Month: March 2010
Back from Work
Damn, that sounds good.
Quote of the Day
I think we’re long past the time when most print newspapers could’ve been saved by simply providing a better product, but I also think there was a window to save, if not the print versions, the institutions which published them. Obviously the WaPo can survive as long as Kaplan Test Prep [The Washington Post] makes enough to keep them afloat, but I do wish more journalists bemoaning the losses in their industry would recognize that at least to some degree ceasing to be relevant and authoritative publications is a part of the problem. Why should people read them when they have to spend a lot of time figuring out when they’re being bullsh%$#ed?
I’ve said it before, many times: One of the problems with newspapers is that their management does not believe that newspapers can survive, so their business plan is to suck the marrow out of these institutions, not to provide good product.
You saw this phenomenon with the American rail industry in the 1970s.
From that Communist Rag The Financial Times
Wolfgang Münchau proposes an outright ban on naked credit default swaps: (CDS)
I generally do not like to propose bans. But I cannot understand why we are still allowing the trade in credit default swaps without ownership of the underlying securities. Especially in the eurozone, currently subject to a series of speculative attacks, a generalised ban on so-called naked CDSs should be a no-brainer.
Naked CDSs are the instrument of choice for those who take large bets against European governments, most recently in Greece. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said last week that the Fed was investigating “a number of questions relating to Goldman Sachs and other companies in their derivatives arrangements with Greece”. Using CDSs to destabilise a government was “counter-productive”, he said. Unfortunately, it is legal.
As I have noted for some time, the Credit Default Swap is insurance, and there is a very good reason that the British Parliament passed the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, which required, “anyone seeking to collect on an insurance contract to have an interest in the continued existence of the insured property,” as well as, “precluding a buyer from insuring property for more than it’s worth.”
This should not be SEC slap on the wrist stuff. This should be illegal unenforceable contracts, and you go to jail stuff.
Harold Ford is Not Running for NY Senate
I guess he finally realized that it was moving from long-shot to fiasco:
Harold E. Ford Jr., the former Tennessee congressman who has sought to parlay his star power and Wall Street connections into a political career in New York, has decided not to challenge Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand in the Democratic primary this September, according to friends and advisers.
After traveling the state on a closely watched tour, he told friends that he could prevail but feared that an ugly campaign would leave the winner drained of cash and vulnerable to a Republican challenger at a time when the Democratic Party controls the United States Senate by a slender majority.
“I’ve examined this race in every possible way, and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened,” Mr. Ford wrote in an opinion article to be published in The New York Times on Tuesday.
Don’t let the door hit you on your butt.
Not Much Posting Tonite Period
I was trying to backup my February posts, and it kept breaking the archive page into little bits.
It looks like this is a feature because a few bloggers had huge front pages, with lots of blogger images, and they decided to have an algorithm break up the pages into digestible chunks.
They are all “It’s going to make everything so much faster.”
The problem is that for some blogs, it made them single posts on the first page.
Luckily that did not happen to me, because I use Imageshack®, which significantly reduces the load that “the Google” sees, and because compared to some of the photographers who blog there, it’s pretty much text based.
On the other hand, means that the monthly archives that I save to a MS Word® file are now broken up into 5-10 separate pages, and it means that it breaks Google’s searches that access archive pages, because it will serve a page that now has only a 15% or so chance of having the post in question.
So, yes, the good folks at Blogger, which is owned by Google, broke Google search, and yes, many of the folks who use blogger are pretty incensed, and the response of the PTB at blogger is that the users are blogging wrong somehow.
Apparently their motto, “Don’t be evil,” is orthogonal to, “Don’t be incompetent and arrogant assholes.”
[on edit] I am looking at moving to WordPress, but I will give it a month or so and fiddle.
On Jim Bunning and His Filibuster
Since I’m starting a new job, I dodge Bunning’s filibuster of extended unemployment benefits.
Jim bunning, go Cheney yourself.
Also, I am thinking about a campaign to remove him from the baseball hall of fame.