This article tries to absolve short selling of responsibility for the bank values crash a couple of weeks ago (it does look like institutions dumped their bank stock as soon as they found out that short-selling was being re-enabled).
But the interesting statistic in this article is that over 3 percent of Barclays shock was out on loan, even while short-selling was banned. Which begs a question:
Why would people or institutions want to borrow stock, if they are not using them to sell short?
I’ve known for a while about this guy’s trials with trying to create the ‘Shutdown’ menu for Windows Vista, but not read his actual blog.
The section on Microsoft’s source control system looks like a world of pain. How can any software company succeed when it take months for code changes to propagate from one team to another?
Continuous Integration this is not!
Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 Billion in bonuses 3 days before the bankrupt company was taken over by Bank of America?!!!!
Three questions: Where was the oversight? Surely, once it was known that bailout money was going into the banks (and Merrill, or its rescuer was clearly going to be a recipient), a method of overseeing the financial management of these companies needed to be created? Or did the government just trust that they would do ‘the right thing’?
Secondly: What on earth was Bank of America doing? Didn’t they do any checks, or did they just assume that the government would cover all of the losses incurred?
Thirdly: How do we change corporate culture to get the definition of ‘bonus’ to return to be something that is paid for creating success, not just turning up every day?
Very amusing description of PZ Myers being ejected from the preview of ‘Excluded’ - the new film on Intelligent Design. But that is not what interested me.
In the 11th paragraph Dawkins repeats his view from ‘The Selfish Gene’ that our origins in Darwinian evolution do not mean that we should structure our society in the same way. He argues that we should use our brains to combat the selfish gene and build societies that rise above pure selfishness.
I believe that this statement encapsulates probably the most important idea of his career - that Darwinism does not doom us to a dog-eat-dog society.
It does seem odd that NASA’s engineers presented technical information in the form of Powerpoint slides. It suggests to me a culture focussed on ‘managing the managers’ rather than engineering problem solving.
ROFLMAO! Thanks to John Gruber from pointing this one out.
