It's time to call this experiment "done" and say goodbye.

This is the 11 month statistics on Facebook referrals back to The Ticker:

So I have generated 1.7% of the inbound links to The Ticker via Facebook.  Put another way, with every single Ticker that has gone there (and they all have) only 1.7% of the inbound links coming into The Ticker have come from Facebook.  

That's crap, to be blunt, considering that all of this content which I have provided to them they have been able to sell ads against and yet they remit exactly zero to me for the privilege of doing so.

Essentially I provide them free content which they can then monetize, but they provide me nothing in return.

Now I have no idea how much money they actually make by having my content there.  Maybe it's basically nothing.  But maybe it's not, and I can't see whether that's the case or not.  They would like me to "promote" my posts to increase their reach, but for what purpose, given that all that would do is increase the amount of advertising they can display against my content and make even more money!

That's a nice model for them -- get me to pay them to show my posts to people and they collect additional advertising dollars too.  In exchange I get nothing.

Now if a lot of traffic flowed my way, to where I can display ads (and make money from same) then it would be a decent bargain.  But I've been doing this for quite a while, and the fact is that I get nothing out of it.

So as of tomorrow I say "Poof!" to that.

You can follow "Tickerguy" on Twitter if you want an announcement service, or use an RSS reader (which is uniquely personal and works just fine.)

This is good...

(Reuters) - Fast-food workers in hundreds of cities across the United States kicked off a day of strikes and rallies on Thursday to demand a higher minimum wage. The largest job actions were expected in New York and Washington, organizers said.

Workers want the federal minimum wage raised to $15 from $7.25, saying the current rate is not enough to live on. Critics counter that doubling the minimum wage would cost jobs, forcing employers to cut back on the number of workers.

Why not?  $15,000 a year (roughly what that wage comes out to) used to be enough to live on, and it wasn't that long ago.

Why isn't it today?

It is because of unbacked credit creation which has driven up the cost of living dramatically beyond that of wage increases, which are naturally limited to the increase in productivity.

In other words you have to actually do more with less to get more (in real terms) with wages.  To depress purchasing power you need only issue credit, spending exactly like currency, backed by nothing.

Rather than deal with that issue (and the fact that The Fed's own charter says that their job is to prevent that from happening) we instead see this.

And what will be the response?  It's already happening -- Applebees is putting tablets in their booths, allowing you to order food and pay right at the table -- with no server.

So now we only need someone to run the food out and bus the table when you're done.  

That will allow elimination of about 3/4 of the waitstaff.

Want to bet against that becoming the norm for pretty-much all fast food within a few years?

Those who are going on strike rather than dealing with the real problem deserve what they're going to get -- a lost job.

And here comes data:

The most surprising aspect of BBM’s success is probably its strong showing in Asia, where it is competing head to head against powerhouse messaging apps like LINE, WeChat and KakaoTalk. Brand new data from Distimo shows download shares of leading messaging apps across a broad spectrum of Asian countries. This data was gathered over the month of November, so it does not include the first week spike of BBM downloads that yielded 10 Million new users across Apple's AAPL +0.71% iOS and Google's GOOG -0.21% Android devices.

The full article shows 39% market share in Indonesia, 38% in India (!!) and 26% in both Malaysia and the Philippines.

Clearly the cross-platform initiative is working by any measurement you care to use, and Forbes seems to think that this will lead to 200 million users by the end of next year.

That's definitely not in the current stock price for the company's shares.

There ought to be a law.....

The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.

....

That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.

Wait a minute.

The temperature stopped going up 15 years ago?  So what have been all the alarmists been telling us for the last 15 years?  A lie, that's what.

And what is a lie when it results in policy decisions and pecuniary benefit for the liar?  It's called fraud and in any honest society it results in indictment, prosecution, conviction and imprisonment.

But we don't live in such a world.

The single most damning aspect of the “pause” is that, because it has occurred when “greenhouse gases” have been pouring into the atmosphere at record levels, it shows at the very least that something natural is at play here. 

Yep.  Like, perhaps, that maybe this big orange ball is responsible for global temperature, that buffering reactions are why we have an inhabitable planet in the first place, and perhaps that atmospheric CO2 levels are a result rather than a cause of temperature levels?

Hmmm....

I think we need to encourage more global warming.

May I suggest that we contemplate a BBQ for the globull warming antagonists, using wood for fuel of course?  That would also reduce the incidence of diabetes so we'd both get rid of the scammers and improve public health.

Sounds like a win to me.

My, what a nice set of Android applications you have there.  Looks like Go Launcher (it is.)

But what is that phone?

What?! 

Oh wait... it's not an Android at all..... it just runs like one along with all the BB10 you want.

One device, two environments, both accessible and running at the same time.