown. If a professional was taking a peek at your stuff, finding things like lint, a strand of hair or talc powder in weird places would probably tilt the scale from maybe you should be watched to you should be under the microscope.

Tome Cruse doesn’t do to badly… for a short guy.

Why won’t kiranas work in the U.S.? Zoning laws. Tax laws. Sign ordinances. Fire codes. Occupancy permits. Subsidized shopping centers. A culture of debt. U.S. retailers can’t put stores within walking distance of most customers because it has been made illegal through zoning. The small retailer is forced into strip centers or shopping centers where they can never own their building and must always pay rent. Customers have to drive to get to them, which makes the small store relatively inconvenient compared with one-stop-mega-stores. Finally, easy money policies have made debt instead of frugality a way of life, meaning that saving money to buy and own (debt free) your building and inventory is not done very often. Modern finance theory promotes the idea of using OPM (other people’s money), so interest payments to a bank are part of their monthly expenses.

I have spent 40 years in retail. I’ve lost jobs 4 times in my life, 3 of them from bankruptcies due to debt. One job (which I still have) began when the company was family owned and boasted the fact that it didn’t pay rent or pay long-term loans to a bank. We competed aggressively with Walmart (and won), we matched prices with Amazon, and we always made money. Our customer loyalty was legendary, even though we were a big-box. For 62 years, we never laid off a full time employee and we never closed a store. All expansion came from profits. We didn’t have a single Harvard MBA in the company. We were an American kirana, and we were successful.

But the original founders got old and sold out to a private equity fund. We are changing rapidly. The structure of the company is taking on a more conventional shape. I’ll let you know how things turn out in a few years.

lwoots, (wink).