Hello All,

Today started out with a report from Bloomberg of an impending Blockbuster bankruptcy. The bankruptcy came as no big surprise.  I am trying to pinpoint the last time I rented a video from a store.  I believe it was in 2005 in Bangkok.  And it wasn’t so much a “store” it was more of a street cart that had hollywood knockoffs, some even before they were released.

Prior to that I had rented some videos in 2003 in Santa Monica, California.  But soon after that I found ways to download the movies for free, and very quickly off the internet and just decided it was silly to drive down to the video store in my car and pick up a hardware media device with digital data encoded on it and return to my house to watch.

Hello TDV Readers,

I have often stated to friends over the last year or two that The Onion, the comedic news satire website should, by all rights, be out of business.

Why?  Not because it isn’t funny.  It is.  But because in the last few years the strangest and most unbelievable headlines are actually real!  The Onion can’t compete with a western world that is following the concepts of Orwell’s 1984 with stunning accuracy.

In fact, because of this bizarre world we now live in, writing the TDV Blog every day is almost too easy.  We barely even have to do more than just look at the top few headlines of the day and we have enough material to cover for a month.

Happy Monday,

In our September 1st issue of TDV we postulated that “it’s like the entire world flip-flopped 20 years ago”.  Twenty to thirty years ago the USSR and China were still communist and the USA still looked like it was somewhat a bastion of free markets, despite having some of the 10 key tenets of communism already firmly installed, including government operated public education, a high income tax and a central bank fixing the price of money (interest rates).