Bob Morris @ 22:22 Category: Election 2008 Tags: Palin;
Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing twitters BB comments on Palin
BB commenter describes the would-be VP’s “dinosaurs and men once coexisted” fundamentalist beliefs as “Palintology”
“Don’t be silly. Their candidacy is crystalline evidence that a dinosaur and a primitive human can coexist.”
Bob Morris @ 18:09 Category: Unfiled;
This innovative concept combines the bus and train into one. By switching wheels, it can drive on a highway or on train tracks, thus getting people to destinations faster and easier. Sounds fascinating but I wonder, how long does it take to change the wheels?
Bob Morris @ 14:48 Category: Unfiled;
This chart shows the final hour of trading in Google today. It is off-the-charts weird.
Clusterstock has a not even slightly safe for workplace post of quotes from traders who jumped on the bizarre swings in Google stock in the closing minutes only to have all their trades killed. They think one of the big firms screwed up, placing an order for 10 million shares when they meant 10 thousand. But they got the trade killed, something that would never happened to a small trader.
Please note that one of the rants is by a trader who risked $1 million here (yeah, that’s a small trader), and would have had a huge profit, only to have the trades killed probably because someone way more powerful had their blunder forgiven.
Let’s see, they’ve temporarily banned short selling to prop up the financials and now apparently routinely kill trades to protect major players who screwed up. And this is supposed to be a free market with a level playing field?
PS TechCrunch quotes a hedgie who says it was a “data glitch.” Gee, that would be a mighy big glitch, wouldn’t it? Among other things, I’m a database programmer. When someone says a huge error was caused by a glitch, trust me, it is almost always human error instead.
And if it was a data glitch, then something is seriously wrong with the software.
Bob Morris @ 14:18 Category: Credit crisis;
Fenian Rising says ” we need an alternative to this barbaric system” while Angry Bears opines that the wealthy are maybe dangerously clueless.
The Wealthy are poor Class War strategists. They are self defeating in such a way that they remove all ability for either side to win the Class War. The Wealthy must let the Enemy win the war in order for the Wealthy to win. I would caution that any approach toward a treaty by the Enemy to the Wealthy must be taken with care. It is not certain as to whether the Wealthy have the strength of character to accept that they are failures. By evidence of their tactics in the face of the data, forming a treaty with the Wealthy who act irrationally will be met with great frustration by the Enemy.
As the economy worsens, and it will, class distinctions will become even more pronounced. Judging from financial blogs I read, more than a few wealthy investor types really don’t get it about how angry people are getting. And we’re just seeing the leading wave of the anger now, it’s a populist upsurge coming out of seemingly nowhere. Of course, it’s been building for years. Now it’s in the open.
Populism can be a powerful force for the good, like the kind that Jim Hightower preaches. But it can also get ugly, as in the blaming of immigrants and foreigners for the problems or stoning the limos of the wealthy (or worse.) Actions like that just increase the ugliness and division and lessen the chance of real solutions. I hope we don’t go that route.
Bob Morris @ 06:24 Category: Energy conservation;
Once again, our little friends from the algae kingdom show they can do astonishing things!
Right now, this pilot project at an Oregon coal plant is minuscule, but when it goes commercial, it could reduce emissions as much as 60% during the day and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year.
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