Goldie - Inner City Life

Shanghai encourages parents to have two children

SHANGHAI — Family planning officials in Shanghai are making home visits and slipping leaflets under doorways to encourage certain residents to have a second child in a bid to balance the city's expanding senior population. A statement about the new campaign posted Thursday on the Web site of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission was quick to emphasize that it didn't signal any change in China's one-child rule and was only an attempt to let people know about the policy's many exceptions. About 3 million, or 21 percent, of Shanghai's nearly 13.7 million registered residents are now aged 60 or older, the statement said. Xie Lingli, the commission's director, was quoted as saying authorities will go door to door to try to encourage couples to have a second child if both grew up as only children. The commission also plans to offer emotional and financial counseling for interested couples, the statement said. Divorced parents in Shanghai may also have a second child with a new spouse, it said. The campaign is aimed at reducing the ratio of elderly people and preventing future labor shortages, it said. A spokeswoman for the commission who would only give her surname, Zong, said officials in charge of the campaign were not immediately available for comment. A report issued this year by a U.S.-based group said China's current ratio of 16 elderly people per 100 workers is set to double by 2025, then double again to 61 by 2050, due partly to the country's strict family planning limits. Without a universal pension system to cover all the elderly, millions of older Chinese could fall into poverty, triggering social and political unrest, the Global Aging Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in the April report. China introduced strict family planning limits in the late 1970s, allowing most couples to have just one child. The policy was designed to control the country's exploding population and ensure better education and health care. The law includes exceptions for ethnic groups, rural families and families in which both parents are only children.
@ 'HuffPo'

Breaking News: F.B.I. Arrests Dozens in N.J. Corruption Sweep

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- FBI agents are sweeping across northern New Jersey Thursday, making arrests in what reportedly is described as a major corruption probe.

WNBC-TV in New York reported and showed images of the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus being taken into FBI headquarters in Newark. The station also showed rabbis being taken into custody.
Radio station New Jersey 101.5 FM reports the sweeps are taking place in Hudson, Bergen, Monmouth and Ocean counties.
The stations say the probe centers on money-laundering and political bid rigging.
FBI spokeswoman Myrna Williams tells The Associated Press the arrests will go on till noon. She would not provide any more information.
Corruption has permeated New Jersey politics for years. Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie takes credit for 130 convictions of elected and appointed officials on corruption charges.
Christie is the Republican candidate for governor.

@ 'NY Times'

UPDATE

44 Charged by U.S. in New Jersey Corruption Sweep
A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.
@ 'NY Times'

The 'Nazi' gnome of Nuremberg

Story @ 'Time'

Update:
Prosecutors in Nuremberg have decided not to take action against an artist who created a series of gnomes giving the Nazi salute, despite German laws which apparently prohibit even garden ornaments giving it a bit of the old Seig Heil.
here.

John Cage Meets Sun Ra

Modern classical composer John Cage and jazz maverick Sun Ra performed together in 1986 at Coney Island, New York. The result was recorded and released on this long out-of-print album. We are fortunate that Ubuweb is able to make this fascinating record available again.

Sun Ra begins with improvisations on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. John Cage performs his vocal work, Empty Words (Part IV), and each alternates performances. Cage’s performance is wonderfully trance-like with long silences as is typical of him. Sun Ra’s playing is other-worldly with little of the jazz quality that one hears in his Arkestra works. As a combined effort this “meeting” may not be very convincing. However if you consider each individual’s artistry, especially Sun Ra’s incredible sojourn at the synthesizer, you will find this a very rewarding experience.

The album is available on two 160kbps MP3s.

Download
(The downloads are #6 and #7)

(Words from: 'Free Albums Galore')

Drunk Yoga

More @ 'Fun Tuna'

Black Eyed Peas Have Officially Written The Worst Song Ever

...and it's called "I Gotta Feeling". Mixing Yiddish phrases with autotune skanks is something only the fabulous Black Eyed Peas could attempt. You know - just like rhyming 'up' with 'up' and 'cup' with 'mazel tov'.

UN Hunger Strike

PHOTOGRAPHS

Smoking # 27

@ 'Wicked Knickers'

Smoking # 27

@ 'Wicked Knickers'

Total Solar Eclipse on Ioh-jima Japan

Google Accused Of Invisibly Deleting Blog Posts On The RIAA's Say-So

The fight between music bloggers and record labels reached its most visible point when a guy who uploaded a leaked copy of the latest Guns N' Roses album to his site got arrested by the FBI. But many music bloggers are now fighting a much more invisible menace, with posts they've written suddenly disappearing from their sites (via Tyler Hellard) hosted on Google's Blogger platform. An RIAA source says that the group sends Google a list of URLs it doesn't like, and Google "then deals with the problem." Google says that it notifies bloggers after their posts have been taken down, in accordance with the DMCA. But it should hardly be surprising that many of those affected say they've gotten no such notice, nor that the offending material was either legally posted and/or supplied by the labels themselves. So two possibilities emerge: the RIAA is filing false DMCA takedowns, and/or its legal right hand doesn't know what the labels' promotional left hands are doing. The upshot of this is that lots of music bloggers say the threat of landing in legal trouble -- particularly for posting music supplied to them by labels and artists -- is having a chilling effect on them, and could eventually stop them from blogging, shutting down a valuable promotional tool for the labels. That sort of shooting itself in the foot, though, seems to be the record industry's specialty.
From 'Techdirt'

Pic of this & every other day

Pic of this (& every other day)

Nice to see that you no longer get told when you get a DMCA take down notice...

Interestingly enough I just discovered this. a translation by 'Pyrolse Bred' of an article in French from Jan 2009 here.

Is the music business in crisis?

If by “crisis” you mean something similar to the steel industry in the 1970s or the automobile industry now, then the answer is no. The music industry had its heydays at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, when people replaced their vinyl records by CDs, while still buying new releases. Those exceptional days are over, but the industry is still doing well. In France, money collected by the Sacem (the main institution responsible for collecting and redistributing royalties) increased from 600 millions € in 2000 to 750 millions € in 2005.

This “crisis” is in fact a crisis of the CD, their sales declining steeply (by 20% in 2008). But this decline is offset by an increase in revenues from live shows and public broadcasting. The sales of digital music (like ringtones and so forth) are fast increasing (+ 26.8%) and music on demand has increased by 85%.

Are illegal downloads responsible for the decline in CD sales?

There’s actually no proof of that. One downloaded song doesn’t mean one lost sale. First, because the song might not have been purchased otherwise. Second, because the discovery of an artist thanks to a free download may induce the purchase of albums or of derived products (ringtones, concert tickets, video games etc).

Are CDs and DVDs the main source of revenues for artists?

No. The sales of records represent only a fraction of their revenues. In 2007 they represented (only) 16.5% of the money collected by the Sacem. Artists earn more money from live shows and public broadcastings (radio, TV, nightclubs).

How many artists suffer from the decline of CD sales?

If we imagined a sudden collapse of sales, only a few music writers would seriously suffer: the ones who never get played on the radio and never give any concerts. Others would see their revenues go from very comfortable to comfortable. In fact, in their vast majority, artists sell too few CDs to be hurt financially by illegal downloads. Only 5% of artists could be earning money from the sales of records. The issue for the remaining 95% of artists is to be known, not to fight piracy.

How come so few artists live off the sales of CDs?

Major record companies are largely responsible for this situation.

From the year 2000 onwards, they focused their marketing strategies on a small number of “safe” artists. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of artists who had a contract with one of the 4 majors has strongly decreased. The result is that by 2006 less than 6% of the artists represented 90% of the market.

Radio stations have also played a big role in impoverishing the market. A 2006 report by the “Observatoire de la musique” stated that on 31 radio stations (making up 92% of the audience) less than 3% of the songs played represented ¾ of the broadcasting time. And on radio stations aimed at young people the situation was even worse: the presumed 40 most popular songs represented 60% of the broadcasting time.

Who is the biggest loser of the decline in record sales?

The record companies: Universal (25% of the market), Sony BMG (21%), EMI (13%) and Warner (11%). They’re the ones who collect the biggest chunk of money from the sales of records. Off the price of 15-20€ for a CD, 19.6% is VAT, 21% goes to the distributor and 50% is collected by the record company. The main artist, writers and musicians collect together about 9%. In theory. Because record companies often deduct the costs of recording, marketing and shooting the video(s) from those 9%.

Could music be cheaper without ripping off artists?

Yes. Right from the start CDs were sold at a price 50% higher than vinyl records. But the manufacturing costs have quickly dropped below that of vinyl LPs. Moreover, in 1987, VAT on records went from 33.6% to 19.6%. The price of CDs on the other hand has only dropped by a mere 8%, and it subsequently never decreased further. Needless to say, artists are still not being better paid now than in the 1980s …