How You Can Tell That Naked Capitalism Threatens Influential People
The last two weeks, including this fundraiser proper, shows how important your contributions are to this site’s independence.
Read more...Yearly Archives: 2013
Thanks! Met Our Second Target Quickly, On to Our Third!
Thanks to your speedy and generous responses, we’ve met our first target, which was an increased budget for hosting and IT support. We blew through our second target, that of funds for travel expenses and site support so yours truly and other regular writers can attend and speak at more conferences. We announced that early last evening and we met it as of this AM.
We are a bit over $1000 towards our goal of $15,500 for our guest bloggers.
Read more...Craazyman: I’m Thinking at Least $5 Million
By craazyman, long time Naked Capitalism reader, peanut gallery commenter, Yves Smith fanboy, and Profeser of Contemporary Analysis at the University of Magonia
You can unpack yer bags ‘cause we’re not going on a guilt trip. I’m way too lazy for that.
But I know a good deal when I see one….
Read more...Links 10/8/13
Budget Brinksmanship: American Exceptionalism Gone Bad
Being exceptional apparently means never having take responsiblity for your actions.
Read more...How One Likely Budget Compromise Will Promote More Congressional Corruption
The current posturing by both the Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling impasse is that both sides are digging in for a long shutdown. Whether that proves to be the case or not, the resolution is likely to involve some face-saving concessions offered by each side. One that is up for grabs is the provision that allows Congressmen and their staffers to continue to have their own Congressional policies. This plan has been attacked as generous, with the Wall Street Journal describing features like doctors on site at Capitol Hill.
This is basically a long-standing plot to try to persuade the public that they can get a free lunch, even when what they are getting is rancid cooking.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Johnny (Paulson) Got His Gun and is Aiming at Bigger Subsidies for His Greek Bank Investments
Yves here. A couple of days ago, we linked to a Financial Times story that featured hedge fund investor John Paulson talking up his investments in the two large Greek banks, Alpha Bank and Piraeus Bank. As a savvy investor buddy once remarked, “When some is talking up something they own, be on the watch that they are actually selling.” In this case, as Varoufakis describes, what Paulson is actually pushing for is for the Troika to change the pricing of warrants on his Greek bank investments because they aren’t providing the big payoff he wanted. So he is indeed “selling” in that he wants his payday now but needs to get official bodies to give him even more subsidies to get there.
Read more...Thanks! Met Our First Target, On to Our Second
Thanks to our loyal weekend readers and early risers! You’ve gotten us past our first target, which was $10,700 for hosting, ongoing battles with spambot and trying to minimize how that affects the comments section, and getting us out of Google hell (a recent change in Google’s algos has effectively blacklisted this site. I can put search strings from recent posts in the search field. I can find the post in Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, but all that comes up in Google is scraper sites that have ripped off our work, and not the original.)
As of 6:30 PM are over $1200 toward our second goal, which is $7800 for travel and conferences.
Read more...Give Until It Hurts, or They Will Take It Anyway
The author of this post is an anonymous Washington insider
The Federal exchanges on Obamacare don’t work. They just don’t. I don’t mean they don’t serve the interests of keeping people healthy, I mean they literally can’t serve pages that allow people to sign up. This is directly due to faulty IT processes, which Naked Capitalism was all over months ago
Read more...Links 10/7/13
Harvard Business School’s Garbage In, Garbage Out “Gender Equity” Experiment
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 54 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.
The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.
Read more...Democrats and Republicans Pedal to the Metal in Debt Ceiling/Shutdown Game of Chicken
You know it’s bad when Grover Norquist is playing elder statesman.
Read more...ObamaCare Launch: First Hints of Real Back-End Problems on the Federal Exchange Begin to Appear
By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente.
Via O’Reilly — the highly literate and excellent tech publishing company — we read the following. Note that the grey-haired[1] tech guy has pronounced judgment in the headline:
Read more...What Developers Can Learn from healthcare.gov
… Remember, even a failure can serve as an example of what not to do
2) Pretty doesn’t trump functional. The site is very well designed from a graphical perspective, and is clearly using lots of Javascript and AJAX to do snazzy transitions and requests in the background. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be interacting with the intermittent failures on the backend very well. If you’re going to make requests behind the scenes, you need to be very tolerant of failures. The healthcare.gov site seems to fail silently and leave a broken user experience in its wake, with no way to continue. Nothing drives a user crazy more than having to go through the same form over and over because of failures that leave them high and dry.
Former Representative Brad Miller: Naked Capitalism – My Hot Sheet on Finance
Matt Taibbi described in “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform” the many ways “the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law,” including the effort by House Republicans after the 2010 election to “pass a gazillion loopholes.”
“You might wonder,” Taibbi wrote, “how a bunch of lunkhead Republican Congressmen would even know how to write a coordinated series of ‘technical fixes’ to derivatives legislation, a universe so complicated that it has become hard to find anyone on the Hill who truly understands the subject. (One Congressman who sits on the Financial Services Committee laughingly admitted that when the crash of 2008 happened, he had to look up ‘credit default swaps’ on Wikipedia.)”
Yeah, that was me.
Read more...
