TWC Fuels the Fires

Since they’re being such good sports (and Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance right now), I thought I’d go ahead and recap some of the better news appearances Time Warner Cable has made lately.

I just want to take a second to state that I know that most of the good people of this company are intelligent and diligent workers. It’s the upper level managers running the company that we should hold responsible for the appalling performance of this technical behemoth.

Don’t want to rent a cable box? Suck it!

Can someone explain to me how cable companies are competitors when the markets they cover never overlap?

They reported a loss of more money ($15B) in 2009Q1 than than of all their profits from 2008Q1 through 2008Q3.

TWC DNS Outage. Again.

Ever seeking to reinforce their appearance of ineptitude, Time Warner Cable has stopped resolving DNS requests again today. It must be that time of the month for them. One month ago to the day Forbes ran an article about how their DNS servers are still vulnerable to attack.

I’ve bypassed this by using public DNS servers, which are usually fast anyway.

If you want to use these their IP addresses are 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2.

Petrodollar Recycling, the Bubble and You: Part II

Yesterday, I commented on how we were getting a demo on how some of the money being spent on oil was coming home and speculating on the real estate market. As insightful as that was, it looks like the downturn in the Dubai real estate market is going to dwarf the rollbacks in US cities. It was all new construction and it was all speculative.

I’d heard about it – that giant hotel with Agassi and Federer playing tennis on the helipad, the peninsula shaped to look like a palm tree – it never made much sense to me, but what do I know?

According to Boing Boing, “Dubai airport (is) clogged with cars abandoned by fleeing construction workers.”

It appears there are more indications that the tail end of the expansion of the global real estate bubble may have been fueled by the late surge in oil prices that started accelerating in late 2007.

The NY Times had a grim report last week, “Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down.”

Boing Boing is also saying that “People are pouring out of Dubai.”

The resultant re-injection of freshly leveraged capital may have perpetuated the illusion of ever increasing M3 capital liquidity. Like a twisted social construct of cold fusion, only our feedback loop dropped when China stopped getting ready for the Olympics.

I’m still pretty sure this theory can be disproved.