Sunday, October 12th, 2008
by Chris
Joe, from 2parse shares the 11 Things He Learned While Trying to Figure Out the Financial Crisis.
A very, very interesting read and I highly suggest that you take a look at it. My favourite ones include:
2. The Martingale. Wall Street fell for a 400 year old sucker bet, the martingale. You always win in this betting game – as long as you can cover your losses. But once your losses are too great, this “double-or-nothing†game leads to catastrophe. The formula to understand this is simplified as:
(0.99) x ($100) + (0.01) x (catastrophic outcome) = 0
In other words, playing for $100, there is a 99% chance that you will make at least $100 dollars playing this game. But there is a 1% chance of a catastrophic outcome. If you never stop betting, the catastrophic outcome is inevitable.
A very succint, but not quite accurate way of looking at things. It’s much more delicately laid out in the Slate article he links to but a very interesting fact indeed.
7. The Shadow Banking System. Existing alongside the regulated banking system is what is called a shadow financial system – including money market accounts, hedge funds, investment banks, and countless other financial creatures. This system was invented in order to avoid government regulation of various sorts. This crisis has been mainly but certainly not exclusively in this shadow system – and those regulated banks have been the big winners in all of this (aside from Goldman Sachs.) Even the remaining independent investment banks – Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have chosen to be subject to greater regulation. Nouri Roubini speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations explained that the shadow banking system is on the verge of collapse because of their lack of transparency and because they took risks they would not have been able to if they were subject to regulation.
As usual, we have those trying to circumvent the rules for peoples happiness and safety screwing it all up for everyone.
And don’t miss his #11: Damn it feels good to be a banksta!
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
by Chris
The movie industry (and music industry as well) have recently become obsessed with filthy, freeloading, artist-livelihood-destroying, rum-drinking, organised crime-funding internet pirates. These enemies of freedom sail the seven ISP’s cutting profits of the honest middlemen with their cutlasses.
An interesting thing popped up today with regards to movie studios trying to discourage pirates. It seems that they are trying out a method to watermark the films – because this idea to make the film undesirable to copyright infringes is quite simply ridiculous for some very obvious reasons…
Their brilliant idea was this:
“Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in order to deter and track piracy.”
Deter piracy with a few gaps in the soundtrack? Have any of these people actually seen what a movie looks and sounds like recorded by a consumer-level camera in the theaters? You’d be lucky if the only thing wrong was a few gaps in the soundtrack! People that are willing to watch a movie recorded by a hand held camera in a theater are simply not going to be bothered by this – they already put up with coughs, splutters, shhush’s, hairdos, moving people and a camera man who appears to be afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. In fact, the only people that it’s going to upset are the poor suckers that just paid $15 to watch your crippled movie in the theater.
Seriously bad idea. My idea would be to throw an infrared floodlight against the theater screen. Invisible to the human eye but you can be sure the camera’s CCD will pick it up 
In other copyright news it seems the New Zealand Government has been invited to discussions regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement. This treaty, in negotiation with UK, US and Canada, has been drawn up in secret and has only just come to light. You can read the discussion paper here and it seems to be just a thinly veiled assault on privacy in the name of Intellectual Property Rights protection.
I can only hope the New Zealand government is not involved with this, as the paper is full of very scary provisions…
“Cooperation†is the “key component†to ACTA, which means governments agree to exchange information with each other about their citizens in order to protect the IPR industry (although the data exchange won’t be limited to that goal)
The big problem I have with this is the fact it was negotiated completely in secret with no transparency. It’s also misleading all the way up to the title. Since when did counterfeiting have anything to do with Intellectual Property Rights (I hate that saying…)? It seems what they can’t put into international law they enforce in trade treaties. For instance an FTA with the USA is almost always conditional on adopting their broken patent system and their draconian DMCA-like laws. Copyright enforcement should be a purely civil matter, not criminal.
This is seriously bad news and can spell major issues for both consumers and other parties such as ISPs and public services should they have to comply. I hope NZ doesn’t touch it with a 10-foot barge pole.
Update: Ars Technica has a very well written analysis of the problems to be had with ACTA. Go Ars!
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
by Chris
Same as the old boss…
Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
Hat-tip: Kiwiblog
