Category: Economy

Merry ho ho

There is now enough chocolate at the office to paper my wall with.  Mmm… edible walls.

I am so looking forward to five days off I can’t tell you.  Except that I’m getting all scratchy and coughy and thinking I’m about to get sick.

Goldman Sachs shorted their bad mortgage loan paper.  I love how that works.  Let’s take a debt instrument that nobody understands and make book on how far it can fall? The whole house of cards is about to come riffling down at high speed… just like I’ve been warning about for years; it’s just that it’s closer than it was in 2004.

I can’t talk about work.  I’ll talk about underwear instead….. my daughter gave me really cute underwear for Christmas.  Or if I talk about work, how about peripherally?

Dave DeR gave me the Onion Atlas for Xmas.  It’s very funny.  Yes, I opened it early! I open every Christmas present I get when I get it.  This crap about waiting just means that the garbage gets loaded into one week, I prefer to spread the Christmas debris over a couple of garbage cycles.

Bitter?  Not at all.  I’ve just gone back to my normal state, which is grumpy.

Snow and fog

It is still snowing, although not very hard, and there’s four inches of snow on my balcony.

I think my thyroid is packing it in.  I’ve been wondering if that was the case for the last couple of years but now three of the more common symptoms dogpiled me at once, so I’ll go off and get blood tests again and see if it’s true this time.

World news round up…. (not very round, but whatever…)
Leave Africa alone…. 

an interesting article on how getting the IMF out of African policies might be a damned good thing.

Ebola’s broken out in Uganda again. 

A group of francophones opine on the death of languages globally. 

(Items are translated).

Ukrainian crocodile dies after six months on the run.

Subprime mess is ‘poor judgement of a few’.  Indeed. 

Need to hear a cat purr? 

Aussies finally figure out about drinking and pregnancy. 

Who knew that Russian hoteliers had such a great sense of humour (NSFW pic) 

Sundry and Various

To address any aspect of my personal life in my blog, consisting as it does at the moment of a bundle of indignities, gripes, aches, bitches, whines and bs, would be merely foolish, so I will try to herd my thoughts into lusher pastures.

My mother’s arm is much improved.  The burning is greatly reduced.

I have forwarded pictures of my mandolin to Tom MacMurray, local LOLcats dude, and expect to see pics of his Piggy Sue and Mawgey playing mandolin SOON.  (This is something to be anticipated with pleasure).

Deb sent me this.  Don’t watch unless you have the speakers blasting and ten free minutes!

There there, Canadian investors…. don’t worry about the subprime crisis in the States. 

Delightful Chick style pamphlet on what to do when the Elder Gods are coming! 

The unexpected losses

Update to this post. 

 

I’ve been pondering the Storm Worm.  Since I’ve been thinking about a piece of software that is a ‘contiguous and not quite self-aware artificial intelligence’ for the last year or so as part of a fiction, finding out about the Storm Worm has made me very uneasy.

My first problem is direct and unequivocal – personally unpleasant.  I make a living from the inertnests.  The VOIP lines that carry the customer voices to me are dependent on the existence and functioning of the internet, which is beginning to look like another Ponzi scheme.  The contact management software is also web based.  Even if by some miracle we were able to switch back to ‘land lines’ after the internet crashes – and it will, and more than once – driving so many voices back to copper will put international telephony into turmoil.

My second problem is unpleasant for my children. Who will benefit from international telephony and the internet crashing?

Think about it.

Essentially, everybody who hates science; everybody who hates freedom; the buggy whip media; and the richest people on earth, who will be insulated from the worst of it. Theocrats, neo-cons, the super-rich and newspapers all have something in common now; imagine if they were able to bring porn, citizen journalism and science to its knees in a single stroke; imagine if various governments in the world were able to profit immediately thereby by locking up anybody they felt like with impunity because there was no one to report on it and the hysteria that surrounded the collapse of the internet made all geeks suspect.

I should have been name Cassandra, so filled am I with dire predictions.  It may be the Russian Mafia behind it… and I’d bet money that’s so – but like 9/11 more than one interest group will profit by the collapse of the internet.

What on earth can I do about it? Is there a silver lining?