Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

actually, both the books I cited quote cavafy's poem. and Hughes quotes the Herod section of W.H. Auden's Christmas Oratorio.

Some nice essays to download, guys. Thank you. Several more marks on my "potential subversive tewwowist agent" file down at the Ministry of Homeland Security.

Personally, I am more a supporter of the Che Guevara Justice in America Reform and Reconstruction Act, but not much chance of getting that passed ... but I would like to see some legislation mandating that the Justice Department expend at least as much energy upon Jamie Dimon et al as they do on Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong. Did you see where the IRS has decided that the fines paid by lenders for defrauding the FDIC are a deductible business expense ? That sets an interesting precedent.

The barbarians won't be at the gates 'cuz they are busy getting dressed for a nice dinner out, up at their palaces on top of the hill.

"First of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got" --President of the United States Barack Obama, May 15, 2012 on "The View"

And that's the liberal, socialist side of the equation speaking ... The question which is interesting is, where will this all lead ?

It seems like the misdeeds have to be of nearly Enron-like proportions for anything to get done about it...

In light of the HSBC sanction-subverting and money laundering settlement, where the government basically declared them not "too big to fail," but "too big to prosecute" -- I don't know if Enron is a contrast to changes post-2008 crash, or if Ken Lay was simply guilty of thinking too small...

just wait for the next wave of fear of unemployment & evil neighbors

Now he's running down the dark
Diabolical awaits
Grabs him by the ankle
Ain't it just like fate
Diabolical laughs
In an alley full of suits
Forget the same
you'll be different now
Somewhat shorter on one side
Let go
Oh no
Would you diabolical inside
Panic in his brain pulls and gets away
Losses him a foot
It's a dark and evil day

See him running, limping blood
Something soft is just ahead
Something soft is Gentle
He's fallen at her side
She comforts him with kisses
He dreams of suicide

(robespierre since you enjoy movies and we're talking about barbarians: there is an ok french-canadian film titled the barbarian invasions or something- can't recall the original french title)


yes it's complicated, people vote but they have no clue what they're voting for. don't forget that the US system is one of the most bastardized ever as it started as a european copy and it got stirred and shaken along the way. one/two decades ago the US consensus was hallucinating about resembling the golden era of ancient Athens in terms of democracy. free-this, free-that, untill they realized they're all masturbating+slaving to a bunch of graphs coming out of stock market tickers.

u-rope is no better at this time, but it's slowly waking up. and since you are in europe, what do you think of the current european mess?

It doesn't seem to have sunk in yet, fu. You read this kind of shit daily in all the papers but the peons still happily chant the Busines Decisions Creed. They're armed. They're dangerous. They've been robbed of their life's savings.

So what do they do ? Go to the local primary school and shoot six year olds.

Point me to one good reason that god should leave the United States on the face of the earth. The rulers are thieves and the people are idiots.

Wait a minute, I take offense! Don't lump me in with the rest of the idiots in this country I woke up long ago to what's happening but all I can do is bang my head against the wall until it bleeds profusely.

I don't have a deep understanding about the whole financial mess, but actually I don't think the people making decisions have it either.
The only thing that I know for sure is that forcing states to spend less money will not help them to reignite their economy, actually it's quite the contrary. Although it may be trivial to assume from a microeconomical standpoint that spending less money = more money left, it's not so hard to realize the failure when thinking in macroeconomic terms.
I guess we'll need some mechanism to permanently transfer money between participating countries with different economic strengths (just like it's already happening in federal states, e.g. germany, where there are states with higher productivity than others), but that will most likely be a hard fight to implement.

So basically the owners of these various infractors are incapable of requiring ethical business practices from their leadership and DOJ and it's sundry regulatory offspring are incapable of enforcing same...

oreissig : I can teach you in five minutes or less.

Everything about the "finance industry" is a fraud. It's nothing but a thirty-year old Ponzi scheme.

Libor : rigged, a fraud
IPO's : rigged, a fraud
Stock market : rigged, a fraud
CDO's, derivatives, hedge funds : rigged, a fraud
Pension funds, 401k's, etc : rigged, a fraud
Mortgage industry : rigged, a fraud
Tax laws : rigged, a fraud
Federal Reserve : rigged, tool of the banks, a fraud
"Business ethics" : phony excuse for behavior that would put the average person in prison for life

Everything that has anything to do with finance is a fraud. When they ran out of people to cheat, it fell apart.

Burning the banks to the ground and slitting all the bankers' throats would be a good first step towards solving the problem.

We'd be better off trading beads and pretty rocks to each other in exchange for work.

reading this thread again i see oreissig & sgtprobe chiming in which is nice because usually the european members just come and bitch about the US every now and then but won't talk about the mud on their own lawn.

and that pretty much sums up the problem of europe. europe forgot what europe is. europe spent the last 5 decades bragging about diversity, civilization and how much better it is than its average american counterpart. a phony fairytale because:

- you can't talk about anything american and keep europe out of the picture (historically, socially, economically, you name it)
- europe ended up being a photocopy of its own american photocopy when it tried the EU experiment (weee! we gonna unify europe and get a single, unified currency to stay "competent", just like the US!). picture a hotel, half of it furnished and ready to accept visitors, the other half still in blueprints (not only for economic reasons).
- thanks to globalbastardization europe turned out to be almost the same shit as the US, except for a few different haircuts and accents. all the major bailout fiascos in the states had similar shows at their european branches.

all this productive/competent brainwash has to go. now. the northern side of europe always had grey skies and heavy industries. the southern/mediterranean side of europe always had blue skies, agriculture and tourism (similar geographical differences in the US but on a bigger scale). the current brainwash in europe dictates that "good, productive europeans" pay for "bad, unproductive europeans". huh? you bite that? your hard-earned life savings were never meant to be confused with intra-organizational EU budgets (EFSF, black funds, bribes etc). but hey, let's scare the funk out of everyone by questioning their job security or savings, or both.

the common distraction line in both EU&US right now is chinesification with an added spice of xenophobia. " see how productive the chinese people are? all for $2/month and 5 grains of rice. bad, bad boys, you've been getting overpaid for so long, now we gonna have to adjust you job/wage/life ".

this is true, internationally. the financial industry is nothing but an imaginary sex fiend for a bunch of greedy horcefaced gamblers who can't socialize. anyone who understands what a debt-based economy is, try to explain it to the folks in your neighborhood (CDS, spreads, leverage effect etc. and count how many will laugh/cry/collapse). the price of bread on your table is being gambled up in the stock market tickers, it's not based on normal wheat production. the whole thing is gossip-driven.

to make it all stick together it is everyone's fault. democracy requires a mature, thoughtful, educated public. the right to vote doesn't come with an undo button, it is the ultimate civil right. part of our civil life includes the duty to monitor whoever we did elect, and take them down every time they fuck up the public for their own personal reasons. kinda hilarious when the same channels that are selling you democracy talk about bailouts for the preservation of democratic and economic stability .

this ain't about left or right anymore guys. this is the biggest redistribution of wealth in the history of mankind.

it is a freaking, tasteless mess and probably the best time to use condoms. no more newborn slaves.

robespierre get your wild bunch together, we need a new "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" or just photocopies of the original. i'll call upon ariadne, nemesis and plato, looks like we have to re-invent the wheel.

I don't think I am going to top that

Would just like to mention that the "chinesification" of which fu speaks is yet another fraud. In fact, Chinese people work eleven months, get paid for twelve months plus a one-month's bonus then get three weeks a year off, paid. They get one month severance pay for every year worked - not worked "for that company" but worked , if you lay them off. Once past the probationary period (generally 90 days) It is close to impossible to fire a Chinese worker. They get all the "entitlements" that the US is so busy claiming are financially impossible to support. Living costs are more than reasonable - outside of a few big cities, housing is flat-out cheap. Women get six months paid maternity leave and they *all* get pregnant once. And then, it takes about four Chinese workers to do as much as a single person of a different nationality. They do not work hard. Nor are they very capable. If you need someone to put Bean A into Slot B all day, fine. But if need someone who can think for themself, you will search long and hard. If one enacted Chinese labor law into the US, the plutocrats would have a heart attack.

(And when HR gets totally out of hand, the factory workers go over to HR's house and burn it to the ground. With HR and HR's family inside. Fact. We don't fuck around here. Or they mess around with the workers too much, the workers block off the highway, kill policemen, smash cars, burn buildings, have a Detroit-size riot. Happens all over China, every year. You don't hear about that in the western press, either.)

Of course people and companies vary from place to place but ... anywhere north of Guangdong, there will be "issues" with Chinese factories. And even in Guangdong, a good place will be sort of like what you saw in the US in 1962.

Not criticizing Chinese factories here - what the heck, I've spent twenty years in them now and I like them and the people - but the crap they feed people in the western press is just so much horseshit. "Globalization" has to do with people who want no responsibilities and no restraints. The economic reasons are limited to "how can three people get wealthy beyond belief ?" not "how can we compete ?" Companies do not compete. They have not "competed" for decades. "I don't make. I own."

If you are a company that makes widgets in the US then you have property, workers, capital equipment, inventory, raw materials, scheduling, responsibility. This is not an easy job.

If your company is "global" then all you do is wail into the phone " I need 600 more doodads ! Tomorrow ! For three bucks ! No, make that a buck fifty !" and someone else has to deal with the hard part. Then if the doodads don't sell as well as you'd like, you just fuck over the supplier and don't take his inventory of 5,000 doodads which you are contractually obligated to purchase. If you are a global company, contracts are just pieces of paper, good for wiping the ass. Crocs, 70 million bucks, don't pay. "Oh. Sorry. Maybe next year." Sorry my ass. If things go really south and one of those pesky little-people companies tries to press the issue you can always declare bankruptcy, sell off the good parts to your friends cheap while you shit on the creditors. Hostess, Atari, SGI, a cast of thousands. Bankruptcy courts are fine with that.

Hahvud Business School Advanced Business Concepts. You guys just don't understand how business really works ! *

*If you assume that the people at the top are cheating you, then you do in fact understand exactly "how business works." If we let these assbreaths run the world we'll get the world we've got.