I was dozing through This Week, when Robert Reich the token liberal, described China as "authoritarian capitalism".  I stopped the doze to listen.  It sound an awful lot like Yes Sir, I Understand and Will Comply from a month ago.  

While it is gratifying to hear Reich dip a toe in… Read full post »

Today the papers are all aglow with the bonuses about to be bestowed on the Wall Street Cretins (ooh, I mean Titans).  As I said in the inaugural installment of this endeavor, recovery can't work just because recovery means to restore the status quo ante.  And it was the status quo… Read full post »

Beware the Yellow Peril!!!!  That was the message of Hearst in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century, and the subject of a book, "The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident" by G.G. Rupert in 1911.  According to the Wikipedia article, the tale in the book has Jesus… Read full post »

Today's report that Benmosche, the current and third CEO of AIG in the past twelve months is having another hissy fit:  he can't pay his star performers what he says they deserve.  Boo Hoo.

Let's be straight about this situation; it was the so-called "innovation" of these knuckleheads that h… Read full post »

She Who Must Be Obeyed got a wild hair up her butt.  Said hair involves the Washington Post, which is running a Pundit for a Month contest (the name is something like that, anyway).  One had to submit a 400 word piece and a 100 word bio.  There was only one… Read full post »

Economists, some anyway, love models (not the willowy kind in chiffon).  Most of the Right Wingnuts always call up the US of 1776 as a model of how the contemporary economic world should be shaped.  They also tend to want the laws of the land to revert to what existed then. … Read full post »

An essay has been festering in the bottom of my brain stem for some time now.  I am finally compelled to put pen to paper by the first pages of Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail, in which he chronicles the Great Recession.  Two points in these early pages are… Read full post »

I've been saying all along that The Cloud is a Crock.  Well, here's the latest in the saga.  You should go and read the story; I won't cut-n-paste it here.  I will gloat, however.  Imagine what's going to happen when the BigMegaCorp leaves its data in the hands of MicroSoft? … Read full post »

I was just over at the Yahoo! STEC message board, attempting to bring some sense to those folks.  A heavy burden, but someone has to do it.  There was a thread from August, which got restarted, which tried to find justification for SSD, STEC's in particular, in cloud computing.

I disabused t… Read full post »

Short and to the point:  how many tax cheats is a paedophile worth? 

You won't color me surprised when the IRS backs off the Swiss banks, now that they've tried to hand over Polanski, who even his victim says, leave him alone.

There is cynicism, and then there is moral corruption. … Read full post »

There was an article in yesterday's NYT talking about Adair Turner, who heads the Financial Services Authority (I've no idea what if anything that corresponds to here).  Mr. Turner's thesis, which has crossed my mind on occasion and which I've also read elsewhere, boils down to this:  the p… Read full post »

One of the good things about Sunday is the NYT, and the Sunday Business section.  Lots of articles/columns/opinions, and not always a clear cut edge amongst them.  

Today, I'll pick on Steve Lohr.  Not because what he says is especially egregious, only because it is the latest in the co… Read full post »

For all of you out there who've been saying that Larry wants Sun for java or Solaris or MySql, here's what he said yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

          We're in it to win it.
IBM, we're looking forward to competing
  with you in the hardware b… Read full post »

Paul Krugman does it again.  His story in today's Times Magazine brings joy to my heart.  Finally, a full-blown bullshit whistle against the Right Wingnut economists.  But with all due respect, he does miss out on one point.  And it's a very important point, why the behaviour of a… Read full post »

There exists, still, the myth of infinite bandwidth.  The myth exists in support of the notion that "web" applications can and should be just like desktop applications.  But there is a problem:  what is a desktop application?  In the beginning, 1982, the IBM PC provided a standalo… Read full post »

This is really simple.   And a really short piece.

Japan means that the US of A is the *last* fascist modern industrialized country on the planet.  We spiral further into the morass of India, China, and Russia.  Don't bray that India is a democracy.  I wasn't born yesterday.… Read full post »

Well, mangled Paul Simon a bit there, but this tid bit (via O'Reilly) from one Carl Hewitt set off the "The Thought Leaders Have Finally Figured Out the Obvious" bell:

As Jim Gray noted in "Distributed Computing Economics" (MSR-TR-2003-24) there is a growing imbalance between the computation power of… Read full post »

>>  can an economy survive with such minimal manufacturing in the portfolio?

Not in the manner of the middle class revolution, post World War II.  I am a Keynesian (my real blog is DrKeynesWasRight), and the reason boils down to:  the level of income inequality from previous types… Read full post »

The next cliff is on or about the Ides of October.  The 2nd quarter "beat expectations" reports that keep being printed are based on draconian firings, not improved revenues.  The reduction in first time unemployment is the canary in the coal mine.  It is not a bright omen, it is Regan… Read full post »

There are many spewings from the Right WingNuts that are irritating.  Among the most such is the claim that a Single Payer health system will "put the government between you and your doctor" or "some government accountant will decide what care you get".  Neither is true, of course.  Wh… Read full post »

[I have another blog, which deals with computer stuff.  This is the first post I've crossed over.  I may do it again.  You have been warned.]

As (what now turns out to be) Part 1 began:
Well, the other shoe dropped.  Oracle has bid for Sun.  In my tracking of speculation,… Read full post »

By now most folks should know that the Red/South states come in last in terms of education, jobs, income, and smarts by any measure.  Now, we find out what that means.

It means that not only ain't they Dumb, Fat, and Happy, they are Dumb, Fat, Poor, Old..... and Sick.  While being… Read full post »

5-4, of course, but the Supremes have just made de facto discrimination legal again.

What a country.

That old saying, "figures don't lie, but liars figure" sound familiar?

When the news appeared that the number of people on unemployment had dropped, and that this was a sign of better things happening in the economy, I had to avoid an upchuck.  Phooey, I told anybody who would listen.  All t… Read full post »

A few small bites today.

Notice that China is feverishly stimulating its domestic consumption?  They have admitted, albeit with loud rectitude, that export (read: labor exploitative) based economies quickly collapse.  They are admitting the truth:  capitalists and consumers are co-depen… Read full post »