1

The sad news for Nintendo fans is that the company will be seeing very little revenue from the franchise they created.  Right now, the projected income from Pokémon Go is so insignificant that Nintendo does not expect their financial estimates to change no matter how popular the game is.

2 This game stands a significant chance of getting augmented reality regulated to the point of a practical ban. Hordes of people wandering around looking at the world through their cell phone screen?
Imagine how many lethal accidents that's going to cause.

3 Except they don't. Not only is the AR piece optional and frequently turned off to save battery life (the game has caused a real boom in external battery packs...), it only kicks in during the brief periods when you're actually "catching" a critter. The rest of the time, it's no worse than "walking while texting".

-j

4 J, however, running your GPS pretty much constantly will burn the battery, and even just having the screen backlight on continuously is a big power drain.

5 ...hence the battery boom. There's someone on Etsy (actually, probably half a dozen someones, and a bunch more knockoffs on their way over from China right now) making custom pokeball cases for external battery packs, so you can chase pokemon in "style".

-j

6
Perhaps this will actually lead to extended life electric car batteries. What a Win!

7

I doubt it will have any effect. The economic value of better batteries has been very, very clear for at least 40 years, and the chemists have been working hard on it.

The reason we haven't gotten the kind of improvement in batteries that we've gotten in semiconductors is that battery technology is fundamentally very difficult. It's going to take an entirely new technological approach, not merely a refinement of existing technology.

1

It is still not as awesome as the pipeline of beer (Or was it whiskey?  That would have been even better.)...

2 I bet it caused a huge traffic jam on the morning commute, as everyone was driving very slowly...

3

Some of the news reports I've seen about this have pointed out that THC isn't soluble in water to any significant degree. There was only one lab that did testing, and it tested 10 samples and declared six of them positive.

Samples have been sent to other labs and definitive results are supposed to become available tomorrow. I suspect what we're going to discover is that the first lab is full of shit.

Also, there are five wells and only one of them tested positive. It's been taken offline.

A different point: THC is expensive and the amount it would take to contaminate the water supply for an entire town would be titanically expensive. It's difficult to believe anyone would waste their drugs like that. (When they would be getting wasted themselves instead, heh.)

So I think this is going to be a false alarm, and a major embarassment for someone.

4 Have to keep in mind that they can now detect things like that at part per trillion levels. 

5 The other tests came back, all negative, and the alert has been cancelled. The report I saw didn't outright state that the first test had been a false positive, but that's certainly the implication.

1 Here's hoping another Muslim Brotherhood acolyte and Obama fellow-traveler bites the dust.  The schadenfreude should alleviate any Amane fog-induced distress.

Good hunting to the Turkish Military.  If they pull it off, they can get rid of a Erdogan who uses Muslim terrorists with plausible deniability the same way Obama uses Black terrorists in America.  It will also be a blow to the EU elite, not to mention choking off a Muslim "refugee" artery into Europe - not a panacea of course.

Ultimately, it's a question of whether the inherent danger your enemy poses overrides the danger of confronting him.  I don't think purging the military worked out for Erdogan as well as he'd hoped.

Obama, take notice.

2 Um... wow.

3 Rykehaven, I try to keep the conspiracy theories to a minimum around here. I don't believe Obama is "using Black terrorists" etc.

4

The ghost of Creighton Abrams said 'Nah, I'll pretend I didn't hear that.'

Personally, I am enjoying Prisma Liner myself this season.  What about you?

5

There isn't anything this season for me, unless Ange Vierge is uncensored on AT-X.

Nothing at all

6 cxt, I've been ridiculously entertained by ReLife, aided by the curious decision to put the entire series up on Lumpyroll at once... meaning no need to watch week-to-week.

And then there's the Aria-'em-up called Amanchu, written by Kozue Amano herownbadself.  Added bonus: the music could have been lifted from Neo-Venezia itself.

7

Amanchu does seem a nice series, but the character design are unpleasant, and some of the character animations just are not right.  It feels like they were trying to decide between SD and realistic, and ended up with a hideous mixture of the two.

And to the occasional interloper - go and watch some Yuru Yuri.  You will enjoy your life more.

8 The coup attempt ended in a whimper, and Erdogan is left in a stronger position than ever.  However, given his inclinations, Erdogan's reprisals will be major and vicious - and if anything could, might just spark a much larger and wider coup attempt against him.

9 ...and it appears the they didn't find their quarry.   Erdogan isn't under house arrest, nor is he 3 ft under.  More's the pity.

Steven Den Beste: Rykehaven, I try to keep the conspiracy theories to a minimum around here. I don't believe Obama is "using Black terrorists" etc.

Hmm...shots fired.  That justifies a last-stand retort later, if I recover from my Saturday morning mood.

And to the occasional interloper - go and watch some Yuru Yuri.  You will enjoy your life more.

Looking at Yuru Yuri; the interloper does enjoy life, and you should try it some time.  I've been waiting to continue Twelve Kingdoms.  Romance of the Kingdoms meets anthropomorphic furballs and unicorns.

I'll look into Relife and Amanchu later.

10

Steven Den Beste: Rykehaven, I try to keep the conspiracy theories to a minimum around here. I don't believe Obama is "using Black terrorists" etc.

Retort.

ReLife, thus far, has its moments of levity.

1 No, see, you've got it all wrong.  Mick Jagger is dead, and has been for some time.  He isn't undead; he just took so many drugs that his nervous system is still twitching is all. 

2 Sort of like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, with the whole functional immortality thing. 

1

It commemorates the storming of the Bastille, a prison in Paris where political prisoners were being kept.

That is the mythology, but by the time it was 'stormed', the Bastille was only holding a few common criminals, not political prisoners.  The storming itself was a classic example of duplicity, since the warden opened the gate to the revolutionaries after he had been assured that the matter would be handled peacefully - which lasted until the revolutionaries got in and proceeded to break their word, executing the warden in the process.

Currently they're on their Fourth Republic, intermixed with two bouts of monarchy not counting Napoleon.

Fifth Republic - the Fourth Republic was immediately following WW2 and collapsed due to the Algiers Crisis.  The Fifth Republic was given to France by the uncrowned king Charles De Gaulle.

And then maybe the French will consider nuking ISIS.

Burning out the hornets in the no-go zones might be the first thing that has to be done.  Maybe the French can ask the Stalinist Algerians to do it.

2

Supposedly that was what was happening during the National Emergency since last November.

By the way, Hollande has now announced a 3 month extension of the National Emergency.

It's interesting to speculate about what kind of consequences something like this will have. One distinct possibility is that Marine le Pen will be the next President, and will try to leave the EU.

3 OK, the attacker was killed in the gunfight with police. At least the French got that part right.

4 If this achieved nothing else, at least it got Obama to use the word "terrorist".

Of course, he didn't manage to get himself to say "Muslim terrorist", but you have to start somewhere. It's a first step.

5 As bad as Bastille day is for an excuse for a national holiday, it's not as bad as Guy Fawkes Day, in which the British celebrate a failed coup, whose name sake (Fawkes) who captured, tortured, and only escaped hanging by jumping off the scaffold and breaking his neck.

6 Hollande's name was already mud. For him personally, the silver lining is that this has driven his previous scandal out of the news, that he had a personal hairdresser that travels everywhere with him, paid $132,000 per year. It wasn't a good look for the head of the Socialist party.

7 By the time the mobs finally storm Bastille prison, the only notable prisoner kept there is Marquis De Sade, who was kept there for violating moral code.

8 For as much as we joke about the French Military, I've long held the opinion that France are the one country I would expect to use Nuclear Weapons against an opponent.  Especially as all of their nukes are sub-launched.

As for what is going on in the West, it would be nice if the Nationalists take power without the current Elites trying to destroy their own countries in the process, but that doesn't look to be the way it's going.  Austria's high court just tossed the recent Presidential election because it was pretty clear voter fraud had swung it.  That's not a good sign of things to come.

That's the reason for the "anti-Muslim backlash is what we need to worry about!" story line existing.  No one is actually worried about it.  It's projection of what the people that push the story line would like to do to the "normals".  The "normals" just want the criminals and jihadists removed.  But they're going to push the "normals" into reacting very violently if the Elites don't start taking serious measures.
But those measures won't really be against the Muslims.  It'll be against the Elites.  Keep an eye on stories about politicians being killed.  That's what'll change the entire dynamic.  Once the Elites become understood as the "problem", that's when things will start getting really messy.

I don't even blame the Muslims that much.  Even the barest of understanding of either the history or theology of Islam tells you exactly what it is: a supremacist cult built around conquest & subjugation.  They've been doing this for 1400+ years.  It ain't new.  The West being stupid enough to allow that many into their countries is the new twist.  The only question is how bloody does it play out.  It's not like massive population transfers haven't happened several times, in Europe, in the last century.  It's just going to happen again because the Elites are just that foolish.

9

For as much as we joke about the French Military, I've long held the opinion that France are the one country I would expect to use Nuclear Weapons against an opponent.  Especially as all of their nukes are sub-launched.

The French military do get a rap but that is because their political class has hamstrung and sabotaged them into incompetence.  The soldiers and officers are generally as good as any other (At the same time that most French troops were restricted from combat operations in Afghanistan, there was a French special operations unit that operated with the US Spec Ops, who were willing to go anywhere and do anything they needed, with skill and panache.).  And I agreed that the French would be the most likely to use nuclear weapons if they got pushed too far - unlikely the US, the UK, or even Israel, if terrorists had attacked something really significant, like the Effiel Tower, those terrorists' base camp would be a glowing parking lot the next day.

Most people (Including those who accuse the US of conducting the most military interventions post WW2.) fail to realize that the French military is the most active conducting operations and interventions in the world, simply due to the French habit of intervening in their former empire.  Their intelligence services also has free reign on their operations - with far less notice than the CIA gets.

10

If you look carefully at French military history, what you find is a long history of good men being led by generals and politicians who are idiots. Most of the bad reputation the French have isn't due to their soldiers performing badly, it's because they were being wasted in futile and ill-conceived military operations by incompetent generals and political leaders..

Dien Bien Phu is the classic example of that though it is by no means the only one. The Franco-Prussian War was another. (The history of the Franco-Prussian war makes me weep for the poor men who had to put up with Louis Napoleon's sheer stupidity.)

Since the Napoleonic war, there's only been one case of French troops performing well because of good leadership, and that's the Free French after the Normandy invasion. But they were under the overall strategic command of the British and American. They performed superbly, because the soldiers were not under French overall command. Their officers were French up to the level of division, but above that it was Americans all the way up to Eisenhower.

11

Since the Napoleonic war, there's only been one case of French troops performing well because of good leadership, and that's the Free French after the Normandy invasion. But they were under the overall strategic command of the British and American. They performed superbly, because the soldiers were not under French overall command. Their officers were French up to the level of division, but above that it was Americans all the way up to Eisenhower.

Ferdinand Foch (Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies in 1918.) and Charles Mangin clearly disagree.  French generals were usually no better and no worse than their foreign counterparts, but there was nothing that made French generals supposedly far worse than average, anymore than German generals supposedly far better than average.

Aside from issues of doctrine (Which was hardly unique - even the Germans had that problem.), the biggest issues with the French military was a general distrust of 'colonial' troops and (For WW2.) an air of caution due to the empty classes of the 1930s and subsequently lower manpower potential of the French Army.

1

"Dear Bacon-ate-r,

I know how you feel.  I went through exactly the same thing earlier this year.  After much soul-searching, I decided I needed a much greater sin to balance the guilt I felt for craving meat.  I considered killing younglings, but this didn't feel evil enough to suit anything but a badly acted movie.  Next, I considered traveling to an Asian country and killing babies, but this was so 1960's as to be useless for making me feel guilty.  After further thought, I realized I must commit a sin so heinous, so vile, no one could ever consider the eating of meat as anything but the most trivial of offenses.  And thus, it is my duty to speak to you today of the joys of accepting Donald Trump as my presidential candidate and personal savior from the forces of vegetarianism..."

 

2 Ubu wins.

3 Meat is the perfect antidote for your typical low-energy herbivore.

On semi-serious note, this SJW dilemma reminds me of an exchange in Spartacus:

Crassus: Do you eat oysters?
Antoninus: When I have them, master.
Crassus: Do you eat snails?
Antoninus: No, master.
Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral, and the eating of snails to be immoral?

At the heart of Antoninus' dilemma is a question of whether his virtue is a result of his morality and upbringing, or a result of intimidation - the threat of punishment by Rome and its Legions - in which case, Antoninus' morality is a rationalization of his submission ex post facto (a facade, "virtue-signalling").

4

'Hitler was a vegetarian.  If you don't want to be like Hitler, don't be vegetarian.'

Or:

"Hitler was a vegetarian, which means vegetarianism is not ethical.'

Note that Hitler was also big on banning animal cruelty and smoking - while being quite happy to murder millions of people in barbaric ways.  Which, now that I think about it, is not much different from the end goals and means of many environmentalists and animal rights activists.

5

My answer to Crassus would be, "It has nothing to do with morality; it's just that I don't like snails."

(Of course, I myself don't eat any kind of shellfish including oysters, but that's as may be.)

1

I'm on leave this week, but I should probably talk to our operations staff to see if we've had anybody trying to catch a Squirtle in the Bonneville forebay or something since Pokémon Go came out.

I'm also wondering if anybody's had a close call chasing a Pokémon on the railroad tracks yet.

(Huh.  The Windows 10 autocorrect puts the accent mark on the "e" in Pokémon.)

2 At our monthly "All Hands" meeting this morning, the director of IT security briefed us on the grave security threat posed by this game.  Not the fact that on some phones it requires too much access to your personal info. 

Instead, his main concern was that apparently the gazebo in back of our building (used for lunch and smoke breaks) is listed as a hot spot for catching rare Pokemon.  He is worried that unsavory people will mingle with employees while hunting, and possibly overhear sensitive conversations (which are already prohibited outside the office, unless you are a Clinton).

3

How soon before the "WOWGOLD!" groups start camping on Pokemon Go hot spots? I guess it would be a bit more of a problem because you have to be on the spot physically.

I can imagine this getting out of hand rapidly if hotspots start appearing places like the middle of Times Square, or the lobby of the NYT, or the White House Rose Garden.

Or the middle of a runway at LaGuardia. Oh, the fun we could have if we hacked the Pokemon Go server and started placing hotspots in wonderful locations like the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or the front lawn of someone we hate.

4 Players camping at hotspots probably won't be feasible at least until Niantic opens up a trading function.

There are two types of hotspots: Gyms and Pokestops. Gyms are where players can fight Pokemon left there by other players, taking the Gym and leaving their own Pokemon to defend it. The bonus for having a Pokemon there is 10 Pokecoins (each Pokecoin costing from 99/100ths to about 20/29ths of a cent, depending on how many you buy) and some Stardust, which can be used to make Pokemon a little stronger. This bonus is claimable every 21 hours, so it's not really feasible as a source of revenue. (By the way, according to this site the White House does have a Gym.)

Pokestops provide a few consumable items with each use, and is reusable after a few minutes. The key is that there's an item called the Lure Module that can be applied to a Pokestop that attracts Pokemon to it, and any player near it benefits. (I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'm given to understand that all players can get their own copy of any particular spawn, but that higher-level players get stronger versions.)

At its cheapest, it's about $1.18 an hour to keep a Lure Module active. In theory, once trading opens up, groups can camp an area and gather Pokemon to trade online for revenue. Depending on how much Pokemon end up going for, this might be worth farming by groups.

There is farming going on already, but not by groups of players. Because it's easy to tell when a Lure Module has been applied, businesses have been using Lure Modules to attract customers. Unfortunately, robbers have used the same method as well.

5 People camping the way the WOWGOLD guys do certainly can't happen until there's a way to transfer pokemons from one person to another. But I can imagine people doing it just to get ahead. It's a pretty day and there's a hotspot in a park, so go there with a book and your phone and read until a new spawn happens, and acquire a new one. Keep it up until dinner

6 Saw a couple hipsters wandering the Barrio with their focus entirely on their phones near our plant today. This can only end poorly.

7

As I understand it, this is one of those Free* games, where you can download and run it for free but there are loads of things you are supposed to decide you need to buy in-game with real-world currency. Is that right?

I'm not capable of going out anymore; I can't really walk any more and I haven't been outside since last Fall. But I wonder if I were to load the thing, if I could see a pokemon out of any of my windows? That would be weird. Maybe I'll try it and see.

(The weirdest thing, of course, would be to try it and discover one in my living room. That's unlikely since I'm on the second floor of a three story building, even if the map position lucked into this location.)

8 Yes, it's free with paid boosters to lure pokemons to you and (I think) help you catch and train them.

One of the girls at my office found one right on her desk.  There must be a bit of give to the GPS co-ordinates.

9 That's unlikely since I'm on the second floor of a three story building...

As I was listening to the sports radio station I am wont to indulge in this evening, the evening host was interviewing his video game expert in-studio about PGo.  As they were talking, the game expert found a pokemon and took a photo.

They're on the 12th floor of Two Prudential Plaza.

10 There are two different functions, is my understanding.  A GPS-based locator gets you to a location, but then the software places the Pokemons in the environment using object recognition programming.  That's how they wind up in desks and on tables or in fireplaces.

11 I've been playing it a bit. The AR function is very simple. There's no object recognition or anything going on; it just overlays the Pokemon model on your camera image, and you can move your phone around to place it in a good spot for a photo if you like.
Ben is right that there are two separate phases. There's the map screen, where you're placed using GPS. The game server spawns Pokemon at various locations. Once you get close enough, you can switch to the capturing screen, which is the aforementioned AR.
Steven, if you ran it in your apartment, you would occasionally have Pokemon spawn close enough that you could try to capture them. There's also an item in the game that causes several to automatically appear right where you are over half an hour. On the AR screen, they might appear to be in your living room or outside (I think wherever your phone is pointing when the capture screen loads, but I'm not sure).

12 There was a report that allegedly Pokemon Go caused a reduction is clinical depression by forcing people out of the house. Suposedly, a big hurdle for them is to get motivated and do anything, like put on clothes.

Not sure how truthful this is, seems a little too easy. Of course I'm sure it's a statistical effect. A game is not guaranteed to help bad cases. On the other hand, Russian researchers experimented in late 90s with hitting junkies with wooden sticks. Those beaten reported significant reduction in interest in drugs for which they had accustomed, as well as reduction in withdrawal symptoms. Normally one would not think that beating someone with a stick would change the organism's biochemistry. So perhaps Pokemon works by some statistical miracle too.

13 That's probably anecdotal. The game simply hasn't existed long enough to allow any scientifically valid data yet.

14 Yeah, typical Soundbite Psychology, written by the sort of person who wouldn't recognize the concept of statistical significance if it bit them in the Squirtle. "Doing something fun" definitely has an effect on people, but "causing a reduction in clinical depression" isn't something that can be measured in less than two weeks. And nobody knows how long it's going to remain engaging and fun, especially for people new to the genre.

-j

1 Another reason I think we're looking at the beginning of the end is that putting on a game is getting absurdly expensive. The Sochi winter games cost something like $56 billion, for example. It looks like a fair amount of that was because of corruption but even without that it's a preposterous amount of money.

And the site selection process was revealed a long time ago as being thoroughly corrupt, involving a lot of bribery. Myself, I can't figure out why any city would want to have anything to do with this, and one way it might end is that for some year no one comes forward with a bid.

2 The Sydney Olympics went off with barely a blip.  Despite being more than three times the size of the Sochi Winter Olympics, they cost about, hmm, $7 billion in today's money.  We (being the state of New South Wales, which ultimately footed the bill) lost money overall, but less than what we currently run as an annual budget surplus.

One proposal I saw that makes a lot of sense is for the Summer Olympics to be permanently hosted in Athens and for the competing nations to contribute to the cost.  Probably never happen because it would drastically reduce the opportunity for graft.

If you want to get really depressed, look at what's going on with Qatar's preparation for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.  (That's soccer, for countries that play real football.)  They're spending the equivalent of their annual GDP on it.

3 Functionally, the Summer Olympics can only be held in about 7-10 cities in the World.  They already have the infrastructure and capacity to deal with the event.  Even the upcoming Tokyo Olympics (2020 Summer Games) is looking to be a bit of a stretch for the Japanese.
They're much like monument building: if they're cheap, it's not a problem; if they're expensive, it's a huge disaster.    Which is why you need locations that already have nearly all of the facilities and don't need to build new ones.   This limits your options to: LA, NYC, London, Paris, Berlin and some collection of a few other major capitals.    Otherwise, you're looking at wasted capital expenses in the billions.
The downfall of the Olympics, though, I believe was the 2004 Games in Athens.  That actually is what blew up the Greek government budget trying to cover the costs, which would eventually set off their financial crisis.  Small countries simply can't afford the outlays, and most of the recent countries have viewed the Olympics as a way to show-off.  Thus China's monster expenses for the 2008 games.

4 Boston recently tried to bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics.  The bid itself was almost as much of a debacle as the Rio games will be.  Bostonians (really Bay Staters in general) rejected the idea, mostly because they didn't believe the rose-colored ROI promises.  Fortunately the idea was killed before tons of public money was sunk into the project, and it was mostly the people who stood to gain the most left holding the bag.
And let's not get into why Boston would be hosting the Summer Olympics instead of the Winter one.... 

5 One of the proposed soccer venues for the Tokyo Olympics is in Sapporo, over 500 miles away. That will probably be easier to reach than the venues in Odaiba. (apparently the soccer venues won't be finalized until after the Rio disaster finishes; everything else is set, including moving the cycling events out to Izu)

If I go to Japan in 2020, it will either be Kyoto in the spring (avoiding all the last-minute infrastructure work) or Tokyo in the fall (after all the cleanup is done). I don't want to be anywhere near Olympic crowds.

-j

6 I went to 1980 Olympics and it was pretty fun, all things considered. A dozen of teams participated under Olympic flag, that being the time of Cold War. We're getting back to that.

In general though, is anyone interested anymore? I think I may muster a modicum of interest in women's beach volleyball, now that women's tennis is what it has become. But I won't go out of my way to watch. If it were a DOTA2 match, that would be different.

7

...most of the recent countries have viewed the Olympics as a way to show-off.  Thus China's monster expenses for the 2008 games.

That is exactly it - most countries bidding for the Olympics these days want it as their international 'debutante coming out party'.  For that matter, you could say a lot of the past ones have been the same way, like 1964 Tokyo, 1968 Mexico City and 1988 Seoul (Which shocked the North Koreans when Seoul's bid actually won.).  Economics have damn little to do with it anymore - the Olympics that had good management (1984 Los Angeles, for example.) are the rarity.  That is why Brazil went for 2016, and that is why Turkey was aiming for the Olympics as well.

What is becoming clear is that the bids that are winning are coming from countries lacking the economic foundations to support extravagance like the Olympics.  South Korea could afford to the 1988 Olympics back then (Now would be a different matter.) - not even the most optimistic person would have thought Greece could afford the 2004 Olympics under the best circumstances.

8

That was why Nashville was the beginning of the end of the World Fairs. Before that, a city would host the World Fair as a way of bringing attention to the city, a "coming out party" as you say.

Nashville saw the fair as a way of making money. They hoped it would bring in more money (tourism, and so on) than they spent putting it on. As a result, they cut things to the bone; there weren't all that many exhibits and most of those were lackluster.

Brazil probably intended the Rio Olympics to be a "coming out" party, but when they made the bid, they didn't expect the world to go into recession, and now they simply don't have the money to make it work.

And the Zika virus scare certainly didn't help any.

9 Nashville?  Knoxville, perhaps.

10 Speaking of World's Fairs, I had considered going to the 2005 one for my first trip to Japan, but the scheduling didn't work out. Looking it up, they apparently made a decent profit on it, and the park they built still gets traffic.

Wikipedia on the Knoxville fair links to an AP story saying that it turned a $57 profit, but that Knoxville was left with $46 million in debt (paid off in 2007). The 2010 Shanghai Expo was reportedly a huge success, but the three billion dollars the city invested wasn't counted against the revenue, and they're apparently still spending money to get the site renovated into a business district.

As for the upcoming Expos in Kazakhstan and Dubai, I don't see them drawing big Western crowds, although I imagine they'll get Asian tourists.

-j

11 You're right; it was Knoxville, not Nashville.

12 CNN: Rio police tell tourists they won't be able to protect them

13 I grew up in Tennessee, so the difference between K-town and Nashville was easy to see. (Of course, one has Instapundit and the other doesn't...)

I have absolutely no doubt that I would fail any similar test between two relatively large cities in Washington state or any other place in which I have not lived.

14 The Brazilian prostitutes are now holding an Olympic sales on their services.  The much promised 2014 World Cup boom fizzled and they're still looking for that fabled sexed up sport tourists.  Brazil is currently in the running for the worse run Olympic, with competition with Sochi 2014, Athens 2004, Montreal 1976 (where they were paying for that overly ambitious retractable dome stadium until 2006).
I just can't wait to see how NBC Sports spins this in their broadcast, not that I ever watch the Olympics anyway.

15 I figure there will be at least three more Summer Games on schedule. Beyond that I am dubious. Oddly, the Winter Games might do better, because they are less expensive to put on.

16 There's a significant risk that could kill it all off. The American broadcast networks pay a grotesquely large amount of money for the broadcast rights each time. If, however, the ratings collapse then the networks won't be willing to ante up as much cash, and that will completely change the entire economic picture, and could begin a downward spiral.

17 Maybe CCTV (Central China Television - i.e. the TV propaganda arm of the PRC government.) can step in with funding.  If the Olympics coverage is going to provide the viewers with Communist propaganda, they should have a (notionally) Communist government pay for it.

18 I wonder if splitting them so there'd be an event every two years instead of four hurt?  I know they feel a lot more mundane now.

1 You make fondue, obviously.

2 Scour the Pacific Rim!  They'll be needing a volcano for a fondue pot.  

3 Any old container will do. The cheese is already hot.

4 Undoubtedly the thieves are from Wisconsin.  There is no "what now"... they just wanted a week's worth of cheese.

5 Winconceivable!