Loud

"Compare Android to Apple’s iOS. Well, try anyway. Which version of Android? On which device? The..."

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:27:58 +0100

“Compare Android to Apple’s iOS. Well, try anyway. Which version of Android? On which device? The stock Android UI or the (purportedly) far superior Sense UI from HTC?”

- [working code]

"The fact that redistributional difficulties tend to arise together with overall stagnation is no..."

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:32:39 +0100

“The fact that redistributional difficulties tend to arise together with overall stagnation is no accident. In order to redistribute income and assets in their favor, rulers need to exert their power on the rest of society; to exert such power, they have to strategically limit and partly sabotage the well-being of the underlying population; and this strategic sabotage tends to appear at the aggregate level in the form of stagnation.26 The rulers themselves, because of their social position, cannot comprehend, let alone accept, this necessity, and their dominant dogmas and ideologies hide and deny it. But the historical evidence, particularly during acute crises, proves it time and again: unable to see the contradiction, the rulers attempt to alleviate the general malaise as well as to keep their redistributional power intact; but because their power depends on the sabotage they cause, this attempt invariably fails.”

- Systemic Fear, Modern Finance, and the Future of Capitalism | Dissident Voice

"Plain money in the bank is now, more so than before September 2008, a risk asset."

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:27:02 +0100

“Plain money in the bank is now, more so than before September 2008, a risk asset.”

- Something has got to give. Warning! PDF.

"In short, CountryWide was trying to collect on a debt that didn’t exist, supposedly owed by a person..."

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:42:11 +0100

“In short, CountryWide was trying to collect on a debt that didn’t exist, supposedly owed by a person who they had wrongly identified, by seizing property owned by other people. And yet the Sheriff’s Department acted on their claim, and refused to give us, the party affected by that series of errors, so much as a return phone call. The only conclusion I can reach from this is that there are no safeguards at all built into the system. None. After all, it would have taken only a trivial amount of due diligence by any of the parties (CountryWide, their outside attorneys, or the Sheriff’s office) to derail this crazy train before it started. However, I assume CountryWide would be against such checks, as they cost money. But guess what? This whole process has cost my wife and me money, time, frustration and emotional distress. It would make more sense to hit up CountryWide for an extra few bucks every time they ask the Sheriff to auction off a house than it does to force the victims of CountryWide’s errors to pay for the company’s mistakes. Fortunately, we could afford an attorney, and despite the whole pinning-a-note-to-a-straggly-tree-in-the-pouring-rain thing, we also had the time to mount a defense.”

- CountryWide goes Kafka – a First Person Narrative « naked capitalism

"Talk about unsustainable. The next chart is one of something that cannot be. The US cannot borrow..."

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:10:25 +0100

“Talk about unsustainable. The next chart is one of something that cannot be. The US cannot borrow $15 trillion in the next ten years. It’s just not there. Long before that, the bond market will simply rebel, rates will rise, and the aftermath will make the last crisis seem like a cakewalk.”

- The Debt Supercycle | Credit Writedowns

"The need to maintain the confidence of rating agencies and investors as well as access to markets..."

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:40:44 +0100

“The need to maintain the confidence of rating agencies and investors as well as access to markets may ultimately force the required disciplines. As James Carville famously observed: “I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Politicians everywhere will learn the reality in Thatcher’s terms: “You can’t buck the markets.” The need to reduce the overall level of debt in certain economies has not been fully addressed. Public debt has been substituted for private debt. As his friend Dink tells author Joe Bageant in Deer Hunting with Jesus: Despatches from America’s Class War: “Sounds like a piss-poor solution to me, cause they’re just throwing money we ain’t got at the big dogs who already got plenty. But hell what do I know?””

- Satyajit Das: Botox Economics – Part 2 « naked capitalism

"Botox is commonly used to improve a person’s appearance by removing facial lines and other signs of..."

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:36:10 +0100

“Botox is commonly used to improve a person’s appearance by removing facial lines and other signs of aging. The effect is temporary and can have significant side effects. The world is currently taking the “botox” cure. A flood of money from central banks and governments — “financial botox” — has temporarily covered up unresolved and deep-seated problems.The surface is glossy and smooth, the interior decayed and rotten The 2009 ‘recovery’ was based on low or zero interest rate policies (“ZIRP”) of major central banks. Massive government intervention also helped arrest the rate of decline of late 2008/ early 2009. Without government support, it is highly probable that most economies would have been in serious recession. Just as China practised capitalism with Chinese characteristics, developed economies discovered socialism with Western characteristics.”

- Satyajit Das: Botox Economics – Part 1 « naked capitalism

"They’re not associated with Muslim countries, that’s what they’re called when they..."

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:27:41 +0100

“They’re not associated with Muslim countries, that’s what they’re called when they are associated with Muslim countries. When they’re associated with rich black guys, they’re called OJ Simpson.”

- The Last Psychiatrist: “Nobody will understand what went on in this house to drive my dad to this level of insanity”

"I am sure someone will shout “20/20 hindsight”. That’s bullshit. Everything I am saying now was..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:47:36 +0100

“I am sure someone will shout “20/20 hindsight”. That’s bullshit. Everything I am saying now was obvious five years ago, and lots of smart people knew and understood it. Some of us even bought into “arbitrage” fairy tales and tried to profit from getting our views “impounded into market prices”. We learned to take a different Keynes quote seriously, the one about markets remaining irrational longer than you can remain solvent. [Shlieffer and Vishny’s famous coinage, “the limits of arbitrage” is not strong enough, because it suggests that efficient arbitrage is the norm subject to some exceptions and limitations. It is more accurate to view efficient arbitrage as the unusual special case, in bond markets as well as in equity markets.]”

- interfluidity » Preventing 2006

"More disturbingly, there is evidence that young people may be not just complacent but also poorly..."

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:37:42 +0100

“More disturbingly, there is evidence that young people may be not just complacent but also poorly informed. A study, published in February, by academics at East Carolina University, surveyed the information habits of 3,500 18-to-24 year olds during the 2008 US presidential campaign. The aim was to investigate whether those learning about news from cable television, comedy shows, podcasts, and social networking sites were equally well-informed about politics. The findings provide few reasons to be optimistic: “Users of these sites tend to seek out views that correspond with their own; they are no more knowledgeable about politics than their counterparts and, in fact, seem to be less so… they do not seem to be more likely to vote.” As David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, said: “If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?””

- Losing our minds to the web – Prospect Magazine « Prospect Magazine

"Tweeting is the opposite of depth of work; so is gossip and reality TV and Facebook and 99.9% of..."

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:25:02 +0100

“Tweeting is the opposite of depth of work; so is gossip and reality TV and Facebook and 99.9% of blogging. Mainstream TV news is the definition of shallowness of work; if a journalist at NBC or CBS ever dared to go deep, she’d be fired on the spot. The Daily Show does go deep, and so does the Colbert Report.”

- Depth of Work, Part Two | Steven Pressfield Online

Icon Reference | Hicksdesign

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:09:58 +0100

Icon Reference | Hicksdesign

"Since the Obama administration claims the “right” to murder anyone in the world and that..."

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:00:03 +0100

“Since the Obama administration claims the “right” to murder anyone in the world and that there is nothing at all that may constrain that “right,” murdering every Afghan, or every Iranian, or every American who disagrees is, in logic and in fact, in the nature of a postscript. “We can murder anyone at all, and as many people as we decide is advisable or necessary. And we never need to explain our reasons to anyone.” The evil has been committed. It is complete. The rest is multiplication.”

- Once Upon a Time…: The Demand for Obedience, and Reverence for Authority: The Lifelong Flight from Responsibility and Judgment (I)

"By putting half baked implementations into non-beta software Chrome and Safari actually do harm to..."

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:18:32 +0100

“By putting half baked implementations into non-beta software Chrome and Safari actually do harm to the web. Why are we cursing Internet Explorer 6. It was not for lack of innovation and standards support when it first shipped. It is because that standards support was buggy and incomplete – that’s right, it was half baked. And now we see Chrome and Safari releasing unfinished implementations as well.”

- Itpastorn’s Thinkpad update & maintenance blog: No browser supports HTML5 yet. Part 2. Technology.

"I am often asked questions like this, and I am less optimistic now that I once was. Certainly we..."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:00:54 +0100

“I am often asked questions like this, and I am less optimistic now that I once was. Certainly we need new energy sources or the future will be very unpleasant. But new energy creates its own problems, which in time we will have to address. We can foresee this with nuclear energy and its waste. Even so-called “green” energy sources will be environmentally damaging. All of our adaptations are short term. They solve immediate problems but set the stage for future problems. Eric Sevareid once said “The chief source of problems is solutions.” He was right, but that does not mean that we forego solutions. I like to use an athletic metaphor to think about sustainability. It is possible to lose—to become unsustainable and collapse. But the converse does not hold. There is no point at which we have “won”—become sustainable forever. Success consists of staying in the game.”

- Interview with Joseph Tainter on Collapse | varnelis.net

"We created a far harsher world for our children to grow up in. It was as though we decided that the..."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:02:36 +0100

“We created a far harsher world for our children to grow up in. It was as though we decided that the freedom and lack of worry which we had inherited was too good for our children, and we pulled up the ladder we had climbed.”

- Baby boomers: powerful and selfish | Francis Beckett | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

"This is the curse of soda: it’s so bad for us that even diet sodas make us fat."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:19:10 +0100

“This is the curse of soda: it’s so bad for us that even diet sodas make us fat.”

- Soda : The Frontal Cortex

"The real form of the question, the one that generates the correct answer simply in its asking, is,..."

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:05:49 +0100

“The real form of the question, the one that generates the correct answer simply in its asking, is, “why doesn’t having kids— or getting married or getting a better job or getting laid or anything else I try to do— make me happy? Oh. I get it. I’ll shut up now.””

- The Last Psychiatrist: Why Parents Hate Parenting

"Wolf, and the Bank of International Settlement (hardly a bunch of socialists) think keeping old..."

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:54:29 +0100

“Wolf, and the Bank of International Settlement (hardly a bunch of socialists) think keeping old people from having to subsist on pet food would be good for economies around the world.”

- Martin Wolf Continues Attack on Fiscal Austerity « naked capitalism

"But while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern..."

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:51:40 +0100

“But while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The very assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding of the professionalism, wisdom, and experience required to create good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Fortunately, a better understanding is easy to come by.”

- From An InDesign for HTML and CSS? – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report. Preach it! Say it! Shout it from the roofs!