Have you ever wondered about the qualifications or provenance of all the insta-pundits that keep popping up across cable news? Jon Stewart did an intensive investigative report…
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank
It’s ironic that these guys are more insightful than Paulson et al about exposing the idiocy of the market abuses and follies. And these comedians highlighted this half a year before the Wall Street pundits… See also this excellent one:
Lost in Translation…
From an article in the New York Times quoting George Dyson: Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary [...]
I got this over email and thought it was funny:
Here is an interesting article about the new frontier of automated trading. Algorithms tracking and reacting to market moves are no longer ‘fast enough.’ Increasingly, algorithms aggregate raw sentiments from newspapers and blogs and issues orders based on them, bypassing human interpretation. The system may indeed be at the cutting edge, but it is dangerously [...]
This article by Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh provides very practical and sensible prescriptions for progress in stabilizing Afghanistan. Winning the battle, losing the faith By Nathaniel C. Fick and Vikram J. Singh Monday, October 6, 2008 WASHINGTON: ‘The lion of the people will turn on you," warned Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, a former [...]
To be fair to my earlier posts here and in the Huffington Post warning about the irresponsible incitement being fomented by the McCain campaign, John McCain at a town hall meeting on Friday Oct 10th reminded me finally of the John McCain I had admired in the primaries, in his acceptance speech, and in the [...]
And on the very negative side, as reported here, small mistakes led to what is already a tragedy: 3 days of violent attacks between Arabs and Jews in the ancient site of Akko (Acre), within Israel. If it is not managed through political and communal leadership into an aberration in an area normally known for [...]