Late Monday Tunes. . .

Neil Young - Old Man

. . . And for some reason this reminded me of Alice In Chains' Rooster

The Cure and Korn, unplugged, live mash up - Make Me Bad & Inbetween Days

Alice In Chains - Rooster

The Oldest Trick in the World. . . .

Monday Tunes

William Shatner and Joe Jackson - Common People

Idlewild - A Modern Way of Letting Go

Friday Tunes

Matt Costa - Sunshine

And here's another. . . because it's Friday

The Offspring - Self Esteem

To Pay or Not To Pay ?

Some very good points made over at Shirky's blog about consumer (non)payment of media. Will be interesting how the battle between the to pay and not to pay camps (Godin vs. Murdoch) plays out. Maybe even Freemium will prevail?

Worth a read, here. Here's a taste:

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. . .

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

This ties in nicely with the ongoing debate about the tabehoodai (all-you-can-eat) media plans raging over the web. Looks like supply-side sentiment is crystallising into action with the tariff shifts against the consumer.

Living in the End Times

Now who said being nuts and being intelligent were mutually exclusive? Here's a fascinating vid of well-known Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek giving his $0.05 worth on a bunch of different current global circumstances. Now clearly this guy's more than a bit of a raving lefty, but interesting nonetheless. Moreover, the structure of the 'interview' is pretty cool. Curious how such a pinko has praise for the benevolent dictatorship of Singapore and their particular flavour of capitalism. I'm sure that communism is largely retired to the trash heap (where it belongs), but the new wave of British 'Red Tories' might turn out to have some staying power as pointed out in this Prospect Magazine article [HT MGJ].

NB: I found the second 'story' of the girl and her family bank and how the market were tripping over themselves to buy the bank and the quality assets on its balance sheet particularly interesting - I'm working on a mandate for a new EU bank desperate to buy prime conforming mortgage books (not RMBS or CMBS). This market is unbelievably hot with every first and second tier credit institution falling over themselves to buy this stuff and shore up their balance sheets, or at worst, hold on to the stuff they've got already. Then you've got the lawyers trying to sell you advice on forward-flow and innovative origination structures. . . The days of these banks taking a haircut on selling prime assets are well and truly over - if you want to play, you pay par.

Youtube page for bigger, high-res viewing here.