Made Thing

A blow-by-blow description of how the collapse of Lehman Brothers became the first domino to fall in a global financial crisis:

… Lehman’s bankruptcy, filed early Monday morning in federal bankruptcy court — case No. 08-13555 — proved far more destabilizing, and spread much further, than many had expected. The bankruptcy immediately wiped out huge investments for Lehman shareholders and bondholders. Among the biggest was Norway’s government pension fund, which invests the country’s surplus oil revenue. As of the end of 2007, the most recent data available, the fund owned more than $800 million worth of Lehman bonds and stock.

Here’s a stupid question from a dude without a savings account: How can governments hope to manage a global financial system that has become too complicated for even economists to fully understand?

Photo by Flickr user Barack Obama

I can’t imagine the pressure of this moment.

Fake Steve’s scathing response to a tech panel:

Was at the EmTech conference at MIT today and suffered through a panel led by Robert Scoble with four geeks (Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Twine) talking about the future of the Web. No prepared remarks, just totally random conversation. Basically they all just spewed whatever came into their heads, at top speed, interrupting each other and oblivious to the fact that an audience was sitting there, glazing over. A few people got up and asked questions and the geeks did manage to (sort of) address one or two but then they forgot about the questioners and just started rambling again, talking to each other and forgetting about the audience. It was like watching five college kids with ADHD and an eight-ball of coke trying to hold a conversation.

Accuracy of observation aside, it’s the last line that interests me. The individual pieces of the comparison aren’t that original — college kids, ADHD, eight-ball of coke — but together they draw a genuine guffaw. I think it’s the specificity of “eight-ball of coke” that really makes it work; it harkens to the “hampster on crack” cliché but freshens it.

Specifying the contents of the eight-ball is important, by the way, because in and of itself, “eight-ball” can be used to refer to an eighth of an ounce of any powdered psychoactive drug. Seriously. I looked it up.

(via Kottke)

Roger Ebert responds to readers who took his recent endorsement of Creationism literally:

These days, there is no room for ambiguity, and few rewards for critical thinking. Now every word of a politician is pumped dry by his opponent, looking for sinister meanings. Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us. No politics, please.

Flickr Photo Download: Untitled

Found in Computer Arts Projects #114: Company info on one side, individual’s first name on the other. 

I need to remember this when it’s time to make some Linebreak cards for me, Ash, and Ashley before the next AWP.

Basics - Putting a Meter on the Computer for Internet Use - NYTimes.com.

Some Internet service providers say they want to end their all-you-can-eat plans because a few customers with immense appetites for Web content are overwhelming the networks and slowing the delivery of news and entertainment for everyone else. Other providers blame pirates, who program their computers to crawl the Internet and suck down complete copies of CDs or DVDs.

Is there any precedent for successfully offering your customers less of a utility once it becomes indispensable? Commodification is supposed to make more of a service less expensive over time, right? Consider cell phone plans: I was afraid to use my first cell phone, the given minutes were so stingy; my current plan includes thousands more rollover minutes than I’ll ever use. And I’d give up my cell phone way before I gave up broadband.

H. L. Mencken : Memorial Service.

My favorite curmudgeon asks: “Where is the grave-yard of dead gods?” A fantastic exercise in perspective that I occasionally like to revisit.

Users Are Tossing Their Landlines Overboard

Still have a landline? You’re showing your age. The young, hip, cool people have cellphones only, and that is bad news for traditional phone providers.

It’s also bad news for anyone who wants telephone polling to be accurate.

And the opening includes an excellent introductory explanation of the role SIM cards play in authenticating individual phones onto a particular carrier’s network.

Citizen_Engineer on Vimeo.