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  • Game Over.

    Chinese banks have been told to immediately stop lending money to the United States, according to Reuters.

    Game over.

    No. 1 lender of finance to the United States: China. According to AFP, China is the world’s biggest holder of foreign reserves and second biggest holder of US treasury bils. Take Chinese money off the table, $700 billion is likely not enough.

    The takeaway line?Ǭ†from “New America Media:

    “In times of hardship, China and the United States seem to have traded places. The United States seems to be moving closer to a Communist economy in the wake of the financial implosion, while officially Communist China is hurtling towards capitalism.”

  • Brilliant Politics

    So your poll numbers are tanking so badly that even FoxNews gives Obama a 9pt lead. Your strategy of hiding Caribou Barbie from the evil liberal press has backfired by taking her out of the spotlight, resulting in the positive buzz shifting away from her. You’ve got a serious case of foot in mouth, making one mistake after another. Things are looking grim, and as the economic crisis continues, Obama looks more the man, so what do you do?

    You suspend your campaign, and you spin it as a being a statesman like decision for the good of the country, days out from the first debate. You then call on your opponent to do the same, shifting the spotlight back on him, and hope that if he refuses, you look like you’re putting your country before the election.

    Brilliant politics.

    The only question now though is will voters buy it? McCain had to try something, and this is a bold gambit. If it works the way they hope it’s going to work, Obama looks bad and McCain gets a boost.

    However….people might see through the ploy in a campaign that has been thick with lies and deception. But then again, while some might see through it, it’s the swinging voters in battleground states that count. Only time will tell.

  • 5 To 10 Days Until Cash Dries Up

    Jim Cramer on MSNBC calls end of the world if the $700 billion bailout isn’t approved. (via Donklephant). Still, bailing out the industry doesn’t fix the problem, it prolongs it. No one wants a great depression, but likewise the concept of bailing out private enterprise from their own muck doesn’t sit right.

  • A digital divide of usability

    So I told my mother on the weekend to try Google Chrome after life long Internet Explorer die-hards and Firefox haters like Steve Hodson tell me that they’re sold and have switched for life. My mother still uses IE and refuses to use Firefox, no matter how many times I’ve tried to convince her otherwise, because it’s “not the same.”

    Next day she tells me she tried but, but she didn’t like it and switched back to IE. I ask why, and she says that Chrome doesn’t have the “favorites” (bookmarks for the rest of us) in the sidebar. I had to get her to explain the concept to me. Basically, she has a left hand sidebar open in IE with all her favorite sites, and she doesn’t like using a drop down menu to access them. In my mothers defence, sight isn’t her strong point and she has a large monitor set to the wrong size (at one stage it was 800×600) so she can see things. For her, the sidebar was easier to read than the drop down menu + she’d become use to it.

    That’s a digital divide… of usability. Of all the things to consider, I’d have never thought of that.

    PS: happy birthday mum.

  • Hurricane Ike

    While waiting for the obligatory “global warming is to blame” commentary, we’ve got the storm covered at The Inquisitr: Hurricane Ike Live.

  • Startup Camp coming to Melbourne

    Sign up here.

    This was run in Sydney recently, and looks like a great event. Dates are 3-5 October.

  • The Inquisitr at 4 months

    September 5 marked the 4 month mark for The Inquisitr, and although I’m a little late with this post, some updated figures and observations.

    We closed August with 420,000 page views, and this is before I noticed that Google Analytics was under-counting, likely due to page load times. Based on the top leaderboard spot, the figure was around the 460,000 mark.

    It was a very good month, and I doubt very much if we’ll repeat it, but certainly I’m hopeful of a result above the 200,000 mark for September, hopefully more again. 1 week in and we’re just shy of 70,000 page views, so we’re off to a solid start, even if it’s not spectacular.

    RSS subscriptions remain an issue, an under performing aspect of the site. Around the 3000 mark across the four feeds (I didn’t total them for the post), but off from a peak in early August, but slowly climbing again.

    Technorati rank has been tough. The indexing went down for our two biggest days in August, so we missed what should have been a huge boost, and we malingered just shy of the top 2000 mark for nearly a week. Since then its started to move again, but as I suspected, the closer we got to the top 1000, the slower the rank improves as you need more and more links to climb the ladder. 1692nd as I write this, with just short of 2 months to get to the top 1000 based on knowing that the stats Technorati use are 6mths worth of links…basically, as we add incoming links, we can only go up until 6 months, when it will level out somewhat.

    On the advertising front, we’ve signed a 6 month agreement with an ad supplier with the ad units to start in the next day or two. More details once the ads are up. Unfortunately it’s US inventory only, but if they deliver the rates they’re talking about, The Inquisitr should break even, and maybe even turn a small profit for the first time, not allowing for me to get paid out of that 🙂

    Overall: at the 3 month mark I was starting to stress a bit, not because the site wasn’t performing well, but because it wasn’t performing well enough to cover costs. Ask me in a month and I’ll tell you if those fears were unfounded, but JR + Meieli have rallied around the site, and collectively we’re getting more things right now than before. It’s getting close…..

    Update: I should have added, if only Awstats figures were actual page views, because we broke 1 million page views according to Awstats in August…I know, I wish 🙂

  • Happiness is a Wagyu Steak

    I finally got around to trying Wagyu steak, the famous Japanese corn fed, heavily marbled stake that commands premium prices compared to regular beef.

    Tender, sweet without being overboard, mouth watering, and not at all fatty, which considering how marbled the steak is was suprising.

    I can say without any question that the piece of Wagyu I consumed last night at Radii was the best piece of steak I’ve had in my entire life.

    The questions for me is: was it the steak alone or the cooking method as well, as Radii is regularly rated in the top ten Melbourne Restuarants?

    I’m going to have to find some to cook to answer that question, although I’ve never seen it in the shops. Someone must have it somewhere…maybe a trip into town to the Victoria Markets might deliver some.

    Naturally it isn’t cheap, but if you’re ever offered the opportunity to try it, don’t think twice about it.

  • Melbourne commuters take note, this is how they do it in South America

    skitched-20080905-100825.jpgI wonder what colour a Connex train would burn?

    via Reuters:

    Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train on Thursday in anger over delays during the morning rush hour.

    Television images showed black smoke and flames engulfing the train at the station of Merlo, in the western suburbs of the capital, Buenos Aires. At nearby Castelar, passengers hurled stones at the ticket office and blocked the rails….

    Many passengers said the delays, caused by a broken down train, had cost them a day’s work.

    Argentina’s dilapidated rail services are plagued by delays and travelers’ anger sometimes erupts into violence.

  • XXXIII

    Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
    Susan Ertz

    and yet…

    All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
    Maurice Maeterlinck

    still

    What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.

    but Woody has a point:

    I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
    Woody Allen

    either way, another year and the quest for eternal life has not been found.

    The idea is to die young as late as possible.
    Ashley Montagu