Reader Richard Kline, who provides regular, sophisticated comments, was keen to continue the discussion provoked by a post last week, “Hoisted From Comments: Greater Liquidity Produces Instability.” An anonymous reader offered a complex systems theory view of our modern financial system. The opening paragraphs: Perhaps a lesson to be learned here is that liquidity acts […]
Read more...Someone needs to tell Microsoft to behave. By way of background, in December 2004, Microsoft lost its final appeal on an EU antitrust case in which it was found guilty of tying its operating system to its media player, undermining competition and hurting consumer choice, and for failing to give rivals the information they needed […]
Read more...Gods, sometimes I am horrifically slow on the uptake. Felix Salmon continues a discussion with Dean Rotbart that effectively started at the econobloggers’ panel at the Milken Institute. Dean was the moderator, and did a very good job in generating a lively session (something I must say that was absent on most of the presentations […]
Read more...The New York Times has one of those “your tax dollars at work” stories in the form of “Costly Lesson on How Not to Build a Navy Ship.” The article recounts how the Navy set out to build a new type of vessel, “littoral combat ships,” which would become the first line of defense in […]
Read more...A Washington Post article, “From DNA of Family, a Tool to Make Arrests,” points to the increasing efforts to look for partial matches in DNA databases that might implicate close relatives. This is a disturbing development, since DNA, like other forensic evidence, isn’t as foolproof as its image in the popular imagination indicates. There have […]
Read more...Now that the credit markets for the moment have been moved out of intensive care, some commentators have shifted their attention away from “what should the powers that be do to prevent a meltdown” to the broader question of “what can we do to prevent this sort of mess from happening again?” Dani Rodrik, in […]
Read more...Before I put my buzz saw to work, let me make a few things clear. First, I have a good deal of respect for Robert Shiller’s work. Anyone who was willing to tell Greenspan in 1996 that he ought to be worried about asset bubbles has a good deal of foresight. Second, I am a […]
Read more...A simply great piece, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” by Walter Kirn in the Atlantic. As someone who nearly died while multitasking, Kirm is particularly well positioned to discuss the considerable downside and dubious benefits of our modern way of attempting to process inputs. It’s an informative and often funny read. A few representative paragraphs: […]
Read more...Many in the security and public policy arena implicitly and often explicitly argue that greater security requires that we give up some, or a lot, of our privacy. Yes, it is necessary and a good thing that we have to take off our shoes to board an airplane. In Ars Technica, Jon Stokes says that […]
Read more...Bear with me on this post; it makes a more important point than you might anticipate. Reader Jim J sent this item from the Daily News, which tells of the indignities suffered by Citibank customers in New York City (including Jim himself) of having their ATM withdrawal limits reduced by half with no advance warning. […]
Read more...An article in today’s New York Times,” Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, is oddly annoying, even though it makes a useful observation. Urganizations tend to develop routinized, and therefore hidebound, approaches, and involving an outsider is a useful way to shake things up. Framed this way, the article is an argument for bringing in consultants […]
Read more...Remember, you skeptics live outside Silicon Valley, even an old warhorse like Oracle is humming along,posting a 35% increase in net income. From the Richter Scales:
Read more...It’s not as scary as having bridges fall down, but just as we have been neglecting our physical infrastructure, so to have we apparently been neglecting our technology infrastructure, in this case, the Internet backbone. The downstream providers are gearing up for, nay encourging, greater consumers use of bandwidth-intensive services like streaming video, without sufficient […]
Read more...Perhaps I am attributing too much importance to a single speech, but the Minneapolis Fed President Gary Stern’s “Credit Market Developments: Lessons for Central Banking,” reveals a lot of what is wrong about the way policymakers are thinking about our credit crisis. And if Stern’s position is widely held within the Fed, we are in […]
Read more...The Chinese have demonstrated, convincingly, that their military technology is superior to America’s, via having a cloaked sub slip, undetected, within striking distance of a US aircraft carrier during war games. This has to rate as one of the most important news stories of the year, yet it has been reported (in English, anyhow) only […]
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