A demonstration was held in south-east Afghanistan to protest the gifting Afghani of children with soccer balls decorated with world flags, including the flag of Saudi Arabia.
Apparently the flag of Saudi Arabia includes the name of Allah somewhere on it, which they find offensive when applied to a soccer ball. Approximately 100 people in Khost were apparently offended enough to take to the streets in protest of what most of the rest of the world would simply consider to be a stupid mistake. Throwing a tantrum over a gift given in good faith is not making an effort to get along with one's fellow man.
Fucking grow up, people. If you're going to be this sensitive about the very name of your god, then be choosier about where you write it, which means don't even put it on flags that will stand around exposed to the elements.
Even the Christians know better than to do things like this... A brief reminder about their tenet... "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain." ...for those whose grasp of English thinks this means simply "don't say goddamnit" it is actually an admonition not to use it like a brand identifier or product endorsement, because that would be vanity at work--presuming to know the mind of the Christian god.
Locative art, a melding of global positioning technology to virtual reality, is the new wrinkle in Gibson's matrix.
It's locative art that leads spooks and counterspooks directly to the cash.
...
Gibson: I don't think "Neuromancer" was prescient. It's more like trend-spotting. ... The level I work at is at the juxtaposition, say, of Prada and Santeria. But it's not about Prada or Santeria. It's not about having ideas about either. It's about seeing what happens when the two are put together.
Orthodox economics assumes that people know roughly what they are doing, that they are rational, and that rationality is unambiguous. But in financial markets, people often don’t know what they are doing. Recognising this helps to solve our puzzles.
Many hedge fund managers, for all their fancy jargon and maths PhDs, do what Nassim Nicholas Taleb accused them of in his book The Black Swan: they are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.
Technology has always been about hope. As the pace of technological innovation has intensified over the past two decades, businesses have come to expect that the next new thing will inevitably bring them larger market opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a technology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to this kind of open-ended hope.
... Management became accustomed to the idea that buying more computers and more software would continue to cut costs and improve operations. But there are limits, some of which are inherent in the nature of software itself.
The proposed fix for these problems — the next new thing — is service-oriented architecture.
The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do.
The same people who've been saying for weeks that all was well are now the loudest in urging the Fed to reflate the bubble. These pleaders ignore two major risks.
The first is the "moral hazard" problem of rescuing Wall Street banks and hedge fund players that walked too far on the wild side during the boom. They made money then, and they need to absorb the losses now. Without enduring the discipline of losses, the offenders will go even further out on the risk curve next time.
The second problem is that a Fed reflation could lead to even more trouble if it causes a loss of confidence in the dollar.
This is the (extraordinarily obvious) point the Wall Street Journal missed when it chimed in yesterday in support of the Senator. As the Journal wrote:
Her answer was met with jeers, but what Mrs. Clinton was daring to tell her left-wing audience is that lobbyists are an essential means by which average Americans transmit their political concerns to Washington, and in turn hold their elected Representatives accountable. Not everyone in America can afford to trek to D.C., or has the clout to demand an audience with a Senator. Lobbyists represent the collective voice of groups with shared ideals, whether they be gun owners, union workers, corporate employees or the pro-choice movement.
Just the sort of reasoning that makes that page so famous: Look, lawyers represent their clients before a judge. Does it follow from that that judges must be free to take money from lawyers? Even just to redecorate their office?
