Obama the Entertainer

Per our earlier post expressing the expectation that this campaign was about the electorate wanting to be entertained, it does indeed seem that Big ‘O’ has wrapped it up. The Wall Street Journal says that O’s 30 minute special outgunned the regular programming it replaced by 10%. But if you watch that special you’ll see it isn’t so, well, special. It’s boring. And that’s important.

So the numbers say that O will get about 10% more than MC. Cool. That’ll be something like 46% Obama, 42% McCain. Or so. (Where to the numbers come from: well, check out the blog title.)

Congrats, O.

But it’ll be a boring 4 years, I suppose.

Buy Apple now.

Here’s a chart.

This chart tells me it’s time to PREDICT!

That comment about the most entertaining president/vice-president pair being elected, that wasn’t a prediction. THIS is a prediction:

Buy Apple stock (NASDAQ:AAPL) at Friday’s closing ($97.40) and you will double your money within two years. 

Why? Look at the chart linked above. The three lines scraping along the bottom are the National Association of Securitites Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ), the Dow Jones Industrials (DJI), Standard and Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500). The line just *below* Apple is Google (GOOG).

So, what, is Suppositio.us a chartist? Is the past a reliable indicator of future performance? No, and, I think, yes. In the past, Suppositio.us has recommened Apple stock to friends and relatives, giving dates and expected profits. They’ve worked out very well. This is one of those, but this time, it’s for everyone.

And I suppose that means YOU.

McCain’s Palin’ Around: Success?

Suppositio.us is still pretty bed-bound depressed. It’s a mood thing. But this needs to be done. Suppositio.us is predicting expecting that the most entertaining of the presidential/vice-presidential candidates will win. And to understand exactly what that means look here: Saturday Night Live – Palin / Hillary Open – Video – NBC.com, Saturday Night Live – Couric / Palin Open – Video – NBC.com, and VP Debate Open: Palin/Biden. The only unknown is whether the current election process will let us elect Palin directly.

I’m not talking about Steve Jobs, yet. But what would you do if you knew, somewhere around July 26th, 2008 – your company was fully valued in a fully valued market. Keep it simple. Ask that question. Then go back to “Apple’s Culture of Secrecy”. So what do you suppose?

Now, Suppositio.us is used to flying off the handle, but how can Forbes have *two* richest men in America? My money’s on Warren Buffet, but didn’t I read somewhere that Bill Gates might still be? The latest news stories all say WB wins. But here’s the story: Who convinced BG not to work so hard? Who *gave* money to BG to spend, so that he’d be distracted? So what does this say about WB? New book: Snowball.

Meanwhile, is it possible for the vice-presidential candidate to be elected *president*? Maybe we’ll find out.

Clarke’s Best Invention: the elevator

Suppositious is very lazy today (read: always) so we’ll just post a link to something we said somewhere else – here.

And then link to Arthur C. Clarke’s most perspicacious comment on this topic: here (be lazy like Suppositious, just read the last paragraph).

And there you have it, a breakthrough in world politics!

Scoble’s very noble, but are we up to it?

Robert Scoble, former Microsoft corporate blogger and currently an A-list blogger (see: Scobleizer) working independently (and also developing some other things, of course) has offered to link to anyone leaving a good reason for linking and, he wrote, (See? The shift key does have a purpose!) “LEAVE YOUR URL … HERE!” (Caps and other emphasis ours)

So good ol’ Sup’ just left a quick note here (comment 47). Check it out and see if there are any URL’s in that note. See? Smart? Prob not. And it would have been so easy. “Coulda been a contenda,” indeed.

Shoulda written:

Scoble, thanks. Take a look at my vain, but feeble attempts at humor. And keep lookin’ in, ’cause We (http://www.suppositio.us) IS a contenda!

But that didn’t happen, did it?

No, guess not. But the comments aren’t closed yet, apparently. Try again? What could it hurt?

Reading isn’t comprehending: thought this was a sulk – don’t care if anybody reads it!

URL: Reading isn’t comprehending

We guess that’s what got us going: the distinction

between reading and comprehending; you can

measure comprehension, but not reading.

In a class, if a student tells us they’ve read

the chapter, book, the hand-out, the syllabus,

whatever… We can’t test that. An approximation would

be to test the material (comprehension?) before and after,

but even that could be …. invented; accidental; misleading,

in any number of ways.

So maybe what “don’t care if anybody reads this”

really means – it sounds like very very sour grapes -

is something like “You don’t understand it, anyway.

And even if you did, you couldn’t do anything about it.”

Which is probably why we reacted so, um, poignantly

to Scott Karp’s comment in passing.

Technorati on the spotti!

We’re reading Sifry’s Alerts about how many blogs there are and how many can there be, and the total population of the Earth, and whether Technorati wants Martians, Venusians, and other ET’s to claim their blogs. It’s really just a fog to me.

We notice that not one of the conversants, neither the original author or any commenters, have mentioned MySpace in this special way: all those kids are going to grow up, step by step. And one of the steps will be to create: A Real Blog.

So what does that mean? Let me think….

Well, let’s ask someone else for their opinion, or, here’s a first at Suppositious, get some facts. Well, a fact, then start supposin’.

 Fact: 4.6×10 to the seventh unique visitors to MySpace in June. That’s from Nielsen//Netratings. If only ten percent of those follow through with, for instance, WordPress when they grow up and move out of the MySpace/old-AOL mindset, that means that Dave Winer will get over whelmed with 5 million new users, making and abandoning blogs like little kittens in cardboard boxes. Or rabbits on Barwon Downs, if you’re Aussie.

So the blog might really be the inheritor of the radio talk show phenom (as they say in BillBoard and Variety). Think about this carefully. It’s the next action of the (typical? out of 50,000,000?) MySpace user that’s important now. And I hope they all go over to Sifry’s house for Kool-Aid. ‘Cause he loves the little buggers, don’t he?

Meanwhile, there’s this:

Technorati Profile

 

later:

Suppositious has read an entry in the Snipperoo Blog with a great title: “Will MySpace eat its young?”. Their comments are interesting: widget strain’s bad, and they cite David Stern’s guest blog at Silicon Beat – he says that it’s good but maybe difficult to ’siphon off’ (his phrase) MySpace users.

And that’s all ok, but didn’t Suppositious make it clear that the model is NOT eBay or M networks (don’t know that well, but, see, that’s what ‘Suppositious’ means). The proper model is …. (ready?) (set?) AOL! (Yeah, we all know what LOL and all that means: read that, typed that.) And while we’re waiting for the applause to start, Suppositious is gonna try and call Dick Parsons and dress him down for not letting AOL BE the children’s network. It was all set up at one point. You couldn’t get on the *real* internet no matter what you did.

So now it’s all free or something and the central advantage of AOL’s insularity is gone. Gone, gone, gone. Next question: should MySpace start insulating? First guess: Yes! Second: Naw. Third: …

Is that a Mac in your pocket?

MacSlash reports that they’re starting to wonder if they should start supposing that Apple (the computer company, not the Beatles’ music company) will release an Apple-branded cell phone. Not us.

Very Suppositious supposes, verily, verily, that Apple (tcc, ntBmc) will release a cel computer, although exactly how soon is a little problematical. If there were only some gargantuan services company that could do all the calculations for Apple, they could just shrug off the internals of the computer, and just make a mint with cells. My uncle was a cells-man.

But Steve Jobs would probably want an Apple (tcc, ntBmc) Network of some kind. Geez, we just remembered: it could be a virtual network carved out of the existing cel and wireless networks! Wow!

So, we can suppose that almost the minute Bill Gates leaves the computer business, it starts being truly inventive again…

Gates wasn’t exactly the life of the party was he? It’s like storm clouds or something. Who was it that invented FUD? Oh, Gene Ahmdahl, according to Wikipedia (good enough for us). About IBM. And, later, MS… Well, LSMFT, eh? All three seem to be carcinogenic… Wait! we take that back! IBM seems to be curing cancer these days. We just checked out Netscape and found this story. And Bill Gates has left the room. He’s curing cancer, too. And Lucky Strike? Well, that’s so well known it requires no comment, we think.

But back to Apple (tcc, ntBmc). Isn’t it about time for the Beatles to sue them again? Or will their stock (symbol: AAPL) just keep moving up the charts?

Up the charts, if you ask us. Right into cell heaven.

The world in your pocket: It’s the phone, stupid!

Scoble, in a story on a story written by David Beers now has a comment from  sabadash trying to illuminate the kind of people that make modern computers and program them. It’s crazy to keep making these silly computers. Who wants ‘em? I’d much rather have a pocket full of phone calls, Google-searches, web sites, and …

 In that comment, sabadash sez that any kid’d like to have a new flashlight – well, he doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious, isn’t it?

And if you could make a flashlight communicator for the kids this X-mas, wouldn’t that sell?

And wouldn’t you like to have a pocket illuminator that could throw the image of Jenna Jameson on the wall in the middle of the night? Or in the middle of class!?!

I’m sure that the only really hip computer maker, Steve Jobs, is working on all this now. The only question is whether the Apple iFlash will be white or black. Oh, or titanium.

Ironically, Blake Ross is better at supposition than Suppositious is:

Ironically (or is it more pathetic than ironic?), Blake Ross is better at supposition than Suppositious is — Here’s one of the current suppositions that Blake is posting at BlakeRoss.Com:

Taking a page from Google’s playbook, Yahoo will announce that its engineers need spend only 80% of their time on core company projects. The remaining 20% will be spent helping Iran enrich Uranium. After outrage erupts, Yahoo will issue a terse statement that “This policy is rigorously consistent with our moral code. Just last month, we bent over for both the U.S. and China.”

Blake is busy revising his 2006 New Year’s predictions. Well, I’ll say this: I predict that Blake will have more suppositious comments in the future. At least one, I’m sure of that.

 However, there are a couple of things in his suppositious comment that wouldn’t usually be seen here at Very Suppositious: first of all, no difficult language. We find the idea of “bending over” a little risque – not risky, that’s different. And it’s just not likely enough. I don’t really believe that Yahoo is enriching uranium. They’re too busy enriching themselves. But I do believe that Bush (43) will get into the atom business. It’s just too easy to top the oil boys when you’ve got atomic power, ya know?