naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

@The Andy Xie article

Superb!

I admire his treatment of the interplay between illusion and reality.

The illusion was destroyed with the implosion of Lehman.

World leaders then went into high gear to restore the illusion, and it appears they have had some success.

But the reality remains.

I also applaud Xie’s analysis of the reason for all this. The question that begs to be answered, after all, is what does the grand Wizard of Oz hope to achieve with his illusions? “The trick is to get the credulous masses to join the bubble game at high prices,” Xie tells us. What more need be said? The masters of smoke and mirrors have but one goal, and that is to separate all but a select few from their property.

bob says:

I would go further and say to never turn the wireless on anywhere but that public access point.

Google and several other companies are using the SSID’s of access points to create 3d maps of everywhere. Some of the original “find me” apps on the iphone used existing 3rd party databases of SSID locations to pinpoint your position, not the GPS chip.

That’s right, there was a van that drove down your street pinging every wireless router and switch, and noting the MAC and SSID, and then plotting them on a map.

Need to know where you are? Turn on your wireless card and see which networks pop up, then go back to the drive by data base and see where all of those networks are, and then where they all overlap.

This is actually pretty neat from a surveying perspective. Most surveyors would take 1 known point on the ground to 15 determined by GPS. GPS is not that accurate, and dependent on a good view of the sky. With the SSID data they can get dozens of known points on the ground.

Each wireless router or switch is a radio beacon.

ComparedToWhat? says:

Regarding email & privacy/security, I thought it was surprisingly sensible that Hank Paulson never used that medium for communication, or so he claimed. He didn’t cite a reason but I assume that would be lack of security.

Here are a couple of video links that I enjoyed this week. First, Vincent Reinhart moderated a couple of panels at AEI on Friday under the title No Way Out: Government Response to the Financial Crisis. The first was extremely good (Greg Ip, Chris Whalen, and Angel Ubide); this is the best discussion of the mess I’ve come across. I looked over the pdf slide files for the second session and gave it a miss. Even if you can’t spare the time to watch the video on CSPAN, have a look at Reinhart’s slides.

Next is Stephen Roach introducing his new book at the Asia Society: A Hard Look at the Next Asia. I’m getting tired of the euphemism “Asia” for China, which is mostly the subject of this talk. That’s a bit unfair to say in this context though, because while lots of top people in finance talk as though they’re diplomats- or greenspans-in-training, Roach is refreshingly down to earth.