- Real estate is a brutal business. It is competitive, it is
cutthroat and there is no mercy for the weak – and that’s just when it comes to
bidding for the few decent homes on the market at reasonable prices. It’s even
nastier for those who make a living selling properties and that’s where the
drones come in. No, sadly there are no real estate agents using unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) to dive-bomb their rivals and blow the sh*t out of some poor,
unsuspecting sap’s open house on a Saturday afternoon. The real estate
brokers at Cushman and Wakefield in Tampa are banking on the UAV phenomenon in
a big way, using photographer Michael Blitch to shoot video of their properties
using a drone so they can get quality footage without having to drag their lazy
asses out and do it themselves. Cushman & Wakefield employee Julia Silva
Rettig explained that such video is a perfect way to show off a building or
home to buyers, especially if they are from out of town. "Now what I can
do is show geographic location and the advantage of that to a user, I can bring
the drone into the building and span through the warehouse, show my column
spacing, so it shows functionality," Rettig said. Part of the appeal,
according to this fine realtor, of using a drone is its ability to shoe a property’s
proximity to major roadways and airports – the very sort of details that make a
major difference when a buyer is deciding if a property is the right fit for
them. Blitch, ever the giving soul, said he doesn't charge for any outdoor
video and is merely taking advantage of Federal Aviation Administration rules
allowing UAVs being used for recreational purposes to fly at or below 400 feet.
"It's a very successful professional toy…I mean business tool,"
Blitch said………
- Is corruption a universal evil fought by nations all
around the globe? You bet your sweet envelope of cash tucked inside a newspaper
left on a park bench it is. It might seem like a Western phenomenon or a trend
centered largely in developed nations where the cash flows freely and morals
are looser than Gary Busey’s grip on reality, but the current state of affairs
in Kuwait would suggest otherwise. The Middle Eastern nation is where the
national prosecutor's office has ordered a secret probe into a videotape
that contains allegations that a number of people conspired to overthrow the
government and called for a media blackout of the investigation. That’s right –
a freaking coup attempt and a media blackout to silence the investigation into
said coup. It’s a baller move that requires…well, huge balls and according to
the official Kuwait News Agency, Public Prosecutor Dherar al-Asousi ordered
that news broadcasts about the investigation be banned. The footage in question
allegesly condemns some persons of plotting to topple the ruling system and
contesting rights and jurisdictions of the country's ruling emir, Sheik Sabah
Al Ahmed Al Sabah. How does a government justify such blatant and blanket
censorship in any situation? Typically, officials don’t. They merely take their
dicey actions and do their best to keep anyone from finding out. In this case,
al-Asousi claimed the blackout was necessary in order to preserve the public
interest, and that his office will make details of the investigation public as
soon as it is finished. Sadly, news of this alleged coup is scarce and no
details have leaked about the alleged coup plotters or the specifics of their
scheme……….
- The news that Seattle Sounders striker Clint Dempsey
is making more money than the entire roster of 15 of the 19 clubs in Major
League Soccer is stunning. No, not because of the gross financial inequity in
which one player is earning such a large chunk of the money paid out by the
league, but because of the fact that someone is paying a soccer player in the
United States $6.695 million in guaranteed compensation this season. Dempsey is
one of 12 players making seven figures in MLS and six of that dozen play for
Toronto FC or the Los Angeles Galaxy, according to figures released by the MLS
Players Union. Toronto threw a lot of money around last offseason (and probably
some bribes involving maple syrup) when it signed U.S. national team midfielder
Michael Bradley from Roma and English veteran Jermain Defoe from Tottenham
Hotspur. Those two lag behind Dempsey and his insanely bloated salary, with
Bradley earning $6.5 million and Defoe pulling in $6.18 million. Dempsey owes
nearly $2 million of his pay this season to his annualized signing bonus and
other bonuses in his deal. The only teams with larger overall payrolls than
Dempsey’s salary are Toronto ($16.7 million), Los Angels ($13 million) and Seattle
($11.7 million). Dempsey earns more than twice as much as the entire Chivas USA
roster, which makes a collective $3.29 million. One could ask where that
cash comes from, given the fact that MLS remains the 17th-most popular
professional sports league in the U.S., but Seattle does lead the league in
attendance on an annual basis and while the cash doled out to its players still
pales in comparison to actual top-tier leagues around the world, it’s always
nice when America can do something absurd like making millionaires out of dudes
who run around a giant grassy field for an hour and a half, failing to score
goals, flopping like they’ve been shot and enacting ridiculous celebrations on
the rare occasion when they do actually accomplish the aim of their sport and
put the ball into the back of the net……..
- It’s time to play, “Who’s colossally f*ckng up our
ecosystem and deserves heaping helpings of scorn to match the heaping helpings
of pollutants they’re dispersing into the atmosphere?” and the United Nations
is here to help. The U.N.'s expert panel is putting
the finishing touches on its latest report outlining the cuts in greenhouse
gases, mainly CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, that will be vital in the
coming years in order to prevent global warming from (allegedly) wrecking
Earth. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change sounds very official and important, but because it’s merely a scientific
body with no actual authority, it won't tell governments how to divide
those emissions cuts. That issue will be at the heart of negotiations on a new
climate pact that's supposed to be adopted next year and in its report,
the IPCC lays out which nations are responsible for the greatest share of
emissions. Back in 2007, at the time of the last IPCC report, the United States
was lapping the field in terms of pollution. These days, as has happened in so
many other areas, China has run down and passed the U.S. China currently accounts
for one-quarter of global emissions and the U.S. is a distant second at 17
percent, followed by India (6.6 percent), Russia (5.1 percent) and Japan
(3.7 percent). The U.S. still holds the title of undisputed king of
polluting if you include the numbers since the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution in the 18th century, tallying 28 percent of the world's cumulative
emissions from energy and industry. Because it lagged behind in the early years
of industry, China’s overall share over that time is a mere 9.9 percent, just
ahead of Russia's 6.9 percent, Britain's 5.9 percent and Germany's 5.6 percent.
Western nations have a decided edge because they have been burning coal and oil
for much longer than the rest of the world. When it comes to per capita
emissions, Australians, Canadians and Americans exceed 20 tons of carbon per
year and that’s more than twice as much as the Chinese. " In other words,
on a person-by-person basis, no one promotes like fair-skinned folks in
industrial nations. Take that, would-be world powers………..
- Never in the history of the world, has anyone uttered the
following sentence: “You have to admit that ‘The Truman Show’ was such a damn
good movie that they need to bring it back to life and make it into a TV
series.” The reason no one has uttered those words is because the film was
mediocre at best and even in the limited career of Jim Carrey, it doesn’t rank
as his best effort. With zeroes and zeroes of people clamoring to bring the
film to the small screen, Paramount has obliged those nonexistent requests by
moving forward with plans to turn the movie into a series. Paramount executive
Amy Powell suggested as much when she spoke about future projects for the
production company. “"We have three buckets of content we're looking at,
and one of them is intellectual property the studio, which has been around for
over 100 years, owns,” Powell said. Good move, A. Mention that your studio has
existed for a century, giving off the impression of stability and intimating
that oyu know what the hell you’re doing even though this might be your worst
idea in some time. The reason no one needs to see a new show based on “Truman
Show” is because the world already has dozens of them. They’re called reality
shows and they are everywhere. The movie was centered on the idea that every
aspect of a man’s life was filmed and broadcast and nothing was real. That is
the premise of every damn reality show that populates the programming schedules
of so many broadcast and basic cable networks and pretending that there is
somehow a huge outcry for people who have been watching “Truman Show” on an
endless loop for the past 16 years is both a recipe for the sort of disaster
that befalls so many freshman shows on network television and the very sort of
willful ignorance that gets executives fired and ruins careers. Just because FX
is turning “Fargo” into a movie is no reason to think that the same needs to
happen for “The Truman Show” at any point in the history of civilization………
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