Possibly an Announcement -- WordPress.comGrrrrr. This feature is core to my memory extension strategy [1].... In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.
The result is a handful of links that should provide you and your visitors something interesting to check out. On blogs that cover the same topics frequently related posts could cause a 5-10% increase in traffic overnight. You could also start to see traffic from lots of other blogs. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’ll be tweaking it a lot based on your feedback and the data that we collect once everything is live.
Gordon's Notes: Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God.The meme persists. Funny about that.
- We need to close the rating agencies down. Now.
- When you give 99% of the human race money and power, they cannot imagine that they don't deserve it. They are convinced they are brilliant. I know I would.
- The part where shorting the bad loans with credit-default swaps enabled the generation of 'virtual' bad loans involving real money is mind-boggling.
- I don't think this was caused by poor black people getting too many loans. Do you?...
Krugman is back, both barrels blazing. I really can't abbreviate much of what he wrote, every word counts. Emphases mine.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Madoff Economy - Paul Krugman
...How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.
Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.
But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion.
Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.
O.K., maybe my example wasn’t hypothetical after all.
So, how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair? Well, Mr. Madoff allegedly skipped a few steps, simply stealing his clients’ money rather than collecting big fees while exposing investors to risks they didn’t understand. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.
We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.
But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.
At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.
Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?...
... Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing...
... Now, as we survey the wreckage and try to understand how things can have gone so wrong, so fast, the answer is actually quite simple: What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.
Go back and read the the "corrupting ... society" lede. We need to recognize how corrupted and degraded our culture has become over the past eight years. That will not be easy to undo.
Elsewhere, Talking Points tells us more than a few people suspected Madoff was a con man ...
... a known reader passes on word from a hedge-fund analyst at one of the big (remaining) financial services powerhouses who says that Madoff was always on their short list of people he and his colleagues thought were crooks.
A bit more concretely, let's go back to Harry Markopolos, the money manager and financial fraud investigator who'd been blowing whistles on Madoff for almost a decade. In the report he submitted to the SEC in 2005, in addition to complex mathematical analyses showing that Madoff's system couldn't work, he said that "I have also spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud." ...
I'd like to know who else is on this alleged "short list of ... crooks". Wouldn't you? Isn't that list worth a vast fortune -- since it predicts who will be next Madoff and thus enables various informed wagers?
While we wait for the rest of the "short list", can we tar and feather Christopher Cox?
Of course that's only going after a henchman, Cheney/Bush set out to destroy government, starting with the SEC. They get to own a good piece of this disaster, though I admit it's hard to find an open space for another pin. The SEC story strengthens Bush's case for being the worse president in history -- and that's a really tough contest.
Years before Bush destroyed much of America and the world, he was a lucid speaker and even had a reputation as something of a "uniter" -- albeit in Texas, where he was "uniting" the moderate right with the extreme right.
Molly Ivins used to remind us of this, and how amazed she was by the incoherent loon of 2000 onwards.
I heard Bush this morning, and I had the same thought as Talking Points ...
As one of my colleagues just remarked here, Bush is surprisingly lucid and cogent in explaining why bankruptcy is not a viable option for the automakers in the short run and why doing nothing is not viable in the short or long term.
So, did some brain sucking earwig fall out? Has he been abandoned by his KGB controllers and reverted to a prior mind? Does he have a split personality?
Weird.
Pogue's Photo tricksHe's referring to a style of lamp where there's a fairly thick screw at the top of an elliptical loop that the lampshade hangs on.
... It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp--the place where the lampshade screws on--are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod...
Jessica Fridrich Specializes in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to SolveThere are 6.6 billion people in the world. Even if only 1 in 10 million have the bizarre mix of talent and obsession needed to be a "speedcuber", that's 660 people.
... She has been far surpassed by speedcubers with records of 14, 13 and 10 seconds, some of whom can solve the cube blindfolded after studying it for less than a minute. “Today I would probably be in 20th or 30th place,” she said...
Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds - NYTimes.comOf course it's possible right sided cancers are different from left sided cancers; maybe they don't have the same slow growth from polyps.
.... In the new study, the test missed just about every cancer in the right side of the colon, where cancers are harder to detect but about 40 percent arise. And it also missed roughly a third of cancers in the left side of the colon.
Instead of preventing 90 percent of cancers, as some doctors have told patients, colonoscopies might actually prevent more like 60 percent to 70 percent ...
... I love his short story “Wang’s Carpets,” (also part of his novel Diaspora) which is sort of about Fourier-transformed aliens4—but would I have understood what the hell was going on if I didn’t have an electrical engineering degree, the acquisition of which required the calculation of far too many Fourier transforms before breakfast? Do readers without any technical background have any hope of getting Egan at all?Vinge, Stross and Banks do some deep dives, but their cover stories are accessible to the newcomer (Banks is especially good at this wonderful trick). Egan doesn't condescend -- he's strong drink, straight up.
Gordon's Notes: Rule #1 for spotting a con ...One of the many astounding aspects of the Madoff con was that people had to go to him to be conned. Only the savviest, the smartest, the most wealthy and clever, those blessed by fortune and fame could be accepted.
[Portfolio.com] ... The sharper someone makes you think you are, the more likely you are to believe that you're in control—and the more vulnerable you'll be when the loop of deception is closed. 'The easiest person to con,' says Robbins, 'is someone who thinks he's too smart to be conned...
As usual, an essential [1] but "minor" OS X update with no significant new features causes widespread issues, though most can be resolved ...
...Overall, the 10.5.6 rough spots are about par for the course for an Apple OS upgrade. However, we at The Reg still recommend that before you attempt the 10.5.6 update - or any update, for that matter - you should create a bootable backup of your entire system, including files and apps. Yes, doing so a time-consuming pain in the wazoo, but as your dear mum used to say, "Better safe than sorry."
Things are bad when reasonable advice includes a full backup bootable backup rather than checking the integrity of routine data backups. Of course since the update addresses issues with corrupt Time Machine backups that can't be restored the backup needs to be done with some other application. Incidentally, it's true that many Apple users have an unhealthy tolerance of Apple's failings. Cognitive dissonance, perhaps?
Apple's due for a leadership change, so it's possible there will be a different approach going forward.
PS. I don't do full system backups prior to these point releases. My procedure is:
Facebook | No Rick Warren at Obama InaugurationI wonder when Parag Mehta will resign.
... Anti-gay pastor Rick Warren has been selected to give benediction at Obama inauguration, this is an utter nightmare and a total insult to the LGBT community and their straight allies.
Send Obama a letter at
http://change.gov/page/content/contact/
And ask Rick Warren to be removed from the event!
Please email Parag Mehta, Obama's LGBT liaison on the transition team at parag.mehta@ptt.gov, to express your concern.
