Well the big news on this, the final week of the 2012 Formula One season, is the replacement of Kamui Kobayashi on the Sauber team by Esteban Gutierrez.

Now this is in some respects not that unexpected.  Gutierrez has been a back up and development driver at Sauber for 3 years now and will be a Mexican on a team with considerable Mexican investment.  Since the departure of Honda and Toyota from the sport Japanese money and involvement has drastically declined and even Suzuka is frequently mentioned as a track on the bubble in Bernie’s insatiable pursuit of petro bucks in a sport as fossilized in greed as the fuel it wastes, not to mention those handy machine gun toting mercenaries who hose the rabble out from underneath the tires of the armored SUVs that shuffle the C List celebrities and whores of the billionaire box business dealers back and forth from the hotels each day.

And so Kobayashi is forced to beg on the internet for enough dough to keep driving, exposing the truth that far from a Galtian meritocracy Formula One is even more blatantly than most a bribery driven sham, an amusement for bored Boyars with more bucks than brains too stupid to realize that they’re merely second class wanna be rubes in a game where the trendy potlach is your own personal state with a space program, a libertarian paradise where you can snort your hillbilly heroin straight from the crack of a dead hooker’s ass and drive around naked except for your multi-barrel mini-gun imagining you’re the Terminator when the only similarity is your steroid shriveled testicles.

Interlagos

• Interlagos
• Brazil Grand Prix

Interactive Track

• Formula One
• The Guardian

Official Sites

• Formula One Official Website
• Speed Racecast

(h/t Herr Doktor Professor)

This project covers from 6 am to 6 pm.

Your usual collection of marathons, movies, and holiday specials.  New College Throwball on offer from ESPN at 7 pm (South Florida @ Cincinnati) and 10 pm (Arizona State @ Arizona).  Late night repeats 2:30 am ESPN2 Syracuse @ Temple, 5 am Arizona State @ Arizona; 3 am ESPN South Florida @ Cincinnati.

8 pm NBC The National Dog Show (repeat), midnight Speed Interlagos Practice (also, too).

Big BCS day tomorrow, Interlagos Qualifying.  This project covers from 6 pm to 6 am.

Black Friday is a bunch of meaningless hype, in one chart

Posted by Neil Irwin, The Washington Post

November 23, 2012 at 9:58 am

When television news crews and newspaper writers go to cover the holiday crowds, they try to give the festivities some great economic import. Standard aspects of the genre include noting that holiday sales can account for about a third of retailers’ annual sales; cite authoritative-sounding projections from the National Retail Federation about what this year’s sales will be, and perhaps even note that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy (conveniently leaving out that most of that spending has nothing to do with gift-giving or holiday cheer).

In fact, sales over Thanksgiving weekend tell us virtually nothing about retail sales for the full holiday season-let alone anything meaningful about the economy as a whole. Paul Dales of Capital Economics analyzed the relationship between retail sales during the week of Thanksgiving against the overall change in retail sales for November through January. As the chart shows, the relationship is a very weak one, with dots all over the grid. But if there is any conclusion to draw at all, the relationship is actually negative!

…

In other words, strong sales results around Black Friday actually predict slightly weaker holiday sales overall.

…

Retailers know that a typical family spends whatever it will spend on holiday gift-giving, and that whether that spending comes on Nov. 23 or Dec. 23 doesn’t make that much difference in the aggregate. But retailers aren’t a monolith; they are all chasing market share from the others.

…

For the media, it is a ready-made story. It takes place at a time that there is little other news, and it is known in advance, so editors and TV news directors can plan in advance for coverage. And there’s no doubt that video of people stampeding through the doors of a Wal-Mart in hot pursuit of a new Wii makes for great television. That is even putting aside more cynical possibilities, such as that media depend on retail advertising and thus have a vested interest in creating a sense of hype and anticipation around an orgy of consumerism.

And what, then, of the people themselves, the consumers who line up with breathless anticipation and make the whole thing possible. From an economists’ perspective, this is a case in which the retailers are using a rationing mechanism other than price to allocate scarce goods: They price a limited number of TVs and other products at a below-market price, and then ration those goods based on who is willing to stand in line the longest.

…

“I think they want to bring the people here and make them tired,” a man named Saeed Yazdi told my colleagues Abha Bhattarai and Steven Overly Thursday night outside the Best Buy in Columbia Heights. “It’s veiled punishment.” Well yes, Saeed, precisely.

Our elites hate us

DCblogger, Corrente

Fri, 11/23/2012 – 11:21am

Looking at this video of shoppers at Walmart fighting over Phones I realized how much our elites must really hate us. I am sure that when members fo the Walton family watch videos like this they must laugh.

Walmart does this deliberately. They have a handful of low priced loss leaders, but nowhere near enough to meet the demand. So people line up and fight to be first, because if you are low income, getting one of those low priced items might be your only chance to own one. This is what the elites delight doing, creating situations where we are battling each other frantically for crumbs. It is not just their workers they hate, the Walton family hates their customers, hates everyone with a net worth less than a billion dollars.

While not quite a pivotal in BCS Standings as tomorrow’s big games, many teams are putting the finishing touches on their seasons today with the following telecasts this afternoon.

• 11 am ESPN2– Syracuse @ Temple
• noon ABC– Nebraska @ Iowa
• 2:30 pm CBS– LSU @ Arkansas
• 3 pm FX Utah @ Colorado
• 3:30 pm ABC– West Virginia @ Iowa State
• 3:30 pm Faux– Washington @ Washington State

It’s also the start of College Hoopies season with most schools participating in pre-season tournaments.  Individual matchups are not available because of the format but ESPN is providing continuous coverage from 12:30 pm to 7 pm and ESPN2 from 3:30 pm until 2 am.

Interlagos Practice @ 11 am.  College Throwball Day 1.  More pre-season College Hoopies.  Movies!  Gold!  Hitchcock!  James Bond!

In short plenty of reasons not to shop.

This covers 6 am to 6 pm.

This is more difficult than it looks.  I hate Robert Kraft and his team with the pure unalloyed hatred that only someone who lives close to Hartford and watched him dick over Connecticut in 1998 can summon.

Unlike John Rowland however I can’t bring myself to declare even temporary allegiance with Gang Green who’ve been by turns feckless and insufferable.

Oh well, 0 for 2.  Whoever I pick will inevitably lose.

So this day 1 thing, that means you’re going to have to put up with this tomorrow at least and frankly the schedules don’t get ‘normal’ until Monday.  I haven’t yet made up my mind about Saturday and Sunday since Zap2It is undergoing some kind of site re-design to make it more ‘mobile friendly’ and it’s screwing with my crystal ball.

I might decide just to highlight specials, we’ll see.

This project covers the Black Friday overnight from 6 pm to 6 am.  I remind you it’s also national ‘buy nothing’ day, advice I intend to take myself.

After long, deep, and careful consideration I have decided that the ‘Boys are the lesser evil.

You can hardly blame a scorpion for its nature, toads on the other hand…

Lions 3 point underdogs because they’re a hard luck story on the holiday, but that’s the reason you should be rooting for a town I hoped would take at least one in the Series.

Besides, they’re the Texans.  I’d go for them in a matchup against the ‘Boys though.

Something must be done! War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes.

Hey, I got an uncle lives in Taxes.

No, I’m talking about taxes – money, dollars!

Dollars! There’s-a where my uncle lives! Dollars, Taxes!